Book Review: The Making of The Lords of Flatbush by Stephen Verona

In the mid-1970s, a little movie was released called The Lords of Flatbush. Unbeknownst to any of those involved at the time, it would singlehandedly launch the modern era of looking back, inspiring other such nostalgia hits as Happy Days (which would make a star out of Flatbush actor Henry Winkler) and Laverne & Shirley.

But few people know very much about the story behind the movie that started it all. The film's co-director, co-writer, and producer — Stephen Verona, Academy Award winner for The Rehearsal — has rectified that with his memoir, The Making of The Lords of Flatbush.

But this book is not just for fans of The Lords of Flatbush. Anyone interested in the kind of talent combined with guts — even when you're a pioneering music-video director who's worked with The Beatles — that it took to get a film made during this period should also pick it up. Verona tells it all, from his own time in a motorcycle gang (the inspiration) through the writing process, fund-raising, and casting (the perspiration) to the shooting, editing, distribution, and afterward. The reader is along every step of the way.

Verona reminisces about stars Sylvester Stallone, Henry Winkler, Paul Mace, and Perry King — who replaced Richard Gere at the last minute — and the musicians he worked with (Joe Brooks and Paul Jabara) who would later go on to win their own Academy Awards (for "You Light Up My Life" and "Last Dance", respectively). Also mentioned in The Making of The Lords of Flatbush are such not-yet celebrities as Bette Midler, Ray Sharkey, Armand Assante, and Susan Blakely.

Verona writes this gripping memoir with a conversational style that, although very easy to read, lapses a little too often into digression, occasionally leaving doubt as to the true order of events. Follow his advice or learn from his mistakes; either way, know more about filmmaking than before from The Making of The Lords of Flatbush.

Book Review: Center Door Fancy by Joan Blondell

"When Joan Blondell published Center Door Fancy in 1972, it was labeled a novel, but everyone knew better. She maintained that virtually all events in the book were from her life. No one questioned her; the parallels were too transparent.... The roman à clef included her vaudeville trouping childhood, her days as a fizzy comedienne of the talkies, and her doomed marriages."
— from Joan Blondell: A Life Between Takes by Matthew Kennedy

Center Door Fancy is an autobiographical novel by actress Joan Blondell covering her life from her birth into a Vaudeville family until her third divorce. (Click on the "Joan Blondell" tag at the end of this review for reviews of some of her films.)

Except for one thing: the heroine of Center Door Fancy is not Joan Blondell but "Nora Marten." The name of every other major "character" in Blondell's life has been changed, too (with walk-ons like James Cagney and Clark Gable retaining their monikers) — but, presumably, everything that Blondell writes about really happened.

Blondell doesn't shy away from anything: her attempted rape by a policeman, her multiple abortions during her first marriage, and her third husband's volatile nature are all here. Her childhood and each of her marriages are handled in detail, making it very easy, as Matthew Kennedy states in the quote above, to tell who is who. "Johnny Marten," writer and star of "The Boy Is Gone," is her ambitious vaudevillian father Ed Blondell (writer and star of "The Lost Boy"); "Ceecy Quinn" is her ultrareligious mother, Katie Cain.

Then there are Blondell's three husbands: the distant and impenetrable David Nolan (Oscar-winning cinematographer and serial husband George Barnes), the caring but insecure Jim Wilson (actor and crooner Dick Powell, also her costar in nearly a dozen films), and the unstable and ambitious Jeff Flynn (Oscar-winning producer Mike Todd).

The years are not specifically stated most of the time, but it's fairly easy to keep up with the time, especially if you look up the real dates. The novel ends around 1950, right after Nora's divorce from Jeff, with her "trying to revive a career" that would continue with movies and regular TV appearances until her death in 1979.

I'm not sure why Blondell chose to write her autobiography as fiction. I don't think it was to avoid a lawsuit — all three of her husbands had passed away by 1972 — so perhaps it was simply in order to achieve a certain amount of distance from painful events. In any case, Center Door Fancy is incredibly readable in that "listening through the keyhole" kind of way.

But it's also very well written. Blondell has a upfront and open style (much like her film persona) that presents a lot of information in few words. I imagined I would like it, but it's even more engaging than I expected. Center Door Fancy is one of those books that fill your every possible moment until it's finished — when I had to put it down, I couldn't wait to get back to it. (And anyone who reads a lot knows how rare that is.)

Book Review: Complicated Women by Mick LaSalle

Subtitled "Sex and Power in Pre-Code Hollywood," author Mick LaSalle's eye-opening book Complicated Women casts a loving eye on the films and actresses in the time before Will Hays's Production Code was enforced, and shows how movies that many people think of as painfully outdated actually contain some of the most modern-thinking females seen on celluloid to date.

(Comparisons are even made to films of the 1990s, with the newer films showcasing much more "old-fashioned" beliefs, which just goes to show that the Production Code pretty much destroyed how women are portrayed in movies.)

Though many actresses are covered, LaSalle's focus is mainly on two: Greta Garbo and Norma Shearer. These two women (Shearer in particular, and with much more concerted effort on her part) made great leaps in women's roles in a very short period, and were trailblazers, allowing the women that came after the ability to do the same.

Only a few pages of Complicated Women are devoted to Kay Francis (the original focus of this weblog, she was the reason I picked up the book in the first place), but LaSalle recognizes her for her portrayals of unmarried professional women who, in a few of her films, became mothers with no negative repercussions. He later proposes a theory regarding why many pre-Code stars, Francis among them, were labeled "box office poison" in 1938, only a few years mid-Code. "Actresses lost their edge" under the censorship of the Code, LaSalle states, and thus their "social relevance. After all, what is the point of a Kay Francis movie in which Kay Francis is less sophisticated than the viewer?"

The most eye-opening part of Complicated Women is that Will Hays was hardly involved at all in the enforcement of the Code that bears his name. The man truly responsible was Joseph Breen, a devout Catholic and director of studio public relations — certainly an individual with far too much power.

Another surprise was the sheer number of actresses that were active in the period. Along with Shearer (of whom I was mostly unaware until now) and Garbo (of whom I was unappreciative), there are several more women whose movies I feel compelled to seek out — or at least watch for on Turner Classic Movies. A partial list includes Joan Blondell, Mae Clarke, Madge Evans, Ruth Chatterton, Glenda Farrell, Ann Dvorak, and Constance Bennett — as well as films from the period by such big stars as Marlene Dietrich, Myrna Loy, Jean Harlow, Claudette Colbert, Carole Lombard, Barbara Stanwyck

Complicated Women also takes time to mention LaSalle's thoughts regarding the actresses of the modern day who are best carrying on the pre-Code legacy. Some of his choices may be surprising, but he backs them all up with substantial cinematic evidence.

LaSalle deftly rides the line between passion and scholarship. It's obvious he feels strongly about the films and women he chronicles, but he hasn't let that get in the way of telling the facts accurately (there's a bibliography of his sources in the back for further reading).

(In 2003, LaSalle was interviewed for a documentary based on his book also called Complicated Women. Featuring clips of films from the period, the documentary is shown occasionally on Turner Classic Movies. Watch TCM also for the films mentioned in the text, or check out the DVD collections Forbidden Hollywood, Vol. 1 and Forbidden Hollywood, Vol. 2 for eight of the most prominently covered.)