THE EPIC SAGA BEHIND FRANKENSTEIN: THE TRUE STORY

Director and historian Irvin presents the behind-the-scenes story of the making of a cult-favorite 1970s monster movie made for British television.

This nonfiction book details the backstage drama that occurred during the making of the 1973 TV movie Frankenstein: The True Story, which starred James Mason, Leonard Whiting (who’d co-starred in Franco Zeffirelli’s film of Romeo and Julietjust five years before), Jane Seymour, and a young Michael Sarrazin (of They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? fame) as a rather stylish monster. The movie was helmed by Jack Smight, who’d directed Paul Newman in 1966’s Harper, with a screenplay by novelist Christopher Isherwood and his longtime partner Don Bachardy. The result was what Irvin calls “a sophisticated reconstruction of the Frankenstein story on a grand scale, populated by A-list actors, with sumptuous settings, lavish costumes, a three-hour running time, and an eye-popping budget of $3.5 million.” In this profusely illustrated account, the author goes into granular detail about every aspect of the movie’s development, writing, direction, and casting, from its genesis as a script idea by James Bridges, who’d later become a director and Oscar-nominated screenwriter, to its final star-studded production and subsequent critical reception. Irvin offers the full personal and cinematic history of every major figure associated with the work, from the stars and the writers to, most especially, producer Hunt Stromberg Jr., who’s the subject of the most compelling chapter. Most intriguing is the wide array of LGBTQ+ talent that worked on the film, and how the creative team strove to bring out the original story’s rarely explored homoerotic undertones. That said, literary folk may bridle at Irvin’s dismal rating of the 1818 horror classic by Mary Shelley that started it all, asserting that “by today’s standards, it is tediously didactic.” Overall, though, there’s lots of compelling material here. This book’s foreword is by novelist Anne Rice, whose own Vampire Chronicles notably explored queer themes, and Oscar-winning director Guillermo del Toro (The Shape of Water) provides an afterword.

A lively and enthusiastic in-depth exploration of an obscure TV horror classic.