Bøger af Gerard Jones

It's post-World War II Hollywood, and Ed and Johnny have proven themselves the fastest rewrite-men in town...except that they're not content to be doctoring the scripts of other writers and are burning to sell original screenplays in which they can showcase their inventive genius. But there's a catch. Their ideas aren't simply inventive, they're downright outlandish...not to mention oddly anachronistic. Who ever heard of making a movie about homosexual cowboys in 1946? Certainly not the moguls who run the big studios. Before they know it, Ed and Johnny have become pariahs.But will they give up their dreams? Not when a relic from Hollywood's silent era is looking to make a comeback and can't find a single respectable screenwriter who'll give him the time of day. So a partnership is born...one that throws the past and future together in one unforgettable brew.

For decades, Will Jacobs and Gerard Jones's cult classic The Beaver Papers has been the only published chronicle of how the world's literary, artistic, and intellectual communities rose up in a doomed crusade to stop the cancellation of the iconic sitcom, Leave it to Beaver. Now, at long last, it can be revealed that the story did not end that day in 1963 when ABC TV finally pulled the Cleaver family's plug. In The Beaver Papers 2: The Fall of the Beaver, Jacobs and Jones detail the heroic quest of the Beaver cast to find a new home for their beloved show, a quest that led them through the darkest corners of the TV, movie, theater, and even comic book industries. Along the way they present twenty-five new Leave It to Beaver adventures as if written by world-renowned authors, including J. D. Salinger (The Beaver in the Rye ), H. P. Lovecraft (The Mayfield Horror), Flannery O'Connor (A Good Beaver Is Hard to Find), Vladimir Nabokov (Pale Beaver), and Ayn Rand (Cleaver Shrugged). If The Beaver Papers demonstrated just how dubious the distinction is between literature and popular culture, The Beaver Papers 2 positively obliterates it.

In 1983, The Beaver Papers chronicled the efforts of the world's literary community to save the iconic sitcom Leave It to Beaver from cancellation. Along with a behind-the scenes look at what went on at the studio during that enchanted summer, the book contained such scripts as Tennessee Williams's Beaver on a Hot Tin Roof, Yukio Mishima's The Sound of Beaver, Jack Webb's Red Beaver, and Ernest Hemingway's A Clean, Well-Lighted Beaver, as well as such classic homages as Herman Hesse's Beaverwolf and Dostoevsky's The Brothers Cleaver...twenty-five scripts that destroyed once and for all the shadowy border between high art and popular culture. Now, for this 30th Anniversary Edition, we present the entire original edition, along with a new introduction from the authors, a foreword by Lionel Endenberry (The Max Kleinman Reader), and a sneak preview of the long-awaited sequel, The Beaver Papers 2, also available from Atomic Drop Press.

Will Jones is an aspiring writer with a love of literature who doesn't get out much. Splendid Man is the most powerful being in the universe who has very little time for himself. But when they become pals, Will tutors Splendid Man in the fine arts while Splendid Man helps Will meet girls, introduces him to his costumes colleagues, and takes him on jaunts through space and time.

Why do the world's greatest novelists suddenly start writing better stories when the author of a boys' detective series goes missing? What happens when a two-fisted private eye wades into the brutal jungle of the poetry business? Such are the questions Will Jacobs and Gerard Jones tackle in stories originally published in the National Lampoon and collected here for the first time. Also included are three new adventures of the improbable costars of MY PAL SPLENDID MAN: Will Jones, an aspiring writer who doesn't get out much, and Calv'In of Strontium, who helps his pal develop a social life as his pal tutors him about literature.Finally, Ed and Johnny, heroes of MILLION DOLLAR IDEAS, those indefatigably hustling screenwriters who are determined to set postwar Hollywood on fire with their highly original-and strangely anachronistic-movie ideas, return for six new stories. Their latest schemes bring them into collision with American icons ranging from William Faulkner to Stepin Fetchit to the Red-baiting agents of the FBI.

From a veteran creator of children's entertainment, an insider's view of how even the most violent games and TV shows can help children conquer fears and develop a bold sense of self.

In the depths of the Depression, out of the crowded tenements of New York and Cleveland, the comic book superhero leapt into being. This book portrays how the immigrant experience and an outsider mentality shaped the vision of the make-believe hero. It demonstrates how the creators of the superheroes established their place in modern imagination.