First published 2002
Julia Phillips chronicles her rise and fall in 1970s Hollywood as the first woman to win a Best Picture Oscar for co-producing The Sting. She details her collaborations with rising directors Martin Scorsese on Taxi Driver and Steven Spielberg on Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Phillips navigated a male-dominated industry where her talents for dealmaking and confrontation matched those of her peers, but her appetite for alcohol, cocaine, and casual relationships earned her different treatment than the men around her. The boys' club that initially welcomed her success gradually pushed her toward the margins. By the late 1980s, with her career in ruins, Phillips decided to expose the industry's hypocrisies and excesses. Her memoir names names and burns bridges with equal fervor. This is the story of a woman who broke barriers in Hollywood only to discover that breaking in and staying in required different skills entirely.
Genres: addiction, 20th-century, business, autobiography, biography-memoir, film
Vibes: emotional, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: memoir, rise-and-fall
Setting: Hollywood
Period: 1970s
596 pages · Paperback · Faber & Faber
Content warnings: addiction, alcohol-abuse, drug-use