Hollywood

Quick Review: LIKE THIS, BUT FUNNIER by Hallie Cantor (Simon & Schuster)

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Interesting premise, but ultimately a strangely familiar story

TV writer Caroline Neumann is thirty-four and mired in professional envy and self-hatred. Even Harry, her usually supportive therapist husband, thinks it’s time for her to press pause on her career ambitions and focus on getting pregnant, despite Caroline’s serious ambivalence about having children.

When Caroline accidentally stumbles on Harry’s patient session notes and offhandedly mentions what she finds in a meeting with a producer, the momentum of Hollywood takes over. Before she knows it — and unbeknownst to Harry — Caroline finds herself pitching a TV show about the deepest, darkest secrets of her husband’s favorite patient, a woman known to Caroline only as the Teacher.

Amid the indignities of the Hollywood development process, Caroline must balance her burning desire for professional validation against her own morality and the health of her marriage. And when Caroline forms a real-life relationship with Teacher herself, the lines between art and life begin to blur further, shaking up Caroline’s understanding of what it means to be the “likeable female protagonist” of her own life.

One of my most-anticipated novels of the year (yes, I’m a big fan of Hollywood-related books), and this one had a very promising premise. It’s well-written, and the characters are believable and mostly well-composed. However, most of the commentary about and critique of Hollywood felt familiar, which made this a less-satisfying read than hoped. Continue reading →

Upcoming: THE LAST KINGS OF HOLLYWOOD by Paul Fischer (Celadon)

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Early next year, Celadon Books are due to publish The Last Kings of Hollywood by Paul Fischer: a new biography of Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, and Steven Spielberg, “and the Battle for the Soul of American Cinema”. As a movie-lover born in the early-1980s, these three directors have been responsible for an incredible number of movies that I have watched many, many times. So this, combined with my love for behind-the-scenes books, means Fischer’s new book became a must-read as soon as I saw it in the publisher’s catalogue. I really can’t wait to read this.

Here’s the synopsis:

The untold, intimate story of how three young visionaries—Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, and Steven Spielberg — revolutionized American cinema, creating the most iconic films in history while risking everything, redefining friendship, and shaping Hollywood as we know it.

In the summer of 1967, as the old Hollywood studio system was dying, an intense, uncompromising young film school graduate named George Lucas walked onto the Warner Bros. backlot for his first day working as an assistant to another up-and-coming, largely unknown filmmaker, a boisterous father of two called Francis Ford Coppola. At the exact same time, across town on the Universal Studios lot, a film-obsessed twenty-year-old from a peripatetic Jewish family, Steven Spielberg, longed to break free from his apprenticeship for the struggling studio and become a film director in his own right.

Within a year, the three men would become friends. Spielberg, prioritizing security, got his seven-year contract directing television. Lucas and Coppola, hungry for independence, left Hollywood for San Francisco to found an alternative studio, American Zoetrope, and make films without answering to corporate capitalism.

Based on extensive research and hundreds of original interviews with the inner circle of these Hollywood icons, The Last Kings of Hollywood tells the thrilling, dramatic inside story of how, over the next fifteen years, the three filmmakers rivaled and supported one another, fell out and reconciled, and struggled to reinvent popular American cinema. Along the way, Coppola directed The Godfather, then the highest-grossing film of all time, until Spielberg surpassed it with Jaws — whose record Lucas broke with Star Wars, which Spielberg surpassed again with E.T. By the early 1980s, they were the richest, best-known filmmakers in the world, each with an empire of their own. The Last Kings of Hollywood is an unprecedented chronicle of their rise, their dreams and demons, their triumphs and their failures — intimate, extraordinary, and supremely entertaining.

Paul Fischer’s The Last Kings of Hollywood is due to be published by Celadon Books in North America and in the UK, on February 2026.

Follow the Author: Website, Goodreads, BlueSky

Excerpt: WHEN WE CHASED THE LIGHT by Emily Meeker (Lake Union)

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Tomorrow, Lake Union is due to publish the latest novel by Emily Beeker: When We Chased the Light. A new novel set in Golden Age Hollywood, here’s the synopsis:

A Hollywood legend. A legacy of secrets. An epic and emotional novel about forgiveness, fame, family, and truly unconditional love by the bestselling author of When We Were Enemies.

Christie’s auction house, Beverly Hills. The effects of Hollywood icon Vivian Snow are up for bid. In the collection is a set of hand-drawn postcards spanning six decades. The sender is Antonio Trombello, a soldier, POW, priest, and Vivian’s confidant. Each postcard sheds new light on a deeply private woman the public only thinks it knows.

It’s World War II. Vivian is a USO showgirl traveling the world when her husband goes AWOL, disappears, and is presumed dead. Facing increasing suspicion, she leans on her dear friend Father Trombello for support. He’s her confessor, her savior, the elusive love of her life, and when it comes to her husband’s death, the keeper of Vivian’s secrets.

As Vivian rises from canteen dream girl to starlet to bona fide legend, she navigates the highs and lows of Hollywood, new romances, and tumultuous family relationships ― all in the shadow of her past and the guilt, unmet longing, and buried truths that could still upend the lives of everyone she loves.

Continue reading →

Excerpt: CLEVER GIRL by Hannah McGregor (ECW Press)

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McGregorH-CleverGirlCAHCNext month, ECW Press is due to publish the next book in their Pop Classics series, which is a range of “Short books that pack a big punch… intelligent, fun, and accessible arguments about why a particular pop phenomenon matters.” (Looking at the range, I have a feeling I’m going to be reading a few of these.) Hannah McGregor‘s Clever Girl focuses on Jurassic Park — a movie that I saw in theatres when I was only 10yrs old, and a franchise that I’ve followed pretty much ever since. To celebrate the upcoming release, the publisher has provided CR with an excerpt to share with you all. First, though, here’s the synopsis:

A smart and incisive exploration of everyone’s favorite dinosaur movie and the female dinosaurs who embody what it means to be angry, monstrous, and free

The Jurassic Park series is one of the most famous and profitable movie franchises of all time — an entire generation of people has never known life without these CGI dinosaurs. The movie spectacle broke film and merchandising records, pioneered special effects, and made Jeff Goldblum into an unlikely sex symbol, and now it has also been re-envisioned as a classic of queer feminist storytelling.

In Clever Girl, Hannah McGregor argues that the female-only dinosaurs of Jurassic Park are stand-ins for monstrous women, engineered by men to be intelligent, violent, and adaptive, and whose chaos resists the systems designed to control them. As they run wild through their prison, a profit-driven theme park, they destroy the men and structures who mistakenly believed in their own colonialist and capitalist power, showing the audience what it means to be angry, monstrous, and free. The velociraptors were not just jump scares for children but also revelatory and predatory symbols of feminist rage. Clever girls, indeed.

Continue reading →

Quick Review: THE FINAL ACT by Lisa Gray (Thomas & Mercer)

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GrayL-FinalActUSHCA missing actress, the uncaring world of Hollywood, and the peculiarity of fame in America

All she wanted was to see her name in lights. Now, her disappearance has made her front-page news.

It’s been twenty years since Madison James had any kind of success in Hollywood. Now she’s disappeared and a TikTok sleuth has found her purse discarded in a Los Angeles park. The news spreads like wildfire across a nation hungry for celebrity tragedy, and the struggling actress’s mysterious disappearance quickly becomes a national obsession.

Detectives Sarah Delaney and Rob Moreno of the LAPD Missing Persons Unit take the case. But truth is a rare commodity in Tinseltown; some people will stop at nothing to get what they want and Delaney and Moreno soon find themselves mired in Hollywood’s dark underbelly with little in the way of clues.

As revelations from the past emerge, it becomes apparent there is more going on than meets the eye. With an obsessive public watching every step of the investigation, can the police find Madison before she becomes more than just missing?

This is the first of Gray’s novels that I’ve read, and I very much enjoyed it. Long-time readers of CR will know that mysteries/crime novels set in and around Hollywood are like catnip for me, and this one was engaging and quickly paced. Thanks to a bout of insomnia, I ended up reading this in just two sittings. Continue reading →

Quick Review: WHERE ARE YOU, ECHO BLUE? by Hayley Krischer (Dutton)

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KrischerH-WhereAreYouEchoBlueUSHCA novel about celebrity, fandom, and the price of ambition following a journalist’s obsessive search for a missing Hollywood starlet

When Echo Blue, the most famous child star of the nineties, disappears ahead of a highly publicized television appearance on the eve of the millennium, the salacious theories instantly start swirling. Mostly, people assume Echo has gotten herself in trouble after a reckless New Year’s Eve. But Goldie Klein, an ambitious young journalist who also happens to be Echo’s biggest fan, knows there must be more to the story. Why, on the eve of her big comeback, would Echo just go missing without a trace?

After a year of covering dreary local stories for Manhattan Eye, Goldie is sure this will be her big break. Who better to find Echo Blue, and tell her story the right way, than her? And so, Goldie heads to L.A. to begin a wild search that takes her deep into Echo’s complicated life in which parental strife, friend break ups, rehab stints, and bad romances abound. But the further into Echo’s world Goldie gets, the more she questions her own complicity in the young star’s demise… yet she cannot tear herself away from this story, which has now consumed her entirely. Meanwhile, we also hear Echo’s side of things from the beginning, showing a young woman who was chewed up and spit out by Hollywood as so many are, and who may have had to pay the ultimate price.

This is the first novel by Hayley Krisher that I’ve read. Where Are You, Echo Blue? interrogates celebrity culture, fandom, and the treacherous nature of child stardom. While I liked a lot of this novel, there were certain portions that didn’t quite work for me. Nevertheless, I enjoyed reading it. Continue reading →

Upcoming: WHAT’S NEXT by Melissa Fitzgerald & Mary McCormack (Dutton)

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FitzgeraldMcCormack-WhatsNextUSHCLong-time readers of CR will know that I’m a bit fan of Hollywood/Television oral histories, and I’ve been rather enjoying the recent publishing boomlet in the sub-genre — I’ve very much enjoyed recent books about The Office, The Big Bang Theory, The O.C. and others. I discovered TWW in 2001, and I re-watched the show every year (or, at least, all that was available) up until 2016. (I had to take a pause during the Trump years…) When I saw that two cast members from The West Wing had collaborated on a behind-the-scenes history of the show, it became a must-read of the year for me. Melissa Fitzgerald (who played CJ’s assistant Carol) and Mary McCormack (who played Kate Harper) have teamed up for What’s Next. Here’s the synopsis:

A behind-the-scenes look into the creation and legacy of The West Wing as told by cast members Melissa Fitzgerald and Mary McCormack, with compelling insights from cast and crew exploring what made the show what it was and how its impassioned commitment to service has made the series and relationships behind it endure.

Step back inside the world of President Jed Bartlet’s Oval Office with Fitzgerald and McCormack as they reunite the West Wing cast and crew in a lively and colorful “backstage pass” to the timeless series. This intimate, in-depth reflection reveals how The West Wing was conceived, and spotlights the army of people it took to produce it, the lifelong friendships it forged, and the service it inspired.

From cast member origin stories to the collective cathartic farewell on the show’s final night of filming, What’s Next will delight readers with on-set and off-camera anecdotes that even West Wing superfans have never heard. Meanwhile, a deeper analysis of the show’s legacy through American culture, service, government, and civic life underscores how the series envisaged an American politics of decency and honor, creating an aspirational White House beyond the bounds of fictional television.

What’s Next revisits beloved episodes with fresh, untold commentary; compiles poignant and hilarious stories from the show’s production; highlights initiatives supported by the cast, crew, and creators; and makes a powerful case for competent, empathetic leadership, hope, and optimism for whatever lies ahead.

For those who want even more TWW content, I’d strongly recommend The West Wing Weekly podcast, in which Josh Malina (Will Bailey on the show) and Hrishikesh Hirway do a re-watch of each episode, invite various guests (including plenty of other cast and crew from the show) to discuss the episode and the show in general.

Melissa Fitzgerald & Mary McCormack’s What’s Next is due to be published by Dutton in North America, on August 13th.

Follow the Authors (Fitzgerald): Goodreads, Instagram, Twitter
Follow the Authors (McCormack): Goodreads, Instagram, Twitter

Quick Review: WELCOME TO THE O.C. by Alan Sepinwall (Mariner Books)

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SepinwallA-WelcomeToTheOCUSHCAn excellent oral history of the development, making, and impact of The O.C.

Welcome to the O.C., b*tch: it’s the definitive oral history of beloved TV show The O.C., from the show’s creators, featuring interviews with the cast and crew, providing a behind-the-scenes look into how the show was made, the ups and downs over its four seasons, and its legacy today. 

On August 5th, 2003, Ryan Atwood found himself a long way from his home in Chino — he was in The O.C., an exclusive suburb full of beautiful girls, wealthy bullies, corrupt real-estate tycoons, and a new family helmed by his public defender, Sandy Cohen. Ryan soon warms up to his nerdy, indie band-loving new best friend Seth, and quickly falls for Marissa, the stunning girl next door who has secrets of her own. Completing the group is Summer, Seth’s dream girl and Marissa’s loyal — and fearless — best friend. Together, the friends fall in and out of love, support each other amidst family strife, and capture the hearts of audiences across the country.

Just in time for the show’s twentieth anniversary, The O.C.’s creator Josh Schwartz and executive producer Stephanie Savage are ready to dive into how the show was made, the ups and downs over its four seasons, and its legacy today. With Rolling Stone’s chief TV critic and bestselling author Alan Sepinwall conducting interviews with the key cast members, writers, and producers who were there when it all happened, Welcome to the O.C. will offer the definitive inside look at the beloved show — a nostalgic delight for audiences who watched when it aired, and a rich companion to viewers currently discovering the show while it streams on HBO Max and Hulu.

The O.C. paved the way for a new generation of iconic teen soaps, launched the careers of young stars, and even gave us the gift of Chrismukkah. Now, it’s time to go back where we started from and experience it all over again.

I was quite late to The O.C., but I was very much aware of it: I remember walking through Durham (where I did my undergraduate degree), hearing plummy British accents shouting down the Bailey streets, “Watching The O.C. tonight, yah?” I watched the first season on DVD, sometime during the original run of the show, but wasn’t able to continue it until I moved to Canada a decade ago. When I saw that Alan Sepinwall had written an oral history of the show, I jumped at the chance to read it. Expansive and engaging, I really enjoyed this. Continue reading →

Upcoming: BURN THE NEGATIVE by Josh Winning (G. P. Putnam’s Sons)

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WinningJ-BurnTheNegativeUSHCNext year, G. P. Putnam’s Sons are due to publish the second novel by Josh Winning: Burn the Negative. I haven’t got around to reading the author’s first novel, yet (The Shadow Glass), but his new novel sounds really interesting. Long-time readers will know that I enjoy novels that are about or linked to Hollywood and the entertainment industries, and Burn the Negative looks like it’s going to be a pretty cool mash-up of Hollywood and slasher-movie style horror/suspense. Here’s the synopsis:

Thirty years hiding from her past.
Eight deaths still unexplained.
One haunted horror film.
Nowhere left to run.

Journalist Laura Warren is mid-flight to LA when she learns that the streaming series she’s about to report on is a remake of a ‘90s horror flick. A cursed ’90s horror flick. The one she starred in—and has been running from her whole life.

As a child star, Laura was cast as the lead in The Guesthouse. She played Tammy Manners, the little girl with the terrifying gift to tell people how the Needle Man would kill them. But her big break was her last, as eight of her cast and crew mates died in mysterious ways, and the film became infamous—a cult classic of fictional horror that somehow summoned the real thing. Hoping to move on, Laura changed her name and her accent, dyed her hair, and moved across the Atlantic Ocean.

But some scripts don’t want to stay buried.

After landing, Laura finds a yellow dress like the one she wore in the movie. Then the words “She’s here” scratched into the wall in an actor’s trailer. And then people working on the series start dying. It’s all happening again, and Laura finds herself on the run with her sister and a jaded psychic, hoping to find answers—and to stay out of the Needle Man’s lethal reach.

An homage to slasher films with a fresh take on the true price of fame, Burn the Negative is a twisty thriller best read with the lights on.

Really looking forward to giving this a try. Josh Winning’s Burn the Negative is due to be published by G. P. Putnam’s Sons in North America and in the UK, on July 11th, 2023.

Follow the Author: Website, Goodreads, Instagram, Twitter

Upcoming: by Tom Hanks THE MAKING OF ANOTHER MAJOR MOTION PICTURE MASTERPIECE (Knopf/Hutchinson Heinemann)

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HanksT-MakingOfAnotherMajorMotionPictureMasterpieceUSHCAnnounced just a few days ago, Tom Hanks‘s new novel The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece is due out next year! Reading the synopsis, it’s almost as if the actor/author asked me what kind of novel I’d like him to write… This really does sound tailor-mode for my fiction interests. Here’s the synopsis:

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.

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.

HanksT-MakingOfAnotherMajorMotionPictureMasterpieceUKHCCut 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.

The book will also be published with 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.'” I really can’t wait to read this. The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece is due to be published by Knopf in North America and Hutchinson Heinemann in the UK, on May 9th, 2023.

Follow the Author: Goodreads, Instagram