Hats off to writers Christian Newton and Casey McAdams for their hilarious NickNolteDiary.com, and for their help in putting together the timeline in the Times Sunday. I happily traded a greg.org mention in the piece for the byline, duh.
Alas, during rewrites, we cut the gratuitous digs at LA residents and my secret blogging shoutouts; for entertainment purposes only, here's the intro I originally tried to sneak by the editors:
Even the best website ideas can languish unrealized for months, pushed off even the back burner by day jobs, intractable schedules, and inescapable inertia. So it was for Christian Newton and Casey McAdams, two Los Angeles residents (aka aspiring screenwriters), who took more than six months nurturing their vision: a fictional diary in the persona of actor Nick Nolte. The story of how their little weblog went from private homage to inadvertent global news hoax to cease-and-desist letter to sitcom pitch- all in one week- reveals the workings of the blog-powered buzz machine. And it may encourage would-be Hollywood players to get back to their laptops and finish that site.The Positively True Adventures of the Counterfeit Diary of Nick Nolte [NYT]
Nick Nolte Reviews Movable Type [the greg.org post that started it all, after Andy Baio's one-man meme-machine Waxy.org, of course]
