Last Updated on 04/09/2024 by Arun jain
Hollywood couldn’t resist Lisa Tadeo’s book “Three Women” when it was published in 2019.
The three women revealed their traumas, desires and sexual histories to Ms. Taddeo, who traveled the country for interviews. During eight years. If a gonzo journalist went to therapy it would be like gonzo journalism.
A bidding war ensued for the bestseller. Showtime won. It wasn’t the highest offer, Ms. Taddeo said, but the synergy looked promising; At the time, Showtime and its publisher, Simon & Schuster, shared a parent company, Paramount Global.
Three and a half years later, the network dropped the bomb. Amidst its roughness Integration In the Paramount+ streaming platform, Showtime shelved the completed series, and canceled or unloaded A handful of others.
“I was told this is the breaks in Hollywood,” Ms. Taddio wrote on Instagram In January 2023. “Three women’s stories are other men’s tax deductions.”
It was a terrible time for Ms. Taddeo. The Showtime ad coincided with the miscarriage, Ms. Taddeo, 44, told me this summer, sitting at her long outdoor dining table in Washington, Conn. This was one of many pregnancies she lost over the years.
The upside was that Starz was quick to rescue “Three Women.” The series will finally premiere in the United States on September 13. Unlike the book, the show focuses on four women, including journalist Gia, a version of Ms. Taddeo played by actress Shailene Woodley.
Ms. Taddeo knows she’s been “lucky” — “in air quotes,” she clarified. She’s a working writer who can reach new audiences and create new jobs, “and that’s all rewarding and cool,” she said. But, she added, “I’m not happy either.”
Lisa and Gia
On the Starz series, Gia is broke, having spent most of her six-figure book advance on futile reporting leads.
It’s an accurate depiction of what Ms. Taddeo’s life was like at the time: Then a freelance magazine writer, Ms. Taddeo pawned jewelry and her father’s Dodge Stratus to keep going. Her husband, Jackson Waite, worked at Kmart. She lived in an RV for a while.
Today, the couple lives in a Connecticut Colonial-style home with their 9-year-old daughter Fox, purchased in 2020 for just under $2 million, with a front porch so beautiful it inspired Kirsten Dunst to comment, “Your house looks so beautiful.” Beautiful!” on Instagram.
It is the picture of success. And pictures can be deceiving. It exists at the whim of Hollywood to maintain success. Working for free until the deal is done. To rewrite and wait and wonder if a project will ever see daylight. To watch it bounce for years, like a plastic beach ball at a concert for millionaires.
“For me, at least, more things dissolve than reality,” Ms. Taddeo said. “Every day I sit at my computer and I think, ‘Am I going to make more money today looking at a blank page, or am I going to make more money resubmitting all the insurance claims from my ACL surgery?'”
One Monday at the family home, which they are considering selling to downsize, Mr. Waite made us pastrami sandwiches. He recreated the recipe from a deli in Millburn, NJ, near Ms. Taddeo’s childhood home. Both her parents died when she was 20 – her father in a car accident and her mother from lung cancer.
Mr. Waite, his wife’s screenwriting collaborator and co-producer, supported the idea of introducing Gia in the “Three Women” series. It seemed the only authentic way to bridge the original three stand-alone story lines: Maggie in North Dakota, bringing sexual abuse allegations against her high school teacher; Lina in Indiana, miserable in her marriage and having an affair with an ex; Sloane, in Rhode Island, whose husband sees her having sex with other people.
The women in the book were all white and mostly straight. Critics took note. “These are the women who spoke to me,” Ms Taddeo said. “It wasn’t for lack of trying.”
In the series, Sloane is Black, written by playwrights Torrie Sampson And Nest Hutchinson – A composite character is semi-inspired by a bisexual woman from Dominica who left the book while Ms. Taddeo was reporting for her.
Ms. Woodley plays Gia with voluminous Carrie Bradshaw curls, ricocheting between snarling freedom and throbbing sensitivity. While the performance is no pretense, it can be difficult to parse where Ms. Taddeo’s experiences end and Gaia’s begins.
In the opening scene of the series, Gia visits journalist Gay Tellis, played by James Naughton. She seeks guidance from Mr. Tellis, author of “Thy Neighbor’s Wife,” an arcane book about sex. (As for Hollywood, the rights to that film were acquired in 1979 for $2.5 million, A record-breaking deal; The film was never made.)
“Women writers don’t usually do the kind of work I do,” says Mr. Talise Gia, who takes some of his reporting advice, such as driving across the country, but not all of it. He encourages her, with colorful language, to have sex with married men.
“Can you believe that actually happened?” Gia says in a whisper, disapprovingly referring to Mr. Talise as her “idol.”
According to Ms. Taddeo, who wrote the episode, it actually happened, though not the entire scene verbatim. “There was a cellular buildup to this book,” she said. “It started in the townhouse of this man I deeply respected, who I still respect for his work.”
The real Mr. Thales begged to differ. When reached by email, she said she did not recall advising Ms Taddeo to sleep with married men. He was “deeply hurt” by the “falsification” in the depiction I described to him – and said he didn’t know it was featured on the show until he heard from me. “I once suggested she join an escort service and describe her experiences,” wrote Mr. Talese, 92, who was working as a massage parlor manager when he reported on his book.
“I think Mrs. Taddeo is used,” he added.
Ms. Taddeo, for her part, denied the denial. (And she was already reporting on escort services.)
In another scene, Gia has sex with a celebrity – an Esquire cover star she profiled. This also happened, said Ms. Taddeo. (If this revelation seems shocking, consider Ms. Woodley’s description of Ms. Taddeo’s “heart-based” communication style: “There’s a way that Lisa navigates this world that’s very much on her sleeve, and it’s very refined, and It’s very honest, and there’s no sugar coating it.”)
These events, Ms. Taddeo explained, made her even more determined to leave New York City in 2012, when she embarked on a cross-country reporting road trip and never returned.
“As a woman writer working in a man’s world, especially at that time, it felt like a fun house,” she said. “This is not real life, and I was not made for this kind of unreal life.”
That’s how Hollywood feels about it now.
‘How Does She Know Me?’
David Granger, a former editor at Esquire, often tells young reporters the story of how Ms. Taddeo began writing for him, he said.
She was an aspiring associate editor at Golf Magazine. They had breakfast at a diner in midtown Manhattan. After that, she sent Mr. Granger a novel in progress about a white-collar man in his mid-40s.
“I read this huge piece of it and I thought, ‘How does he do it know Me?’” Mr. Granger added one critic. “She’s 20.”
In 2008, he asked Ms. Taddeo to report on Heath Ledger’s death. The first draft of the story didn’t work, and the magazine offered her a kill fee. Ms. Taddeo asked for 24 hours to fix it.
After spending the night smoking and crying, Mrs. Taddeo said, she “The last days of Heath Ledger” was the story based on On her report, but because of the creative liberties Ms. Taddeo took—it was written from Mr. Ledger’s perspective—it was published as fiction.
From there, “she did a lot of stories for us,” Mr. Granger said. “And almost every time, her made someone angry“
Her approach can be unorthodox. Journalistic distance does not correspond to its process. Maggie Wilken, the only woman in “Three Women” to use her real name, describes Ms. Taddeo as “family.” Mrs. Taddeo moved to North Dakota with her husband and child for the book — for Maggie, now a 33-year-old physician in Fargo.
“I wondered, ‘What time are we talking?'” Ms. Wilken said of the time. “‘At what point does this relationship end?’ To find out that never happens, that was really special.
For her upcoming nonfiction book, Ms. Taddeo said, she exchanged thousands of messages online about grief with strangers.
“I feel the need to respond to almost everyone because I don’t know how not to when someone is sad,” she said. “It has refocused me.”
Mrs. Taddev has been opened About living with depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and post-traumatic stress disorder. Plus: fear of abandonment, intense concern for her daughter’s emotional and physical safety, feeling disconnected around gender (“I never felt like a man or a woman,” she said), and the shame of it all.
And yet, her only mental health treatment at the moment is “talking to these women who are incredibly depressed,” she said. “It seems useful to me.”
When Ms. Taddeo is not working on the book of grief, she is adapting more projects.
She has written a television pilot, potentially starring Vanessa KirbyBased on “Ghost Lover”, her short story about a ghostwriting service for dating messages. She has written a horror script, in which she may star Lizzie KaplanBased on her experience connecting with her gynecologist Ashley MadisonDating app for cheating.
Her short story “Lois and Varga”, published by Granta in 2019 and centered on a yoga-teaching stripper, is in development. Rachel Brosnahan. Her novel “animalwas acquired by MGM and Plan B.
“I already told him I’m throwing my hat in the ring for ‘Animal,'” said Emma Roberts, who also volunteered to read audiobooks. The novel opens A woman saw her married boss-lover shoot himself.
Ms. Taddeo’s projects attract actresses desiring complex, edgy roles. This, she reckons, is one of the keys to her success in Hollywood: Her characters behave badly, and bad things happen to them, but Ms. Taddeo neither judges nor seduces them. They are not victims, she said – “we are All Victim,” even the worst of us.
The morning after I visited her in Connecticut, Ms. Taddio planned to fly to Los Angeles for more project meetings as well as some promotional work for “Three Women.”
“I get off the plane and I go straight to lunch and then to a Netflix meeting,” Ms. Taddio said with some distaste. “This is not me. I’m, like, a writer.”
Her dream is to write short stories, exclusively, and teach at the University of Bath. Obsessed with William Shakespeare as a child, the Cotswolds region of Britain fascinated her. It’s a goal she’s reiterated in several interviews.
“I’m just trying to do enough to make the dream sustainable,” she said.
She pointed to her large backyard. “This is like the Cotswolds, you know,” she said. Hills, trees, flowers. “I’ve never been.”
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