"It’s the kind of mordant show-business diary you wish [Dorothy] Parker had been together enough to keep...Bruce Eric Kaplan manages to find the mordant laughs in today’s industry foibles... Beautifully brutal about the absurdities of his industry... unusually [for] a timid town, it names names."
—New York Times
“Bruce Eric Kaplan has long been one of our foremost humorists—in cartoons, on TV—but his prose is him at his best. His impressions of life are both dagger-sharp and comforting and he engages with the challenge of everyday—everyday parenthood, everyday politics, everyday madness— to create something of philosophical depth and comic precision. This book doesn’t shy away from the challenges of being a person, yet does no less than remind me of the magic in the quotidian, of all there is to love about being human.”
—Lena Dunham
"A funny, melancholy and poignant journal of Kaplan's personal plague year... a comic primer on how good ideas are slowly strangled by an unwieldy and inefficient streamocracy whose lingua franca is an artfully evasive lie."
—LA Times
“It's the best book I've read about waiting for something to happen. It's beautiful. I love it so much.”
—Gary Janetti, New York Times bestselling author of Do You Mind If I Cancel? and Start Without Me
“Bruce Eric Kaplan has written a funny, riveting, honest, and shocking memoir about hope and heartbreak. Essential reading for anyone aspiring to, contemplating, or dreaming of the Hollywood life.”
—Delia Ephron, New York Times bestselling author of Left on Tenth
"In other hands, the book might have read like an extended exercise in sour grapes. Instead, it’s an idiosyncratic meditation on creativity, success and failure, self discovery via frustration—and, because Kaplan includes dispatches on his home life, it’s about the ecosystem of a family, too.”
—Vanity Fair
“Bruce Eric Kaplan's hilarious, harrowing memoir captures the Sisyphean slog of Hollywood screenwriting better than any work of art I've ever seen. Brutal, devastating, and also somehow inspiring, it made me laugh, scream and sigh with recognition. I absolutely loved it.”
—Simon Rich, author of Glory Days
“I don’t know anyone funnier than Bruce Eric Kaplan and I don’t know anyone who suffers more than Bruce Eric Kaplan. Both of these truths bring me great joy.”
—Judd Apatow
"Screenwriter and cartoonist Kaplan captures the agonizing uncertainty of trying to get a TV series greenlit in this plangently funny memoir. . . With a balance of sharpness and pathos, the results offer a revealing look at the demoralizing effects of gig work. This mordantly entertaining account buffs the shine off Tinseltown."
—Publishers Weekly
"A humorous and deeply introspective memoir."
—Library Journal
"Kaplan, who is best known for his New Yorker cartoons, writes with the candor of one of his put-upon characters. In fact, many of his blunt, woeful sentences would work perfectly well as captions ("Is there any way my life could be turned into a musical about nothing ever happening and nothing ever getting fixed?"). His observational humor may conjure Seinfeld—no surprise, as Kaplan wrote for that show's final season—but he also evinces a devotion to his family that turns They Went Another Way into something more than a book about nothing. And yes, it would make a good television show."
—Shelf Awareness
"A good read for anyone seeking a truly frank look at what the life and career of a working television writer looks like."
—Booklist
"Hollywood dealmaking as seen from the inside out... Kaplan's journal entries have the same snappy rhythm and pace as cartoon captions."
—Kirkus
2024-08-30
A veteran television writer and producer chronicles his struggle to get a TV show sold and into production.
Kaplan’s pilot, about a woman in a relationship with a man half her age, attracts industry interest when Glenn Close signs on, then even more buzz when Close suggests Pete Davidson as her co-star. What follows is a blizzard of emails, texts, premeetings, Zoom meetings, and postmortems with the actors, their agents, and reps from streaming services and production companies. These would read as tediously as they sound, were it not for Kaplan’s wry, ironic delivery, and his wearied perspective as the pitches and counter-pitches plod on for months. Kaplan is also aNew Yorker cartoonist, and his journal entries have the same snappy rhythm and pace as cartoon captions; each day’s reflections rarely run more than a few pages. Because the diary covers 2022, Kaplan notes that year’s cataclysmic events: the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the overturning ofRoe v. Wade, the pandemic. His project thus becomes “an aspirational comedy…in dystopian times.” At the same time, he writes about his everyday life with his wife and children in Los Angeles, including home repairs and recipes for vegan soups and casseroles. In the end, Showtime pulls out of the deal, and Kaplan realizes that his book is aboutnot shooting his TV show. But even this he finds “profound,” and he achieves a certain equanimity, writing that he doesn’t “need or want anything other than what I have.” In the context of today’s Hollywood, that comes close to achieving enlightenment.
Hollywood dealmaking as seen from the inside out.
