My wife has often called film my heroin, as I confess to be more than just a little bit addicted. When not watching and writing about cinema, I can usually be found either in our family room in the winter months or on the deck by the pool in the summer with the latest new film book or biography in my hand.
I have always loved reading, discovering Classics Illustrated, that incredible comic book series at a young age in the 1960s, and laying eyes on the first Famous Monster of Film Land shortly after that. My grandmother took me to the library where I followed a sign that said “film.” Thinking they were showing a movie, I wandered over and found an entire floor devoted to books on movies.
Talk about a wet dream for that 11- or 12-year-old kid! She got me my own library card and I took out six or seven books at a time, focusing on my first love at the time, horror, and then absorbing John Wayne, Elia Kazan, John Ford, Orson Welles, everything I could find.
As a film critic and published author, I receive many film-related books to read and comment on, which I do when time permits. So I thought I might share some of the best reads I have enjoyed lately in this week’s column.
“Victor Fleming: An American Master” by Michael Sragrow is the best film biography I have read in a long, long time, likely since Richard Schickel’s seminal work on Elia Kazan. Fleming, of course, is the director behind two of Hollywood’s most essential classics: “The Wizard of Oz” and “Gone With the Wind,” both in the same freakin’ year. He was a man’s man, who took no garbage from anyone and was known to bully the talent into doing their job. The research for this book is superb because Fleming left no personal papers, making the writer’s job a massive jigsaw puzzle, but one he finished to utter perfection. A master work of a bio.