I’ve been a film buff since before I could read or write. One of my earliest memories is, at age five, sleeping in the back of our station wagon while my mother took in a midnight showing of Michael Cimino’s epic western (and epic flop) Heaven’s Gate at our local drive-in. Restless and uncomfortable, I’d emerge every so often to climb into the front seat and catch a few minutes of Kris Kristofferson, my first and longest celebrity crush. My early film buff status was baptized in the fire of that sprawling attempted masterpiece, which is most famous for the myths and yarns about how wrong everything went behind the scenes.
The novelist in me has always loved reading about the drama behind the films as much as I like watching the films themselves: directors with eccentric or risky practices, actors prone to diva fits and temper tantrums, method actors refusing to break character, ambitious locations where the terrain or the weather ultimately proved impossible to navigate—these just make for great stories and entertaining characters. Was everything permissible behind the scenes as long as it yielded magic on the screen? Like in love or war, it seems all was fair on the set, and whatever it took to get a great emotional performance or capture a perfect shot, the means justified the ends. With time and a slightly more evolved understanding of the actual damage this left on the humans involved, many of our beloved masterpieces remain in a bittersweet cloud, marked by excess, cruelty, or even abuse.
This is precisely the kind of behind-the-scenes drama I wanted to investigate when I began working on my novel Porthole, about a film maker who has come to a tipping point in her career because of her working methods and her complicated and messy relationships with actors and her crews. Her unyielding but often myopic artistic vision has led her to some considerable success, and some colossal failures as well—she can no longer run from the damage. I was interested in exploring this fine line between the eccentric and the extreme when it came to methods behind the camera. At what point does this kind of exacting vision tip over into failure: a project that can’t ever be completed, or which outstrips any ability to recoup its costs—either monetarily or metaphorically? What leads to a situation where the ambition of the vision ultimately destroys the possibility of it ever succeeding?
There is probably a reason that I stuck to writing on the page, rather than for the screen—there’s safety to the anonymity of the author versus the fame of the film auteur. But this list has a few books that capture the best of both those worlds. Several are beloved favorites mostly by women with women protagonists, though some came to me through recommendations from other enthusiasts. All of these books offer some compelling explorations of the drama and intrigue of filmmaking.
The Third Hotel by Laura Van Den Berg
This magnificent story of a woman in search of her dead or presumed dead or walking-dead husband is set to the backdrop of a horror film festival in Cuba and is reminiscent of Brian De Palma at his high point. As the protagonist of The Third Hotel follows a ghost through the streets of Havana in her own kind of horror story, Van Den Berg investigates the horrors behind horror film history, the cultural inheritance of gendered violence in the genre, and the mixed bag of seduction and dread inherent in the form.
Colored Television by Danzy Senna
Focused more on the relationship between book publishing and television development, the protagonist of Colored Television is a novelist trying to ditch the hungry artist lifestyle and narrowminded gate-keeping of publishing in favor of a nearly-utopian hope of the streamable serial: the new television. Hoping to reach an audience beyond the white, liberal paradigm of publishing and finally make an income, she quickly learns Hollywood always has a few tricks up the sleeve. With Senna’s signature turn of phrase, and scathing cultural coinages, Colored Television exposes the latest version of artistic exploitation: corporate studios and streaming platforms, art made by and for the market-economy, and a wild west attitude to intellectual property.
Something New Under the Sun by Alexandra Kleeman
Set in a near-future Los Angeles, an era of late-stage climate disintegration featuring synthetic water, perpetual wildfires, and sinister wellness cults doesn’t prevent Hollywood film-making from lurching forward like an undead beast as the rest of the world burns. Something New Under the Sun follows a novelist working on the adaptation of one of his books for a film. Relegated to gopher, he is forced to watch every aspect of the work he created disappear in production. In flight from wildfires, he finds himself on a road trip with a messy starlet, whose prepper paranoia pans out amid Twelve Monkeys-esque anarchist plot twists in a mycelial web of global greed, artistic vacancy, and dystopian collapse.
The Public Image by Muriel Spark
The protagonist of Muriel Spark’s The Public Image is a mousy actress called Annabel who, despite a lack of talent, has managed to carve out a successful career on the strength of a public image (an infantilizing but hyper-sexualized typecasting) imposed on her by studio executives. Annabel is essentially a walking void, but things get complicated when her husband, a failed actor-turned-pretentious auteur, filled with resentment, casts her in his own film with a long game of ruining her public image. As with any Muriel Spark novel, just when you think things are dark, they go much darker, but you can never underestimate a dippy underdog surrounded by petty would-be patriarchs, and Annabel does not disappoint.
Innocents and Others by Dana Spiotta
Dana Spiotta’s Innocents and Others centers a pair of female filmmakers, Meadow and Carrie, whose long-standing friendship must endure the pressure-cooker of corporatized filmmaking as they grow into their very different film careers. Peppered with film history and the anxiety of influence—Orson Welles looms large—the book uses formal experimentation in the flavor of cinematic montage to mimic the technological immersion of modern filmmaking, and the fragmented modes of composition and communication it demands. Spiotta challenges any simple, singular category of woman-as-artist and maker, highlighting nuanced differences in aesthetic, ideology, and methodology for the two friends, and a difference in their feminisms, and strategies for navigating the male-dominated industry.
Suite for Barbara Loden by Nathalie Léger
Acclaimed French writer Nathalie Léger’s Suite for Barbara Loden—the first in a trilogy of books focused on women in art and performance—is partly an auto-fiction focused on her obsession with the American actress and filmmaker Barbara Loden, whose career and interpersonal dramas could easily have been a model for Muriel Spark’s The Public Image. Loden began as a bombshell-ingenue, whose glamorous Hollywood marriage to Elia Kazan was underpinned with insecurities and resentments. Léger focuses on Loden’s pivot from a trade in her sexuality toward a career behind the scenes. We see the ambiguities and unexpected moments that led to the making of her cinema verité cult classic Wanda. Weaving biography, film criticism and imaginative flights of fancy that take readers not just into the mind of Loden but into the mind of her character Wanda, Léger creates an intimate but Cubist portrait of an often overlooked artist.
Subterrane by Valérie Bah
Quebecois artist and filmmaker Valérie Bah brings the funny and fierce with their award-winning first novel Subterrane, set in fanciful New Stockholm, a Janus-faced city of bourgeois delights and post-industrial low-income wastes. It is these zones of exclusionary inclusion where protagonist Zeynab attempts to shoot their state-funded but relentlessly avant-garde documentary. In the margins, Zeynab finds a vibrant collective of artists, activists, philosophers, and holistic separatists centering Black and Queer voices. Bah uses her filmmaker’s eye to spotlight precisely those communities who get bracketed, but nonetheless resiliently maintain their esoteric and learnéd revolutionary scheming despite a dystopian squeeze, and the soul-killing drudgery of urban Renaissance for the few, rather than the many. A must read for the hunger artists looking for a witty and brilliant fix that doesn’t skimp on cultural critique.
Aliens and Anorexia by Chris Kraus
What could I say about Chris Kraus’s classic Aliens and Anorexia that hasn’t already been said by Chris Kraus in Aliens and Anorexia? In her renowned third book, Kraus adds film-maker/film-theorist to the list of her other genre colliding monikers as she recounts an attempt to get her experimental film “Gravity & Grace” distributed and shown at the Berlin Film Festival. Self-centering (and self-decentering), this exploration of alienation in artistic ambition, in all possible connotations of “alien,” also manages to uplift “anorexia” to the conceptual and psychological stature of Deleuzean “schizophrenia,” for one of the earliest efforts to complicate the stigmatized (with just a hint of misogyny) condition.
