If you came of age when comedy albums were all the rage, as I did, it’s likely you were a fan of Mike Nichols and Elaine May (and fellow Chicagoans Bob Newhart and Shelley Berman). Graduates of Chicago’s Compass Players and Second City, they hit New York in 1958 and took show business by storm. Their improv-based comedy vignettes were smart, fresh and new. They officially broke up the act a short time later but remained in each other’s lives through Nichols’ passing in 2014. (She scripted two of his best movies, The Birdcage and Primary Colors.) May directed just three feature-length comedies but became infamous for ignoring deadlines and budgets. She co-starred with Walter Matthau in A New Leaf, then remained behind the camera for The Heartbreak Kid and Ishtar. All three have their champions, and Courogen questions if a male director would have been dismissed as readily by Hollywood, which is a matter for some debate. (After all, she kidnaped the negative and wouldn’t respond to studio chiefs…) The author explains her frustration that May would not talk to her for this book, but she needn’t apologize. She has crafted a first-rate biography of a brilliant woman and her unique career, asking the right questions and placing every phase of that life into a larger mosaic. May gives new meaning to the word “contradictory” but the author is properly empathetic to the perplexing genius she has portrayed so well.
I saw tom thumb on the big screen when I was seven years and I’ve been a Russ Tamblyn fan ever since. But I knew nothing about his life off-camera until now. His parents were in show business, but they just barely got by and were less than ideal parents. A natural show-off, Russ was cast in a play that piqued the interest of a movie studio and that led to work in the movies—first as Rusty (in Gun Crazy and Samson and Delilah) and then as Russ. He lived to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of his most famous film, West Side Story, which is remarkable when you consider his sybaritic lifestyle and the quantities of drugs he ingested, alongside lifelong pals like Dean Stockwell and Dennis Hopper. His long-term contract at MGM insulated him from many of life’s mundane realities, as he readily admits. Eventually put his energies into creating fine art—collages and canvases that often sold at exhibitions but couldn’t match what he earned as a performer. That’s why he accepted latter-day parts in films like Son of a Gunfighter and Satan’s Sadists. He finally found happiness with his third wife, while their daughter Amber made a name for herself as an actress and published poet. Tamblyn doesn’t excuse his trespasses but instead offers a straightforward, account of his many misadventures. He also shares his recollections of working with the likes of directors Cecil B. DeMille, Joseph H. Lewis, Robert Wise, Jerome Robbins, and David Lynch, among others. This is a good warts-and-all autobiography that underscores the difference between an on-camera persona and a real-life individual.
Here is a charming, pocket-sized book sure to attract any Chaplin completist. After being exiled from the U.S. in 1952, Chaplin wrote and directed A King In New York, in which he satirized America and its current preoccupations. He cast British actress Dawn Addams as his co-star. Just before the film’s release in 1957, writer John Francis Lane sat down with Addams and conducted a candid interview on what it was like to work with the Great Man. Rare-book dealer Jim Pepper has produced this slender book with tender loving care. It includes some previously unpublished material written by Chaplin while shooting the picture and is Illustrated with rarely-seen photos. To order, click HERE.
ERROL FLYNN; THE ILLUSTRATED LIFE CHRONOLOGY by Robert Florczak (Lyons Press)
If you really, really care about the life and times of Errol Flynn you’ll want to own this handsome, oversized volume chronicling his life from cradle to grave. When I say “chronicling” I mean providing information about almost every day of his life on our planet. Copiously illustrated with stills, family photos, scrapbook items and other ephemera, it is exhaustive and clearly a labor of love. Some of my favorite entries come right from the Warner Bros. Archives as various coworkers report on his often-scandalous behavior while his films were in production. It’s a great book for browsing and I highly recommend it.
I am an unabashed fan of Drew Friedman’s unique black-and-white portraits, which include obscure show-business figures and ordinary people whose facial expressions (or contortions) inspire him. Here you’ll find all-but-forgotten comedian Milt Kamen, second-banana-turned-cartoon voice actor Arnold Stang, the late stand-up comic and podcast host Gilbert Gottfried, an elder Buster Keaton and an off-camera Milton Berle, among many others. Friedman provides a guide or glossary in the back of this handsomely produced, oversized hardcover to explain who some of the members of this rogues’ gallery are. Oh, yes—there are also new renderings of such Friedman favorites as Shemp Howard and Rondo Hatton. What a great collection!
Time hasn’t permitted me to read these other books that have come my way in the past few months. They all look good to me:
Authors Silver and Ursini wrote one of the foundational books on film noir and now they have given us an entire book on one of the defining examples of that genre. Its jacket blurbs from Eddie Muller and Walter Hill are pretty impressive right off the bat.
The frighteningly prolific Segaloff has had fun romping through the files of the Production Code administration and here is the result: actual responses from Joseph L. Breen and his team to submissions of scripts, ranging from Stagecoach to Some Like It Hot. There is even an extended chapter concerning the notorious 1933 Warner Bros. film Convention City.
Experienced entertainment journalist Nashawaty posits that the Hollywood industry—and moviegoers alike—were transformed by eight major movies that were released during the summer of 1982: E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial, Tron, Star Trek II: The Warth of Khan, Conan the Barbarian, Blade Runner, Poltergeist, The Thing, and Mad Max: The Road Warrior. It’s a sound premise, if arguable, but the author makes his case.
MAKING ‘A BRIDGE TOO FAR’ by Simon Lewis (GoodKnight Books)
The folks who published my last two books are choosy about what properties they take on, so I’m intrigued by this recent release. British author Lewis goes into great detail about director Richard Attenborough’s efforts to re-live Operation Market Garden, a noble failure during WW2, as authentically as possible—in 1977, just prior to the development of CGI.