TELL THE STORY

Tannen’s memoir details a life spent telling stories, in one form or another, in 20th-century Hollywood.

The author’s second memoir begins with a bleak account of the latter days of an unnamed, once world-famous Hollywood star. This legendary actor was spiraling toward oblivion, his cocaine habit so extreme that he needed to build it into his contractual rider. Though this opening scene is brief, it effectively colors the early portions of this work, in which readers get to know Terrell in the years before he left his home in Washington, D.C., to pursue his dreams in filmmaking in Los Angeles. For years, the author aspired to be a musician; when that didn’t pan out, he worked odd jobs for a time, including a memorable stint in the boiler room at George Washington University Hospital, a place with “the appearance and personality of a set from a mid-twentieth-century era science fiction film, lacking only the theremin soundtrack of Forbidden Planet.” He drove a taxi in D.C. and eventually got involved in politics, which he parlayed into gigs making political films; in this period, he wrote his first screenplay. With the success of Tricks, a documentary about a down-and-out boxer, Terrell expanded his film company and, after shooting a slasher film in rural Maryland, finally made his way to L.A. to begin his Hollywood career in earnest. Like many neophyte filmmakers he was hit by the rude realities of the business, in which cash is king and relationships are expendable.

Somewhat counterintuitively, the work grows less interesting once things move to L.A., where the travails Terrell faced are mostly what readers would expect: unreliable actors, too-tight budgets, demanding producers. But readers will be charmed by the affable tone of self-deprecation Tannen strikes, particularly about his own early work: “Making a good movie is extremely difficult, even for experienced filmmakers, and our film clearly showed we were not that.” While many Hollywood tales are long on self-aggrandization and short on pathos, Tannen’s work is much the opposite; what is so compelling about the narrative is the author himself, not the intricacies of the film world he describes. Though readers will no doubt come for cinematic insights, they will leave remembering the early sections most clearly, in which Terrell describes kicking around in his youth, finding new ways to make ends meet while yearning to carve out a space for his creativity and passion for filmmaking and storytelling. Some readers may bump up against the author’s diplomatic unwillingness to “name names”—one senses there are any number of juicy anecdotes about celebrities he could relay—but this memoir gamely avoids the salacious temptation of gossip in favor of focusing on a life spent making art, and the pitfalls and joys of pursuing one’s dreams. While this is not the tell-all some may want, Tannen has crafted a work from the heart that serves as an enlightening journey through the latter of half of 20th-century Hollywood.

A smooth-reading Tinseltown chronicle sure to satisfy both cinephiles and fans of introspective memoirs.