About...

...Straight Up 
The agenda is just what it says: arts, media & culture delivered with attitude. Or as Rock Hudson once said: "Man is the only animal clever enough to build the Empire State Building and stupid enough to jump off it." more

...Books 'n Stuff 
I'm the author of "A Talent for Trouble," the biography of Hollywood director William Wyler. Putnam published it in hardcover. It is now in paperback (Da Capo Press). more

...My Checkered Career 
Writing of mine has appeared in "little magazines," among them VDRSVP, Ricochet, Unmuzzled Ox, San Francisco Earthquake and John Bryan's Notes From Underground, as well as in Partisan Review, The New York Times Book Review, Trans-Atlantik and The Journal of Film History. more

...Jan Herman 
When not listening to Bach or Cuban jazz pianist Chucho Valdes, or dancing to salsa, I like to play jazz piano -- but only in the privacy of my own mind. more

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Checkered Career

Me Elsewhere

BUSTER KEATON REVISITED 
Buster Keaton: Tempest in a Flat Hat is not a biography. "This book is merely a fan's notes," Edward McPherson writes in the introduction, although his publisher ignores the disclaimer and calls it a biography on the cover. In fact, the book is a bit of both, a difficult combination to bring off unless you're David Thomson, who set the standard with Rosebud, his penetrating rumination on the life and career of Orson Welles, which was nothing if not a distillation of every obsessive thought he ever had about the myth and the man and all his movies. more

THE STARS ACCORDING TO BOGDANOVICH 
Peter Bogdanovich's superb collection of movie-star profiles and interviews -- a sequel to Who the Devil Made It, his interviews of top film directors -- begins with an affectionate tale about Orson Welles that reminds us just how intimate the author's connection to Hollywood's greatest has been. But contrary to what we've come to expect from dime-a-dozen celebrities and celebrity interviews not worth two cents, the tale avoids bromidic egotism and journalistic platitudes. more

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