My writing takes readers behind the scenes of major moments in pop culture history and examines the lasting impact that our favorite TV shows, music, and movies have on our society and psyches. I investigate why pop culture matters. I have written eight books, including the New York Times bestseller Seinfeldia, When Women Invented Television, Sex and the City and Us, and my latest, So Fetch. I’ve chosen books here that share my mission not only by going behind the scenes of major films but also by chronicling their effects on people’s real lives as well as culture and society at large.
I wrote...
So Fetch: The Making of Mean Girls (And Why We're Still So Obsessed with It)
It’s been 20 years since Mean Girls hit theaters, winning over critics and audiences alike with its razor-sharp wit, star-making turns for its then-unknown cast, and obsessively quotable screenplay by Tina Fey. Fast forward two decades, and Mean Girls remains as relevant as ever.
Here, I offer the first-ever authoritative book about this beloved classic that shaped an entire generation. Based on interviews with the director, cast, and crew, it tells the full story of the making of Mean Girls, from Fey’s brilliant adaptation of a self-help guide for parents of teen girls to the challenges of casting. It also explores the film’s lasting cultural influence in the realms of feminism, internet memes, social media, LGBTQ+ culture, and its newest musical iteration.
Biskind takes us right inside the boardrooms, movie shoots, and parties, oh, so many parties, that produced one of the biggest change movements in American cinematic history, the auteur wave of the 1970s.
From the shocking success of Easy Rider through the tsunami of modern classics such as The Godfather, Chinatown, and Taxi Driver, as well as crowd-pleasers like Jaws, Biskind tells the story of how the likes of Scorcese and Coppola, DeNiro and Pacino, and other giants of modern film came to be.
Biskind was among the first to prove that Hollywood history could be as engaging and as serious a subject as presidential politics or world wars while remaining outrageously entertaining.
When the low-budget biker movie Easy Rider shocked Hollywood with its success in 1969, a new Hollywood era was born. This was an age when talented young filmmakers such as Scorsese, Coppola, and Spielberg, along with a new breed of actors, including De Niro, Pacino, and Nicholson, became the powerful figures who would make such modern classics as The Godfather, Chinatown, Taxi Driver, and Jaws. Easy Riders, Raging Bulls follows the wild ride that was Hollywood in the '70s -- an unabashed celebration of sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll (both onscreen and off) and a climate where innovation and…
This book looks at the ways the pop culture of 1974 reverberated throughout history. I must admit that one of the reasons I love it is that I was born in 1974. Another is that I am enamored of the culture of the ‘70s, which might be evidenced by this list.
Brownstein, a political reporter for The Atlantic and a commentator for CNN, takes pop culture seriously here, and I cannot help but be excited by that. In this book, he looks at the ways that movies, music, TV, and politics interacted in this critical year, and my favorite thing about it is the way he brings them all together.
Brownstein makes the case that this was the year when conservatives lost the culture war and have been playing catch-up ever since.
In this exceptional cultural history, Atlantic Senior Editor Ronald Brownstein-"one of America's best political journalists" (The Economist)-tells the kaleidoscopic story of one monumental year that marked the city of Los Angeles' creative peak, a glittering moment when popular culture was ahead of politics in predicting what America would become.
Los Angeles in 1974 exerted more influence over popular culture than any other city in America. Los Angeles that year, in fact, dominated popular culture more than it ever had before, or would again. Working in film, recording, and television…
As someone who wrote a book about Mean Girls, I have to quarrel just a bit with that subtitle. But twenty years after its release, Anchorman remains vital comedy viewing and shares a lot in common with Mean Girls: both came out in 2004, and both were made by a team of Saturday Night Live alums (in this case, Will Ferrell and Adam McKay), and both were crucial in shaping the comedy of the last two decades.
Austerlitz dives deep, showing the comedic and societal forces swirling beneath the surface of this quite silly-looking comedy, from Steve Carrell to Judd Apatow, from pioneering real-life news anchor Jessica Savitch to George W. Bush.
This is the book about Anchorman that you didn’t know you needed.
From the author of Generation Friends, featuring brand-new interviews with Will Ferrell and Adam McKay, a surprising, incisive, and often hilarious book about the film that changed comedy, Anchorman.
It’s been nearly twenty years since Ron Burgundy burst into movie fans’ lives, reminding San Diego to “stay classy” while lampooning a time gone by—although maybe not as far gone as we might think? In Kind of a Big Deal, comedy historian Saul Austerlitz tells the history of how Anchorman was developed, written, and cast, and how it launched the careers of future superstars like…
Nora Ephron’s classic rom coms When Harry Met Sally and You’ve Got Mail are, I am certain, the two movies I have rewatched the most, and I could still flip them on right now, and revel in every second, laugh again at every joke, swoon at every romantic turn. And Ephron herself, a journalist-turned-filmmaker, has been a lifelong inspiration to me.
So it’s no surprise that I adore Carlson’s look behind the making of these two films, plus Sleepless in Seattle, which I also like but is not a tentpole of my existence like the other two.
It will have you pining for a time when human relationships, not superpowers, and explosions, ruled the box office.
A backstage look at the making of Nora Ephron's revered trilogy--When Harry Met Sally, You've Got Mail, and Sleepless in Seattle--which brought romantic comedies back to the fore, and an intimate portrait of the beloved writer/director who inspired a generation of Hollywood women, from Mindy Kaling to Lena Dunham.
In I'll Have What She's Having entertainment journalist Erin Carlson tells the story of the real Nora Ephron and how she reinvented the romcom through her trio of instant classics. With a cast of famous faces including Rob Reiner, Tom Hanks, Meg Ryan, and Billy Crystal, Carlson takes readers on a…
This book directly inspired my book about The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and because of that, my entire oeuvre afterward.
I remember seeing it at Barnes & Noble and buying it immediately, the subtitle calling to me. I read it and loved it, then analyzed Wasson’s every structural decision and research method to learn how to write my own such book.
This book itself is slight, gorgeous, riveting, and delicious.
"So smart and entertaining it should come with its own popcorn"-People
Coinciding with the sixtieth anniversary of the film version of Truman Capote's Breakast at Tiffany's, the acclaimed, New York Times bestseller that is the definitive account of Audrey Hepburn and the making of the cultural landmark film-now updated with a new introduction by the author.
In Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M., Sam Wasson goes beyond the legend to explore the woman inside the little black dress and the film that captured the imagination of the nation in 1961-when the staid propriety of the Eisenhower years gave way to the glamorous…
I’m a professional historian and life-long lover of early American history. My fascination with the American Revolution began during the bicentennial in 1976, when my family traveled across the country for celebrations in Williamsburg and Philadelphia. That history, though, seemed disconnected to the place I grew up—Arkansas—so when I went to graduate school in history, I researched in French and Spanish archives to learn about their eighteenth-century interactions with Arkansas’s Native nations, the Osages and Quapaws. Now I teach early American history and Native American history at UNC-Chapel Hill and have written several books on how Native American, European, and African people interacted across North America.
A magisterial history of Indigenous North America that places the power of Native nations at its center, telling their story from the rise of ancient cities more than a thousand years ago to fights for sovereignty that continue today
Long before the colonization of North America, Indigenous Americans built diverse civilizations and adapted to a changing world in ways that reverberated globally. And, as award-winning historian Kathleen DuVal vividly recounts, when Europeans did arrive, no civilization came to a halt because of a few wandering explorers, even when the strangers came well armed.
A millennium ago, North American cities rivaled urban centers around the world in size. Then, following a period of climate change and instability, numerous smaller nations emerged, moving away from rather than toward urbanization. From this urban past, egalitarian government structures, diplomacy, and complex economies spread…
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