1 comments about The PR Bible for Community Theatres.

1. AT LAST! A book that's not only chock full of great tips and pointers, do's and don'ts - but one that's easy and entertaining to read. Forget all those dry-as-dust tomes that feel like you're reading a dictionary - pick up this book and laugh as you learn!

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1 comments about Sean Connery: A Celebration.

1. Sean Connery: A Biography is an exciting presentation of the actor and his life's work on the silver screen, including but not limited to his famous portrayal of James Bond 007. Black-and-white photographs, as well as a few color photographs illustrate virtually every two-page spread of this lavish celebration. The text by biographer Bob McCabe is relatively simple and straightforward, and offers a telling glimpse into the personal history that shaped the "Politically Incorrect Sexiest Man Alive." Sean Connery: A Biography is extremely enjoyable reading a "must" for all Connery fans!

5 comments about The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film.

1. Growing up in Iowa in the 70s, we didn't have the grindhouses movie theaters of NY nor did we have the drive-ins of the South. Being a b-movie fan at that time meant combing the TV Guide every week to find oddball movies, although if the title was not eye catching (e.g.-The Devil's Rain, Blue Sunshine), it might be missed. This book came out when I was 15, and although horror movie encyclopedias had been published in the past, this was the first really comprehensive tome on what is generally described now as "exploitation movies," "cult movies," or more recently, "grindhouse movies."
   
   The term the author coined, "Psychotronic," became inclusive of not just horror movies, but also biker, blaxploitation, juvenile delinquency, drug, scare, softcore, and any other type of offbeat movie the author happened to fancy.
   
   It was published at the very cusp of the VHS boom, when not only were video shops sprouting up all over the place, but electronic shops, supermarkets, and even convenience stores had huge video rental operations. Michael Weldon's movie guide gave an entire generation of b-movie buffs who did not live in NYC a glimpse into what was out there. This book became a bible to us given that it was first time in our lives that these movies were available to us thanks to the proliferation of VHS rental tapes.
   
   The book is now 25 years out of date and younger audiences might not find it quite so useful (it doesn't list The Evil Dead-that's how old it is!), but on the plus side, there are many listings for movies from the early 80s and before that have disappeared, so it's difficult to write it off as irrelevant even now.



2. The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film consists of plot summaries of the kind of movies that come on at 3 am. No not porn - get your mind out of that gutter. Weldon chronicles 50's movies with huge mutant animals from the old nuclear test site, vampires, werewolves and anything with killer androids.
   
   Each movie has a plot summary and many have publicity stills or small news articles about the film culled from Weldons home collection. The introduction includes a section on the psychotronic film zine which Weldon ran. The zine included a listing of which weird movies were on that week and included plot summaries of said movies. What I found entertaining about this section was Weldons description of the difficulties getting his girlfriend to xerox the copies on the office copy machine when no one was looking. This book grew out of that zine.
   
   When it was published in the early 80's this book would have been a great idea for any fans of bad movies. It is still a good source for info about bad movies up through the 70's. (I checked it out of the library and kept it for a semester during which I investigated such classics as Doctor Goldboots and the Go-go Girls and found that it was pretty thorough in the bad movies department.) As Weldon points out it was very difficult to find information about the kinds of films covered here at the time when this was published. However with the internet and sites like badmovies.org and the ever handy Internet Movie Database it is possible to get the information elsewhere.
   
   If you have an internet connection then don't bother with The Psychotronic Encyclodedia. If you like bad movies and don't have internet access then this is a very useful reference for plot summaries and information on bad movies made prior to around 1980 and would be worth buying.



3. I am the first to confess that not everyone spends their time wondering if they might like to watch Untamed Women tonight, or have an Ed Wood film festival, but I am one of them. Call me crazy (ahem!), but I like really bad old movies, especially the ones that try to scare/pander you. Perhaps I yearn for the time when showing a bit of cleavage was considered racy. So I nose around the discount rack looking for such gems as Mermaids of Tiburon or The Earth Dies Screaming. I come across a copy of Demonoid. Should I buy it or not? Comes the rescue the Psychotronic guide which safely guides me through these murky dark waters. It and its companion Video guide are essential for those who share my idea of fun, with reviews of 6000 screen gems, such as Curse at Cactus Creek and Robot Monster.

   Perhaps my only objection is that the guide makes no pretense at being authoritative. For example, When a Stranger Calls is reivewed (favorably), but its sequel, When a Stranger Calls back, does not appear at all (and is arguably the better movie). There is also a smattering of "legitimate" film, such as Pursuit of the Graf Spee, and Polyester. No matter, all the films reviewed are, at the least, quirky, and there is a pretty good chance, at any rate, that the film you seek is reviewed. If not, you will have great fun just looking for it.

   My only grief is that the concordance is limited to an index. After all, what more important thing could there be than a filmography of Barbara Steele, the geratest actress that ever lived?

   These things aside, I recommend this without hesitation. There are other books listing gore/sleeze/exploitation films, but you will find none better.




4. Absolutely indespensible guide to cult, sci-fi, horror and every other offbeat film genre written by people that understand subculture. Never ceases to amaze with the rare titles the Psychotronic folk somehow managed to track down and review years before we mere mortals knew these films existed. I refer to my copy at least once a week which should indicate how valuable a resource book this is to me.



5. This tome makes one yearn for the good old days, long gone, of the drive-in movie of the 60's and 70's now replaced by video bins. B movie makers of those days- their names are legion - made an honest attempt to entertain their audiences with meagre resources and often more meagre talent(unlike exploitation film makers of today, whose direct to video releases are lazy and witless). Weldon chronicles this glorious time in a very generous compendium, chocked full of wonderful black and white stills and capsule reviews of the inane and the obscure, thw wild and the wonderful, the unbelievable and the unforgettable. A feast for the fan of offbeat cinema.

5 comments about Inherited Risk: Errol Flynn and Sean Flynn in Hollywood and Vietnam.

1. To the best of my knowledge this is a well researched account of the life of Flynn. A person who seems to be one of those types who is either loved or despised intensely, Flynn is a tough subject for an unbiased account. Mr. Meyer's book, according to some Flynn experts is flawed in some details however the basic facts and incidents offered are well supported and provide a truly tragic and sad saga of a man whose influence on myself has been inescapable! I learned of Flynn as a young toddler watching his films from my daddies knee. I always enjoyed Bogart, Cagney, Cooper and Wayne however there was always something so much more compelling in Flynn's classic films. It was very painful for me to read of his life. This is something I'd purposely held back from doing in light of all the unsubstantiated negative stories surrounding Flynn's life. It was particularly hard to read of his son's tragic life. Perhaps it's not possible to have an entirely accurate representation of Flynn or that of his son given their nature and circumtances. Being a new father myself I plan on spending as much quality time as I possibly can with my son!



2. I have to agree with Mr. Hurst's eloquent review, and I'll put it more succinctly: this is a lousy book. Why write a biography of Errol Flynn, of all people, if you're going to do it with no humor and with lordly disdain? It's like a biography of Tom Sawyer written by his half-brother, the tattle-tale goody-goody Sid. Like many, I guess, I picked it up in order to read about Sean Flynn, since there is so little out there about him. But as noted, Sean is reduced to three chapters presented as endpapers. One might conclude there wasn't enough to his short life to make a full book... if there weren't so much other evidence of the biographer's tendency to stop researching once he has enough evidence to support his (rather ugly) pre-determined thesis.



3. Jeffrey Meyers, best known for his works on such literary figures as D. H. Lawrence, Ernest Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, is a gifted, at times brilliant biographer. Here he brings to his treatment of Errol and Sean Flynn his knowledge of the world's great literature. Meyers can take almost any figure and make him acceptable from a literary point of view. Who else could find a parallel between Errol Flynn and Edgar Allan Poe? One can imagine a future Meyers biography of Bugsy Siegel, with frequent allusions to Julius Caesar, Faust, and MacBeth.

   Meyers's gift for finding parallels between disparate people's lives is especially impressive. I found those between the lives of John Barrymore and Flynn to be especially compelling and insightful - more so than those between Errol and Sean. With reference to Sean, few will feel competent to judge the validity of Meyers' sections which reincarnate his last days. Some of it I found persuasive, but other parts - especially some of the links in the chain of logic - seemed weak; the recreation of "the facts" may be a bit too confident when dealing with mainly hearsay evidence.

   In the main section of this book Errol Flynn comes across as a tragic, forlorn, dejected, melancholic sociopath. The habitual choice to put Flynn in a darker rather than positive light surfaces in numerous ways, as in Meyers' handling of Basil Rathbone. All biography involves some shading of details, which usually goes under the heading of "literary license." But the deliberate reshaping of a quotation by rearrangement and omission, for the purpose of producing the desired result, is disingenuous - a distinct "no-no" for a front-rank biographer. At the top of p. 146, a long comment of Basil Rathbone is subtly rearranged so as to produce the desired result ý to contribute to Meyers' overall scheme of the father-son shared death-wish. It creates a false impression of what Rathbone actually wrote about Flynn, and leaves one wondering how many other things have been cleverly reshaped in order to fit the thesis.

   The question therefore lingers: Does Meyers actually get under Errolýs skin (or that of Sean for that matter)? The answer, I fear, must be no - despite what Meyers and his publicists say. Meyers, in my opinion, is far too detached in his literary mien to explore effectively a man like Flynn. His Flynn is a two-dimensional, black-and-white figure who set out to destroy himself. The real-life Flynn was an infuriatingly complex, three-dimensional, Technicolor personality. Meyers is a very careful writer, but he also tends to be a cold, dispassionate, joyless writer, with an occasional tendency toward shading and over simplification. One gets little sense of the joi-de-vivre of the Errol Flynn of this book. Flynn was at heart a very, very funny man.

   On the other hand there is something un-humorous, at points even tiresome, about INHERITED RISK. The whole thing is written from the point of view of Greek tragedy. It is doubtful that after reading it the reader will have chuckled even once. This is a major failing in a biography of Errol Flynn. The ever-so-literate Meyers, in all his zeal to analyze him - to dissect him into his component parts and to isolate his various destructive influences - has somehow let the real Flynn elude him.

   There are other anomalies in INHERITED RISK. In one of his appendices (p. 326), Meyers breaks down Flynn's films into three categories: "best," "seeable," and "poor." With all due respect to Meyers, the list is bizarre, and may call into question his cinematic judgment. Is "The Roots of Heaven" (1958) really a better film than "They Died with Their Boots On" (1941) or "Adventures of Don Juan" (1949)? What cinematic myopia would place "The Sisters" (1938), "Edge of Darkness" (1943), and "Northern Pursuit" (1943) - not to mention "Silver River" (1948) - into the "poor" category?

   Despite the dual photos on the front of the dust-jacket, the book is not really an analysis of the relationship of the two men, Errol and Sean, along the lines of Sir Edmund Goss' FATHER AND SON. The disparity in the treatments is made clear by the arrangement - Sean constitutes the endpapers (totaling a mere 49 pages), while the main section deals with Errol (244 pages). There is thus a serious question of balance.

   Also, Meyers' central idea of Greek tragedy - that of the fatal character flaw of the father being reproduced in the son, leading to the latter's inevitable doom, does not really come off - no matter how energetically Meyers tries. One gets from this book the clear impression that the lives of the two Flynns were a complete waste. That may well have been true of the son, but it can't be said of the father. Errol Flynn brought untold joy to millions worldwide ý and still does to this day.

   INHERITED RISK is a missed opportunity. With all the research that went into the book, it could have been the best Flynn biography ever written. But throughout most of it Meyersý staid approach just doesn't hold the readerýs attention. There is also a procrustean feel ý the impression that the lives of these two men are being stretched and cut to fit the "Greek tragedy" model that Meyers is pushing. Such shortcomings, sadly, mar what otherwise might have been a monumental biographical achievement.




4. There is a tendency to describe people whose lives veer into chaos far more frequently than our own as troubled. The balance is provided in this book by rendering an account of how superior the lives of ERROL AND SEAN FLYNN IN HOLLYWOOD AND VIETNAM seem compared to the rest of us. I'm partial to this account because I was already a fan of the Flynn associates in Nam: Tim Page, Michael Herr, John Steinbeck IV, Robert Sam Anson, and Dana Stone. Dana Stone gets credit for taking the photo in Ha Than in 1968 in which Sean Flynn, "In full battle dress and holding a grenade, with arms outstretched and right boot in midair, he charges over the top of the hill and attacks the North Vietnamese enemy. . . . After the officer was wounded, Sean saved the day by assuming one of Errol's movie roles, leading the charge himself and killing an enemy soldier." (pp. 55-56). There are few pictures of Sean in this book, but real fans will have the collection in REQUIEM: BY THE PHOTOGRAPHERS WHO DIED IN VIETNAM AND INDOCHINA, edited by Horst Faas and Tim Page.

   The picture of Sean Flynn and Dana Stone on motorcycles in Vietnam, c. 1970, facing page 97, might be rough for those whose expectations were shaped by Jack Warner's "considerable shrewdness and a clear grasp of public taste." (caption to picture 11). Errol Flynn was interesting enough to dominate the first 29 pictures in this book. Then number 30 shows Sean Flynn with a friend, Steve Cutter, in 1958, and the final page of pictures shows the contrast between the highly professional look of an American studio portrait, c. 1962, and how Sean and Dana would look when last seen by Western eyes.

   If armies are usually considered highly disciplined, as well as the most modern, civilized mechanism for establishing order in the midst of chaos, Sean and Dana miscalculated how outrageously the enemy in Cambodia would be striving for something else, that they hadn't counted upon. A journalist card issued by the U.S. Department of Defense was supposed to be sufficient to convince the inhabitants of this planet that they possessed the opportunity to have their story told to the world, and the cameras should have convinced the enemy that the main thing the Americans wanted to take was pictures. Part of Sean's trouble was that he was expecting to see more than the usual amount of trouble. The previous year, Sean spent a few days in jail in Djakarta because of a 17-year-old high school girl, daughter of a Caltex corporation lawyer and a princess from Sumatra, "named after a Hindu goddess." (p. 49). For me (still an effetely snobbish reader and broadcaster of my own opinions), being in the army was like spending two years with the Djakarta taxi driver who drove Sean and the girl to her home in his Mercedes taxi. The taxi driver assumed that the girl was the hot attraction that Sean thought she was and returned with a Chinese businessman. The story is related partly in words that Sean wrote to his mother November 2 and December 4, 1969, which admitted that Sean "stepped out of the bushes swinging a baseball bat. He smashed the car's and windshield, then attacked the driver. The Chinese customer meanwhile had fled." (p. 49).

   Tying it all together like this book does is a hoot: "American officers expected extraordinary courage from Errol's son and Sean always met their expectations. Accompanying the 4th Division's long-range recon patrollers for a month, Sean walked point on dangerous four-man patrols in the northern Highlands. He stayed in a besieged bunker at Kon Tien where, in only three days, 375 Marines were wounded." (p. 51). As famous as Sean Flynn became, it might still be possible to find 375 Marines who remember being wounded in the same bunker at Kon Tien, but it seems more likely they were wounded at Con Thien when Sean was in some other country. Sean probably had more combat experience than most of the guys on walking recon patrols for the 4th Division, who previously were more likely to have some incident of looking for a lost pet in their childhood than of finding anything in the Highlands. Most of the 4th Division called it the Central Highlands. Up north, where the Marine operated, Con Thien was at one end of the McNamara Line on the map on page 127 of HISTORICAL ATLAS OF THE VIETNAM WAR by Harry G. Summers, Jr. According to an official count in that book, 3,077 mortar, artillery, and rocket rounds struck the base there during the week of September 19-27, 1967, only three months after Sean Flynn photographed the results of the six-day Arab-Israeli War, when, "On his way back from Sinai, Sean dragged a recoilless rifle behind his rented Volkswagen and gave it to Mandy Rice-Davies (who had been implicated in the John Profumo spy-and-sex scandal in Britain and had emigrated to Israel) to decorate her discotheque in Tel Aviv." (Meyers, p. 45).

   Most of ERROL AND SEAN FLYNN IN HOLLYWOOD AND VIETNAM is devoted to the life of Errol Flynn, pages 59-303. His death of a heart attack was rather pathetic, as the doctors in those days seemed better able to find heart problems in an autopsy setting than "when Flynn suddenly felt sharp pains in his back and legs." (p. 295). A doctor told him to ease the pain by lying on the floor. "After an autopsy, the coroner found that his death was caused by myocardial infarction (blood not reaching the heart), coronary thrombosis (clot in the coronary blood vessels) and coronary atherosclerosis (hardening of the arteries)." (p. 295). Errol's mother, Marelle, wrote to Sean two months later that "my poor boy knew that he had not long to live. He had several heart attacks, & had been warned seriously only a short time ago." (p. 295).




5. As a long time fan of Errol Flynn, I had to buy this latest biography. This is probably one of the best written biographies on Flynn I have ever read. It is right up there with MY WICKED WICKED WAYS by Flynn himself. This book is painstakingly researched with obvious assistance from the Flynn family for accuracy. No outrageous claims are made as in the past books about the actor. It is downright eerie how parallel Sean and Errol Flynn's lives really were. Definitely a must read for Flynn fans and highly recommended to those who love all things Classic Hollywood.

   Reviewed by Miriam van Veen

4 comments about Scenic Art for the Theatre.

1. As a working scenic artist far from the lights of broadway, (or even a theater department that teaches scene painting) I find this book to be one of the most helpful in my library. Step by step information on materials and techniques are easy to use. I often get ideas for solving scenic problems just by browsing. Thanks for finally writing a book just for scenics.



2. This is a truly excellent book for scenic painters. It covers all the basics, gives a good historical context and a smart look at the "biz". This is not a retread of some hack mural painting text, it's an excellent source and guide for the person who would like to paint scenery for the theatre.



3. Despite the title, this book contains only ONE colour plate, and hardly any visual graphics depicting scenic techniques.



4. This book will be valuable for the amateur and professional alike.It's splendidly illustrated and the photos of scenic drops,scrims,and translucencies show some first-rate work. Best of all this book is by two WORKING professionals who not only know what they're doing but also have the ability to cogently and effectively communicate the multiple ways scenic art is produced.The two authors are not "bookish theorics" as Shakespeare would put it, but accomplished pros who are out there doing it! A must for anyone who's interested in becoming a scenic artist or simply wants to paint their school or community theatre production in a more effective, efficient, and beautiful way.

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