quote:Originally posted by Grimm: Another great Reeves book that I've mentioned before is Hollywood Kryptonite. The author's name escapes me, but it's an excellent book centering around his life and activities leading up to his death.
I have the paperback edition of that book. It is a good read, provided you take into account that it's a somewhat fictionalized presentation of the events. Sam Kashner and Nancy Schoenberger took a lot of heat for playing fast and loose with the facts (the controversy of which is discussed in Speeding Bullet, for those of you who haven't read it).
quote: In Search of Dracula is an excellent book as well. Pick up Stoker's biography if you get a chance. Lots of cool stuff in there.
The one by Barbara Belford? Read it in college. Great book, but a pain in the ass to come by. Amazon.com insists it's out of print and it's still a fairly new publication.
quote: His original intentions in writing Dracula were actually to have it performed as a play by his boss, Henry Irving (Stoker's main job was helping run a theater), whom Stoker wanted to play the part of Dracula. The role was intended as something that would combine the best of the villainous parts Irving specialized in. Irving walked in on a reading of Dracula, and declared it would never be performed in HIS theater. Poor Stoker.
Yeah, I remember reading that in the Belford book. Dracula was played in the reading by Whitworth Jones, another celebrated actor of the day. It's also worth noting that Stoker's descriptions of Dracula's face are very heavily based on Irving's looks, especially since the recent Norton Antholgy edition of Dracula edited by David Skal prominently features a malevolent-looking Irving (in a still from Faust) on the cover.
The Skal-edited version of the book has some great articles and reviews in it by film and literature historians. It's amazing how stuff like that can utterly transform a text you're familiar with into something fresh and new.
I'll have to check out Speeding Bullets and Skal's edit on Dracula, then. I loved his biography of Tod Browning.
