Filmmakers - General & Miscellaneous - Biography, Horror Films, California - Major Cities - History
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Overview
One of the most original and unsettling filmmakers of all time - the creator of the horror classics Dracula and Freaks, among others - Tod Browning is also one of the most enigmatic directors who ever worked in Hollywood. A complicated, troubled, and fiercely private man, he confounded would-be biographers hoping to penetrate his secret, obsessive world - both during his lifetime and afterward. Now, film historians David J. Skal and Elias Savada, using newly discovered family documents and revealing unpublished interviews with friends and colleagues, join forces for the first full-length biography of the man who earned a reputation as "the Edgar Allan Poe of the cinema." Browning's legendary collaborations with Lon Chaney, Sr., and Bela "Dracula" Lugosi are explored in depth, along with the studio politics that ended his career after the bizarre circus drama Freaks - a cult classic today - proved to be one of the biggest box-office disasters of the early thirties.One of the most original and unsettling filmmakers of all time, Browning is also one of the most enigmatic directors who ever worked in Hollywood. Illustrated throughout with rare photos, Dark Carnival is both an artful and shocking portrait of a singular film pioneer and an illuminating study of the evolution of horror, essential to an understanding of our continuing fascination with the macabre.
Editorials
Gordon Flagg
His career virtually began with that of motion pictures (he was an actor for D. W. Griffith), but filmmaker Tod Browning is remembered today for two early sound masterworks of horror: "Dracula" (1931), starring Bela Lugosi, and "Freaks" (1932), the bizarre, disquieting story of a traveling sideshow, cast with real-life human oddities. The outraged public reaction to the latter, which was quickly pulled from circulation, effectively derailed Browning's career. After a few final films, he withdrew to an eccentric retirement in Malibu until his death in 1962. Although his work was rediscovered by movie aficionados--"Freaks" became an arthouse staple in the antiestablishment 1960s--the director himself has remained largely anonymous. Skal and Savada rectify that situation with a detailed, painstakingly researched biography that draws on unpublished interviews with Browning's coworkers and friends as well as the new contributions of surviving family members. They call Browning's reclusive career and its dissolution "one of Hollywood's most mysterious vanishing acts." Their illuminating work should help win him his just place in the annals of cinema.Book Details
Published
October 1, 1995
Publisher
New York : Anchor Books, 1995.
Pages
256
Format
Hardcover
ISBN
9780385474061