Vancouver author and former MGM assistant's debut novel is based on her own Hollywood blunder
In the early 2000s, Christine Stringer worked as an assistant on film sets in Vancouver. She brushed shoulders with stars and knew the inner workings of Hollywood North.
While working on a film starring Dwayne (The Rock) Johnson, the director hired her to move to Los Angeles and be his assistant while they finished up the movie — Walking Tall.
"It was just my dream come true," she said.
But her dream became something of a nightmare when she was accused of stealing a copy of the film and investigated by the FBI for piracy after she lost a DVD.
That story is the inspiration for her debut novel, Charity Trickett Is Not So Glamorous, a light-hearted, comedic take on what Stringer actually endured — which includes a scene where Charity takes a date to a movie premiere only to learn he wasn't quite what she thought.
"Jack is definitely a real guy that I went on a first date with in L.A. and he used me to sneak into the premiere of Mean Girls," Stringer told CBC's North by Northwest host Margaret Gallagher.
'She's a better version of me'
Stringer set the book in the '90s, a little earlier than when she found herself in Tinseltown.
"I am such a lover of Hollywood and, in my mind, if I wanted to write this book and have it represent the Hollywood that I grew up with and I loved, I had to move the timeline backwards a little bit," she said.
She said she has already planned two more books for Charity Trickett, which will move into the early 2000s.
Charity Trickett, who gives off true main character energy, is "everything that I wish I was in my early 20s when I lived in L.A.," Stringer said.
"She's feisty, she's smart," she said.
"I think that hindsight and age has given Charity … she's a better version of me because of it. When I was in L.A. and I was under FBI investigation, all I could think about was how it impacted me. I didn't realize, then in my 20s, how it was going to impact my boss who was on the verge of getting married, or how it would impact the executives at the studio who had decades of experience in their industry and have kids that they have to send off to university."
In the novel, things go awry for the protagonist when she loses a copy of the big film she's been working on.
If this happened today, Stringer said, the fallout would have happened more quickly.
"With HD, that film could be distributed globally within seconds."
In Stringer's case, things did eventually settle down. She continued to work in film for a few years before leaving the industry in 2011.
As for the missing DVD, she said investigators told her that she had been pickpocketed.
"He was trying to extort MGM for, like, millions of dollars — this is the story I was told, mind you, and then they caught him. Nobody would tell me any details, but that's the story they gave me."
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