Samantha Greene Woodruff's "The Trade Off," the movie

Featured at My Book, The Movie: The Trade Off: A Novel by Samantha Greene Woodruff.

The entry begins:

Someone recently asked me for a one sentence, Hollywood-style pitch for The Trade Off and I said: “It’s The Great Gatsby meets The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel on Wall Street.” Not to compare myself for a single moment to Fitzgerald or Amy Sherman-Palladino, but my book is set in the roaring ‘20s and examines the “have and have nots” of the era. And, as I was writing my protagonist, Bea Abramovitz, I always had Rachel Brosnahan’s Midge Maisel in my mind. So, it might be a bit too on the nose, but it’s hard for me to envision anyone but her in the movie version of my book.

Bea is a first-generation American daughter of Russian Jews who immigrated to the US to flee the pogroms, losing everything along the way. Bea has a gift for numbers and, in the stock market boom of the 1920s, wants nothing more than to become a broker in the very male world of Wall Street. But she has three strikes against her: she’s female, she’s poor and she’s Jewish. Bea doesn’t share Midge’s background or career goals, but she has a similar spunk, likeability and determination that conjured Brosnahan’s Midge in my imagination.

For Bea’s friends, I pictured Christina Hendricks à la Mad Men for Henrietta, the dazzling rich Jewish secretary who wants to be a “modern gal” and make it on her own; Taylor Swift for Milly, the awkward girl who finds herself; and...[read on]

Visit Samantha Greene Woodruff's website.

My Book, The Movie: The Lobotomist's Wife.

My Book, The Movie: The Trade Off.

--Marshal Zeringue