The phone call came on a hot July day--a day like any other for Marin County mom and freelance writer Tanya Harris. But this call--from Tanyaś agent--was anything but ordinary, offering a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity: the chance to write a major Hollywood screenplay, a dream she had put aside long ago to devote her energies to her family. This time, Tanya knows she cannot refuse, even though sheś torn about leaving her husband and their daughters....

A grief-stricken screenwriter unknowingly enters a three-way relationship with a woman and her film executive husband - to chilling results.

Blends fictional characters and situations with the lives of real people: obsessive orchid hunter John Laroche, "New Yorker" journalist Susan Orlean, Hollywood screenwriter Charlie Kaufman and his twin brother Donald. As Charlie struggles to adapt a best-selling book, he writes himself into the movie plot.

Examines the life, career, and legacy of Alice Guy-Blache, the first female filmmaker.

At twenty-three, Ruth Saunders headed west with her seventy-year-old grandma in tow, hoping to be hired as a television writer. Four years later, she's hit the jackpot when she gets The Call: the sitcom she wrote, The Next Big Thing, has gotten the green light, and Ruthie's going to be the show-runner. But her dreams of Hollywood happiness are threatened by demanding actors, number-crunching executives, an unrequited crush on a boss, and her grandmother's...

Success hasn't spoiled screenwriter Lou Calabrese -- it's just given her a taste for luxury. And it's put her in some bizarre situations -- like in a helicopter en route to the wilds of Alaska, sharing too-close quarters with the last man she wants to be with: Jack Townsend! Once a sexy nobody whom Lou helped make a somebody, Jack's just been dumped by a high-profile Hollywood airhead -- who's eloped with Lou's longtime love! So what else could go...

"One thing I’ve always liked about Hollywood is its zip, or speed. The whole industry depends to some extent on talent spotting. The hundreds of agents, studio executives, and producers who roam the streets of the city of Los Angeles let very little in the way of talent slip by." In this final installment of the memoir trilogy that includes Books and Literary Life, Larry McMurtry, "the master of the show-stopping anecdote" (O: The Oprah Magazine)...

Dixon Steele is an alcoholic screenwriter who has some success but is now in the midst of a long dry spell. One of his neighbors is Laurel Gray, a would-be actress and a smart cookie. Steele is a bitter, angry man who succeeds in insulting everyone he sees while drinking at noon in his usual hangout. Dix has taken a job adapting a trashy novel for the screen--but he doesn't want to read the book. The celebrity-obsessed coat check girl at his hangout...

Dramatizes the life of Naval Commander Frank "Spig" Wead, who became a Hollywood screenwriter after being injured in World War II.