As many of you may know, led by John Soister, Henry Nicolella, Bill Chase, Harry Long and I have been toiling away on a book covering U.S. feature-length silent horror, science fiction and fantasy films. Recently we hit a milestone; our 300th essay is ready to go! Now this project has taken longer than anybody could have foreseen (about 6 years give or take). But there’s a reason for that. If the film was based upon a short story, novel or play, we tried to read it for background. If the film was known to exist (even only at archives), we tried to get a firsthand account. Naturally, we’ve dug up scores of interesting reviews but we also attempted to produce pertinent commentary along the way. ..stuff like how the picture fit into the trends (film-wise, genre-wise and current event-wise) of the time, biographical sketches on key contributors, etc. Each film is covered as extensively as possible; many of them have not been previously covered in depth or even at all. And the book will have illustrations. We’ve still got about 50 or so titles to cover and we’re a year or so away from completion. It’s coming from McFarland.
Steve Joyce
