It is the summer of 1973, and 12-year-old James Gillespie lives with this family in a Glasgow project, which is becoming increasingly squalid as a garbagemen's strike wears on. While at play one day, James accidently causes the drowning of his friend Ryan in the local canal--and flees the scene, apparently unseen. Ratcatcher follows James as he trys to live with his terrible secret and how it effects his life and relationships. Along the way he strikes up a touching intimacy with an older girl whom the other project boys use for sex, falls in with a street gang, and dreams desperately of leaving the projects and moving to one of the clean, new houses being built a few miles out of town. But there are no fairytale endings, and ultimately, he is as incapable of escaping his circumstances as he is of escaping his guilt over Ryan's death, rendering Ratcatcher a finely-wrought, unsentimental, and wholly remarkable coming-of-age tale.

Ratcatcher

Humor & Entertainment

Francke, Lizzie

Ramsay, Lynne

Movies

Faber&Faber

Women have been writing for movies since the earliest days of the industry. Tracing the history of women in the screenwriting profession - from Gene Gauntier's 1911 version of "Ben Hur" to Callie Khouri's "Thelma and Louise" - this work looks at the lives and fortunes of the women who put pen to screen. Complete with extensive interviews with women working today - including Nora Ephron, Callie Khouri and Caroline Thompson - plus filmographies, this book aims to put women back into the Hollywood picture.

Script Girls: Women Screenwriters in Hollywood

Arts & Photography

Performing Arts

British Film Inst

The stereotypical Hollywood screenwriter is a smugly macho male pounding away at his typewriter. Yet women have been writing screenplays since the beginning of the silent era. Francke shows how, as the industry grew, screenwriting became virtually the only area in which a woman could play a significant role. In documenting Hollywood's early female scenarists, she touches on such prominent figures as Anita Loos and Dorothy Parker but concentrates on dozens of hitherto unsung heroines. Her account of female writers' current status is more compelling than that of the earlier days, thanks to interviews with Nora Ephron and other contemporaries. Francke's survey also points out how badly women have fared in other areas of the industry, on screen as well as off. But if "Writers are the women of the film industry," as a Hollywood figure once observed to indicate the lowly status of screenwriters, then women writers would seem to be the lowest of the low. Still, Francke describes her book as celebratory rather than as a catalog of discrimination, and it does detail the extensive contributions female screenwriters, facing daunting obstacles, have made. Gordon Flagg

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Books by Francke, Lizzie