Guest post written by Bad Reputation author Emma Barry
Emma Barry is a teacher, novelist, former political staffer, and recovering academic. Emma lives with her high school sweetheart and a menagerie of pets and children in Virginia, where she occasionally finds time to read and write.
For fans of Christina Lauren, Ali Hazelwood, Kate Clayborn, Kate Canterbary and Lucy Parker, Bad Reputation is a must-read this fall. Let me know if I can send you additional information as you consider coverage.
When I sold the proposal that became my book Bad Reputation, the pitch was, “a Hollywood himbo hopes his role on a historical romance series will be his career comeback when he unfortunately finds himself falling for the show’s new intimacy coordinator.” There’s just one problem: I don’t know the first thing about making movies. Most of the celebrity memoirs and biographies I’d read were about Hollywood’s Golden Age, long before the internet and streaming television. They weren’t going to help me.
So what I needed were books that illuminate the technicalities and the feeling of being on set in the last few decades. If you’re faced with a similar challenge or if you just want to marinate in backstage vibes, here’s a reading list to get you started.
As If! The Oral History of Clueless by Jen Chaney
Like every good elder Millennial, I have entire portions of the 1995 film memorized. But how did it get made? In the by-now familiar pattern of an oral history, this book tracks the project from its pitch, through casting, writing, production, and promotion, and it even dives into the movie’s legacy. It’s delightful.
As You Wish: Inconceivable Tales from the Making of The Princess Bride by Cary Elwes
Also enchanting is this production memoir written by Westley himself. It’s shot through a rosy lens of nostalgia, but would you want it any other way? I was particularly interested in the sections about the training, rehearsal, and filming for the famous sword fight sequence.
The Sense and Sensibility Screenplay and Diaries, Emma Thompson + Madly, Deeply: The Diaries of Alan Rickman, Alan Rickman
Elwes’s “we all got along so well” narrative makes a fascinating comparison to these takes on the classic Jane Austen adaptation. I watched Sense and Sensibility while reading Thompson’s script and then I read her filming diary. It gives the impression of controlled but generative chaos. However, I later discovered Rickman’s own diary—and he was far less taken with the production and especially the directing than Thompson. Read them together and make the call for yourself.
Just the Funny Parts…and a Few Hard Truths About Sneaking into the Hollywood Boys’ Club by Nell Scovell
If Emma Thompson wore several hats on the set of Sense and Sensibility, Scovell has assembled a closet full as a writer, director, and showrunner, both on television and in the movies. This book is hilarious, and it never pulls its punches or downplays how hard it was for Scovell to get into those rooms—nor what it cost her.
The Revolution Was Televised: The Cops, Crooks, Slingers, and Slayers Who Changed TV Drama Forever by Alan Sepinwall
If you’re interested in the television revolution of the early 2000s, you need this book. Sepinwall dives into twelve shows you’ve seen win Emmys, assembling long-form interviews with their showrunners, as well as some of their writers, actors, and studio executives. I was particularly interested to learn that much of Friday Night Lights was improvised by the actors and filmed with multiple cameras at once, allowing the production to assemble the show in editing.
Burn It Down: Power, Complicity, and a Call for Change in Hollywood by Maureen Ryan
Temper Sepinwall’s narrative with this examination of Hollywood’s all-too-often toxic and dysfunctional dynamics. Maureen Ryan focuses on several abusive, powerful media figures, considering how the system enabled them and hid their bad behavior. She primarily discusses television shows from the last twenty years. Compare her chapter on Lost to Alan Sepinwall’s, but be prepared to stare into the middle distance for a while afterward.
Finding Me by Viola Davis
A searing and unputdownable memoir of an artistic life, Davis describes her difficult childhood, her training at Juilliard, and the ups and downs of her career, including the colorism she endured. The sections on How to Get Away with Murder were of particular interest to me, but honestly, I forgot I was reading this for research and got swept up in the narrative. There’s a reason Davis won an EGOT.
The Actor’s Life: A Survival Guide by Jenna Fischer
I have an embarrassing confession: I have never watched The Office. But you don’t need to be familiar with Fischer’s acting to enjoy this book. It’s written as advice for actors and focuses on topics such as how to handle auditions, what makes a good headshot, and why you might change agents. Fischer’s argument that auditions are the work is good advice for writers since we also spend what can feel like most of our careers on submission.
Trejo: My Life of Crime, Redemption, and Hollywood by Danny Trejo
If Davis and Fischer trained to be actors in the traditional way, Danny Trejo absolutely did not. His prolific acting career was an accident: he started playing gangsters because he was Trejo’s voice comes across clear as a bell. Reading it will make you feel as if you’ve spent a late night doing shots of tequila with the stunt crew.
I’m Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy
If Trejo’s book will make you wonder if Hollywood can save lives, McCurdy’s will make you wonder how many it’s ruined. The former childhood star of several Nickelodeon shows, McCurdy excruciatingly details the abuse she experienced in her family and on set. This book is difficult to read, but McCurdy makes some of the industry’s ugliest truths inescapable. No portrait of modern Hollywood would be complete without it.
