A lively and enthusiastic in-depth exploration of an obscure TV horror classic.
Director and historian Irvin presents the behind-the-scenes story of the making of a cult-favorite 1970s monster movie made for British television.
This nonfiction book details the backstage drama that occurred during the making of the 1973 TV movie Frankenstein: The True Story, which starred James Mason, Leonard Whiting (who’d co-starred in Franco Zeffirelli’s film of Romeo and Julietjust five years before), Jane Seymour, and a young Michael Sarrazin (of They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? fame) as a rather stylish monster. The movie was helmed by Jack Smight, who’d directed Paul Newman in 1966’s Harper, with a screenplay by novelist Christopher Isherwood and his longtime partner Don Bachardy. The result was what Irvin calls “a sophisticated reconstruction of the Frankenstein story on a grand scale, populated by A-list actors, with sumptuous settings, lavish costumes, a three-hour running time, and an eye-popping budget of $3.5 million.” In this profusely illustrated account, the author goes into granular detail about every aspect of the movie’s development, writing, direction, and casting, from its genesis as a script idea by James Bridges, who’d later become a director and Oscar-nominated screenwriter, to its final star-studded production and subsequent critical reception. Irvin offers the full personal and cinematic history of every major figure associated with the work, from the stars and the writers to, most especially, producer Hunt Stromberg Jr., who’s the subject of the most compelling chapter. Most intriguing is the wide array of LGBTQ+ talent that worked on the film, and how the creative team strove to bring out the original story’s rarely explored homoerotic undertones. That said, literary folk may bridle at Irvin’s dismal rating of the 1818 horror classic by Mary Shelley that started it all, asserting that “by today’s standards, it is tediously didactic.” Overall, though, there’s lots of compelling material here. This book’s foreword is by novelist Anne Rice, whose own Vampire Chronicles notably explored queer themes, and Oscar-winning director Guillermo del Toro (The Shape of Water) provides an afterword.
A lively and enthusiastic in-depth exploration of an obscure TV horror classic.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2023
ISBN: 9798864623428
Page Count: 406
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
A frank and funny but uneven essay collection about neurodiversity.
An experimental, illustrated essay collection that questions neurotypical definitions of what is normal.
From a young age, writer and comedian Myers has been different. In addition to coping with obsessive compulsive disorder and panic attacks, she struggled to read basic social cues. During a round of seven minutes in heaven—a game in which two players spend seven minutes in a closet and are expected to kiss—Myers misread the romantic advances of her best friend and longtime crush, Marley. In Paris, she accidentally invited a sex worker to join her friends for “board games and beer,” thinking he was simply a random stranger who happened to be hitting on her. In community college, a stranger’s request for a pen spiraled her into a panic attack but resulted in a tentative friendship. When the author moved to Australia, she began taking notes on her colleagues in an effort to know them better. As the author says to her co-worker, Tabitha, “there are unspoken social contracts within a workplace that—by some miracle—everyone else already understands, and I don’t….When things Go Without Saying, they Never Get Said, and sometimes people need you to Say Those Things So They Understand What The Hell Is Going On.” At its best, Myers’ prose is vulnerable and humorous, capturing characterization in small but consequential life moments, and her illustrations beautifully complement the text. Unfortunately, the author’s tendency toward unnecessary capitalization and experimental forms is often unsuccessful, breaking the book’s otherwise steady rhythm.
A frank and funny but uneven essay collection about neurodiversity.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9780063381308
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2025
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.
Avuncular observations on matters historical from the late popularizer of the past.
McCullough made a fine career of storytelling his way through past events and the great men (and occasional woman) of long-ago American history. In that regard, to say nothing of his eschewing modern technology in favor of the typewriter (“I love the way the bell rings every time I swing the carriage lever”), he might be thought of as belonging to a past age himself. In this set of occasional pieces, including various speeches and genial essays on what to read and how to write, he strikes a strong tone as an old-fashioned moralist: “Indifference to history isn’t just ignorant, it’s rude,” he thunders. “It’s a form of ingratitude.” There are some charming reminiscences in here. One concerns cajoling his way into a meeting with Arthur Schlesinger in order to pitch a speech to presidential candidate John F. Kennedy: Where Richard Nixon “has no character and no convictions,” he opined, Kennedy “is appealing to our best instincts.” McCullough allows that it wasn’t the strongest of ideas, but Schlesinger told him to write up a speech anyway, and when it got to Kennedy, “he gave a speech in which there was one paragraph that had once sentence written by me.” Some of McCullough’s appreciations here are of writers who are not much read these days, such as Herman Wouk and Paul Horgan; a long piece concerns a president who’s been largely lost in the shuffle too, Harry Truman, whose decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan McCullough defends. At his best here, McCullough uses history as a way to orient thinking about the present, and with luck to good ends: “I am a short-range pessimist and a long-range optimist. I sincerely believe that we may be on the way to a very different and far better time.”
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781668098998
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
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