We’re back at the White Lotus, gang. That means Sunday night social media, equal parts wealth porn and hatred, and the return of the “braggy beach book.”
In previous seasons, the show’s conspicuous titles have served a satirical purpose. There’s a lot of laughs to be mined from the ways the idle rich try (and evidently fail) to self-improve.
Season one minted the concept of Book Girl Summer when two erudite Zoomers brought Lacan and Fanon to the pool. Season two saw Aubrey Plaza’s Harper, an immigration lawyer, take a distracted pass at Valeria Luiselli’s The Lost Children Archive. But fretting about her husband’s imagined infidelity regularly trumped that tour de force on the border crisis.
Some wise speculators have noted that so far into season three, the books seem less prominent. But I’ve been assured that this is not a commentary. This year’s crop is supposed to be more or less as literate as previous guests. (Parker Posey’s pill-addled Victoria perhaps notwithstanding.) Titles may be out of focus because of the DP’s preference for close-ups this season. Also, certain publishers levy prohibitive licensing fees, and even the big shows are feeling budget cuts.
But as to the how of it all? I spoke with Michael Cory, props master for White Lotus season three, about the titles that go into a guest’s bag. The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
How you go about book selecting for this specific universe?
I mean it’s one of the more fun things for me on most jobs, because it gets right into either who people are or who they want to be.
Were titles mentioned in this season’s scripts? Or were books something you got full jurisdiction over?
Well sometimes they are, but on this project I talked to Mike [White] about it, in one of my first meetings with him. I came up with a list of what I liked for certain characters initially, then he sent me a list that he liked. Then, once the actors were cast, it kind of ran off in different directions. But I think the only scripted books this season were fictional.
As in ‘invented?’
Yeah. Well Piper’s there to visit the monks and possibly join their program, so we created six different titles for that monk. We had them in Thai as well as English. And you see them sort of in the background at the meditation center. I have to rewatch it to see if they’re even visible. I was tooling around with having them in German and Russian, also. But we ran out of time to create all those covers. And that’s sort of the harder thing—to make a fake book look real.
I imagine so. Especially against recognizable titles. I notice [Natasha Rothwell’s] Belinda is reading something real, in the latest episode…?
Yeah, that was a fun one.
What was the title of that book?
Somebody figured it out online. But it’s actually Surrounded by Narcissists: How to Effectively Recognize, Avoid, and Defend Yourself Against Toxic People (and not lose your mind). [By Thomas Erickson].
Oh, that’s funny. I love what a big part of the character storytelling that does.
Sometimes it might be a little bit on the nose. But we couldn’t resist.
Could you tell me a little about how you found the books for this crop of White Lotus-ers?
Some were ideas in advance, and some came from going to the bookstores in Thailand. Bangkok is a wonderland of all sorts of bookstores. Yeah there was one, I think it was called Asia Books? Half stationery store, half bookstore. There was the Thai section and the English section. And we were looking for books for Thai characters as well. Mook [Lalisa Manobal] has a book in her bag, though I don’t think you can ever see what it is.
We had to decide which books characters bought in Thailand, and how many books [they brought from home]. Like for Piper [Sarah Catherine Hook; arguably the show’s most literary character], I was buying from the local bookstores in Durham and Chapel Hill. Like the university bookshops, the university press. And putting their bookmarks in her books.
That’s an amazing attention to detail.
And I’d never stayed at a Four Seasons hotel until we started filming at one, and if you have a book out—and you know I had six or so books on my bedside table—and when I’d come back at night, each one of them would have a Four Seasons bookmark in them. So we stole that idea, too.
We made White Lotus bookmarks and stuck them in books around the hotel.
How’d you find your way into prop mastery?
A love of film that ran through my whole family. My father always insisted on staying through the credits at the end of everything. So reading the credits and thinking, which job could I do?
I tried a bunch out but just kind of fell in love with the props side of it. It’s creative and problem solving and collaborative.
Speaking of collaboration! I noticed that you worked on another HBO show, And Just Like That, which also has a pretty conspicuous syllabus. Can you comment on that experience?
It’s similar in a way that books are all over both shows. But [in AJLT] they’re in their own homes, they’re in New York. On White Lotus we can kind of get carried away. Like, how many books did these people actually bring with them to their supposedly weeklong vacation? But AJLT doesn’t have that issue. And Sarah Jessica Parker is a huge reader. Often we get, if not specific titles, genres or things she’s interested in at the time.
We actually have a rolling library that we just keep with us, to see what she wants to read in different scenes.
Some of these titles I see Carrie holding are very buzzy, and therefore time-bound. Have you ever had to switch out a title, as production creeps closer?
That’s part of the trick. In that show, her character’s in the publishing world, so she thinks she has access to galleys. But that’s tricky for us because we never know when the show is coming out. And we try to work closely with the publishers to get things that aren’t necessarily released yet, but often times it fails because by the time the show actually airs the books are out. You can only get so far ahead.
Well since you brought up your own TBR stack, did you manage to read any of your own vacation books in Thailand?
I thought I’d have more free time! But in Thailand I read Miranda July’s All Fours, and I read Jonathan Lethem’s Brooklyn Crime Novel, which is set in my neighborhood in New York. And before I went to Thailand I read Bangkok Wakes to Rain, a novel by Pitchaya Sudbanthad.
And there was a book I originally intended for Laurie. [Carrie Coon’s frazzled single character.] Which was Olivia Laing’s The Lonely City.
Tee-hee.
Weirdly, the actress who played Piper became interested in that one, and she wanted to read it between scenes. There was one scene–which may be on the cutting room floor, but could pop up in a future episode–where she just pulled it out of her bag and started reading it. And we panicked, because most of the publishing companies are fairly friendly but some require licensing fees, and that one did.
As she pulled it out of her bag and we were like, “well, I guess we’re buying that book now…” Where normally, anyone who wants to charge us a fee we try to avoid.
It’s such a close way of looking at characters. Imagining what they’re reading.
Oh, yeah. We basically try to get in their heads as much as possible. What they’re reading, what they have in their bag. With [every object], we create our own little story of where they got it, why they have it, what it means to them.
I’m thinking of that old fiction adage about ‘what’s in your character’s purse…’
It’s also what people will tell you is in their purse vs. what’s actually in their purse. It goes with that thing of, which books you’ve actually read and which books are sitting in your house unread.
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