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
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.
In which the veteran humorist enters middle age with fine snark but some trepidation as well.
Mortality is weighing on Sedaris (Theft by Finding: Diaries 1977-2002, 2017, etc.), much of it his own, professional narcissist that he is. Watching an elderly man have a bowel accident on a plane, he dreaded the day when he would be the target of teenagers’ jokes “as they raise their phones to take my picture from behind.” A skin tumor troubled him, but so did the doctor who told him he couldn’t keep it once it was removed. “But it’s my tumor,” he insisted. “I made it.” (Eventually, he found a semitrained doctor to remove and give him the lipoma, which he proceeded to feed to a turtle.) The deaths of others are much on the author’s mind as well: He contemplates the suicide of his sister Tiffany, his alcoholic mother’s death, and his cantankerous father’s erratic behavior. His contemplation of his mother’s drinking—and his family’s denial of it—makes for some of the most poignant writing in the book: The sound of her putting ice in a rocks glass increasingly sounded “like a trigger being cocked.” Despite the gloom, however, frivolity still abides in the Sedaris clan. His summer home on the Carolina coast, which he dubbed the Sea Section, overspills with irreverent bantering between him and his siblings as his long-suffering partner, Hugh, looks on. Sedaris hasn’t lost his capacity for bemused observations of the people he encounters. For example, cashiers who say “have a blessed day” make him feel “like you’ve been sprayed against your will with God cologne.” But bad news has sharpened the author’s humor, and this book is defined by a persistent, engaging bafflement over how seriously or unseriously to take life when it’s increasingly filled with Trump and funerals.
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.Pub Date: May 29, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-39238-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
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