Shepperton Babylon

Description

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, 20s film idols snorting cocaine from an illuminated glass dance floor on the back 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 is a journalist and broadcaster. He has been a columnist for The Big Issue and a director's assistant at the RSC. He holds a doctorate from Oxford University, has contributed to the Oxford Companion to English Literature and edited an edition of Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White for Penguin Classics. He is television critic for the Independent on Sunday.

"'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"