Just the Funny Parts…

Just the Funny Parts…And a Few Hard Truths About Sneaking Into the Hollywood Boy’s Club by Nell Scovell       Audio Book: 8 hours, 36 minutes     Hardback Book:  336 pages     

Nell Scovell is both funny and a great writer.    She spells it out and names names on her experiences trying to break into writing for television and film.    Even in this day and age, the field is often closed to women, most t.v. writers are men and they are a very closed network.   Being a women and breaking through the glass ceiling of Hollywood writers is almost but not quite impossible.   Nell was able to do it, to hold her own to earn respect from her bosses and co-workers but in doing so she often had to become one of the guys.   If she worked with there being another woman on the writing team it never lasted.   They gave her hell, often ignoring her ideas or taking credit for them instead of giving it to her, even being belligerent and shouting in her face she was only there because they were giving the impression they were a diverse team.   Nell talks about the old boy network alive and rampant in all of the Hollywood studios.  If you do manage to break in don’t be surprised if you are harassed, sometimes verbally sometimes sexually.  It takes a tough skin to survive and she has learned to give and take with the men in the room by tolerating some of their crude remarks even giving them verbal jabs now and then, and she goes into detail  about the treatment she received from some of the top names in show business.   It is a very good book with a lot of insight into what to do and what not to do, what to expect and what not to expect.    She tells it all with aplumb and so much humor you will be laughing out loud at times.   This book is so open and informative a real taste for wanna be writers – a serious if you can’t stand the heat get out of the kitchen type of advice.    She is like a mentor giving the ins and outs.    She said as a woman and as a white woman she still seemed to have an advantage as in her decades long career she has never seen a black woman writer and so very few minorities working as writers on t.v. shows that it could be a room out of the 1950s and would still look pretty much the same.    An eye-opening look into Hollywood bias.   I would recommend this book.