50 SECRETS NOBODY TELLS YOU IN HOLLYWOOD: The Working Actor’s Guide to Avoiding Pitfalls and Supercharging Your Career is just that: A collection of musings on the vicissitudes of the acting life. Writer and actor Mike Kimmel offers thoughtful and wise meditations on what it means to be working in this part of the entertainment industry.

Much of what Kimmel includes falls into a category of self-talk, a type of occupation-centered therapy. He has much to offer the reader on the subject of why and how actors can be rejected for roles, many of which have disturbingly little to do with quality. In a fickle business, the race does not always go to the swift, the most talented, or even the most handsome or beautiful. Though this can hardly be a surprise even to non-actors, auditions are held for appearances’ sake—as the agents of big-shot names play games of brinksmanship with filmmakers to get the best possible deal for their clients. Kimmel has many relevant things to say on typecasting, the importance of gaining real-life experience, and the abominable practice known as “shelving”—whereby agents purporting to be on the lookout for roles for new clients place them “on the shelf” if the actors are so good that they’re perceived as a threat to that agent’s more successful charges. Regular quotes by some of Hollywood’s most famous actors on various aspects of the business add lots of value.

Kimmel has penned a terrific book. It is highly readable, humble, and rare in that it does not over-promise in the way far too many self-help books do. Moreover, there is a surprising amount of crossover; while the subtitle loudly proclaims the target audience, more than a few of the takeaways are equally applicable to work in other parts of the entertainment industry, or any sort of creative work that one pursues for financial gain. Novelists, no less than painters or YouTubers, know that one needs a thick skin, oodles of resourcefulness, and Sisyphean reserves of persistence to make a clean breast of working in those fields. Sometimes it’s comforting simply to have that acknowledged.

Crammed with sage advice for the working actor, Mike Kimmel’s 50 SECRETS NOBODY TELLS YOU IN HOLLYWOOD: The Working Actor’s Guide to Avoiding Pitfalls and Supercharging Your Career is an excellent advice book for anyone looking to make it in Tinseltown.

~ Craig Jones for IndieReader