Pay or Play

by Jon Boorstin

A filmmaker presents a satirical novel about Hollywood that follows the career of a young screenwriter whose script attracts a star and a top studio head, which turns out to be a mixed blessing

Genres: Fiction

278 pages, Hardcover

First published March 1, 1997

About the author

I have the blessing and the burden of being Daniel J. Boorstin’s son. He was a ‘distinguished historian’ when that meant something: the world cared what he thought about America and Americans, and took it out on me.

I fled from Harvard to Hollywood, blessed land of Daniel J. Boorstin ignorance. There I earned the attention of world class Tinsel Town tutors, thanks to skills I’d learned surviving Daniel J. Boorstin. The designer Charles Eames godfathered me into documentary filmmaking, enlisting me to make Kid City (view on YouTube) about an unknown architect named Frank Gehry, and the Oscar®-nominated film Exploratorium on the museum in San Francisco, also on YouTube. Robert Redford made me a producer on All The President’s Men, and its director Alan Pakula also directed the thriller I wrote, Dream Lover.

I morphed into writing novels, from Pay or Play (“the definitive sendup of Hollywood” – Publishers Weekly) to The Newsboys’ Lodging-house, in which the philosopher William James discovers his Will to Believe (winner of the New York Society Library Book Award for Historical Fiction). William James, my father’s favorite philosopher.

I finally sat down and faced Daniel J. Boorstin head on.

Find him at jonboorstin.com

Reviews

[Jon Boorstin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well, I wrote it, so it's five stars in my book of life. My first novel, after much film-making and screenwriting, a humbling and a thrilling experience. I tried to capture what pushed people like me into the movies, and how that shaped our lives, for better and for worse; the nutty nobility, and sometimes the tragedy, of putting movies first. Inspired by Waugh's comic skewering of journalism, Scoop. I like to think it inspired Tropic Thunder, which came out after, and also concerns an action hero who goes native on a jungle shoot, but who knows?

[Kitten McCreery-Navis · Rating 2 out of 5]

I picked this book up for .25 at the YMCA monthly book sale and it has been the "fast food novel" I carried to read in scattered bits of downtime at work.
Flimsy characters, a scattered story, and the occasional poorly developed sex scene. But, it's amusing enough and takes more than a few good jabs at Hollywood as an industry. So, a good "fast food" option. It has no real value but it fills a void when you have no other options or motivation.