"GETTING SOME"
Tracy McArdle
Besides being a writer, Tracy McArdle has over thirteen years experience in entertainment, integrated marketing and promotions. Working for such companies as Sony Pictures 
Entertainment, Turner Broadcasting System and Twentieth Century Fox as well as renowned creative advertising agency Arnold Worldwide, she has developed an informed sense of integrated marketing communications across a variety of businesses.
Throughout her career she chronicled her more colorful work experiences, page by page, journal after journal. She has been writing since childhood and was first published at age 8 in The Bedford Minuteman with the poem, I Like Winter.
McArdle began her career in the early nineties in New York, where she handled entertainment clients for the agency Samantha Dean & Associates. She worked on accounts such as the Montreal Film Festival, the filmmakers Merchant/Ivory, the estate of Orson Welles, the New York Film Festival, the government of Morocco and Miramax Films.
Highlights include being stalked through Morocco (the 50th anniversary of the filming of “Othello) by famed photographer Harry Benson, who wanted his plane ticket changed; messengering a chocolate leg in mid-August in Manhattan to an actor making his Broadway debut and being reprimanded by her boss for mentioning that her paycheck bounced. She continued to write essays and performed in a live reading series, “Nights with VCR”.
She then spent four years with Turner Broadcasting, where she helped design public relations strategies and promotional campaigns for original series, specials and franchise programming for Turner’s entertainment networks. A memorable experience involved forcing Ted Turner and Robert Redford to speak at a hastily organized press conference where the attendees were largely comprised of seven Turner employees and anyone who happened to be in the building. Moving to the Los Angeles office of TBS, she served as Director of Development for Turner Original Productions, where she helped conceive programming ideas and accompanying marketing plans for non-fiction series and specials. Her first project involved a documentary producer who, one day each week, didn’t speak, which proved challenging in meetings.
Had she stayed at Turner following the Time Warner merger, she would now be deeply ensconcd in the television genre that became known as reality television. Instead, she took her severance check and wrote several television series proposals, three sitcom spec scripts, two screenplays (optioned but never produced), and performed her essays at the monthly L.A. reading series, “Spoken Interludes.” After securing literary representation, her new agent’s first words upon signing her were, “the first thing I need you to do is send me a list of everyone you know in Hollywood. Then give it to me.”
Leaving Turner in the wake of the Time Warner merger, she became a senior communications consultant for Twentieth Century Fox in the specialty film division Fox Searchlight Pictures where she helped plan and execute publicity and promotional campaigns and partnerships for such films as William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Waking Ned Devine, and Boys Don’t Cry. Retreating to the shelter of a regular paycheck, she took creative exercise in documenting events like: being reprimanded by Carrie Fisher’s friend for having him removed from a premiere because he seemed creepy and was following Michele Pfeiffer with a disposable camera; delivering roast chicken dinners to dozens of DJs in the Los Angeles area to promote the big dinner scene in a film; and sitting in Monday morning box office meetings where movie executives said, “We can’t get out of Titanic’s way – it’s a goddamn tsunami!”
McArdle then moved to Sony Pictures Entertainment’s Screen Gems as Vice President of Publicity, where she worked on fully integrated marketing campaigns for such films as Snatch, Girlfight, The Brothers, The Mothman Prophecies, the movie version of the hit video game Resident Evil, Underworld, In the Cut and Adaptation. She led publicity strategy at the Cannes, Sundance and other film festivals, hosted world premieres and press junkets, supervised media promotions, Award campaigns and leveraged strategic partnerships. Highlights include securing behind the scenes footage of Madonna mooning the camera from the set of “Swept Away” for MTV and delivering zombies to horror conventions to promote John Carpenter’s film.
McArdle then began work on her semi-autobiographical essay, Fixing the Hole in My Cat, which chronicled the life of a tired movie studio publicist who struggles to pay veterinary bills while wondering if religion is more important than movies. This essay would eventually become her first novel, Confessions of a Nervous Shiksa (Downtown Press, 2005).
McArdle has worked with Richard Gere, Madonna, Jacques Cousteau, Ted Turner, Hank Aaron, Robert Redford, Mike Tyson, the Wu Tang Clan, Brooke Shields, Robert Downey, Jr., Hulk Hogan, Dizzy Gillespie, Brad Pitt, Ja Rule, Samuel L. Jackson, Spike Jones, Richard Attenborough, Nicolas Cage, Debra Messing, Sir David Frost, Meryl Streep, Meg Ryan, the Goodyear Blimp, Quentin Tarantino and many others. She has orchestrated partnerships with MTV, Harvard University, Yahoo, National Geographic, the F/X Network, the NBA, NASCAR, the Center for Disease Control, the Smithsonian and the Fangoria Science Fiction and Horror Convention.
Leaving Los Angeles behind to return to New England in 2003, McArdle served several high profile clients as a freelance marketing and communications consultant, including The Boston Red Sox, Showtime Networks, World Wrestling Entertainment, Suffolk Downs, Harper Collins Publishing, Volkswagen, PBS, and the National Thoroughbred Racing Association.
She began to take writing more seriously (especially during the period as a consultant for World Wrestling Entertainment) and her pieces were published in The Boston Globe and Premiere. Her short story, "Happily Never After" was featured in the Downtown Press anthology In One Year and Out the Other (2004) and her first novel was published the following summer. She has been featured in Daily Candy, The Improper Bostonian, Plum TV, Daily Variety, Concierge, WCVB-TV's Chronicle, Boston's UPN Morning Show, and The Carlisle Mosquito. She has read and given workshops on writing and publishing at Porter Square Books, Gleason Public Library, Arnold Worldwide and has been a guest of several New England area book clubs.
McArdle is a graduate of Fordham University in New York and the Sorbonne in Paris. She was born and raised in suburban Massachusetts and now resides in the rural town of Carlisle, MA, where she keeps a horse, a goat, a three legged dog and Little, the cat featured in her first book (now fully recovered).
Real Women Eat Beef is her second novel. She is currently at work on Dear Orzo, a book about pregnancy after 35 but before self realization.