End Credits: How I Broke Up with Hollywood

“If you run into an asshole in the morning, you ran into an asshole. If you run into assholes all day, you're the asshole.” - Raylan Givens

There are aspects of this book that were interesting and I learned some things about productions on specific shows but I heavily disliked the author the entire time. She had grievances with every single person in this book, mostly for dumb, inconsequential, or pure conjecture reasons. She was never asked back for any job, and at a certain point, you get to understand why - everything is always everyone else's problem, she is always the only virtuous one in the room, the only one willing to stand up for what's right. There are moments where she is very critical of Hollywood culture but then turns around and lashes out at people who try to help her.

I was willing to give her the benefit of the doubt to a degree because Hollywood is a known difficult place and some situations were unambiguously unfair/terrible for her to be in, but I reached my limit of grace with the Breaking Bad stuff. She wrote for the first season and while I obviously do not know Vince Gilligan and he could be totally different than his media portrayal, everyone seems to think highly of him and he is always praising other people. And Patty Lin didn't like him, which, fair enough. I don't know the story. But she doesn't out him for crazy behavior. She tries to paint him as a rude, aloof, selfish person for things like not using a whiteboard, forgetting to tell her about revisions, the irredeemable sin of procrastination, not being sure the direction he wanted the show to go in, and wanting to get some last minute writing in for the show before the Writer's strike. And for having the audacity to fire her, of course.

Maybe she is completely in the right and every person she ever came across in Hollywood was insufferable and she is a writing genius who just was underutilized by everyone. Or maybe not.