Tuesday, April 9, 2024
Republican-American (Waterbury CT): On centennial of his birth, Brando remembered as iconic rebel
(The following review of Burt Kearns’s new book, Marlon Brando: Hollywood Rebel was published on January 31, 2023, in the Republican-American newspaper of Waterbury, Connecticut. The R-A site is protected by a paywall, but you can view five articles for free by registering at rp-am.com. Click the headline below to link to the original story.)
On centennial of his birth, Brando remembered as iconic rebel
By ALAN BISBORT April 8, 2024
Marlon Brando in "The Wild One"
Marlon Brando the actor died in 2004 at age 80. However, Marlon Brando the cultural icon just turned 100, on April 3, the centenary of his birth. A number of articles have appeared marking the occasion, as has a film series on Turner Classic Movies and other cable and streaming services.
The one essential book published in connection with the anniversary is “Marlon Brando: Hollywood Rebel,” by Burt Kearns. Kearns, a Stamford native and Fairfield University grad who now lives in Los Angeles, is a veteran print and broadcast journalist and Emmy-winning TV documentarian. He is also a serious film history buff, and his previous book was a biography of the boozing, brawling tough-guy actor, Lawrence Tierney.
It may come as a surprise to some readers that Kearns opens this book with “The Wild One” (1953), which isn’t one of Brando’s crowning cinematic jewels. There is a method to the author’s madness, though. Kearns is not interested in a chronological story, nor is this book a biography – though there is much fascinating biographical detail in it.
Instead he’s documenting the astonishing range of influence that Brando wielded on his own times and over succeeding generations – in acting, outlaw attitude, style of speech, manners and dress, political activism, countercultural movements and even music. And “The Wild One” was a game changer.
About this book, Kearns writes that it’s “a study of how one man’s artistic and personal decisions affected not only those around him, but all of Western society and popular culture. … The reader will find that Marlon Brando’s mark on the modern world has been indisputable and pervasive in the 77 years since he walked onstage at Broadway’s Ethel Barrymore, 20 years after his death, and 100 years after his birth.”
For example, you may not have realized, until this book, that Brando had high hopes and serious intent for “The Wild One.” It was not an exploitative biker flick in the Roger Corman-Russ Meyer mold. Brando took this role of Johnny Strabler, outlaw biker gang leader, as seriously as any of the other films that would win him fame and acclaim.
At the time, he’d already garnered two Academy Awards nominations – for “A Streetcar Named Desire” (1951) and “Viva Zapata!” (1953) – so he had no reason to slum with cheesy B movies.
Before filming even started, he immersed himself in biker culture, hung out at L.A biker bars and bought a motorcycle. He wanted this to be a serious film. But then, the Hollywood censors came calling, insisting the script had to be changed so that the “bad guys” took all the blame. Brando later said, “We started out to do something worthwhile, to explain the psychology of the hipster. But somewhere along the way we went off the track.”
As low on Brando’s totem pole as it may be, “The Wild One” had huge cultural impacts. In Memphis, where it was banned, a 19-year-old wannabe singer named Elvis Presley was determined to see it; he became a Brando fanatic. Presley signed a record contract with Sun Records and then with RCA right about the time “Rebel Without a Cause”(starring James Dean, another Brando acolyte) was released. This created a perfect storm of youth revolt, in manners, film and music. In addition to being a rock’n’ roll star, Elvis now wanted to be a “serious” actor like his idol, Marlon Brando.
A group of lads from Liverpool were also smitten with Brando and Elvis. When they were fishing around for a band name, they recalled a line from “The Wild One.” Chino, a gang leader played by Lee Marvin, tells Strabler (Brando’s character) “the Beetles miss you.” The Beetles was the name of another biker gang, and when “The Wild One” came to Liverpool, two best pals, John Lennon and Stu Sutcliffe, were there to see it. It was not too far a leap to adopt the name the Beetles, change the ‘e’ to an ‘a’ and, bingo, rock’n’ roll history was made. In homage, Brando is one of the people featured on the cover of the “Sgt. Pepper’s” album.
Kearns makes similar deep dives into Brando films in order to illustrate the actor’s equally strong influence on the Beat Generation (Jack Kerouac was a fan), Pop Art (Andy Warhol was a fan), the gay subculture and gay rights, the American Indian movement, Black power, environmentalism and even the punk movement of the 1970s and 1980s. And then there are the generations of actors who stood in Brando’s shadows, the ones who, following his example, immersed themselves in roles as outsiders and malcontents, everyone from De Niro, Depp and Nicholson to Daniel Day-Lewis and Nicole Kidman.
One of the most fascinating aspects of this book is to remind us how Brando, a product of the Midwest (like Orson Welles and Buster Keaton) had already become one of America’s great young stage actors before ever setting foot in Southern California. He really didn’t need Hollywood; Hollywood needed him. When he arrived in Hollywood in 1949, he snubbed the journalists and gossip columnists and said things like, “This town and everything in it is overrated.”
He was, in short, a “Hollywood Rebel” from the start and remained one until the end.
“Marlon Brando: Hollywood Rebel” by Burt Kearns
(Applause Theatre & Cinema Books, 280 pages, $29.95)
TRIVIA QUIZ
Text your knowledge of all things Brando with this 10-part quiz.
1) Brando came to the attention of Hollywood through his celebrated Broadway appearances in “A Streetcar Named Desire.” Who wrote the play on which this production was based?
2) Who played the role of Blanche Dubois in the stage production with Brando? Who portrayed Blanche Dubois in the film version?
3) What actor took over the role of Stanley Kowalski on stage after Brando left? (Hint: He would go on to have a long film career.)
4) What was the only musical Brando ever appeared in?
5) Brando was nominated six times for Academy Awards. How many did he win, and for what films?
6) What was his only film given an X rating?
7) What was the only film he directed and what famous director did he replace?
8) Who appeared in Brando’s stead at the 1973 Academy Awards ceremony when he won Best Actor for his role in “The Godfather”?
9) What was the only film in which Jack Nicholson and Brando appeared together?
10) What was the only film in which Robert De Niro and Brando appeared together?
ANSWERS:
1) Tennessee Williams. 2) Jessica Tandy, Vivien Leigh; 3) Ralph Meeker. 4) “Guys and Dolls,” with Sinatra. 5) Two, for “On the Waterfront” (1954) and “The Godfather” (1972). 6) “Last Tango in Paris” (1972). 7) “One-Eyed Jacks” (1961), Stanley Kubrick, who was hired to direct but, two weeks before production started, he dropped out and Brando volunteered to take over. 8) Sacheen Littlefeather, a Native American actress who, under instructions from Brando, refused the Oscar to protest Hollywood’s depiction of Native Americans and in solidarity with the protesters at Wounded Knee. 9) “The Missouri Breaks” (1976). 10) “The Score” (2001).
Saturday, March 30, 2024
'Marlon Brando: Hollywood Rebel’ internacional! Spain’s El Mundo features Burt Kearns’s latest book
The Los Angeles Times weighed in this week-- as did the Spanish newspaper El Mundo, in its La Lectura cultural magazine. Journalist Dario Prieto spoke to the author and featured the book this weekend.
The article is shown below, and a rough translation follows.
A rough translation:
LA LECTURA The cultural magazine of EL MUNDO Friday, March 29, 2024
100 YEARS OF MARLON BRANDO:
"TODAY HE WOULD BE CANCELLED...
AND HE WOULDN'T CARE."
intimidator of women,
openly bisexual, activist
in favor of the creation of
State of Israel, as well as
for native rights
of the US and African Americans,
the actor made his life a
representation greater than its
own myth. “It was limited to
live your life, no matter what
that no one would think,” says the
author of a new biography
by Dario Prieto
The first issue of Punk magazine, which popularized the term to refer to that youthful revolution, chose Marlon Brando (1924-2004) as "the original punk." The leather jackets worn by the Ramones were the same Perfecto that he wore in Savaje (1953), just as the rebelliousness and rebellious spirit of those young people was a reflection of what the actor had put into practice on and off the screen.
This Wednesday marks the centenary of his birth and, coinciding with the anniversary, Marlon Brando: Hollywood Rebel (Applause), a biography by Burt Kearns that delves into the living legacy of the interpreter of A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), The Law of Silence (1954), The Godfather (1972) and Apocalypse Now (1979).
"Brando was a giant of cinema and popular culture," says Kearns in a conversation with La Lectura in which he explains his approach: "I'm a journalist and an expert in culture, not a cinephile. And when it was suggested that I write a book about him, I thought: What else can you write? There are 800-page books about his life, Brando himself wrote a book, his achievements and his mistakes have been dwelt on many times... So I approached it from a different angle and it's how this man, through the choices he made in his life and on screen, continues to shape Western popular culture in every way: from Lily Gladstone being the first Native American to be nominated for the Oscar for Best Actress to what's happening in Israel."
THE HOLLYWOOD GAME. The first thing that stands out, the author points out, is that, "even though he had an incredible talent for acting - which meant nothing to him; it was just a song and dance - activism was more important to him than anything he did in film. If he was in a film, it had to be one that helped people, that made a difference". Based on Savaje and its influence on the advent of rock and roll and pop (it profoundly influenced both Elvis and the Beatles), Kearns draws parallels between Brando's image and his social commitment: "When Brando came to Hollywood, you had to do certain things when you set foot there: sign with a studio, talk to the press and deal with the gossip columnists who ran the city's media. Brando never did it, so he was greeted with suspicion: he was a weird guy and couldn't be trusted because he lied and made up stories about his past, in a similar way that Bob Dylan would later do. He wasn't someone the industry could trust, but his talent won out and he ended up playing the Hollywood game.”
"He led the way," he says. "In the old days of Hollywood, the '40s, if a star wanted to get into political activism he would come out and say you had to support the guys in the military and buy war bonds. But when he became a great figure, he began to appear in the vicinity of a prison where a man was to be executed, to protest against the death penalty. And the reaction was one of hostility: Who cares what that guy thinks? He's just an actor. But he did it because he was concerned about human rights, so he got involved in issues such as the inequalities of the caste system in India or the treatment of natives in the United States. The stars didn't do that and he was willing to be humiliated for it." And he paid a heavy price. "The gossip press was very conservative then – it still is – and it was waiting until you had a divorce or a problem on a set to say, 'Look at Marlon Brando; he's trying to change the world, but pay attention to what's happened in the courts today,'" Kearns said.
"He was a very troublesome person from a young age," he adds. "I don't want to fall into cliché, but as a teenager he was a rebel looking for a cause." And he puts the spotlight on a well-known moment: "When he received the Oscar for Best Actor for The Godfather, he sent Native American rights activist Sacheen Littlefeather to turn him down. No one had ever done anything like this before: George C. Scott had relinquished the statuette he won for Patton a few years earlier, but on the grounds that the actors shouldn't compete with each other. But Brando did so as a protest at the way the country treated its native people. That divided the public and the country itself: on the one hand, people like John Wayne, who said how can anyone dare to do something like that; on the other, those who went their way. For example, he raised his voice that films did not include black people and that if no one included them, he would start making films in which there were." It is, he points out, a case similar to that of John Lennon, who was in a hotel bed for a week playing the guitar for peace: "He was laughed at, but he started a movement that is still going on. The parallels don't end there: in his personal life, Lennon was sarcastic and violent towards women. Brando had his own problems with women, sometimes with cases of abuse. But again, he tried to turn it around.”
Asked how we view his myth today, Kearns replies, "Marlon Brando would be canceled today, but I don't think he would care." For him, "in a way, he was cancelled at the time because he was a weird guy, someone who could be caricatured. In fact, at the end of his life his best friends were Michael Jackson and Elizabeth Taylor."
ESPIDO FREIRE:
"CHARACTERS LIKE
KOWALSKI FORM A LINE
OF IRRESISTIBLE DESTRUCTIVES
THAT IS IN GOOD HEALTH TODAY”
And would it be possible for a Marlon Brando to emerge today? The writer Espido Freire, who collaborates in the collective volume The Universe of Marlon Brando (Notorious), responds in the affirmative, where she analyzes "the animal and primary part" of Kowalski's character in A Streetcar Named Desire, "which does not contradict the attraction he emanates, and which makes it even more complicated to differentiate what is evil in him and what is vulnerable." For her, "cancellation is rather a superficial movement, like a lip service, which from time to time rests its gaze on one work or another: the history of literature, like that of art, is nourished by horror, by the dark side of the human being as much as by the light." Although the revision of certain prestiges or facts "is necessary and fair", the author adds, "there is a need to address and look at the horror that will prevail, because to do otherwise would be to reduce oneself to the banal". Thus, Kowalski "belongs to a long tradition of destructive and irresistible men who populate literature (think, for example, of the sentimental novel today) and not only has not disappeared but enjoys good health and presence." Kearns, for his part, refers to what happened with Johnny Depp, whom he sees as a transcript of today's Brando.
ASEXUATED SEX. Similarly, his idea of sexuality remains uncomfortable. "He said that sex was asexual," says the author of his biography. "He didn't think much of having sex with women or men since his days at the military academy, when he had an affair with a male cadet while sleeping with the girls who worked at the base. Similarly, when he made Julius Caesar (1953), John Gielgud gave him some Shakespearean lessons and slept with him as a way of thanking him, as I was told by those who are still alive from that shoot. 'They appreciate it, so I'm happy to do it,' he said.
"Whether Cary Grant was gay or not, his characters never were. But Brando made a spectacular breakthrough in this regard. No major player had ever been involved in something like this before," he adds.
More controversial is his participation in Last Tango in Paris (1972), especially as a result of the accusations of his co-star Maria Schneider (1952-2011) of how the director, Bernardo Bertolucci, had created an environment in which the boundaries between interpretation and acting were blurred. "Ingmar Bergman said that the film is not about a man and a woman, but about two homosexuals," Kearns recalls. "People who highlight the scene in which Brando sodomizes Maria Schneider overlook another in which he teaches her how to cut her nails so that she can insert her fingers into his anus. There he is, again Brando, changing the rules of masculinity in society. I'm not saying that he made the world a safe place for that kind of exploration, but that he did it for himself. He just lived his life, followed his inspiration, and, no matter what anyone thought, revolutionized sexuality." He adds: "What happened was cruel. Even more so when you consider how young she was. But I found an article in the New York Times in which she said that when she met him, he told her, 'We need to get to know each other and be friends. After all, you're going to have to shove your fingers up my ass.’"
Signed copies of Marlon Brando: Hollywood Rebel are available exclusively at LarryEdmunds.com
Friday, March 29, 2024
Library Journal: Marlon Brando Hollywood Rebel is “an entertaining and enlightening study"
Library Journal, the trade publication for librarians in the United States, has high praise for Burt Kearns’s new book, Marlon Brando: Hollywood Rebel, The review by Lisa Henry states that despite numerous books about the great actor, author Kearns “successfully manages to focus on the impact Brando had on a dizzying array of societal and cultural topics.” The “verdict”? “An entertaining and enlightening study iof Brando’s impressive influence."
The review, for subscribers can be found here.
Marlon Brando: Hollywood Rebel
by Burt Kearns
Applause, April 2024
One of the greatest actors of the 20th century, Marlon Brando (1924–2004) had a larger-than-life screen persona and a personal life dominated by his passions for acting, activism, and sexual activities. These are all well-documented in numerous biographies, including his memoir. But Kearns (Lawrence Tierney: Hollywood’s Real-Life Tough Guy) successfully manages to focus on the impact Brando had on a dizzying array of societal and cultural topics. It begins with his tweaking of Method acting (he never memorized his lines), which reinvented the profession and forged the path to stardom for everyone from Jack Nicholson to Ryan Gosling. His character in The Wild One influenced the careers of Elvis Presley and John Lennon, provided inspiration for Andy Warhol, and kicked off the punk rock culture. As he publicly worked through his internal dilemmas, Brando is credited with normalizing the discussion of psychoanalysis and breaking sexual boundaries. He was an early supporter of gay rights. His purchase of a French Polynesian island eventually led to the boom of ecotourism, and his willingness to protest for Indigenous peoples, support opportunities for Black people, and more brought attention to topics considered verboten.
VERDICT An entertaining and enlightening study of Brando’s impressive influence.
Reviewed by Lisa Henry, Mar 29, 2024
Monday, February 5, 2024
Publisher to release two books by Burt Kearns in 2024: Tierney to Brando to SHEMP!
 |
| Shemp! |
While gearing up for the release of his new book, Marlon Brando: Hollywood Rebel, author (journalist and television and film producer) Burt Kearns already has another book ready to be launched in 2024. After his acclaimed biography of tough guy actor Lawrence Tierney, his forthcoming study of Brando’s influence on popular culture, what other actor and iconic Hollywood figure could round out this trio of giants? None other than Shemp! Shemp Howard of the Three Stooges.
Publishing giant Rowman & Littlefield has announced that Kearns's book (and second of 2024), SHEMP! The Biography of The Three Stooges’ Shemp Howard, The Face of Film Comedy, will be unleashed on October 1. Like Hollywood Rebel (due April 2, the day before Brando’s centennial), Shemp! is on the publisher's Applause Theatre and Cinema Books imprint.
The publisher describes the book:
Shemp Howard is one of the most recognizable faces of the twentieth century. He was also one of Hollywood’s most influential comic actors. An original member of the Three Stooges, Shemp, along with his brother Moe and vaudeville violinist Larry Fine, perfected a brand of raucous, lowbrow, slapstick comedy that had audiences rolling in the aisles of vaudeville houses, Broadway theatres, and movie palaces, and left an indelible imprint on the face of popular entertainment. Then he walked away... and the new Three Stooges – Moe, Larry, and brother Curly – made history.
But Shemp didn’t disappear. He made Hollywood history on his own, in a successful and -- until now –- unexplored career in more than a hundred movie shorts and features. He appeared in comedies, dramas, mysteries, Westerns, and musicals -- alongside the biggest stars of the Golden Age, including W.C. Fields, John Wayne, James Stewart, William Powell, Abbott & Costello, Lon Chaney, Jr., Myrna Loy, and Marlene Dietrich.
Shemp! is the first book to challenge the “official” version of Three Stooges history that’s been repeated for decades, shattering myths as it uncovers the surprising and often unsettling facts behind the man’s unlikely story: how the child of Jewish immigrants, racked with severe anxiety and a supposed fear of automobiles, dogs, and water—could conquer vaudeville, Broadway, and Hollywood. And it’s more than a biography: author Burt Kearns digs into the shorts and feature films he did on his own—more than a hundred of them—and, through interviews with fans, family members, scholars, experts, filmmakers, and celebrities, examines the “cult of Shemp” that thrives today.
We’re told to "expect to be surprised” in this new, critical, and journalistic look at an often-overlooked comedy star.
Tuesday, November 28, 2023
Burt Kearns looks at a legend’s legacy in 'Marlon Brando: Hollywood Rebel'
Marlon Brando: Hollywood Rebel looks at the the great actor’s influence on popular culture, on the centenary of his birth in April 2024.
According to the publisher:
“Brando’s intense approach to acting technique was emulated by his contemporaries as well as generations of actors who followed, from Nicholson and De Niro to DiCaprio and Gosling. But his legacy extends far beyond acting, His image in The Wild One helped to catalyze a youth revolution, setting the stage for rock ’n’ roll culture in a way that directly inspired Elvis Presley, the Beatles, Andy Warhol, and punk rock culture.
“Brando was also frank about his affairs with both sexes: a leader in the sexual revolution amd hero of gay culurte, he defied stereotypes and redefined sexual boundaries in his life and the roles he played.
“But of all his passions, activism was even more important to Brando than acting. He was an early supporter of Israel, civil rights, the American Indian movement, Black power, gay rights, and environmentalism.”
The book is published by Applause Theatre and Cinema Books and is available for preorder at Amazon.com.
Friday, August 25, 2023
LAWRENCE TIERNEY & DONALD TRUMP: PUBLIC ENEMIES NUMBER ONE!
Wonder where Donald Trump got the idea to glare at the mugshot camera?
Order a copy of Lawrence Tierney: Hollywood’s Real-Life Tough Guy, Burt Kearns’s landmark biography of a truly hard character.
Tuesday, February 28, 2023
Michael Madsen stars in new biography of his Reservoir Dogs costar Lawrence Tierney
Michael Madsen, the acclaimed actor, poet, photograopher, and subject of the documentary film, American Badass, shows of his copy of the new biography, Lawrence Tierney: Hollywood's Real-Life Tough Guy.
Madsen’s recollectons of his experience working with Tierney on Quentin Tarantino’s film Reservoir Dogs, his first-person account of the clashes between Tierney and the young director, and subsequent escapades are a highlight of the book.
From the frontspiece:
I respected Lawrence. I was awed by him. After we were shooting Reservoir Dogs, I’d turn on the TV late at night and—“Holy shit, there he is! There’s Lawrence Tierney. Oh, my God.” And there he’d be with his handsome face in some black-and-white movie, usually playing some sort of a bad guy. That was back in the day. And I have tremendous respect for those guys, so I wasn’t about to give Lawrence a hard time. I’m just a kid playing Mr. Blonde in a Tarantino movie. I didn’t know what the hell I was doing, but I knew that he did. So even when he was throwing punches at me, I found it kind of endearing.
Wednesday, February 1, 2023
Republican-American (Waterbury CT): Connecticut author pulls no punches in Lawrence Tierney bio
(The following review of Lawrence Tierney: Hollywood's Real-Life Tough Guy was published on January 31, 2023, in the Republican-American newspaper of Waterbury, Connecticut. The R-A site is protected by a paywall, but you can view five articles for free by registering at rp-am.com.)
Connecticut author pulls no punches in Lawrence Tierney bio
By ALAN BISBORT January 31, 2023
Lawrence Tierney came out of retirement and went back into acting,
including the TV show "Hill Street Blues" as Sgt. Jenkins. He appeared in
the NBC series from 1985-87. (NBC)
You know you’re in for a wild ride when a book opens with an aging tough-guy actor, Lawrence Tierney, taking a swing at his much younger director, Quentin Tarrantino, on the set of “Reservoir Dogs.”
No Hollywood trickery could hide the fact that this tough guy, Tierney, was the real deal. By the time he was taking swings at Tarrantino, he’d left in his wake decades of brawls, jails, drunk tanks and more second chances than Saul Goodman ever got. (As Tierney himself put it in a late-life interview, “I threw away about seven careers through drink”).
Tierney may be best known for his first major role, as the title character in the crime biopic “Dillinger” (1945), which made him an overnight star. The film was one of the earliest smash successes of an independent studio; with a budget of just $65,000, it took in $2.5 million on its initial box office run (and has been a cult classic since). Tierney’s face was suddenly on a billboard above Sunset Boulevard, and the star-making machinery was in full thrust.
Meanwhile, the new star was arrested three times for public drunkenness, and jailed for 10 days on the third charge – all within weeks of the film’s release. Still, he’d made such a striking, hulking, menacing impression that he was then cast in other, similar roles – “The Devil Thumbs a Ride,” “Bodyguard,” “The Hoodlum,” “San Quentin” and as Jesse James in “Badman’s Territory” – with equally jarring reactions. Critics didn’t know what to make of him, partly because he was totally untrained as an actor and played every role on gut instinct.
Unfortunately, off the set, Tierney continued to play the same character. He was arrested 11 times in the first two years after “Dillinger” and then repeatedly for the rest of his surprisingly long life (he lived until 2002, making it to age 82). Barely out of the gate as an actor, he was already being lumped in with Hollywood “bad boys” like Robert Mitchum, Robert Walker and Errol Flynn. Unlike these other actors, however, he became an outcast and eventually an exile, living for many years in France and working odd jobs.
Actor Lawrence Tierney stands by his Hansom Cab horse after driving a party
to a theater in his rig, In New York, Oct. 8, 1974. After retiring from acting
Tierney took up driving the carriages through Central Park. (AP Photo)
Burt Kearns has the perfect credentials to get Tierney’s story on paper. The Stamford native and Fairfield University alum has lived in Los Angeles for many years, having made his name as a writer, producer and director for tabloid TV programs (and authored one of the funniest memoirs about that world, called “Tabloid Baby”). Kearns has a rollicking good time telling Tierney’s tale, bringing his deep knowledge of film history and the film industry, as well as his nose for salacious detail, to this meaty subject.
After his early troubles, Tierney may no longer have been box-office boffo but he sure was gold to the gossip columnists of the 1940s and 1950s. As Kearns tells it, Tierney’s life can be compared to a rollercoaster, with a few ups and downs at the start, a steep climb in the late 1940s and then all downhill after that. Because of his alcoholism and lack of impulse control, he spent the last decades of his career as, at best, a supporting actor in feature films with occasional forays into stage productions (including an ill-fated stab at Stanley Kowalski in “A Streetcar Named Desire”) and bit parts on TV (including as Elaine’s father in an episode of “Seinfeld,” the finale of “Hill Street Blues” and a voiceover in “The Simpsons”).
It would be nice to report that, despite his chronic legal and bottle troubles, Tierney was a colorful and well-loved man, but it’s simply not true, as hard as the fan in Kearns tries to burnish his reputation. This is one of those odd biographies where the writing is far better than the subject, who really comes off as an entitled sociopath (which could probably be said for about 75% of Hollywood). The repetitive nature of Tierney’s life is ultimately just sad. There’s never a final redemption, even as you keep hoping there will be.
Still, Kearns carries a reader along to Tierney’s late-career resurgence, when some of the best anecdotes in this biography occur. The description of filming the “Seinfeld” episode is alone worth the price of the book (“You know, that Seinfield, I don’t think he’s funny. I’ve known every comic from Jack Benny, you name it. This guy is not funny.”). But the real icing on the cake is the whole “Reservoir Dogs” episode. I refuse to spoil it here by giving away any of the details. Read it and weep (with laughter). Suffice it to say that Tarantino got way more than he bargained for in Lawrence Tierney.
Sunday, January 22, 2023
Tough Guy International: Lawrence Tierney book featured in The Times of London
Lawrence Tierney: Hollywood’s Real-Life Tough Guy, the new book by Burt Kearns, is getting more international attention as it's featured in The Times’ -- known internationally as The Times of London -- in the much-read column, Times Diary, by Patrick Kidd. The Times is the UK “paper of record.” Author Kearns is a former employee of Times owner Rupert Murdoch, and though “The Boss” had an affection for his work and book Tabloid Baby, he assures us no strings were pulled.
The article is protected by a paywall (very reasonable subscription rate), so we post the pertinent information here.
And get your copy of the wildest Hollywood story of all time here (signed) or here.
Thursday, January 12, 2023
“It's amazing that he never killed a man -- as far as we know!” NOIR CITY magazine reviews new Lawrence Tierney book
“A 432-page rap sheet! An index of awfulness
that focuses more on perps than performances….
If Tierney’s life tells us anything,
it’s that toxic masculinity is real --
and it’s spectacular!”
The magazine’s contents are not posted online, so we show the review below.
Meanwhile, it’s easy to get on the Film Noir Foundation mailing list -- do it here -- and by making a small donation, you can subscribe to the essential magazine (available in print version here).
In the words of the founder, Czar of Noir Eddie Muller:
“Who would have thought that movies based on desperation and alienation would bring so many people together around the world?”
(click image to expand)
Thursday, January 5, 2023
Lawrence Tierney is much tougher and scarier than Prince Harry; so is new Tierney book.
Lawrence Tierney: Hollywood’s Real-Life Tough Guy is scaring off the competition
in bookstores and sales sites.
Book information at LawrenceTierneyBook.com
(along with Tierney film clips and latest coverage and appearances).
Wednesday, December 21, 2022
UPDATE: American CInematheque’s Instagram photos of the Lawrence Tierney double feature and book launch
 |
| Burt Kearns at work |
 |
The evening’s host and moderator, screenwriter and producer Larry Karaszewski |
 |
| The official Reservoir Dogs Joe Cabot 12” action figure |
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