Bruce Ferber

Despite increasing corporate mergers and bottom-line thinking, the entertainment business will never function like a bank or an insurance company because it is an industry rooted in imagination. Rules are meant to be broken. The best work is often produced in an environment where plans change by the minute and nothing seems to make sense. To wit, those who choose this profession must alter preconceived notions of work itself, sometimes discovering that fantasy and horror describe both movie genres and life on the job. The phenomenon crosses class lines: From the writers, directors, and producers to the lawyers, agents, studio executives, and crew and right down to the porta-potty suppliers. The Way We Work provides a window into the skill sets and the insanity that make movies and television tick. Essays by award-winning writers, directors, and producers chronicle the process and the obstacles facing those at the top of the creative food chain. Oral histories from executives to "below-the-line" workers describe life in the trenches, which often present as Stud's Terkel's Working--on acid.

On the Job in Hollywood

The Way We Work

Ira Overman, veteran of multiple botched careers and a singularly botched marriage, finds himself revisiting and confronting the uniformly poor choices of his past and making sense of a world he has never known how to negotiate.

Elevating Overman

Jimmy Kozlowski has a regular gig playing in a Beatles tribute band, part of a cottage industry built around mimicry, where each group strives to be the ultimate Fake Fab Four. Unlike many around him, Jimmy has limited bandwidth for this. He works a straight job and yearns to connect with the daughter he's never met. And he wants a shot at realizing his creative dreams, even if it means ""burying Paul"" in the process.

I Buried Paul

Jimmy Kozlowski has a regular gig playing in a Beatles tribute band, part of a cottage industry built around mimicry, where each group strives to be the ultimate Fake Fab Four. Unlike many around him, Jimmy has limited bandwidth for this. He works a straight job and yearns to connect with the daughter he's never met. And he wants a shot at realizing his creative dreams, even if it means burying Paul in the process.

Bruce Ferber

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