A meditation on love and marriage set against the backdrop of six film productions over three years, The Trouble with Love in the Movies is both an inspirational and a cautionary tale. Exotic travel and eating in the same lunch tent as the famous people you work alongside can make for an intoxicating professional life. Long months away from home and family can be toxic for your personal life.
The book is a painfully honest account of the writer’s journey through a doomed marriage and a tumultuous affair with a free-spirited journalist. It’s also a travelogue through fictional times and places with occasional pauses to contemplate how the real world is reflected in and sometimes incorporated into the creative process of making movies.
Kirkus Reviews: One of the 100 Best Books of the Year
“A memoir of a publicist’s year on Hollywood movie locations. Harris enjoyed privileged access to the insular world of Hollywood movie productions and he puts that experience to effective use in this memoir of his work on movies such as Gladiator (2000) and The Perfect Storm (2000). He also effectively depicts the tensions—and temptations—that came with spending months at a time away from his wife and two children. ‘This is partly my story, partly the story of all of us—gaffers, grips and go-fers alike—who spend our lives traveling with the circus, cleaning up after the elephants, making movies,’” he writes. In a breezy, engaging style, he captures both the tedium and glamor of the shoots he worked on, sharing a steady stream of tidbits about actors and others he encountered in the Moroccan desert, Malta, Toronto, Los Angeles and other locations. There’s a terrified Joaquin Phoenix saying of his role in Gladiator, “I can’t do it. I’m just a kid from Florida”; a crew member warning Harris that Russell Crowe always does “some actory thing where he behaves like [his] character”; and Mark Wahlberg’s manager telling the author to make sure that reporters on the set of The Perfect Storm don’t see the actor’s entourage.”