Inspirational Women In Hollywood: Author Samuel Garza Bernstein On How Actress Joan Crawford Helped To Shake Up The Entertainment Industry
An Interview With Eden Gold
Nobody could tell me anything when I first started. I knew everything. Smart people told me all kinds of things I should have listened to, about moderation, backup plans, common sense, and financial caution. I never really listened to anyone.
As a part of our series about Inspirational Women In Hollywood, I had the distinct pleasure of interviewing Samuel Garza Bernstein, screenwriter, playwright, and author of the new book, Starring Joan Crawford. Samuel is the winner of a Stonewall Book Award from the American Library Association for Uncommon Heroes, an exploration of heroes and role models in the LGBTQIA+ community. He is co-executive producer and co-showrunner of the third season of the Emmy-winning series After Forever, dropping on Amazon at the end of May 2024.
His latest book is “Starring Joan Crawford: The Films, The Fantasy, and the Modern Relevance of a Silver Screen Icon” available June 4, 2024. Books on Cesar Romero and Roddy McDowall are also in the pipeline for release in 2025 and 2026. He and his husband Ronald Shore divide their time between Los Angeles and Porto, Portugal, held hostage by a pack of diabolical dachshunds.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Our readers would love to get to know you a bit better. Can you tell us the story of how you grew up?
I was born to a Mexican mother who passed as Anglo and a Jewish father who moved us to Cairo when I was six — while Israel and Egypt were still at war. They split up when I was a toddler, and I never remember them being together. It was a strange, sometimes violent upbringing, set to a leitmotif of family secrets as my dad kept us constantly on the move, traveling and living all over the world. All I wanted was to get back to my mother — a return I finally engineered when I was eleven. The next six years with her and my stepfather were stable as I attended junior high and high school in Austin, Texas. At seventeen I graduated early and moved on my own to New York City to study at the American Academy of Dramatic Art.
Can you share a story with us about what brought you to this specific career path?
The entertainment industry was always the aim. I wish I could say it was all motivated by a fever for artistic fulfillment, but at that time I think I was more influenced by reading Valley of the Dolls when I was seven and imagining myself living in its melodramatic excess. Acting and writing seemed like a calling rather than a function of craft. I left school after a year to go on tour with a musical revue, and worked primarily as a performer for seven years, most notably in several productions of Evita. The transition to writing came naturally, first for stage, then for film and television and books, and a depth of purpose did emerge, mostly away from the heady world of Jacqueline Susann.
I worked my way up the writing and producing ranks to the title of co-executive producer/co-showrunner, while working in Los Angeles, New York, and London. In 1994 I met my husband, Ronald Shore. We were married in a non-legally binding ceremony performed by a rabbi in 1996, then legally married in Canada in 2003, and then, legally married again in the United States in 2013. I was a CASA volunteer (Court Appointed Special Advocate) to foster children for five years, headed a mentoring program called Screen Students for LAUSD high school writers for ten years, and have worked with LGBTQIA+ youth throughout my adult life.
Though credited as Samuel Bernstein for much of my career, I legally changed my last name in 2019 to honor my late mother by adding her maiden name. This coincided with the surprisingly happy discovery that my parents were never actually married.
Can you tell us the most interesting story that happened to you since you began your career?
The most interesting story — albeit quite destructive — happened on a CBS television series years ago. I was caught in a power struggle between the showrunner who hired me and a co-executive producer who wanted control of the show. The writing was on the wall that my boss would be fired soon, and my manager called one day to tell me the deed was done, and I needed to call him to give my condolences. He could hire me again. Call him. I didn’t want to. The whole experience had started so happily and devolved into a nightmare. But my manager insisted I call so I did. It turns out he had NOT been fired. But the next day, when he WAS fired, he angrily wanted to know why he had to hear it from ME the day before instead of from them. My manager hadn’t realized his information was jumping the gun. The former co-executive producer, now the new showrunner, believed I had stirred the pot to cause trouble. This came to be what CBS and Twentieth Century-Fox also believed. My television career was almost completely derailed because of something completely out of my control. That’s show biz.
On a happier note, Starring Joan Crawford literally would not exist (nor would my upcoming books on Cesar Romero and Roddy McDowall) if my book agent Lee Sobel had not contacted me out of the blue on social media, and if I hadn’t had the instinct to reply. He asked me why I hadn’t published any books after Mr. Confidential for several years. I’d been working on other things. But I decided to trust this stranger and give it a whirl.
It has been said that our mistakes can be our greatest teachers. Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
I knew nothing when I started. I didn’t even know how normal people lived. My upbringing was so weird, I had no real grounding in the basics of regular life. But I believed I had to always have the answer to every question and felt it was vital to pretend to know far more than I did. (One of the pleasures of getting older and having a lot of experience under my belt, is having the freedom now to be open about the things I don’t know.) When I was living in New York, probably eighteen or nineteen, I got a call about a movie shooting in Lima, and I was thrilled. I had traveled widely but had never been to South America. I bought a Spanish study manual. Turns out the job was in Lima, Ohio. Non-union. And the financing fell apart before they ever started shooting. The lesson I learned? No cuentes tus pollos antes de que salgan del cascarón.
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?
My husband, hands down. He guided and produced my first really big project, a movie for Showtime and Paramount, and without him I don’t think it would have happened. Since then, as my career has gone up and down, he has believed unwaveringly in my abilities. On both an emotional level and a financial one, I would never have been able to do any of this without him.
You have been blessed with great success in a career path that can be challenging. Do you have any words of advice for others who may want to embark on this career path, but seem daunted by the prospect of failure?
You must fail. Learning to fail and finding the resources within to bounce back is vital. All careers have their trajectories, and there will inevitably be times when things do not go your way. If you can’t adapt and flow with the current, you will drown.
Every industry iterates and seeks improvement. What changes would you like to see in the industry going forward?
I wish we could all be kinder. Our discourse leaves little room for giving one another the benefit of the doubt; little room for critical thinking and understanding of those with whom we disagree. The social media feeds of some of my peers trouble me. Why do we relish getting snarky about other people’s projects, taking one another down and/or ascribing the worst motives to every statement that is open to misinterpretation. We must be accountable for our words and actions. But we can be a little more humane about it.
You have such impressive work. What are some of the most interesting or exciting projects you are working on now? Where do you see yourself heading from here?
I did a solo theater piece a few years ago about my childhood called The Secret World of Danny Lopez. I’m developing it now as a television series with John Rogers and Jennifer Court at Kung Fu Monkey. It’s full of music, fantasy, and non-normative gender expression. I have high hopes.
We are very interested in looking at diversity in the entertainment industry. Can you share three reasons with our readers why you think it’s important to have diversity represented in film and television? How can that potentially affect our culture and our youth growing up today?
My life is the very definition of intersectionality. I fit everywhere and nowhere. I’m gay, Latino, Jewish, Anglo, by turns privileged yet also marginalized. I’ve worked a lot over the years, but I feel like I’m coming into my own right now, in this environment where diversity has value. My stories are not those of everyone else. I’m still that kid who assumes I’m going to Lima, Peru, because why not? Anything is possible. Wait, okay, three reasons: Diversity in the entertainment industry allows more people to see themselves represented in media; it allows for fresh takes on familiar situations, and it allows us all to see ourselves through something other than the hetero, cis-male, white gaze.
What are your “5 things I wish someone told me when I first started” and why?
Nobody could tell me anything when I first started. I knew everything. Smart people told me all kinds of things I should have listened to, about moderation, backup plans, common sense, and financial caution. I never really listened to anyone. That’s not true. An astrologer told me when I was nineteen that my life would end in absolute failure if I didn’t recognize that the most important thing for me is to love and be loved — not my career, not getting famous, not getting rich — love. He didn’t think that for everyone, just for me. And I thought I couldn’t allow my life to fail, so I better wrap my head around this loving and loving business. It was that simple. I started a process that undid all of the toxic programming of my childhood and found my husband because of a weird guy who did my chart when I was nineteen. And I don’t believe in astrology, nor have I ever sought astrological advice again. I tell this to highlight the fact that advice is a crapshoot. You can’t understand what people tell you before you experience life. But occasionally something randomly penetrates and matters.
Can you share with our readers any self-care routines, practices or treatments that you do to help your body, mind or heart to thrive? Please share a story for each one if you can.
It takes a lot to keep this whole enterprise afloat. I do Pilates, take dance classes, do Zumba, get massages, go to therapy, do weird stuff like energy movement sessions, and I go every two weeks to an osteopath for spinal treatments. I also float in the bathtub for a half hour to an hour every day with the shower going. I know it is a waste of water. But without that feeling and the sound of water, I find myself discombobulating. I feel better about it when I am in Porto, Portugal, where it rains a lot and water is plentiful. In LA I feel like a reprobate. But I won’t stop.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
Joan Crawford used to say, “If you want the girl next door, go next door.”
To me, it means we don’t have to make ourselves into whatever we think will be palatable to someone else.
There’s another one. This is going to sound flippant, but I will elaborate: “No good can come from going outside.”
It is true that I am not what anyone would consider “outdoorsy” and most of the things I like to do happen indoors. It is also true that I actually do go outside a lot and like it just fine. The reason I think the phrase is so meaningful though, is that it is a funny way of remembering that you don’t have to like what everyone else likes. Find your own things. Question the prevailing winds of popularity — be they for sunsets or the latest Netflix hit.
You are a person of enormous influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be?
I was involved in a writing mentorship program for several years and the most amazing thing I saw regularly was that kids having their creativity taken seriously is transformational. Some of the kids I worked with became writers but that was never the specific goal. By taking their creativity seriously the students got permission to trust their own instincts, to help them evaluate the world around them in critical ways. The arts must become a vital part of education again. It is what transforms humanity, allowing us to see things larger than ourselves. You can become an accountant or a bartender, whatever, you don’t have to become an artist to lead your life with artistic, creative intent.
Is there a person in the world whom you would love to have lunch with, and why? Maybe we can tag them and see what happens!
I would love to meet and work with the writer and producer Russell Davies in the U.K. He is a genius. Literally. Going back to a show called Bob and Rose and the original Queer as Folk, through Cucumber, Banana, It’s a Sin and Nolly, and returning this year to Doctor Who. This is stupid, why have I not tried to meet him before? I’m sure there’s someone I know who knows someone he knows. I should get on this right now…
Are you on social media? How can our readers follow you online?
I’m on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/samuel.bernstein.31/ and Instagram https://www.instagram.com/starringjoancrawford/ but I’m not super active with it. Anyone can message anyone though. And I do read my messages.
This was so informative, thank you so much! We wish you continued success!
About The Interviewer: Eden Gold, is a youth speaker, keynote speaker, founder of the online program Life After High School, and host of the Real Life Adulting Podcast. Being America’s rising force for positive change, Eden is a catalyst for change in shaping the future of education. With a lifelong mission of impacting the lives of 1 billion young adults, Eden serves as a practical guide, aiding young adults in honing their self-confidence, challenging societal conventions, and crafting a strategic roadmap towards the fulfilling lives they envision.
Do you need a dynamic speaker, or want to learn more about Eden’s programs? Click here: https://bit.ly/EdenGold
Inspirational Women In Hollywood: Author Samuel Garza Bernstein On How Actress Joan Crawford Helped… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.