Shepperton Babylon

Paperback / softback

Main Details

Title Shepperton Babylon
Authors and Contributors      By (author) Matthew Sweet
Physical Properties
Format:Paperback / softback
Pages:400
Dimensions(mm): Height 196,Width 126
Category/GenreFilms and cinema
ISBN/Barcode 9780571212989
ClassificationsDewey:791.430941
Audience
General
Edition Main

Publishing Details

Publisher Faber & Faber
Imprint Faber & Faber
Publication Date 16 February 2006
Publication Country United Kingdom

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.

Author Biography

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.

Reviews

"'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"