A breezy, affably written amalgam of memoir, advice, and workplace survival guide from the front lines of the entertainment...
A TV writer reflects on carving out a career in male-dominated Hollywood.
Scovell, a veteran writer, producer, director, and show creator, minces few words when skewering the toxic atmosphere for female talent in Hollywood. In her frank memoir, the author, who collaborated with Sheryl Sandberg on Lean In, escorts readers through the beginnings of her career writing for SPY magazine in the 1980s while unpacking the emotional baggage of two botched marriages. At 26, she spontaneously flew from New York to Los Angeles to meet with an executive producer only to be placed in the first of many competitive, sexist, “penis party” writing teams, learning one industry lesson after another. A talent for comedic timing and impressive spec scriptwriting ushered Scovell into the writers’ meetings of some of TV’s top programs over a career that now spans over three decades. She reflects on the mixed success of scriptwriting for an impressive array of popular programs, including The Simpsons, Coach, and Murphy Brown. She also created and produced Sabrina the Teenage Witch and Charmed and even wrote jokes for Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. “The ratio of fun versus not fun varies from show to show,” she acknowledges, commenting that “the people, the process, and the product” are the determining factors. As Scovell’s career matured and her confidence bloomed, so did her role as a wife and mother of two. Her fearlessness was clearly evidenced when the David Letterman sex scandal broke and the author made a controversial and risky career move by speaking out about a marked lack of gender diversity in the late-night TV arena. Photographs, newspaper mentions, and script clips further illuminate the author’s rise to prominence. While arguing that the industry still has a long way to go “in changing its casual acceptance of inappropriate behavior,” Scovell counts herself among the many who have made successful careers in show writing and creative collaboration.
A breezy, affably written amalgam of memoir, advice, and workplace survival guide from the front lines of the entertainment industry.Pub Date: March 20, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-247348-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 10, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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