HOW TO MAKE IT IN HOLLYWOOD: The Inside Story
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $5.99
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- $5.99
Publisher Description
How to Make It in Hollywood: The Inside Story is an often funny, always enlightening insider's view on how to break into the world of show business and navigate its shark-infested waters.
Filled with anecdotal "war stories" of working with Academy-award winning talent, each short chapter explains a rule to follow to "make it" in Hollywood, from " It's All About Passion" to "Good Ideas Don't Just Fall Off a Turnip Truck,"Humility is a Highly Over-rated Virtue" and much, much more.
Coming from Cheyenne, Wyoming, with no family, friends or contacts in the entertainment business, author Rick Friedberg became an award-winning writer/director of movies, television, TV commercials, music videos, documentaries and digital media. His experiences, told with candor and humor, encompass the do's and dont's of dealing with the frustrations, rejection and politics that can and must be overcome to forge a career in show business.
Some say this book is funnier than Julia Phillips' You'll Never Eat Lunch in this Town Again," less "sour grapes" than Joe Esterhaz's Hollywood Animal and more broadly encompassing than William Goldman's Adventures in the Screen Trade.
Customer Reviews
Readers would be foolish to dismiss the wisdom that Friedberg has the guts to share.
Maverick veteran filmmaker Rick Friedberg shares valuable insight into an industry crippled from fear of failure, quest for power, and a pursuit of profit. How To Make It in Hollywood is a must-read for students of drama and all of us tired of the gratuitous, uncreative comedy spawned from Hollywood’s trend-research mass-appeal focused studios.
Like many in the entertainment business, Friedberg entered Hollywood with dreams of making a difference in comedy, telling stories to make young men laugh. A naïve and trusting young man from Wyoming, he studied at USC and gained crucial life experiences abroad, in New York, San Francisco, and L.A. He then tackled industry jobs with dedication and humor and gained the essential connections to launch his screenwriting and directing career.
He calls himself a maverick – which he skillfully illustrates with poignant tales from candid insider life experiences – but I see him more as a courageous leader who takes on the young and powerful MBAs behind the corporate studios. In the name-dropping but humble discourse common among legacy Hollywood writers, he questions the wisdom of the youth in suits and the deal-makers attached to them who make the decisions behind what stories are told and to whom they are marketed. Bravo, Friedberg; you said what needed to be said: suits are messing up stories.
Friedberg has been through the wringer. From him, we have much to learn about how comedy was made before independent films challenged studios, how Hollywood works today, and how comedy should continue to be made for TV and film. As in his first hit comedy, the hilarious and irreverent Pray TV, he is again ahead of his time with this memoir, seeing the inevitable threat from the moviegoers themselves emptying theater seats while distribution and investment capital changes the power structure from which films are made.
But How To Make It in Hollywood is not a rant on how business is done under benchmarking stats and hotness trends. At the same time that Friedberg shows the ugliness of the industry’s backstabbing, he also gives future actors and crew hope. He has a dream to make great films and with such wisdom and creativity, Hollywood would be foolish not to tap into his talent again and again and again.
Readers would be foolish to dismiss the wisdom that Friedberg has the guts to share. He was generous with his time to write his reflections on what he continues to learn. Now it is time for readers to listen.
Book Review by Carla J. Hanna, author of young adult novels about teen celebrity