Ken Russell's Dracula (21 page)

Also Published by Bear Claw Books
:

The Definitive Biography of Ken
Russell Volume One

BECOMING
KEN RUSSELL

By
Paul Sutton

After eight years of research and
writing, this tells the full story of Ken Russell’s rise through ballet,
photography, and amateur films to become a professional independent filmmaker.
Using years of interviews with Russell, and dozens of interviews with his
colleagues (for example, Sutton interviews five actors from Russell’s famous
short film, Amelia and the Angel), and using the full production records, he
details the day-by-day, almost frame-by- frame, making of Russell’s first 35mm films,
short films about John Betjeman, Marie Rambert, Spike Milligan, Mechanical
Instruments, The Guitar Craze, Gordon Jacob, and the Scottish Painters Roberts
Colquhoun and McBride, that redefine the meaning of ‘English Cinema’ and which
contain the origins of scenes and images from Ken Russell’s most famous films,
including
Tommy
,
Women in Love
and
The Devils
.

The most detailed and the most
impressive biography ever written about a British filmmaker. Illustrated and
Indexed.

978-0-9572462-2-5     
Amazon Kindle

978-0-9572462-6-3     
paperback

Volume Two - ‘
Ken Russell, To and Beyond Elgar
’
(expected January 2014)

John Francis Lane

TO EACH HIS OWN DOLCE
VITA

Deciding not to come of age in a
war-broken England facing decades of austerity, and where sexual exploration
led only to prison, John Francis Lane escaped first to Paris to study at film
school but, in the early 1950s, chose to settle in Rome where cinema was
becoming a way of life. As a newspaperman he reported not only on films but
also on the death and election of Popes and the economic miracle. He followed
the blossoming of the ‘dolce vita’ before it was given a name in Federico
Fellini’s masterpiece, in which Lane appeared, and for which he would be
entrusted by Fellini to supervise the English-language version.

He cameoed in films by Antonioni,
Pier Paolo Pasolini, Marco Ferreri, Riccardo Freda, Terence Young and many
others; and he met everyone who was anyone passing through or living in the
Italy of those years, from Gore Vidal to Antia Ekberg, Luchino Visconti to
Orson Welles, Franco Zeffirelli and Vittorio De Sica to John Wayne, Sophia
Loren, Tot̀o, Sean Connery, Eduardo De Filippo, Anna Magnani, Marlene
Dietrich, Lindsay Anderson, Laurence Olivier, Charles Laughton, Francesco
Rosi, Dario Fo, Enrico Mattei, Dino De Laurentiis, Richard Fleis- cher, Steve
Reeves, Rock Hudson, Vittorio Gassman, Monica Vita, Warren Beatty, Gina
Lollobrigida.

The deliciously honest,
occasionally profound and often amusing memoirs of an Englishman abroad, who
was knighted for his services to Italian arts. Illustrated and Indexed.

978-0-9572462-4-9     Paperback
(April 2013) 978-0-9572462-5-6   Amazon Kindle

Tim Dry

Falling Upwards

Tim Dry’s virtuoso memoir of a
life in arts. It rises and falls through the worlds of art school and mime and
New Romantics pop to the cinema of Star Wars and the theatre of Steven Berkoff;
hallucinogenic drugs; internationally-prized photography and a globetrottery of
commercials. From a childhood encounter with a UFO to playing an alien in the cult
film,
Xtro
; from seeing The Beatles as a boy to befriending Angie Bowie
and performing in front of 100,000 people with Gary Numan. Tim Dry breaks into
a theatre to see Kate Bush; makes a highwire appearance on stage with Duran
Duran; photographs Mick Jagger; is paid to go berserk as a robot in Germany;
has a week-long near nude scene in a film with Ann-Margaret; and presents a
food programme on Channel 4. All this and much, much more.

978-0-9572462-6-3
Paperback (April 2013)

Kevin Sutton

Orphans of the Underworld

“There were five of us –
Fairy Jane, French Christine, Olly Wood, Cosmic Mark and myself; We were such a
bizarre group of teenage castaways, estranged from our own families, we banded
ourselves into a kinship group of our own making and together we lived free and
uncontained. At the centre of our group was Fairy Jane. She had poppy-red,
dreadlocked hair and dressed like a sugar-plum angel in ragged tutu, shiny
black tights and plimsolls. Tiny bells tinkled around her ankles as she skipped
light-hearted through the streets of London. Her eyes were jewels of laughter
and her face was a moonbeam smile. She was as free as a summer breeze, a
giggling Alice in Wonderland lost in an emotional void.”

Published in May 2013