Review of the Day: Television
Television by Lauren Rothery is a satire of Hollywood and the movie industry. The plot is a little thin and occasionally hard to follow; the highlight is the prose. Rothery’s novel alternates first person chapters between Verity, an aging actor, and Helen, his companion, editor, and sounding board. About a third of the way through the book a screenwriter named Phoebe. There is more plot, but that is all you really need to know. In some ways the novel owes something to the work of Joan Didion; for example: Everybody thinks they’re Joan Didion when they write about the flowers or the river (location 490). There are quite a few references to filmmakers such as Tarkovsky, Bergman, Bunuel, Satyjit Ray, Chaplin, Kurosawa, Scorsese, and others. And there are many passages commenting on filmmaking I thought worth remembering: The trouble with having an idea for a screenplay is you have to write the screenplay. A real idea for anything kind of haunts you. Whether you know how to d...
