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
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PERSPECTIVES
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
A pleasingly unformulaic book of hard-won advice that never rings false.
The comic and television personality turns serious—semi-serious, anyway—in a combination memoir and self-help book.
Handler opens these generally short essays with a memory of childhood that closes with the exhortation to keep the child within us alive into adulthood: “Hold on to that child tightly, as if she were your own, because she is.” The memory soon veers into the comically absurd, with an account of a cocaine-fueled cross-country trip with a random companion who looked like another TV personality: “I don’t know if Dog the Bounty Hunter does copious amounts of cocaine, but he sure looks like he does.” Drugs and juice are seldom far from the proceedings, but therapy is close by, too, and clearly the latter has been of tremendous use, if “exhausting in the sense that every new development or idea led to a period of intense self-awareness followed by waves of acute self-consciousness coupled with endless self-recrimination.” As the anecdotes progress, that intense self-awareness becomes less fraught. Some of her life lessons are drawn from her experiences wrestling with the yips and setbacks of performing before audiences; some turn into knowing one-liners (“I knew if three men in a row told me not to do something, it was imperative that I do the opposite”). Most, even if tongue-in-cheek or rueful, are delivered with a disarming friendliness laced with her trademark archness: Her account of a dinner opposite Woody Allen and daughter/wife Soon-Yi is worth the price of admission alone. In the main, Handler is a cheerleader for everyone worthy of cheers, and especially women. As she writes, encouragingly, “You have misbehaved, and then corrected, and then misbehaved again, and then corrected some more”—and have grown and flourished.
A pleasingly unformulaic book of hard-won advice that never rings false.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593596579
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dial Press
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2025
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