Date: Friday, August 7, 2009
Time: 7:00pm – 10:00pm
Location: Jennifer Bates Gallery @ Germ Books
Street: 2005 FRANKFORD AVE
City/Town: Philadelphia, PA
Underworld Amusements presents:
GERMOPHILIA
Stacy Barich – atomiccheesecakephotography.com
Stephanie Crabe – stephaniecrabe.com
Jack Donovan – jack-donovan.com
Stephen Kasner – stephenkasner.com
Peter H. Gilmore – churchofsatan.com
Christopher Mealie – christophermealie.com
Jen Tydings/Ida Slaughter – catfightphotography.com
Kevin I. Slaughter – underworldamusements.net
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From what I understand Tyrone Power bought the rights to Lindsay Gresham’s novel for something like $60,000 and wanted it to be a vehicle to shed his romantic lead image and establish him as a legitimate actor. The studios at first felt the material was unfilmable but Powers and prospective director Edmund Goulding were persistent and the movie was filmed.
via FILM NIOR TRIPLE FEATURE: NIGHTMARE ALLEY, PANIC IN THE STREETS, THE BIG KNIFE |.
A Number of stills on this page.
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Here is William Lindsay Gresham’s life insurance ID card, and his copy of a particularly apt title by Ed Wood, Jr. (Kathleen Everitt was Ed’s wife’s name.) His books: Nightmare Alley and Monster Midway, fiction and nonfiction respectively.
via William Gibson.
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I just bought a copy of The Book of Strength so I can fill out the book page. I own Nightmare Alley, Monster Midway and Limbo Tower, and there’s plenty of information on the Houdini book online.
I’ll OCR a few passages for the blog in the near future….
UPDATE MAY 16th:
I added a few scans of the book on the book page itself. Check it out!
admin The Book of Strength The Book of Strength
Below are classic works of Satanic literature. Here you’ll find Satanic heroes as well as characters that expose the foibles of the human species. Read these with care, for they are full of dark wisdom.
via Church of Satan Fiction Reading List.
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Nightmare Alley (1947) Directed by Edmund Goulding. Tyrone Power, Joan Blondell, Coleen Grey, Helen Walker (110 min).
Tyrone Power, his handsome hunk days behind him, plays a conniving drifter who covets a job as a carnival mentalist, wooing earthy Joan Blondell for the secrets of her racket. His scurrilous ambitions lie beyond the circus tent, and he purveys his mind reading deceptions into a fortune, after linking up with an unscrupulous Park Avenue psychologist. Helen Walker’s icy vixen, Dr. Lilith Ritter, exploits her wealthy, troubled clientele, while redefining femme fatale, in this lurid tale. Power is brilliant as the seedy hero. “Spectacularly sordid” Dave Kehr, New York Times.
Director Edmund Goulding and matinee idol Tyrone Power collaborated successfully on the film version of the best selling novel The Razor’s Edge in 1946. Somerset Maugham’s soul-searching book struck a chord with weary post-war audiences. This was Power’s first film after returning from his Marine service, and it was nominated for Oscar’s Best Picture of 1947. For both Goulding and Power, Nightmare Alley would be a thematic departure in their careers. William Lindsay Gresham’s trashy—and best selling—novel had plenty of raunch, unfilmable under the Production Code, where you could not use words like “bitch” “screw” or “douche” or mention that one character had been sexually abused by her father, and another died of a back alley abortion. Studio head Darryl Zanuck was persuaded to keep the proven team of Goulding and Power together, even though neither of them had never made a movie quite like this one.
Power read Gresham’s book, which had been well reviewed for its hard-boiled prose style, and wanted to star in the screen version. Zanuck was appalled that his golden boy wanted to play in such a downbeat film, with only Joan Blondell for any box office sparkle. Director Henry King, who had championed Power from the beginning of his screen career, was summoned to try and talk some sense into him. King said there were plenty of other serious dramatic roles he could play on the lot, and Power challenged him, “Name one.” King could not think of any (Guiles 221).
(more at the link)
via MDNightmareAlley.
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The film Nightmare Alley laid in copyright limbo for over fifty years, a struggle between the estates of producer George Jessel, author W.L. Gresham and the 20th Century Fox Film Corporation. In that time, its cult status continued to grow. Not just from the rarity of its screenings on television and at film festivals, but from the later suicides of the book’s author and the movie’s director, and its remarkably grim, bold, and disturbing look at hucksterism and its milieu.
It was 1946 and Tyrone Power, Fox’s leading male star, had returned from service in World War II. From an acting family and a stage background, he had grown tired of the empty “pretty boy” image that had made him a matinee idol. He wanted a different role. One that would showcase his range and depth and change the public’s (and industry’s) perception of him from a toothpaste ad to a serious actor. He had leaned toward that end with his first post-war duty role by playing Larry Darrell in Somerset Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge.
Power leveraged his past success (and the considerable money he made for the studio) to make Nightmare Alley his prestige project. Studio Head Daryl F. Zanuck was against it from the start but he owed Power gratitude and a bit of artistic license so he green-lighted the film. Ultimately, Zanuck’s instincts would prove correct (as they so often did). The film failed miserably at the box office and Power ended up returning to the adventurous, swashbuckling roles that had made him famous. Interestingly, many of 20th Century Fox’s most unique and enduring pictures were made in this vein, by a proven film artist’s passionate plea and Zanuck’s begrudging nod.
War weary audiences of the late ’40s were not ready for it. Although film noir was seeping into the mainstream, an “A” picture starring the dashing and overwhelmingly handsome Tyrone Power as a greedy, manipulative charlatan was too much for them. Adding to this shock was the story, adapted from a novel immersed in the sleazy world of carny, portraying the darker realities of alcoholism, marital infidelity, religion, spiritualism and ambition by an author who was a known communist, drunkard and wife beater.
via Fox Studio Classics – Film Noir – Nightmare Alley – Point Of View.
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Excitingly tawdry, as well as self-defeatingly slick, this backstage excursion through the showbiz lower depths was based on the doggedly poetic pulp novel by William Lindsay Gresham (perhaps the only drugstore shocker inspired by T.S. Eliot). The project was evidently initiated at Power’s request and involved a number of high-powered professionals. Howard Hawks associate Jules Furthman wrote the hard-boiled adaptation for high-gloss director Edmund Goulding; Sternberg cameraman Lee Garmes provided the opalescent cinematography. The early sequences are nearly timeless in introducing the carnival world of marks and rubes, Gypsy fortune-tellers, dimwitted strongmen, and the unseen geek—a broken-down alcoholic who bites the heads off live chickens for a daily bottle of booze and a place to sleep it off.
Nightmare Alley doesn’t begin to approach the vérité ferocity of Tod Browning’s Freaks. The dappled studio lighting and artfully cluttered midway mise-en-scène suggest a rancid Oz forever stuck in Kansas. When the movie opened in October 1947, Variety found it both grimly realistic and horrifyingly fantastic. Writing in Time, James Agee praised the cynical humor and sharp social observation, although both seem to have evaporated over the past half-century. Nightmare Alley is a grim morality tale in which gum-chewing smoothie Stanton Carlisle (Power, who appears in virtually every scene) graduates from barker to mind-reading mentalist to big-time spiritualist, while stringing along a succession of female costars—notably Joan Blondell as a warmhearted soothsayer and Colleen Gray as a winsome circus girl.
via New York Movies – Side Shows – page 1.
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William Lindsay Gresham
William Lindsay Gresham was born in Baltimore in 1909, “the descendant of a family that settled in Maryland in 1641,” according to the promotional copy on the back of the paperback edition of Nightmare Alley. He moved with his family to New York as a child, where he became fascinated by the freaks and sideshows he saw at Coney Island. It is the dark side of carnival life that continued to obsess him as an adult, and it is that world which inspired his novel, Nightmare Alley, as well as the handful of non-fiction books he wrote. Nightmare Alley belongs not to the hard-boiled world of Dashiell Hammett and James M. Cain, but to the dark and shadowy world of noir. As a literary term, noir can be applied to any work–especially one involving crime–that is notably dark, brooding, cynical, complex, and pessimistic. Nightmare Alley is certainly all that and more, described by one critic as “a tough, relentless, colorful novel that exposes the private world of the freaks in order to comment on a sick, degrading society.” The novel depicts the rise of Stan Carlisle from a carnival mentalist to a successful “spiritualist,” preying on the rich and gullible matrons of society, to his eventual fall and total disintegration. The book sold fairly well, and was made into a striking and memorable film starring Tyrone Power and Joan Blondell.
Gresham’s depressed vision of society colored his private life as well; he was an alcoholic and an abusive husband to his wife Joy Davidman, as well as to their children. Joy eventually fled to England with their children, where she conducted a long-term love affair with the author C. S. Lewis, whom she eventually married (their story was recently told in the 1993 film Shadowlands). In 1962 Gresham committed suicide in a run-down hotel room in New York, where he had registered under the name “Asa Kimball, of Baltimore.” The only tribute paid to him in the New York Times came from the bridge columnist.
via .
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Allistair Crowley Magick In Theory and Practice
Crowley, Allistair. Magick In Theory and Practice. Paris, 1929. Subscriber’s limited edition. Cloth bound. Damp staining to rear cover, former owners notations and ex-libris inside front cover, otherwise good condition. Signed and inscribed to William Lindsay Gresham by James “The Amazing” Randi: “To Bill Gresham- I’ve tried the routines in this book – and found the instructions confusing – if you can make them work – YOU’RE SICK! Randi July 1959.” William Lindsay Gresham authored Houdini: The Man Who Walked Through Walls, Limbo Tower, Monster Midway and Nightmare Alley.
via Allistair Crowley Magick In Theory and Practice.
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