Secretary: A Screenplay [ILLUSTRATED] (Paperback)

by Erin Cressida Wilson (Author), Steven Shainberg (Author) "A young woman's face in a ray of sun..." (more)
Key Phrases: second spanking, typing scores, shot list, Edward Grey, Lee Holloway, Dolly Parton (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description
This companion to the movie Secretary, starring James Spader and Maggie Gyllenhaal which won Special Jury Prize for Originality, 2002 Sundance Film Festival, is a powerful love story that exalts the extreme, the ecstatic, and the weird. When a self-mutilating secretary goes to work for an over-exacting lawyer, the ingredients are ripe for a workplace S/M romance. With offbeat humor and edgy eroticism, Lee and Mr. Grey tread the thorny balance between control and surrender. Accompanying the screenplay are color photos, illustrations, the filmmakers' storyboards, notes, and essays.

From the Inside Flap
Freud famously and bemusedly said that women's sexuality was a dark continent, and in fact so repressed were our impulses, so deeply denied, that it has taken a sea change in mores to admit to some of the less 'acceptable' ones at all. We have been waiting for cartographers like Erin Cressida Wilson to lead the way into this uncharted territory, to identify the routes through the thicket of previously inadmissible appetites and fantasies…At last a feminist—or a post-feminist, as Wilson has been described—with the nerve and talent to challenge the orthodoxies of power and powerlessness that have too often locked feminism into a Manichaean view of gender relations.

—from the foreword by Molly Haskell, author of From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies

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Product Details

• Paperback: 250 pages
• Publisher: Soft Skull Press; illustrated edition edition (March 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1887128190
• ISBN-13: 978-1887128193
• Product Dimensions: 10 x 6.9 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #819,169 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good screenplay, GREAT movie!!!, December 30, 2004

By	LaDeBoBo (Aurora, Illinois United States) - See all my reviews

This screenplay was fun to read, and it is a good companion book for anyone who--like me--adores the film! It was fun to read all of the scenes that were cut from the movie, as well as to discover how some of the scenes were moved around or shortened. The interview with Steven Shainberg was also interesting to read...and finding out why Erin Cressida Wilson decided to write the script is enlightening (on many levels)! The only thing that annoys me is that there are only four color photos, but several black and white ones somewhat make up for this. Overall, an amusing screenplay for fans of the film!

10 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars a most unusual secretary, November 4, 2003

By	L O'connor (richmond, surrey United Kingdom) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

The screenplay of this very funny story of an unusual boss/secretary romance is fun to read if you enjoyed the film, you get to read all the scenes that were cut. Most of the scenes involve Lee's family and friends, who feature more prominently in the screenplay than they do in the film. Particularly amusing is a scene where Lee watches her friends waxing their legs, and realises she has found another wonderful way of inlficting pain on herself. Later she rushes off to the chemist to buy loads of wax, another funny scene cut from the movie. The introduction, in which Erin Cressida Wilson explains how she came to write the screenplay, is fascinating. I found myself gritting my teeth with annoyance though, when I read the interview with director Steven Shainberg at the end of the book. Talking about Lee's life after the film has ended he says "I don't think she's going to end up a housewife.....this isn't someone who just stays at home". Oh no, perish the thought. It's quite alright to have Lee being spanked, made to climb into a garbage dump, wearing a saddle, crawling on the floor with letters in her mouth, urinating in her wedding dress - but God forbid she should be degraded to the level of being - shock horror - a HOUSEWIFE. I found myself thinking how nice it would be to be able to push Mr. Shainberg into a very large and smell garbage dump. Has the thought ever crossed his mind that she might find staying at home preferable to being stuck in some dreary office all day? No, I don't suppose so. Oh well, the screenplay is fun to read anyway.