Tom Williams, film producer

It’s the age-old question: was the book really better than the movie? For the last however many millennia, the book has been the unrivalled compendium of human knowledge. However, since the turn of the last century, there’s been a new kid on the proverbial block: the movie.

Today I got to speak to Tom Williams, a film producer based out of LA, whose 25 year film industry tenure has given us a brief window into the glitz, glamour, and (perhaps) practical realities of working in the biz. In this episode we cover a wide range of topics, and have a go at recontextualising the historic chasm between cinema and literature – not a brutal clash of deadly foes, but actually something rather symbiotic.

Find some of the books mentioned in the episode below:

• His favourite book I’ve never heard of was The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll, Alvaro Mutis (1992)
• His favourite book from the last 12 months was Seven Empty Houses, Samanta Schweblin (2022)
• A book he found disappointing was The Archivist by Rex Pickett (2021)
• The book he would bring to a desert island was Foucault’s Pendulum, by Umberto Eco (1988) 
• The book that changed his mind was The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand (1943)

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