Books I Read in 2024: The Money Shot

My dead mother would have called this play in the form of a book “ugly.” I picked up a copy of Neil LaBute’s The Money Shot: A Play because of the subject matter and because I have liked a couple of his movies: In the Company of Men, Your Friends & Neighbors. The premise of The Money Shot is simple. Two A-list stars looking to make a hit movie decide to co-star in a movie in which they will have actual sex. The entire play involves the two stars and their romantic partners hashing out the details—(seemingly, the characters stand in as symbols for LaBute’s barely containable rage towards the Hollywood industrial complex that didn’t recognize him as the genius he perceives himself to be)—and bantering endlessly in dumb and crude ways. This insipid, go-nowhere work is a garbage can into which LaBute dumped the intense misogyny and homophobia with which he must wrestle with containing every day. Maybe if I saw the play performed I’d like it. But probably not.

Books I Read in 2024: Victory Parade, I Hate Men, My Friend Dahmer, The Crying of Lot 49, Machines in the Head, Big Magic, The Valley, End of Active Service, An Honest Woman, The Money Shot, Atomic Habits, Finding Your Own North Star, Crazy Cock, Sigrid Rides, Your Money Or Your Life, The Big Sleep, Eventually Everything Connects, Smutcutter, Shine Shine Shine, A Serial Killer’s Daughter, Confessions of a Serial Killer

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