Novels about making a movie, mess and all
+5 more
Bad catering and a star who won't come out of the trailer. Novels from behind the scenes of a film shoot, where the better story is the one off camera.
Hand-picked and sealed. Every book here was chosen on purpose — no votes, no algorithm.
Stacked by Drayfus · 14 views · Updated 1 month ago
The 9 books on this stack
Tap “Want to read” on the ones that catch your eye. No account needed, we'll keep them for you.
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Tom Hanks 2023 1 want to read
Why it's on the stack
It makes you laugh
It shares this with 2 more books on this stack
Funny, touching, and wonderfully thought-provoking, while also capturing the changes in America and American culture since World War II.
Why this book Drayfus
The one that started this stack. Hanks has spent four decades on film sets, and the people whose names scroll past in the credits get as much page time here as the stars. There are even full comic books inside, drawn for the novel.
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Jess Walter 2012 1 want to read
Why it's on the stack
Funny and sad at once · odd and endearing
It shares this with 3 more books on this stack
From the moment it opens--on a rocky patch of Italian coastline, circa 1962, when a daydreaming young innkeeper looks out over the water and spies a mysterious woman approaching him on a boat--Jess…
Why this book Drayfus
Half of it happens far from the set, and that's the charm. The Cleopatra shoot in Rome spills onto a tiny cliffside village in Italy, and fifty years later someone in Hollywood is still cleaning up the mess. Richard Burton shows up and behaves about as well as you'd expect.
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Jonathan Coe 2020
Why it's on the stack
A small, intimate story · comforting, like coming home
It shares this with 2 more books on this stack
On a Greek island that has been turned into a film set, she finds herself working for Billy Wilder, about whom she knows almost nothing.
Why this book Drayfus
A young Greek woman gets hired as an interpreter on one of Billy Wilder's last films and follows the shoot from an island to Munich. Wilder is out of fashion by then and he knows it. Coe writes him with so much fondness you'll want to rewatch his films afterwards.
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William Boyd 2020
Why it's on the stack
Funny and sad at once · it makes you cry, in a good way
It shares this with 3 more books on this stack
A novelist. An actress.
Why this book Drayfus
Brighton, summer of 1968, a sixties comedy mid-shoot and already in trouble. Boyd follows three people tied to it, and my favourite is the director's wife, a novelist who should be writing and is mostly drinking. Funny and sad in about equal parts.
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Charles Bukowski 1989
Why it's on the stack
It makes you laugh
It shares this with 2 more books on this stack
There are many scandalous books about life in Hollywood, but none as poetic and dangerous as this.
Why this book Drayfus
Bukowski wrote the script for Barfly, then wrote a novel about the experience. Old Chinaski watches a crew spend a fortune recreating the life he spent years barely surviving, and he's mostly amused. Everyone is a real person under a fake name. Guessing who is half the fun.
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Paul Tremblay 2024
Why it's on the stack
It ties your stomach in a knot · properly strange
Summer, 1993 - a group of young guerrilla filmmakers spend four weeks making Horror Movie, a notorious, disturbing, art-house horror film.
Why this book Drayfus
Narrated by the actor who played the monster in a tiny horror film shot in 1993, one almost nobody has seen, for reasons that come out slowly. Chapters alternate with pages of the script. The scariest thing in it might be what a crew with no money will agree to do.
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Christopher Isherwood 1945
Why it's on the stack
Funny and sad at once · melancholic and unhurried
It shares this with 3 more books on this stack
With one impatient phone call, a young Christopher Isherwood is drawn into the film industry.
Why this book Drayfus
Short enough for one evening. A young English writer is hired to script a silly Viennese musical with an Austrian director far from home, while the news from Vienna gets worse every day. The director is based on Berthold Viertel, whose son wrote White Hunter, Black Heart.
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Peter Viertel 1953
The world famous movie director John Wilson has gone to Africa to make his next movie.
Why this book Drayfus
The director has a whole crew waiting in Africa and would rather hunt an elephant. The screenwriter tagging along, pretty much Viertel himself, can't decide whether he admires the man or wants to throttle him. If you know John Huston, you'll recognise him in two pages.
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Robert Stone 1986
Why it's on the stack
Nobody is entirely good · it tells it straight
This is the intimate history of the original Saturday Night Live, from its beginnings as an outlaw program produced by an unruly band of renegades from the comedy underground to a TV institution that…
Why this book Drayfus
The darkest book here. A burned-out screenwriter heads down to a location shoot in Mexico to see the actress he never got over. She's starring in his adaptation and has stopped taking her medication. Stone wrote screenplays himself, and it shows in every scene on set.