There’s a reason we all dream about the movies.
Filmmakers, actors, singers, models, and screenwriters are in the business of making reality seem a bit more polished, a bit more cinematic and beautiful, than it really is. The fact that, behind the scenes, they’re just as flawed as the rest of us (if not more so! The artistic temperament is a very real thing) makes any story about how the sausage gets made into something that’s, at the very least, distracting.
At their best, backstage tales illuminate both artists and audience, explaining how work comes together and what about that work and the people who made it keeps us transfixed.
One of my goals for my new novel, The Talent, was to have readers feel as if they were really there as awards season runs on. In my professional life, I cover Hollywood, including the Oscar race, as a journalist; this fictional awards pageant draws on what I’ve witnessed in my line of work, but is fueled, too, by the passion and drama that accompanies show people wherever they go. These books do a similar thing — shedding light on what kind of temperament it takes to make art, and what pressures artists face as they try to express something genuine.
Daddy by Emma Cline
Cline’s short story collection ranges widely in subject matter, while keeping, throughout, her cool-to-the-touch approach to human relations and her tendency to center somewhat off-kilter female characters. But it’s “The Nanny” that lands like a bomb right in the middle of the book. The story features a woman enduring a tabloid scandal, one who’d been employed as a babysitter for the family of a famous actor who finds herself enmeshed in his marriage during a long film shoot, and then must live in the aftermath. This author tends to write characters who drift through life; adding the tractor beam-like charisma of a celebrity into the mix is an ingenious destabilizing element.
The Vanity Fair Diaries by Tina Brown
As the editor who made Vanity Fair into a veritable bible of politics and movie stars, Tina Brown ran culture in the 1980s and 1990s. And her retrospective diary about the business of liaising with celebrities of all stripes is as delicious a reading experience as one could hope for. Her dishy recollections about her ongoing flirtation with Warren Beatty — with her motive being to get him to agree to sit for a cover story, and with his intriguingly unknowable — is, alone, worth the price.
Audition by Katie Kitamura
This forthcoming novel takes the art and alchemy of acting seriously. Kitamura’s protagonist, an actress rehearsing for a demanding role in a play, finds herself drawn into what seems like a fantasy version of her own life, one that demands she start performing in her off hours as well. What does it mean to live theatrically, and what lines must an artist draw between her work and her life? Kitamura doesn’t find an answer, but the question intrigues.
Monster: Living Off the Big Screen by John Gregory Dunne
With his wife, Joan Didion, Dunne had a lucrative sideline as a screenwriter. But as this nonfiction account of a long attempt to bring one project to completion shows, the money may not have been worth the hassle. In granular detail, Dunne anatomizes the process by which a planned movie about a real-life journalist who died tragically became the fun, sunny Michelle Pfeiffer romantic comedy “Up Close and Personal.” Dunne’s headache makes for readers’ pleasure: This is a dishy, fun analysis of just how many competing pressures screenwriters for big studios face if they try to make anything without a classic Hollywood ending.
Mike Nichols: A Life by Mark Harris
The greatest Hollywood biography of recent years tracks one prolific director through a long and varied career. Mike Nichols rose to prominence as a filmmaker with Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and The Graduate and went on to make Working Girl, Closer, and Charlie Wilson’s War. Intriguingly, he lacked a fundamental signature or style. He was competent and engaged enough to allow his career to go on, and he spent his life wearing a wig and false eyebrows (a side effect from a childhood medical treatment), which left him fundamentally relating to outsider characters, whether they were a young college alum driftless in Southern California or a Staten Island secretary looking for more. Harris marshals a fantastic set of interviewees to make Nichols’s life and work into a narrative that, itself, might make a great film.
The Last Dream by Pedro Almodóvar
Almodóvar is one of the defining directors of world cinema, and his collection of personal writing represents as close as he will come to writing his autobiography. The particular preoccupations and obsessions that run through his work, from the life of his mother to religious faith to passion and sexuality (represented in one instance in a parable-like tale about a vampire in a Catholic monastery), are drawn out here; one story even represents the genesis of the idea for Almodóvar’s great film of piety and revenge, Bad Education.
Swing Time by Zadie Smith
Tracey is a dance prodigy, a girl whose feet seem to move in perfect rhythm no matter what song is playing. But it’s our narrator, a relatively talentless dancer, who ends up in the heart of the entertainment industry, working as a personal assistant for a pop star named Aimee. (Take a dash of Kylie, a big scoop of Madonna, and maybe some Mariah, mix it all together…) “Swing Time” is shaggy and loose, and perhaps not Smith’s very strongest novel, but its depiction of celebrity vanity — culminating in an act of selfishness cloaked as benevolence during one of Aimee’s trips to West Africa — is written with a sharpened pen.
Inside Out by Demi Moore
Moore’s memoir is likely the most accomplished in a while — thanks in part to New Yorker writer Ariel Levy’s work on the manuscript, but also to Moore’s willingness to dive deep into her work and life and reflect on what it all meant. For much of her career, Moore was treated more as object than as artist (a state of affairs that has happily concluded with the release of The Substance, a film that makes explicit comment on the way our culture chews up actresses). After walking away from the spotlight, Moore found herself the subject of tabloid scrutiny once again during her marriage to and divorce from Ashton Kutcher. Her reflections on the experience, on the trauma and addiction that haunted her early career, and on what movie stardom meant to her make for a moving, haunting read.
Veronica by Mary Gaitskill
Gaitskill’s masterpiece toggles between a grim and unhappy present and a glimmering past, as protagonist Alison reflects on her dazzling, avaricious former life as a top model. The fashion world is drawn with stiletto precision as a collection of users, jerks, and worse, with Alison herself queen of the ego monsters. The whole story is told with the bleak moral clarity of a Grimm Brothers fairy tale, with Alison’s redemption coming through her reflection on her friendship with the pure-hearted Veronica, a person who has given her life over to her appreciation of beauty. There can, of course, be no art without an audience, something the disdainful Alison, years after her beauty has faded, realizes too late.
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