My Life Uncovered
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My Life Uncovered :: A Hollywood Expose
:: Laura Taylor | Bella Feega
Finding Myself In Porn
“Look you guys, you really have to go,” I implore reaching for the off button on the remote that Adam has finally set down on the coffee table.
At this point, the room goes silent. All of our jaws simultaneously drop because the actors are now completely naked and ferociously giving each other blow jobs.
Adam giggles first. “You got a job writing a porn film, Laura.”
“Well, at least in pays the rent.” Corie adds, “When it’s finished could we borrow it?”
“This is the story of a woman who…”
“Hold it right there,” interrupts the diminutive Aryan-looking greenhorn Hollywood studio executive. “There’s no way we’re going to make this movie.”
“I haven’t even begun to tell you the story. May I a sky why?” In inquire incredulously.
“It’s a female protagonist. We’ll never make it,” he proclaims.
Joe, the side-kick executive in the room, doesn’t say a word. He impishly sits there nodding his head.
“But her husband, Peter, is an equal protagonist. It’s just that the story is told from Holly’s point of view.”
“I’m sorry, Miss Taylor, but the demographics just aren’t big enough,” the little greenhorn states, standing up to leave. “The majority of movie-goers are male and they have no interest in female protagonist driven films.”
“What about movies like My Big Fat Greek Wedding?” I counter.
He pauses. The flatly responds. “No comment.”
“Hot Pick of the Week — Mary Tyler Moore meets Tootsie a la Boogie Nights in this sex romp featuring a straight-narrow Michigan writer who lands in Hollywood only to lead a double life penning porn! Can she ever reveal the naked truth?”
:: US Magazine
“Lynn Isenberg’s delightful debut tells the story of a woman trying to break into Hollywood screenwriting who finds herself writing for a rather different clientele. … Along the way, she meets a colorful cast of adult movie stars, connoisseurs, and a handsome cinematographer, making for a hilarious comedy of love and fulfillment in unexpected places.”
:: Booklist Review
“I’ve known her since she was a little girl running around in Danskins. She was always entertaining… and she still is.”
:: Sandra Bernhard | Actress-Author-Comedienne-Singer
“Funny, honest, twisted and deep – what else could you want? Oh, yeah – there are sex scenes!”
:: Jeff Arch | Academy Award Nominated Screenwriter for Sleepless in Seattle
“Lynn Isenberg is totally in control of a plot with more turns than a labyrinth and an out-of-control heroine juggling two identities. You’ll LOL at this naked look at the Hollywood porn industry, but Isenberg’s talent is not a laughing matter… Read it in one gulp!”
:: Faye Moskowitz | Author of Peach in the House and Chair, English Department at George Washington University, D.C.
“My Life Uncovered is a comic adventure more infectious than anything that happens within the world of the adult films it chronicles. This is not a plodding minuet but a very intricate concerto well-played which I could recommend to everyone.”
:: Adam Belanoff | Writer-Co-Executie Producer (The Closer, Murphy Brown)
“Funny. Gifted. Intelligent. Lynn Isenberg reminds me of me.”
:: Alan Zweibel | Writer (Curb Your Enthusiasm, David Letterman, Monk, SNL, Collaborator with Billy Crystal on 700 Sundays)
“For a steamy, funny, and well-written story about a woman who never gives up, try MY LIFE UNCOVERED to heat up your winter nights.”
:: Romance Reviews Today
Laura Taylor left Michigan for the lights of Los Angeles where she hopes to make it as a screen writer rather than a waitress or pumping gas in San Jose. Her agent Scott Sher of Significant Talent Agency says he just cut a major deal for her. However, not only does she learn this was a lie, but that he has quit and vanished either with the Peace Corps or in a detox cell.
When her car breaks down, her mechanic Joseph sees a script and suggests he take it to his cousin who works for Accent Film Company. Under the name of Bella Feega, Laura begins writing scripts for porno movies. However, Laura’s efforts to hide her money making career from her mainstream attempts prove difficult and futile as her two worlds collide exposing a good Jewish girl.
MY LIFE UNCOVERED is an amusing look at Hollywood from the perspective of a talented wannabe. The vast support cast (a list at the beginning is critical to keep track) enables readers to get up close and personal with Laura or her alter ego. The frazzled Laura is the key to the tale as she comes across as genuine even when her antics seem off kilter. Chick lit fans will enjoy Lynn Isenberg’s ironic homage to the movies sort of like the Debbie Reynolds character in Singing in the Rain solo starring.
:: Harriet Klausner | The Klausner Review
As author Lynn Isenberg ’82 explains, readers want “a way to make sense out of their lives by reading about the chaos of someone else’s.” Another thing readers want, Isenberg believes, is “an experience.” The experience she offers readers in her first novel, My Life Uncovered (Red Dress Ink, $12.95), is an insider’s view of Hollywood’s less famous industry: adult entertainment.
The novel’s heroine, Laura Taylor, is a struggling screenwriter from Michigan who, when her big deal falls through and her money runs out, finds herself writing scripts for pornographic films. The success she achieves in this new line of work is, of course, not without its drawbacks. But the cast of characters Laura encounters and the plot twists she endures keep readers engaged and smiling throughout the book.
Although Isenberg had never even heard of chick lit until Red Dress Ink bought her novel, she has warmed to the buzzword and now sees her novel as “a natural fit.” Still, she admits, “It does bother me that some people dismiss the label without taking the work of the writers seriously. But I also believe that good talent rises to the top.”
:: University of Michigan | Michigan Today “Chick Lit”
“Movies; Getting by on Indie Dreams”
by Bob Baker
May 2, 2004
Lynn Isenberg, 42 , came here to make movies that would force people to reevaluate their lives. But she wound up, for a few weird years, as an iconoclastic adult-film screenwriter — one who cared as much about plot as sex. Today she’s a novelist, promoting a semi-autobiographical comedy-drama about a woman whose scripts give adult flicks temporary integrity.
A novel approach.
Isenberg loved writing as a child. She grew up in white-collar Bloomfield Hills, went to the University of Michigan, majored in English and film studies and headed to L.A. in the 1980s to become a screenwriter and producer. She got a job with the literary arm of Creative Artists Agency, got a co-producer credit on the Lawrence Kasdan comedy “I Love You to Death,” and worked on her own screenplays.
She also fell in love with a cult-favorite novel about friendship and loss, Lynn Sharon Schwartz’s “Disturbances in the Field.” She optioned it several times at a total cost of about $50,000 and set about developing it for the screen. It would be the first project she controlled from start to finish. “I really thought that it would help people deal with grief; the whole reason I became a writer was to help inspire people, to give them another way of seeing.”
But she could never close the deal: The well-known actress who loved it backed off in favor of a new project; the Oscar-winning screenwriter she’d lined up had to return to another film at a producer’s insistence; the nonlinear screenplay was, she suggests, ahead of its time.
After five years of reversals she was running out of money. So she called an old Detroit friend who had worked at PBS but was now with the Playboy Channel. Write me a soft-core script, he said. She responded with what became known as “Things Change,” the story of a woman who leaves her female partner to explore her sexual identity.
Unbeknownst to her, Playboy co-financed the script with an adult-film company, which made a far more explicit version. (No extra speaking parts needed, just more sex.) Also unbeknownst to her, the film’s relatively sophisticated dialogue got considerable attention in the adult-film world and numerous nominations in the annual Adult Video News competition. “It allows its characters a dignity heretofore unequaled in adult entertainment,” one reviewer said in 1993. Isenberg was asked to write another script. And another. She negotiated her own four-picture deal with another adult-film company, making $2,500 to $5,000 per script. She cast and wrote a sex-ed video for couples. She was, at different times, surprised by what she was doing but determined to go with the flow. “This was where I was at this moment in time. I was going to be open-minded … I let go of control.”
Isenberg kept telling a fellow writer about her experiences, and the friend, who found them hysterical, kept prodding her to turn them into a novel. After she quit adult scripting in 1996 for a career in New Media, Isenberg went back to Detroit in 2001 and knocked out “My Life Uncovered” in a couple of months. Her protagonist, Laura Taylor, loses her dream screenplay deal when her agent vanishes and she accepts an adult-entertainment offer to pay her bills. Like Isenberg, Laura tries to reconcile the gulf between her ambitions and her new career as she listens to her rabbi’s Shabbat morning services. Like Isenberg, Laura pens an introspective line of dialogue about her inability to trust men that, when her father sees the film, helps heal the estrangement between them.
The first publisher Isenberg approached, New York and Toronto-based Red Dress Ink, which specializes in “chick lit,” bought the novel and printed an initial run of 70,000 copies in December. The book has enjoyed favorable Internet reviews (as well as applause from the Jewish Journal). Isenberg says she is sifting through TV and film adaptation offers while working on her next novel.
Funny, she tells the other women from Detroit, she came to Hollywood to be a filmmaker and wound up the novelist she’d wanted to be at 8. They agree publishing is less barbaric. Like an agent once told her, Isenberg says, “the difference is, in Hollywood they want to kill you; in the publishing business, they just get bitchy.” Funny, too, how you wind up paying homage to your elders. Isenberg tells them that a great aunt was an author, and that next month she’ll return to Bloomfield Hills to address an annual meeting of immigrants from her great aunt’s native town, David Horodok, in what is now Belarus.
“When they asked me,” Isenberg says, “I said, ‘Maybe I should talk about storytelling, and how traditional storytelling carries on … ‘ and the woman on the phone said, ‘No, you don’t understand. You have to talk about porn. They’re expecting it. I think we’re gonna have the biggest turnout yet.’ ”
People tell Isenberg, who is single, that despite her Detroit roots, she reminds them of a New Yorker, in a Sarah Jessica Parker-as-Carrie Bradshaw way. And the image fits as she puts a copy of “Things Change” into her Marina del Rey condo’s DVD and tries to locate a moment of dialogue between the two female stars that she’s proud of. She has to keep skipping around, and every time she does there’s — whoops — another graphic sex scene. “Oh God,” she apologizes earnestly to her guest, “I’m so sorry.”
:: Los Angeles Times
“Porn to be Famous”
by Kelly Hartog
March 4, 2004
In her book’s jacket photograph, Lynn Isenberg looks every inch of her 44 years. Wearing a spaghetti-strap top and revealing a tantalizing hint of cleavage, Isenberg looms larger than life – staring semi-seductively down at the camera lens, attempting a “come-hither” look; her straight brown hair blow-dried to within an inch of its life.
As the author of the recently released novel by Red Dress Ink, My Life Uncovered – based loosely on her three years as a scriptwriter for the adult film industry over 10 years ago – the publicity shot makes sense. But in reality, nothing could be further from the truth. Dressed casually in faded jeans, a cuddly sweater and sensible hiking boots, Isenberg looks at least 10 years younger. Tucked away in her three-story condo in Marina Del Rey, Los Angeles she plays affectionately with her two-year-old border collie/retriever – Tao. (“I got her from the pound to get over a broken relationship.”)
Her hair is wild and tousled, and there’s not a red talon in sight. In fact, her fingernails are cut back to the quick. And she is incredibly tiny. She looks like the kind of woman Hollywood moguls chew up and spit out before they’ve had their morning coffee. However, Isenberg is nothing if not tenacious (her choice of word). And it’s that tenacity that saw this nice Jewish girl from Michigan up sticks and trek out to Hollywood to become a scriptwriter after graduating from the University of Michigan in 1982.
That she found herself writing scripts for adult movies is just one aspect of her extraordinary life which she has chosen to share in her debut novel.
So how exactly does a nice Jewish girl land up writing pornography? By accident, says Isenberg.
Upon moving to Hollywood, Isenberg did enjoy some success early on, collaborating as both a writer and a producer on mainstream films such as I love you to Death with Keanu Reeves and Kevin Kline, and Youngblood with Rob Lowe and Cynthia Gibb. But when money and work began to dry up she touched base with a friend in the business who was working for the Playboy channel, and he asked her to send a few scripts.
“I had no idea I’d written an adult movie,” she says. “I had been hired to write a movie for the Playboy channel – soft porn. I didn’t know that Playboy had co-financed it with an adult film company, and suddenly there were many different versions of my film. I didn’t know until a year later, when the head of Playboy called me up and said, ‘Congratulations on your nomination for best screenplay,’ and I said ‘What are you talking about?’”
Isenberg says it’s no coincidence that her first adult movie Things Change (the only real name she keeps in the novel) was such a hit. ”I’d never seen a porn movie before, and I just thought I’m going to do the best job I can and I’m going to deal with issues that are relevant and I’m going to write a real plot, a real storyline, and develop these characters as best as I can. And I did.”
As a result, Isenberg actually received a mention in the Wall Street Journal for Things Change because it became one of the highest-selling adult films of all time.
In the novel, the protagonist, Laura Taylor, grapples with the moral implications of her work, and finds inspiration in attending her local synagogue and listening to the rabbi’s sermons. And Isenberg is no different. Raised in a conservative household in Michigan, she attended Hebrew school through 12th grade and attended Sha’are Zedek Temple.
So how does she feel about the caveat that “nice Jewish girls don’t write porn,” and how has the Jewish community reacted to her novel?
“I have no idea how the Jewish community has reacted, but I’d like to know,” she says. “But Jewish/non-Jewish,” she adds, “when I was writing for the adult movie industry, I had to be open-minded and tolerant. And because Jews have always been discriminated against, I think being Jewish helped me to not be judgmental.” And as to the charge that her novel glorifies and promotes pornography – “Pornography and prostitution have been around for ages,” she says. “They’re not going to go away. I think pornography helps reduce sexual abuse, rape and violence. I believe it’s an outlet. I’m not condoning certain forms of pornography which are extremely violent and that even the adult industry is denouncing. But what about the men out there who have no social skills and are uncomfortable around women?
“When I went to a strip club for the first time, I saw men lining up to have their photos taken with a porn star. Initially, I thought, ‘Oh my god, is this what they aspire to?’ And then I thought ‘Thank god they have something like this to aspire to.’ Because where would they be otherwise? They could be out running the streets looking for women to rape. This way they can go to a strip club, have a community of friends, and have this outlet – blind men, handicapped men. I saw all kinds of men there. When I saw that side of it, it really opened me up to looking at it in a different way. And had I not gone through this life experience, I don’t know that I would be as open-minded.” Whatever her views, Isenberg’s funny debut novel about a porn writer with a heart, a conscience, and a soul is finally bringing her some much-deserved success. She has a two-book deal with Red Dress Ink, and is halfway through her second novel, about a female entrepreneur.
She is currently in discussions to turn My Life Uncovered into a film or a television series, and there is talk of finally producing her own script, Disturbances in the Field, proving that old Hollywood adage that life can indeed imitate art – even if it takes 20 years to get there.
Lynn Isenberg (with her dog, Tao) believes that being Jewish helped her not to be judgmental.
Photo: Kelly Hartog
:: The Jerusalem Post
:: Radio-TV Interview Report
:: Romantic Times Book Club
:: Metro Times (Detroit)
:: McNaughton Paperback
:: Hour Magazine (Detroit)
:: California Literary Review
:: The Argonaut
:: The Los Angeles Times Book Review
:: Jewish Journal
:: The Detroit News
:: Detroit Jewish News
