This is a wonderful secret history of British movies that includes the scandals, the suicides, the immolations and the contract killings - the product of thousands of conversations with veteran film-makers. Here you'll meet, among many others, the 20s film idols snorting cocaine from an illuminated glass dance floor on the bank of the Thames, the model who escaped Soho's gangsters to become the queen of the nudie flicks and the genteel Scottish comedienne who, at the age of fifty-five, reinvented herself as a star of exploitation cinema, and fondly remembers 'the one where I drilled in people's heads and ate their brains'. Welcome to the lost worlds of British cinema.
Matthew Sweet presents Night Waves and Freethinking on BBC Radio 3, and is the summer presenter of The Film Programme on Radio Four. He is the author of Inventing the Victorians and Shepperton Babylon, which he adapted as a film for BBC Four. His TV programmes include Silent Britain, A Brief History of Fun, The Age of Excess, Truly, Madly, Cheaply and The Rules of Film Noir. .
Title: Shepperton Babylon: The Lost Worlds of British Cinema
Author: Sweet, Matthew
ISBN: 9780571212989
Binding:
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Publication Date: 2006-02-16
Number of Pages: 400
Weight: 0.2995 kg
'A singular triumph... It makes our cinematic history vivid and invigorating in a way few books have yet managed.' Empire 'Very well-informed and effortlessly funny. I doubt there will be a better film book this year.' Independent