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Sex, Drugs & Pilot Season: Confessions of a Casting Director
From his humble beginnings growing up on his grandfather's dairy farm in New York, JOEL THURM became one of the most admired, powerful, and accomplished casting directors in Hollywood, Early on, Thurm's instincts proved beyond reproach when he recognized John Travolta as much more than a teen idol, casting him in the TV movie THE BOY IN THE PLASTIC BUBBLE. It was during his years as Vice President of Talent and Casting for both Paramount Television and NBC that he discovered the remarkable Phoenix family, from which River and Joaquin became A-list movie stars. With his insider's knowledge, irreverent style, and biting wit, Thurm tells the stories of his key involvement in such iconic movies and shows as GREASE, AIRPLANE!, THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW, CHEERS, TAXI, THE LOVE BOAT, FANTASY ISLAND, STARSKY & HUTCH, CHARLIE'S ANGELS, THE GOLDEN GIRLS, KNIGHT RIDER, THE COSBY SHOW, HILL STREET BLUES and many, many more. SEX, DRUGS, AND PILOT SEASON is the ultimate backstage pass to the boardrooms of Manhattan and the executive suites of Hollywood where show-business history was made.
"A true talent at the top of the biz. We are all lucky to know him! And a great guy! It's fun and I love it."
-JOHN TRAVOLTA
"Thank you for pretty much everything in my life."
-TED DANSON
"Always grateful for helping to cast me and for all the unsung work he did behind the scenes for GREASE …. Great memories and details I didn't know."
-OLIVIA NEWTON-JOHN
"Actors are naturally nervous around casting directors. Then one comes along who changes your life! Thanks, Joel,"
-DANNY DEVITO
"Joel is one of the good guys,"
-TONY DANZA
"This book will make you laugh out loud, cry and wonder 'did this really happen?' Joel Thurm was in the eye of the tornado and he is still standing."
-DEBBIE ALLEN
"A true talent at the top of the biz. We are all lucky to know him! And a great guy! It's fun and I love it."
-JOHN TRAVOLTA
"Thank you for pretty much everything in my life."
-TED DANSON
"Always grateful for helping to cast me and for all the unsung work he did behind the scenes for GREASE …. Great memories and details I didn't know."
-OLIVIA NEWTON-JOHN
"Actors are naturally nervous around casting directors. Then one comes along who changes your life! Thanks, Joel,"
-DANNY DEVITO
"Joel is one of the good guys,"
-TONY DANZA
"This book will make you laugh out loud, cry and wonder 'did this really happen?' Joel Thurm was in the eye of the tornado and he is still standing."
-DEBBIE ALLEN
416 pages, Hardcover
Published December 12, 2022
207 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
March 1, 2023
Snarky casting director makes many claims that are unsubstantiated or just plain wrong in a book that does contain some good stories or previously untold facts about movies or TV shows. However, the author's grating attempts at humor, throwing shade at all sorts of successful people and shows or tossing in unnecessary sexual comments, don't read well.
It doesn't help when he starts with, "As far as I know there has never been a book about show business written from the point of view of a casting director." Um, I know of at least four other books written by or about casting, including the most famous from Marion Dougherty.
He uses way too many pages at the start of the book to discuss his theatrical background, basically as a ticket taker and gopher assistant. He encounters some famous old Hollywood names and decides to insult many of them, including Ginger Rogers, Judy Garland, Lauren Bacall, and Marlene Dietrich. As his career grows he encounters many whose talent he puts down in the book, and often it's others in the LGBTQ community such as Rosie O'Donnell (who he says can't sing) and then-named Bruce Jenner (can't act).
The problem is he often makes these unnecessary comments in the middle of a too-long paragraph that has nothing to do with his career. Watch out, TV fans, Thurm doesn't hold back on classic sitcom hits either and has no problem claiming that the award-winning, well-loved Bob Newhart Show just wasn't that good.
He has some very biased perspectives on himself and others' work. He writes, "I'd become a TV bigshot...I was the most important person in the room." Who thinks that way? Especially a guy who is just a casting director. The irony is that this is written in his chapter on his drug abuse, where he freely shares cocaine with the people who work for him, and his gossiping about co-workers who were closeted gay. Classless and unprofessional.
His perspective on TV shows is also warped by his personal political perspectives. For example he claims the sitcom Soap was "forced off the air by conservative watchdog groups who were appalled by its frank though totally silly and not at all lascivious sexual content." Truth is the series was on four years so it wasn't "forced off the air" due to the initial objections of religious groups and previously in the book he says shows cancelled after four years are great successes with enough episodes for syndication. Soap started its first season ranked 13th, by its last year fell to 46th and lost one-fourth of its audience so was ripe for cancellation. Those that disliked Soap included the very liberal Los Angeles Times (calling its sexual humor "manure" and the program "a prolonged dirty joke...without cleverness or style or subtlety") and the progressive National PTA that called Soap one of the ten worst shows on TV. Thurm even complains that the Billy Crystal gay character wasn't realistic in his desire to change gender? Sounds like the author is just blowing hot air to spin propaganda about a ground-breaking program that has been dead for four decades.
Somehow this guy partially defends the casting couch because he is gay (claiming he's disturbed that some gay casting directors and agents would seduce straight male clients but also admitting that he'd bed a client if they met in a bar). Thurm can't keep it in his pants and sleeps around with seemingly any older man, including those he finds unattractive. He calls it "sexual networking," which is highly disturbing that he endorses using sex and lies to get ahead in show business. He even manages to defend some of guilty parties exposed by the #metoo movement!
One of the oddest, and somewhat intriguing, chapters is about his close friendship with the Phoenix family. Joaquin and River's mother worked for Thurm for five years and he claims to now be like an uncle to the kids. But in his synopsis of the wacky hippy family, he claims they were once "members of a Christian movement calls the Children of God." Christian movement? Is he serious? The group was a well-known cult, books have detailed the group's sexual abuse of young children, and Jewish Thurm's summary of them as a "Christian movement" is disgusting and blatantly false.
Then it gets worse in a chapter on Nell Carter, who he manages to overly praise and outrageously insult at the same time, exposing some of her secrets and trashing her while claiming he loves her. Thurm comes across as a very mean, insulting hypocrite. That's followed by his ridiculous preaching about how casting needs to be more color-blind, when he himself admits he failed to usually think of actors of color for most of the roles he cast. Ultimate hypocrite.
As he gets into discussing some of the shows he worked on (including a lot of big ones), he has a number of his facts wrong, and there are spacing, spelling, and punctuation errors in the editing process making the whole thing very distracting. Toss in his takes on all sorts of illegal drugs (which he loved) and AIDS (which he blames for gays being blacklisted in Hollywood), an.d he gets on tangential rants while failing to tell many detailed stories beyond "then I saw this actor and thought he was going to be a star."
Thurm should have had a good co-writer help put this together and make it more objective. The stories could have been beefed up instead of mostly resulting in him trying to give himself credits for some hard-to-believe influences on major move or TV plots.
If Joel Thurm couldn't even take 30 seconds to look up on Amazon the other books written about casting before he boasted that he wrote the first ever, then how do you trust him to verify any of the information he is spewing fifty years after it happened? He thinks he is responsible for the success of Grease, Cosby Show, Cheers, Golden Girls, and some major celebrity careers, when in truth he's just a casting guy that likes sex, drugs, and fame by association.
It doesn't help when he starts with, "As far as I know there has never been a book about show business written from the point of view of a casting director." Um, I know of at least four other books written by or about casting, including the most famous from Marion Dougherty.
He uses way too many pages at the start of the book to discuss his theatrical background, basically as a ticket taker and gopher assistant. He encounters some famous old Hollywood names and decides to insult many of them, including Ginger Rogers, Judy Garland, Lauren Bacall, and Marlene Dietrich. As his career grows he encounters many whose talent he puts down in the book, and often it's others in the LGBTQ community such as Rosie O'Donnell (who he says can't sing) and then-named Bruce Jenner (can't act).
The problem is he often makes these unnecessary comments in the middle of a too-long paragraph that has nothing to do with his career. Watch out, TV fans, Thurm doesn't hold back on classic sitcom hits either and has no problem claiming that the award-winning, well-loved Bob Newhart Show just wasn't that good.
He has some very biased perspectives on himself and others' work. He writes, "I'd become a TV bigshot...I was the most important person in the room." Who thinks that way? Especially a guy who is just a casting director. The irony is that this is written in his chapter on his drug abuse, where he freely shares cocaine with the people who work for him, and his gossiping about co-workers who were closeted gay. Classless and unprofessional.
His perspective on TV shows is also warped by his personal political perspectives. For example he claims the sitcom Soap was "forced off the air by conservative watchdog groups who were appalled by its frank though totally silly and not at all lascivious sexual content." Truth is the series was on four years so it wasn't "forced off the air" due to the initial objections of religious groups and previously in the book he says shows cancelled after four years are great successes with enough episodes for syndication. Soap started its first season ranked 13th, by its last year fell to 46th and lost one-fourth of its audience so was ripe for cancellation. Those that disliked Soap included the very liberal Los Angeles Times (calling its sexual humor "manure" and the program "a prolonged dirty joke...without cleverness or style or subtlety") and the progressive National PTA that called Soap one of the ten worst shows on TV. Thurm even complains that the Billy Crystal gay character wasn't realistic in his desire to change gender? Sounds like the author is just blowing hot air to spin propaganda about a ground-breaking program that has been dead for four decades.
Somehow this guy partially defends the casting couch because he is gay (claiming he's disturbed that some gay casting directors and agents would seduce straight male clients but also admitting that he'd bed a client if they met in a bar). Thurm can't keep it in his pants and sleeps around with seemingly any older man, including those he finds unattractive. He calls it "sexual networking," which is highly disturbing that he endorses using sex and lies to get ahead in show business. He even manages to defend some of guilty parties exposed by the #metoo movement!
One of the oddest, and somewhat intriguing, chapters is about his close friendship with the Phoenix family. Joaquin and River's mother worked for Thurm for five years and he claims to now be like an uncle to the kids. But in his synopsis of the wacky hippy family, he claims they were once "members of a Christian movement calls the Children of God." Christian movement? Is he serious? The group was a well-known cult, books have detailed the group's sexual abuse of young children, and Jewish Thurm's summary of them as a "Christian movement" is disgusting and blatantly false.
Then it gets worse in a chapter on Nell Carter, who he manages to overly praise and outrageously insult at the same time, exposing some of her secrets and trashing her while claiming he loves her. Thurm comes across as a very mean, insulting hypocrite. That's followed by his ridiculous preaching about how casting needs to be more color-blind, when he himself admits he failed to usually think of actors of color for most of the roles he cast. Ultimate hypocrite.
As he gets into discussing some of the shows he worked on (including a lot of big ones), he has a number of his facts wrong, and there are spacing, spelling, and punctuation errors in the editing process making the whole thing very distracting. Toss in his takes on all sorts of illegal drugs (which he loved) and AIDS (which he blames for gays being blacklisted in Hollywood), an.d he gets on tangential rants while failing to tell many detailed stories beyond "then I saw this actor and thought he was going to be a star."
Thurm should have had a good co-writer help put this together and make it more objective. The stories could have been beefed up instead of mostly resulting in him trying to give himself credits for some hard-to-believe influences on major move or TV plots.
If Joel Thurm couldn't even take 30 seconds to look up on Amazon the other books written about casting before he boasted that he wrote the first ever, then how do you trust him to verify any of the information he is spewing fifty years after it happened? He thinks he is responsible for the success of Grease, Cosby Show, Cheers, Golden Girls, and some major celebrity careers, when in truth he's just a casting guy that likes sex, drugs, and fame by association.
April 18, 2023
I'd like to report that this was a quick, breezy, gossipy read and leave it at that. But I can't. On the copyediting level, it's a disaster, filled with typos, practically one every 3 pages, and weird line spacings. The writing style is almost as bad. I used to teach collegiate freshmen English and the writing here is on the level of the first draft of a paper by an 18-year-old. It feels self-published, but it's not. Someone (or, more likely, several people) failed this author in terms of editing. As for content, there is fun stuff here, though some of it (much of it about people no longer living) has the stink of unsubstantiated gossip. His best chapter is about Nell Carter, Tony winner and star of the 80s TV show Gimme A Break, who became a friend of his. Perhaps worst of all, Thurm never talks about how he did his job; there's rarely a word about his thought process behind casting. He just says things like "John Travolta would be perfect for the part" without ever saying why. Disappointing to say the least, especially since we rarely hear from background show biz folks like casting directors.
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March 24, 2023Honestly I skimmed through a lot of the beginning to get to the actors and shows I remembered from childhood. The last chapter he lists every series he was involved with and some facts about them and refers back to the book if covered in more detail there. (Alf!! My favorite!!)
Actually very dark, depressing with the drugs, alcohol and sex abuse demolishing so many lives, particularly kid actors. (Diff'rent Strokes prime example) This is an industry that destroys people. Everyone more powerful seems to prey on those less so. Or turns a blind eye to it in the quest of the almighty dollar. Then if they are successful they are preyed on by the financial types who "invest" (steal) their money.
The Punky Brewster actress made a documentary 'kid 90' that really covered this well. I was heartbroken when I realized Jonathan Brandis from seaQuest had committed suicide when he couldn't find acting work as he got older. I had watched seaQuest on Netflix as an adult and wondered what happened to him.
If you hate someone send them to Hollywood to be a star.
Actually very dark, depressing with the drugs, alcohol and sex abuse demolishing so many lives, particularly kid actors. (Diff'rent Strokes prime example) This is an industry that destroys people. Everyone more powerful seems to prey on those less so. Or turns a blind eye to it in the quest of the almighty dollar. Then if they are successful they are preyed on by the financial types who "invest" (steal) their money.
The Punky Brewster actress made a documentary 'kid 90' that really covered this well. I was heartbroken when I realized Jonathan Brandis from seaQuest had committed suicide when he couldn't find acting work as he got older. I had watched seaQuest on Netflix as an adult and wondered what happened to him.
If you hate someone send them to Hollywood to be a star.
May 18, 2023
The book is full of typos and format issues and that is most likely the most positive thing I can say about it. The book is utter crap and has very limited useful or entertaining information. The author is vile to some people and I feel it's for nor reason other than shock value. The comments he made about Kim and Kyle Richards are inhumane and the fact that Andy Cohen had him in WWHL to advertise this book is shocking to me. Total waste of time and any payment that was made to the author is a crime of robbery for what was provided to print.
April 3, 2023
This book was okay, but I had a problem with the punctuation and spacing mistakes. Those made it hard to read and the book should have been proofed better. That said, it was an interesting read although I didn't always agree with the assessments the author made of the various shows he'd worked on and the various stars he worked with. Also, he wasn't only a casting director but held many different positions over the years. Still, it was worth the read.
July 8, 2025
I had high hopes for a light, trashy read from an author who has been "celebrity adjacent" for decades - primarily 60s - 90s. Alas, there was lots and lots of detail about Thurm's own life story and not nearly enough about celebrities. It wasn't worth the time to nuzzle out the interesting tidbits. For a much better read, try "Dropped Names: Famous Men and Women As I Knew Them", by Frank Langella.
April 2, 2023
Fantastic! For anyone who loves television, pop culture, and grew up on entertainment. This book is for you! Love, love, love, loved it, and you can tell this guy has A good heart, and it was always in the right place. However, someone should’ve edited the book before it was published… That was very distracting… So many typos, and beyond… Still a fun read!
May 31, 2023
This was a fun read about the live and times of a casting director, in NYC and then mostly in Hollywood. The author has many amusing tales to tell and makes special notion of his close relationship with the Phoenix family and John Travolta. There is a great appendix where the author discusses all NBC pilot shows and series in the 1980s..
June 6, 2023
It's not a page-turner, but this biography does give a lot of insight into how TV series and movies are cast, who gets cast (and who does NOT get cast, and often why). It also gives an inside look into who is who: producers, scriptwriters, casting directors, etc. I learned a lot about behind-the-scenes drama in the production of some of my favorite movies and TV shows.
July 21, 2023
Juicy, salacious, a tell all about what really went on in casting between the 70’s and early 90’s. Joel Thurm was responsible for casting many of my favorite shows and films and it was interesting to Lear who he cast, and under what conditions. Up there with Sue Mangers’ bio. Highly suggest if you’re a celebrity slut like I am.
February 4, 2024
Incredibly badly written book about the people a casting director met in his work. The grammar is horrendous and there are way too many misspelled words for my taste. It boils down to little more than a retiree's opportunity to make money by name dropping. I do not understand how it got the good reviews it received unless these were friends who felt sorry for the author.
February 17, 2024
Great stories but MY GOD the typos. It’s riddled with them. Mr. Thurm, your book deserves better. As a writer with extensive backgrounds in editing and proofreading, I’m willing to make corrections for you pro bono. Let me know.
July 16, 2025
Lots of interesting info about the TV shows and movies that the author has done the casting for. However, this must be a self-published book because the number of typos and misspelled words are mind-boggling. For me, I admit that it's very distracting.
March 18, 2023
I wanted to like this more, thought it would be fun celebrity dishing memoir, but it was just so badly written. Sentence after sentence plodding along. Didn't finish.
April 25, 2023
Didn't need the tell-all stories, but the biz-related stories were great.
June 20, 2023
I felt the flow was random. There were also quite a few editing errors.
April 23, 2024
Great book! It was fun hearing about the casting process.
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews