Novels about making a movie, mess and all
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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 · Updated 5 days ago
The 9 books on this stack
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The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece
Tom Hanks · 2023
NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • AN NPR BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • From the legendary actor and best-selling author: a novel about the making of a star-studded, multimillion-dollar superhero action film...and the humble comic books that inspired it. Funny, touching, and wonderfully thought-provoking, while also capturing the changes in America and American culture since World War II. "Wild, ambitious and exceptionally enjoyable." —Matt Haig, best-selling author The Midnight Library, The Humans and Reasons to Stay Alive Part One of this story takes place in 1947. A troubled soldier, returning from the war, meets his talented five-year-old nephew, leaves an indelible impression, and then disappears for twenty-three years. Cut to 1970: The nephew, now drawing underground comic books in Oakland, California, reconnects with his uncle and, remembering the comic book he saw when he was five, draws a new version with his uncle as a World War II fighting hero. Cut to the present day: A commercially successful director discovers the 1970 comic book and decides to turn it into a contemporary superhero movie. Cue the cast: We meet the film’s extremely difficult male star, his wonderful leading lady, the eccentric writer/director, the producer, the gofer production assistant, and everyone else on both sides of the camera. Bonus material: Interspersed throughout are three comic books that are featured in the story—all created by Tom Hanks himself—including the comic book that becomes the official tie-in to this novel’s "major motion picture masterpiece."
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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Beautiful Ruins
Jess Walter · 2012
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 Walter's Beautiful Ruins is a dazzling, yet deeply human, roller coaster of a novel. From the lavish set of Cleopatra to the shabby revelry of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, to the back lots of contemporary Hollywood, Beautiful Ruins is gloriously inventive and constantly surprising--a story of flawed yet fascinating people navigating the rocky shores of their lives while clinging to their improbable dreams.
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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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Mr Wilder and Me
Jonathan Coe · 2020
The prize-winning, bestselling author of Middle England turns his gaze to one of cinema's most intriguing figures - famed director of Some Like It Hot , Billy Wilder. ***SOON TO BE A MAJOR FILM*** In the summer of 1977, naïve Calista Frangopoulou sets out to venture into the world. 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. While Calista is thrilled with her new adventure, Wilder himself is living with the realisation that his star may be on the wane. Rebuffed by Hollywood, he has financed his film with German money, and when Calista follows him to Munich, she finds herself joining him on a journey of memory into the dark heart of his family history. At once a tender coming-of-age story and an intimate portrait of a Hollywood icon, Mr Wilder and Me explores the nature of time and fame, of family and the treacherous lure of nostalgia . . . __________ 'Utterly charming, deeply poignant and ultimately uplifting ' Mail on Sunday 'Sweeps beautifully from Hollywood to Greece and London' FT, Best Books of 2020 'The dialogue's sharp, the comic timing excellent' Sunday Times
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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Trio
William Boyd · 2020
'An elating read' Sunday Times A producer. A novelist. An actress. It is summer in 1968, the year of the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy. There are riots in Paris and the Vietnam War is out of control. While the world is reeling our three characters are involved in making a Swingin' Sixties movie in sunny Brighton. All are leading secret lives. Elfrida is drowning her writer's block in vodka; Talbot, coping with the daily dysfunction of making a film, is hiding something in a secret apartment; and the glamorous Anny is wondering why the CIA is suddenly so interested in her. But the show must go on and, as it does, the trio's private worlds begin to take over their public ones. Pressures build inexorably - someone's going to crack. Or maybe they all will. From one of Britain's best loved writers comes an exhilarating, tender novel that asks the vital questions: what makes life worth living? And what do you do if you find it isn't? _______________________________________________ PRAISE FOR WILLIAM BOYD 'The ultimate in immersive fiction . . . magnificent' Sunday Times 'A finely judged performance: a deft and resonant alchemy of fact and fiction , of literary myth and imagination' Guardian on Love is Blind 'William Boyd has probably written more classic books than any of his contemporaries' Daily Telegraph 'Simply the best realistic storyteller of his generation' Sebastian Faulks
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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Hollywood
Charles Bukowski · 1989
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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Horror Movie
Paul Tremblay · 2024
Summer, 1993 - a group of young guerrilla filmmakers spend four weeks making Horror Movie, a notorious, disturbing, art-house horror film. The weird part? Only three of the film's scenes were ever released to the public. Steeped in mystery and tragedy, the film has taken on a mythic renown. Decades later, a big budget reboot is in the works, and Hollywood turns to the only surviving cast member - the man who played 'the Thin Kid', the masked teen at the centre of it all. He remembers all too well the secrets buried within the original screenplay, the bizarre events of the filming, and the crossed lines on set. Caught in a nightmare of masks and appearances, facile Hollywood personalities and fan conventions, the Thin Kid spins a tale of past and present, scripts and reality, and what the camera lets us see. But at what cost do we revisit our demons? After all these years, the monster the world never saw will finally be heard.
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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Prater Violet
Christopher Isherwood · 1945
With one impatient phone call, a young Christopher Isherwood is drawn into the film industry. On the other end of the line is temperamental Austrian director Friedrich Bergmann. Christopher’s job is to rescue the script of an idiotic love story set in nineteenth-century Vienna, a film called Prater Violet. Meanwhile, in the real Vienna of 1934, the Austrian right crushes a socialist uprising. Bergmann is distraught; his prophecy of a coming war goes unheeded. As tensions on set grow, studio intrigues and competing egos threaten to derail the whole project, and Hitler’s shadow lengthens over Europe. ‘A masterly novella’ Guardian ‘A deliberate historical parable. Prater Violet resembles episodes in Goodbye to Berlin and keeps up the same high level of excellence’ New Yorker
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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White Hunter, Black Heart
Peter Viertel · 1953
The world famous movie director John Wilson has gone to Africa to make his next movie. He is an obstinate, contrary director who'd rather hunt elephants than takes care of his crew or movie. He has become obsessed with one particular elephant and cares for nothing else.
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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Children of light
Robert Stone · 1986
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 made stars of John Belushi, Bill Murray, Chevy Chase, Gilda Radner, Jane Curtin, Laraine Newman, Garrett Morris, Joe Piscopo, and Eddie Murphy. This is the book that reveals what really happened behind the scenes during the first ten years of this groundbreaking program, from the battles SNL fought with NBC to the battles fought within the show itself. It's all here: The love affairs, betrayals, rivalries, drug problems, overnight successes, and bitter failures, mixed with the creation of some of the most outrageous and original comedy ever.
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.