A lightweight, sometimes-funny showbiz memoir from a successful background player.
A view from the trenches of show business by a comic actor straddling the line between success and obscurity.
In the foreword, Ray Romano praises Stoller, who had an occasional guest role on Everybody Loves Raymond, as someone who “without fail…always ‘brought’ the funny” and proceeds to describe this memoir as a “hilarious, honest look at the world of the working actor.” The hilarity may be more of an inside joke; the author seems more concerned with illuminating the struggles of actors, and with settling a few grudges along the way (bad dates, unappreciative colleagues), than with delivering laughs. As he explains early on, “In the Screen Actors Guild, 90 percent of the active members are out of work at any given time and 10 percent work for less than eight weeks a year…I’m thrilled to be working in a union where only 2 percent of the members work.” So even though he has “done more than sixty sitcom guest appearances,” on hits such as Seinfeld (where he was also a writer for a season, an experience he chronicled in My Seinfeld Year, 2012) and Friends, he describes a life of uncertainty and insecurity, working with agents and coaches that he isn’t sure are doing him any good and waiting for offers that might take months, even years to materialize. He reveals which casts were friendly and which paid little attention to a week’s guest, he shares the joy of being well-fed on some (and not so well on others), and he frets over sharing a bathroom. Said one casting director after a typical audition, “That’s an interesting way to go. It’s supposed to be a typical, annoying comedian, but you read it as if you were a special-ed kid, who’s pathetic and takes night courses on how to be a comedian.” He explains to readers, “I was basically just being me.”
A lightweight, sometimes-funny showbiz memoir from a successful background player.Pub Date: May 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-62087-706-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2013
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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