Entries tagged with excerpts

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R. C. Sherriff on writing Journey's End

One thing that R. C. Sherriff discusses in his autobiography, No Leading Lady, is the process of writing Journey's End. I found this passage fascinating, but it's relatively long, so it took me a good deal of time to transcribe. That transcription follows the LJ-cut, and is itself followed by my commentary.

imgur album of the scanned pages.

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Variety, 20 February 1929

Here's an excerpt from the 20 February 1929 edition of Variety; this is from Hannen Swaffer's column "London As It Looks". Mostly I found this of interest because it's a relatively early review of Journey's End, appearing in an American publication as part of their regular feature on recent happenings in London.

Also he says nice things about Colin Clive, so I couldn't not post this.

( Click to read the excerpt... )
Notes:

Swaffer made a couple of obvious mistakes - the play is set in March, not May; Sherriff is spelled with two Rs - and drops a couple references that have become a little esoteric. (Translation: I had to go Google some of this.)

"Tallulah bedroom scene" - Tallulah Bankhead was then working in the theatre in London, and was well-known for her larger-than-life personality.

Jed Harris, Arthur Hopkins, and [David] Belasco were all American theatre producers. Harris and Hopkins were still relatively early in their careers; Belasco was nearly at the end of his.

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W. Scott Poole on Journey's End

W. Scott Poole's book Wasteland: The Great War and the Origins of Modern Horror has only been out a couple months, but I feel comfortable saying it's a good survey of how the experience of WWI shaped horror fiction in the decades immediately following.
( Read more... )Overall I'd recommend buying this book, though I have a couple small qualms*. Here's a link to the publisher's website, which offers a couple ways to get your hands on a copy.

* Namely, I wish there were an index, and I mildly disagree with his assessment that At the Mountains of Madness was Lovecraft's only novel. However, Poole has written and published a biography of Lovecraft, and I, uh, have a blog, so...

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R. C. Sherriff on Colin Clive

This is a brief excerpt from R. C. Sherriff's 1968 autobiography, No Leading Lady. I have a lot more to say about this book, but I just couldn't wait to post this. There is a transcript following the image~~, and when I'm not posting from my phone, I'll go back and correct formatting errors~~.

This falls on page 97. Journey's End has started its second run, to rave reviews. Sherriff goes to talk with his young lead actor, Colin Clive.
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10 December edit: holy moly that image turned out huge! Downsized it, added lj-cut as well, please forgive me for wrecking your flist.

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James Curtis on casting Journey's End

I’m working on a long piece about Journey’s End, a 1928 stage play set in a British trench during WWI, which was Colin Clive’s first big role. Here’s a short excerpt about his casting in the second run of the play.

This comes from James Curtis’s fine biography of James Whale – I am working from the 1982 edition from the Scarecrow Press, but there’s also a revised edition from 1998. Scroll down for the transcript; each image is clickable to view at full size.

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It's been a very long time since I composed a post like this; please let me know if there are any formatting issues