Writing for the Screen is a collection of essays and interviews exploring the business of screenwriting. This highly accessible guide to working in film and television includes perspectives from industry insiders on topics such as breaking in; pitching; developing and nurturing business relationships; juggling multiple projects; and more. Writing for the Screen is an ideal companion to screenwriting and filmmaking classes, demystifying the industry and the role of the screenwriter with real-world narratives and little-known truths about the business. With insight from working professionals, you’ll be armed with the information you need to pursue your career as a screenwriter. Contains essays by and interviews with screenwriting consultants, television writers, feature writers, writer-directors of independent film, producers, and professors. Offers expert opinions on how to get started, including preparing your elevator pitch, finding mentors, landing an internship, and moving from an internship to the next step in your career. Reveals details about taking meetings, what development executives are looking for in a screenwriter, how and when to approach a producer, and how to pitch. Explores strategies for doing creative work under pressure, finding your voice, choosing what to write, sticking with a project over the long haul, overcoming discrimination, and reinventing yourself as a writer. Illuminates the business of screenwriting in the United States (New York and Los Angeles) as compared to other countries around the globe, including England, Ireland, Peru, France, Australia, and Belgium.

**THE INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER** “A Gen-X This Boy’s Life...Music and his fierce brilliance boost Jollett; a visceral urge to leave his background behind propels him to excel... In the end, Jollett shakes off the past to become the captain of his own soul. Hollywood Park is a triumph." —O, The Oprah Magazine "This moving and profound memoir is for anyone who loves a good redemption story." —Good Morning America, 20 Books We're Excited for in 2020 "Several years ago, Jollett began writing Hollywood Park, the gripping and brutally honest memoir of his life. Published in the middle of the pandemic, it has gone on to become one of the summer’s most celebrated books and a New York Times best seller..." –Los Angeles Magazine HOLLYWOOD PARK is a remarkable memoir of a tumultuous life. Mikel Jollett was born into one of the country’s most infamous cults, and subjected to a childhood filled with poverty, addiction, and emotional abuse. Yet, ultimately, his is a story of fierce love and family loyalty told in a raw, poetic voice that signals the emergence of a uniquely gifted writer. We were never young. We were just too afraid of ourselves. No one told us who we were or what we were or where all our parents went. They would arrive like ghosts, visiting us for a morning, an afternoon. They would sit with us or walk around the grounds, to laugh or cry or toss us in the air while we screamed. Then they’d disappear again, for weeks, for months, for years, leaving us alone with our memories and dreams, our questions and confusion. ... So begins Hollywood Park, Mikel Jollett’s remarkable memoir. His story opens in an experimental commune in California, which later morphed into the Church of Synanon, one of the country’s most infamous and dangerous cults. Per the leader’s mandate, all children, including Jollett and his older brother, were separated from their parents when they were six months old, and handed over to the cult’s “School.” After spending years in what was essentially an orphanage, Mikel escaped the cult one morning with his mother and older brother. But in many ways, life outside Synanon was even harder and more erratic. In his raw, poetic and powerful voice, Jollett portrays a childhood filled with abject poverty, trauma, emotional abuse, delinquency and the lure of drugs and alcohol. Raised by a clinically depressed mother, tormented by his angry older brother, subjected to the unpredictability of troubled step-fathers and longing for contact with his father, a former heroin addict and ex-con, Jollett slowly, often painfully, builds a life that leads him to Stanford University and, eventually, to finding his voice as a writer and musician. Hollywood Park is told at first through the limited perspective of a child, and then broadens as Jollett begins to understand the world around him. Although Mikel Jollett’s story is filled with heartbreak, it is ultimately an unforgettable portrayal of love at its fiercest and most loyal.

Socially awkward and prone to accidents, Franny Dawson has a brand-new project—herself. Owning the local bakery, The Sweet Spot, has taken all her time and energy and she's neglected the social aspects of her life. The small lakeside town of Granite Cove, New Hampshire is full of quirky residents eager to help and hinder her new plan. Mitch Atwater, an award-winning director, returns to town. He has an agenda of his own and is wreaking havoc with her goals and her heart. Can Franny outwit her nemesis, overcome her perfect sister's surprise return, and escape the cocoon of her own insecurities to take a chance on love and get her very own happily ever after?

Albert Brooks: Interviews brings together fourteen profiles of and conversations with Brooks (b. 1947), in which he contemplates, expounds upon, and hilariously jokes about the connections between his show business upbringing, an ambivalence about the film industry, the nature of fame and success, and the meaning and purpose of comedy. Throughout all these encounters, Brooks expresses an unwavering commitment to his own artistic expression as a filmmaker and a rejection of mainstream conventions. With his questioning and critical disposition, nothing seems certain for Albert Brooks except for the integrity of art and the necessity for a wry skepticism about the incongruities of everyday life in corporate America. Brooks is neither a Hollywood insider nor an outsider. He’s somewhere in-between. Since the early 1970s, this inimitable actor-writer-director has incisively satirized the mass media system from within. After initial work as an inventive comedian, both live and on network television, Brooks contributed six shorts to the first season of Saturday Night Live, which earned him a cult following for their avant-garde form and sensibility. These were followed by his feature debut, Real Life, the first of only seven films—including Modern Romance, Lost in America, and Defending Your Life—that Brooks has directed to date. His limited output reflects not only the difficulty in financing idiosyncratic films, but equally the exacting seriousness which Brooks has in making audiences laugh and think at the same time.

Book 4 – Movie Lovers Grace Brewster makes the biggest mistake of her life with sexy, bad boy movie producer, Gunther Quill. Humiliated by Quill and Jake Matthews, her sister’s Broadway co-star, Grace vows to even the score with both men. Will her plan work or blow up in her face, losing her the man she loves? Book 5 – Love’s Last Chance Seeking true love, respected choreographer, Dorrie, reconnects with each of three men. Will she find what she’s looking for or end up back with the one man who broke her heart? Book 6 – Lovers & Liars Gunther Quill, arrogant, brilliant producer, hates liars worse than anything. Erica Wheeler needs a job or face eviction. Will a little white lie used to get a plum job working for Gunther destroy her chance for happiness?

Hollywood's Silent Closet provides a banquet of information about the pansexual intrigues of Hollywood between 1919 and 1926, compiled from eyewitness interviews with men and women, all of them insiders, who flourished in its midst. Not for the timid, it names names and doesn't spare the guilty. If you believe, like Truman Capote, that the literary treatment of gossip will become the literature of the 21st century, then you will love Hollywood's Silent Closet. Hollywood's Silent Closet is a vivid portrait of the decadent, homosexual, and gossipy world of pre-talkie Hollywood. It's an Info-Novel where 90% of everything in it is true. It represents the greatest collection of star-studded scandal ever assembled on the film stars of Hollywood's Silent Era. Valentino, Ramon Novarro, Charlie Chaplin, Fatty Arbuckle, Pola Negri, Nazimova, and many others figure into eyewitness accounts of the debauched excesses that went on behind closed doors. It also documents the often tragic endings of America's first screen idols, some of whom admitted to being more famous than the monarchs of England and Jesus Christ combined. Many of the interviews that went into the compilation of this book were conducted between 1940 and 1974, as the subjects were nearing the end of their lives and were willing, at last, to reveal scandals and insights that had previously been repressed by their own fears and by the media machines of the studio system. Marriages of convenience are the norm as intra-male peccadillos (and lots of lesbian love, too) are swept under the potted palms of the Edwardian age. The hero of this tale is the amiably cross-dressing Durango Jones, a wide-eyed neophyte from Kansas, circa 1919, who hits Hollywood during its Pre-Code excesses, and stays for a sexual feast wherein the banquet consists of many of the era's most flamboyant sex symbols. And although technically, this title has been formatted as a novel rather than a straight-line biography, there's the sometimes disturbing sense that this book is genuinely historical as well as being a jolly and rollicking piece of very savvy entertainment. This is high-testosterone Hollywood at its most compulsively readable. The 60s didn't invent sex-the stars of the Silent Screen did. --Cruiser. Who slept with Mary Pickford's three husbands, her two brothers-in-law, and even her brother? The hero of Hollywood's Silent Closet, that's who! --Trova Roma.

From her days as a youthful minx at Metro Goldwyn Mayer to her post-studio reign as America's lustiest middle-aged movie queen, Taylor has defined the very essence of Hollywood stardom. How to be a Movie Star is a different kind of book about Elizabeth Taylor: an intimate, up-close look at a girl who grew up with fame, who learned early-and well-how to be famous, and how that fame was used and constructed to carry her through more than sixty years of public life. Indeed, one might say Elizabeth went to school to learn how to be famous, her education courtesy of Metro Goldwyn Mayer, the greatest, most glamorous movie studio of all time.

Hollywood marks the fifth episode in Gore Vidal's "Narratives of Empire," his celebrated series of six historical novels that form his extended biography of the United States. It is 1917, and President Woodrow Wilson is about to lead the country into the Great War in Europe. In California, a new industry is born that will irreversibly transform America. Caroline Sanford, the alluring heroine of Empire, discovers the power of moving pictures to manipulate reality as she vaults to screen stardom under the name of Emma Traxler. Just as Caroline must balance her two lives--West Coast movie star and East Coast newspaper publisher and senator's mistress--so too must America balance its two power centers: Hollywood and Washington. Here is history as only Gore Vidal can re-create it: brimming with intrigue and scandal, peopled by the greats of the silver screen and American politics. "Hollywood shimmers with the illusion of politics and the politics of illusion," wrote the Chicago Sun-Times. "A wonderfully literate and consistently impressive work of fiction that clearly belongs on a shelf with Vidal's best," said The New York Times Book Review. With a new Introduction by the author.

The star of the Harold and Kumar franchise, House, and Designated Survivor recounts why he rejected the advice of his aunties and guidance counselors and, instead of becoming a doctor or “something practical,” embarked on a surprising journey that has included confronting racism in Hollywood, meeting his future husband, and working in the Obama administration, in this “incredibly joyful and insightful” (Kiefer Sutherland) memoir. You Can’t Be Serious is a series of funny, consequential, awkward, and ridiculous stories from Kal Penn’s idiosyncratic life. It’s about being the grandson of Gandhian freedom fighters, and the son of immigrant parents: people who came to this country with very little and went very far—and whose vision of the American dream probably never included their son sliding off an oiled-up naked woman in the raunchy Ryan Reynolds movie Van Wilder…or getting a phone call from Air Force One as Kal flew with the country’s first Black president. “By turns hilarious, poignant, and inspiring” (David Axelrod, New York Times bestselling author), Kal reflects on the most exasperating and rewarding moments from his journey so far. He pulls back the curtain on the nuances of opportunity and racism in the entertainment industry and recounts how he built allies, found encouragement, and dealt with early reminders that he might never fit in. He describes his initially unpromising first date with his now-fiancé Josh, involving an 18-pack of Coors Light and an afternoon of watching NASCAR. And of course, he reveals how, after a decade and a half of fighting for and enjoying successes in Hollywood, he made the terrifying but rewarding decision to take a sabbatical from a fulfilling acting career for an opportunity to serve his country as an Obama White House aide. Above all, You Can’t Be Serious shows that everyone can have more than one life story. The book “is insightful, funny, and instructive for anyone who’s ever grappled with how they fit into the American dream” (Ronan Farrow, New York Times bestselling author), and demonstrates that no matter who you are and where you come from, you have many more choices than those presented to you. And okay, yes, it’s also about how Kal accidentally (and very stupidly) accepted an invitation to take the entire White House Office of Public Engagement to a strip club—because, let’s be honest, that’s the kind of stuff you really want to hear about.