Groundbreaking Movie Book “Forgotten Horrors” Returns to Its Roots for a Revised & Expanded Edition -- Due in August 2012

The publication in 1980 of Forgotten Horrors: Early Talkie Chillers from Poverty Row launched a new direction in film scholarship by subjecting the weirder movies of Old Hollywood’s low-rent district to the scholarly and critical attention customarily reserved for acknowledged classics from the big studios. Authors George E. Turner and Michael H. Price staked out a distinctive territory while rediscovering little-seen favorites and identifying early work from important stars-to-be and emerging major directors.

“We intended the title, Forgotten Horrors, to be a challenge—a self-denying prophecy,” says Mike Price in announcing a new edition, revised and expanded. “With very few exceptions, such as White Zombie and The Vampire Bat, these Depression-era pictures had been popularly forgotten through neglect, careless archiving, and inconsistent copyright maintenance. We sought to make them less ‘forgotten.’

“George and I covered more than 100 such films from 1929-1937 in the original edition, and within a few years of its publication many of these pictures started cropping up on the home-video market,” adds Price. “One large-scale video dealer went so far as to publish a catalogue called Forgotten Horrors. Mission accomplished.”

The new edition, Forgotten Horrors: The Original Volume—Except More So (Cremo Studios; $35), features many new chapters and an introduction by Mel Brooks—the filmmaker responsible for such horror pictures as Young Frankenstein and David Cronenberg’s The Fly. The expansion will serve both to unearth additional rarities and to restore much of the original manuscript. At the behest of the original publisher, the Tantivy Press of London, the authors had removed many chapters for the sake of brevity—including coverage of such significant independent films as Sam Goldwyn’s Bulldog Drummond and Harold Lloyd’s creepy comedy Welcome Danger, both from 1929. These and others have been restored to the text, along with many photographs and advertising images previously unpublished.

A key new discovery is a lost film by acclaimed director Edgar G. Ulmer, The Warning Shadow—made shortly before Ulmer’s big-time breakthrough with the Boris Karloff-Bela Lugosi starrer The Black Cat (1934). While The Warning Shadow remains a missing film, Price has traced its surviving footage to an unlikely location and reports accordingly on the find. More than 50 new chapters complete the package, ranging from weird Westerns to ghostly crime melodramas and offbeat comedies. The book’s 370 pages cover the rise of such iconic stars as Boris Karloff, Ginger Rogers, and Gene Autry; the decline of many silent-era talents who stuck around through the arrival of talking pictures in the late 1920s; and significant relationships between such major studios as Columbia and Universal and low-budget companies including Tiffany, Majestic, Victory, and Monogram.

Michael H. Price and the late George Turner, longtime editor of American Cinematographer magazine, also are responsible for such books as The Making of King Kong (Spawn of Skull Island) (1975-2002); Forgotten Horrors Vol. 2 (2001); and The Cinema of Adventure, Romance & Terror (1989). Price also has delivered Vols. 3-5 of the Forgotten Horrors series in collaboration with genre historians John Wooley and Jan Alan Henderson. A collection of Price’s film reviews for the New York Times News Service (1985-1998) is in preparation.

Forgotten Horrors: The Original Volume—Except More So will be issued in August of 2012 by Cremo Studios, Inc.

John Wayne's Gothic Westerns

This just in from the Fort Worth Museum of Science & History:

John Wayne rides again in the Fort Worth Museum of Science & History’s Lone Star Westerns film festival — a triple-shot of the Duke’s favorite movies from his earliest years of stardom during the 1930s! Selected from Monogram Pictures’ Lone Star series by Hollywood historian Mike Price, the films capture John Wayne in his youthful prime as a maverick lawman at large in a lawless frontier, fighting murderers and land-grabbers on their own ruthless terms in Randy Rides Alone (Jan. 15), The Star Packer (Jan. 22), and Blue Steel (Jan. 29). As a novice player working in modest circumstances, John Wayne was the genuine article – serving Monogram Pictures’ Lone Star Westerns series as a grimly resourceful protagonist who was not above stooping to the villains’ level in order to thwart their treacheries…

Each film will play at 2 p.m. in the Museum’s Oak Room, with introductory remarks from Price’s interviews with John Wayne. Admission is FREE with Fort Worth Stock Show/Moo-seum Experience admission. Films include:

2 p.m. Sunday, January 15, 2012 RANDY RIDES ALONE (Monogram Pictures; 1934)
Undercover lawman Wayne is gathering evidence on an outlaw band when he finds himself accused of murder in connection with a barroom massacre. He breaks jail and tracks the criminals to their lair. A principal role belongs to George Hayes, who had not yet transformed himself into the beloved Western-film sidekick “Gabby” Hayes.

2 p.m. Sunday, January 22, 2012 THE STAR PACKER (Monogram Pictures; 1934)
Another outlaw mob (“What a nest of hornets!” says Wayne) led by a mysterious boss attracts the attention of U.S. Marshal Wayne. The follow-up to Randy Rides Alone emphasizes action from start to finish, with a spectacular array of stunt falls and a terrific struggle between Wayne and stuntman Ed Parker. George Hayes reappears as a character leading a secretive double life.

2 p.m. Sunday, January 29, 2012 BLUE STEEL (Monogram Pictures; 1934)
An attempt to drive settlers from a supposedly worthless townsite inspires heroic teamwork by John Wayne and George (not yet “Gabby”) Hayes. The picture is as distinctive for its extravagant stunt-action routines and imposing scenery (California’s rugged Alabama Hills) as for the showcase it allows John Wayne as an emerging star.

BACKGROUND: The Lone Star series of Western movies of the Depression years represents a cornerstone in the Hollywood career of John Wayne. Despite a promising break in 1930 as the top-billed star of a big-studio picture, The Big Trail, Wayne remained a struggling actor until tiny Mascot Pictures put him to work during 1932-1933 as the star of three low-budget action serials. These brought Wayne to the attention of Warner Bros., which cast him in the earliest Lone Star pictures, combining recycled silent-film footage with new scenes.

After six of those patchwork films, Warner Bros. ceded the Lone Star franchise in 1933 to Monogram Pictures, which developed 16 entirely new features. Our selections come from the Monogram Lone Star series — a turning point for Wayne, and for Western movies as a class.
Wayne’s portrayals, in conflict with criminals in an untamed frontier, were consistent with a formula followed by such established stars as Buck Jones and Ken Maynard — but Wayne brought such innovations as a breezier manner and an ability to develop new standards of realism on extremely small budgets. With director Robert N. Bradbury and stuntman-actor Yakima Canutt, for example, Wayne created a style of make-believe fighting that eliminated the risk of physical impact while appearing authentically strenuous. This method has remained in use by generations of action-stunt players.

By the later 1930s, Wayne had graduated to greater prominence as part of the Three Mesquiteers ensemble of cowhand heroes, though still in the low-budget sector. His big-studio star power reasserted itself in 1939 with the breakthrough of John Ford’s Stagecoach. The Monogram Lone Star Westerns were among Wayne’s most fondly remembered assignments.

ABOUT MICHAEL H. PRICE: Hollywood historian Michael H. Price began researching the long-obscure early films of John Wayne in 1967 after meeting the star during a promotional tour for The War Wagon. Having learned that Wayne relished the experience of making the Lone Star Westerns at the dawn of his career, Price secured television-syndicate prints of Randy Rides Alone and The Star Packer, among other Lone Stars, and found them rich in inventive cinematic technique and pioneering stunt-action tricks — the very source of the dynamic screen presence that Wayne would convey in such bigger films as Stagecoach, The Searchers, and The Quiet Man. Price and fellow author George E. Turner have chronicled the Lone Star Westerns for the American Film Institute’s Catalogue of Feature Films and the American Society of Cinematographers, in addition to their own studies of American independent filmmaking.

Price is a founding archivist of the Tyler, Texas, Black Film Collection at Dallas’ Southwest Film & Video Archive; a consultant to Los Angeles’ Gene Autry Museum; curator/presenter of the quadrennial Van Cliburn Film Festival in connection with the Cliburn Piano Competition; and founding president of the Fort Worth Film Festival, Inc., forerunner of the Lone Star International Film Festival. His film programs include the John Wayne postage-stamp cancellation ceremonies (2004) at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art and a long-running American Cinema series at the Carter Museum. Price’s books include five volumes in the Forgotten Horrors series of movie encyclopedias and (with George Turner) Spawn of Skull Island: The Making of King Kong.

FORGOTTEN HORRORS: THE GRAPHIC NOVEL

Zooming along with Forgotten Horrors Comics & Stories, the first graphic-novel spinoff. Off-the-wall full-scale comics versions of The Man from Planet X (1951), Destination Moon (1950), Carnival of Souls (1962), and The Wampire Bat (1933), along with John Wooley & Bruce McCorkindale's comics biography of Tor Johnson, Tor Johnson -- Hollywood Star, out of print since 1992. And herewith, the first promotional collateral...

Wooley’s Wes Craven bio finds new depth in Nightmare Master

In my home-base town of Fort Worth, Texas, One of the more peculiar pastimes of the past generation has been the phenomenon of the Random Wes Craven Sighting. The spontaneous game seems to have originated with an impostor on the local scene — pretending to be the filmmaker responsible for such lucrative box-office franchises as A Nightmare on Elm Street and Scream.

Never met the guy, myself — although I have been cordially acquainted with the genuine Wes Craven and affiliated actors since the first Nightmare on Elm Street appeared during the 1980s. I halfway expected a bogus Craven to show up late in the 1990s when the Fort Worth Film Festival included Elm Street as part of a showcase for star player John Saxon. But no doubt the poseur steered clear of events whose producers would have known the real Craven.

And why Wes Craven? And why Fort Worth, Texas? Go figure, as the wise old Klopstokian proverb would have it. The act of imposture, in any event, seems to have been good for Craven’s box-office returns within the region. And any city outside of Hollywood always enjoys imagining a connection with a for-real moviemaker. The recent opening of a new Scream feature might even have generated a Craven Sighting or two.

The interest is compounded with the arrival of a perceptive biography called Wes Craven: The Man and His Nightmare (Wiley; $16.95), by John Wooley. The book deals in primary sources and interpretive insights to such an extent as to become an essential document of the perils and pleasures of the filmmaking process. (Full disclosure: Wooley, an Oklahoma-based novelist and cultural historian, has deep connections to Fort Worth, largely through the Stockyards’ Western swing music-making scene. He and I have collaborated extensively, and the new book contains portions of interviews, some hitherto unpublished and some long out of print, that I have conducted with Craven.)

Typecast since the 1970s as a horror-movie director, Craven comes across in Wooley’s view as a versatile and ambitious artist, philosophically accepting his genre-fied niche while retaining a sense of humor and a willingness to plant big social-political ideas and literary sense in films that most customers associate with rudimentary scares and sensationalized shock value. As Craven has described his situation elsewhere: “I was teaching mythology, as a professor, and when it dawned on me that [horror films are] the American mythology of the present day, I told myself, ‘Okay, let’s make the best films that you can in the genre.’”

Craven’s conversations with Wooley are particularly revealing, covering a scholarly background and a strict upbringing that seem naturally to have led to the rebelliousness implicit in the films. Craven’s generosity as a storyteller proves to extend to a trusting nature that has placed much of his moneymaking work under unsympathetic corporate control. Along the way, the book digresses rewardingly to cover such points as the real-world events that inspired Craven’s The Hills Have Eyes, the practical background of the Scream franchise and the childhood anxieties that have figured in Craven’s life as a productive businessman-artist.

Craven has told on occasion of the factual inspiration for his celebrated bogeyman, the Elm Street pictures’ Freddy Krueger, as originally played by Robert Englund. Wooley’s biographical survey elaborates so rewardingly upon that story that it should not be repeated here — better to let the book treat that matter as a fresh revelation.

And here, all along, you’d believed that A Nightmare on Elm Street had been inspired by a rush-hour traffic jam in downtown Dallas.

Michael H. Price’s new book-in-progress, The Movie Beat, is a collection of his newspaper movie reviews spanning 2002–2007.

Forgotten Horrors Podcast Up & Running

Producer-engineer Joey Hambrick has launched the Forgotten Horrors podcast -- a series of opinionated conversations and general hoo-hah between John Wooley and Mike Price on topics dear to the hearts of genrefied scholars and enthusiasts. The opener is a sustained riff on writer-director Edward D. Wood, Jr., and his peculiar screenplay for a grindhouse staple of the 1960s, Orgy of the Dead. Further entries are in the works, so subscribe while the thought is fresh and stay attuned, already...




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Forgotten Horrors Update -- Vol. 5 et Seq.

Forgotten Horrors update: Nifty interview with FH co-author Jan Alan Henderson just posted at Carl Glass' Website --http://www.glasshousepresents.com/jan_alan_henderson.htm -- and some fine progress meanwhile on the sixth volume in the FH series, covering the history of indie off-Hollywood chillers during 1955-1960. An additional book of Forgotten Horrors comics (movie adaptations) is in the works. More about that as things develop.

Forgotten Horrors Vol. 5 Is Complete -- Vols. 6 &c in Preparation

Just now approved final pruf (that's journalese for "proof") on Forgotten Horrors Vol. 5: The Atom Age. Up and running any day now at Amazon-dot-com.Working away with John Wooley on one long-term sequel, Forgotten Horrors to the Nth Degree, and with John W. and Jan Alan Henderson on Forgotten Horrors Vol. 6; these two additional titles will carry the series from 1955 to somewhere around 1985. John and I will be launching a Forgotten Horrors podcast, in the meantime. And more about all that as things develop.