Dark Victory, The Life of Betty Davis

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All About Eve, Now, Voyager, Jezebel, What ever Happened to Baby Jane?.... Bette Davis' films are legendary. Davis herself transcends them.

She was magnificent and exasperating. Pretty enough to be given the star treatment in her early twenties, she developed by middle age into a weathered boniness graced by a slash of red lipstick. Elderly, crippled by strokes and weakened by breast cancer, she still compelled us to look, just as she compelled herself to keep acting. Some stared, some cackled, some didn't care anymore, but Bette Davis never stopped working. It was the only thing that really mattered in the end.

Dark Victory is a twenty-first-century rethinking of this titanic actress, whose centenary will be in 2008. Treating her films at least as acutely as she herself did - and often more admiringly - Dark Victory traces Davis's rise to stardom at Warner Bros., her powerful drive to wrangle and oppose, her bitter disappointments and sporadic moments of public triumph, her four failed marriages, and her strategies for continuing her career in the face of age and popular tastes. It covers Davis's films on an equal footing with her personal life because she believed in her work and her work was terrific. Dark Victory takes that belief as the starting point. She wasn't just a star but a gifted artist who changed the face of acting. This book respects her talent.

Headstrong and scrappy, Davis hacked her way through Hollywood's front offices and didn't much care who or what she chopped, all in pursuit of the essential truth of filmed fiction, an electric authenticity in which she never stopped believing. Davis could be radiant, but she didn't hesitate to make herself appear repulsive onscreen when she thought the role demanded it. She fought for the right to perform women as cruelly as she pleased, if that's what she thought her characters deserved. Bette Davis wasn't afraid to cause a scene, onscreen or off.

Mr. Strangelove, a biography of Peter Sellers

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A revealing look at the short, eventful life of the extraordinarily gifted, exceptionally troubled comic genius Peter Sellers.

Mr. Strangelove is the first American biography of one of the cinema's greatest comedians. It's the story of a screamingly funny, desperately unhappy soul - a man who thought he was empty. Sellers, who could mimic anyone and don any mask at will, was privately convinced that his personality had no core - that there was no personal substance under the put-on characters he so readily and hilariously assumed. The Goon Show made him famous; the Pink Panther films made him rich; Lolita and Dr. Strangelove gave him artistic respectability; I Love You, Alice B. Toklas and What's New, Pussycat? turned him into a 60s flower-power icon that still resonates today.... And yet Sellers - whose blistering improvisations could ruin takes by sending the casts and crews of his films into peals of uncontrollable laughter while the camera was running - remained confused and lonely, difficult to work with, volatile one minute and torporous the next.

He worked with some amazing stars, from Shirley MacLaine, Sophia Loren, Maggie Smith, and Goldie Hawn to Shelley Winters, Ringo Starr, Elke Sommer, and Claudine Longet. And he made films with such talented, voluble directors as Blake Edwards, Roman Polanski, Paul Mazursky, Billy Wilder, and the late Stanley Kubrick. As his Pink Panther director Blake Edwards describes him, "Peter was a mercurial clown who could get you laughing one minute and cut your heart out with a bloody ax the next."

"Sikov has pulled off a difficult trick of producing both an authoritative biography and a compulsive page turner."
- Michael Palin, The New York Times Book Review

"Mr. Sikov hasn't just written a celebrity biography. He's rehabilitated a literary form."
- Eric Gibson, The Washington Times

"Sikov's fair-minded, thoughtful, and honest look at [Sellers] may be all the understanding anyone will ever have of the strange comedian, and, in fact, is probably all anyone needs."
- Jeanine Basinger, Washington Post Book World

"Sikov's book is often melancholy, but always informative and entertaining."
- Simon Louvish, The Guardian (U.K.)

Books

On Sunset Boulevard: The Life and Times of Billy Wilder

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The first comprehensive critical biography of the writer-director of Double Indemnity, Sunset Boulevard, Some Like It Hot, The Apartment, 22 other films, and at least 28 other scripts. From his Jewish childhood in Krakow through his teenage years in Vienna and his first career (as a shady reporter for two disreputable newspapers) to his years of struggle in Berlin, his first screenwriting jobs, his early success at Ufa (the German film studio), his escape from the Nazis, and of course his long and brilliant career in Hollywood, On Sunset Boulevard is a detailed portrait of a complex, funny, troubled man and his art.

How many takes did Gloria Swanson have to perform at the end of Sunset Boulevard before Billy got what he wanted? What did the corpses say to each other in the opening morgue scene, which was greeted by such derisive laughter at a screening that it had to be cut and another scene reshot? What did Fred MacMurray say in the gas-chamber sequence in Double Indemnity, also cut because of bad previews? Why was Jimmy Stewart such a terrible pain in the neck during the filming of The Spirit of St. Louis? Who was the only star ever to get away with rewriting Billy's dialogue on the set? (Answer: Bing Crosby.) What was the real beginning of Billy Wilder's career as a journalist? Which Billy Wilder films never got made? (They include: a 1950s movie about an abortionist and a comedy for Julie Andrews.)

Built on extensive new research and interviews, On Sunset Boulevard combines detailed biography with in-depth criticism of Wilder's work, from his journalism in Vienna and Berlin (translated for the first time into English) to his German film scripts and Hollywood feature films. New interviews with people who knew and worked with him (from Susan Sarandon and Joan Fontaine to some unsung people who knew him way back when) round out this picture of one of the American cinema's most blazingly talented, articulate, and quirky filmmakers. As Billy says, "My life is an open book. A little pornographic maybe, but open."

Books

Queer Representations

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Queer Representations, edited by Martin Duberman, celebrates the eclectic nature of gay and lesbian culture and scholarship. The volume features 34 writers and academics, including Chris Straayer, David Halperin, Mandy Merk, Allen Ellenzweig, Joan Nestle, George Custen, Jill Johnston, Joe Keenan, Allen Ginsberg, Edmund White, Samuel Delany, and Dale Peck.

Ed Sikov's essay, "Laughing Hysterically," traces, in both broad strokes and pinpointed details, the way in which classical Hollywood comedies simultaneously repress and reveal gay identities, themes, and sensibilities. From Chaplin's City Lights through Hawks's Bringing Up Baby to the films of Frank Tashlin, Jerry Lewis, and Dean Martin, "Laughing Hysterically" shows that no amount of Hollywood censorship was ever able to erase gay men and gay ideas from American mass culture.

*The essay is drawn from a 45-minute presentation - illustrated with film clips - that I have delivered at the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at the City University of New York, Yale University, the University of Michigan, Colorado College, and the Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center in New York. Audiences have ranged from film students and gay academics to members of the wider community. For more information, please e-mail me at file:///C:/Dan/Ed_Sikov[1]/Ed%20Sikov/site/. By the way, I'm cheap. To quote Kirk Douglas at the end of Billy Wilder's Ace in the Hole, "I'm a thousand-dollar a day newspaperman - you can have me for nothing but travel expenses and a small honorarium."

Books

Friends and Lovers

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"Any gay reader is bound to find in this collection a glimmer of his own experience - a way to think about the accidental arrangements of our lives."