Mr. Strangelove, a biography of Peter Sellers

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A revealing look at the short, eventful life of the extraordinarily gifted, exceptionally troubled comic genius Peter Sellers.

Mr. Strangelove is the first American biography of one of the cinema's greatest comedians. It's the story of a screamingly funny, desperately unhappy soul - a man who thought he was empty. Sellers, who could mimic anyone and don any mask at will, was privately convinced that his personality had no core - that there was no personal substance under the put-on characters he so readily and hilariously assumed. The Goon Show made him famous; the Pink Panther films made him rich; Lolita and Dr. Strangelove gave him artistic respectability; I Love You, Alice B. Toklas and What's New, Pussycat? turned him into a 60s flower-power icon that still resonates today.... And yet Sellers - whose blistering improvisations could ruin takes by sending the casts and crews of his films into peals of uncontrollable laughter while the camera was running - remained confused and lonely, difficult to work with, volatile one minute and torporous the next.

He worked with some amazing stars, from Shirley MacLaine, Sophia Loren, Maggie Smith, and Goldie Hawn to Shelley Winters, Ringo Starr, Elke Sommer, and Claudine Longet. And he made films with such talented, voluble directors as Blake Edwards, Roman Polanski, Paul Mazursky, Billy Wilder, and the late Stanley Kubrick. As his Pink Panther director Blake Edwards describes him, "Peter was a mercurial clown who could get you laughing one minute and cut your heart out with a bloody ax the next."

"Sikov has pulled off a difficult trick of producing both an authoritative biography and a compulsive page turner."
- Michael Palin, The New York Times Book Review

"Mr. Sikov hasn't just written a celebrity biography. He's rehabilitated a literary form."
- Eric Gibson, The Washington Times

"Sikov's fair-minded, thoughtful, and honest look at [Sellers] may be all the understanding anyone will ever have of the strange comedian, and, in fact, is probably all anyone needs."
- Jeanine Basinger, Washington Post Book World

"Sikov's book is often melancholy, but always informative and entertaining."
- Simon Louvish, The Guardian (U.K.)

Books

On Sunset Boulevard: The Life and Times of Billy Wilder

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The first comprehensive critical biography of the writer-director of Double Indemnity, Sunset Boulevard, Some Like It Hot, The Apartment, 22 other films, and at least 28 other scripts. From his Jewish childhood in Krakow through his teenage years in Vienna and his first career (as a shady reporter for two disreputable newspapers) to his years of struggle in Berlin, his first screenwriting jobs, his early success at Ufa (the German film studio), his escape from the Nazis, and of course his long and brilliant career in Hollywood, On Sunset Boulevard is a detailed portrait of a complex, funny, troubled man and his art.

How many takes did Gloria Swanson have to perform at the end of Sunset Boulevard before Billy got what he wanted? What did the corpses say to each other in the opening morgue scene, which was greeted by such derisive laughter at a screening that it had to be cut and another scene reshot? What did Fred MacMurray say in the gas-chamber sequence in Double Indemnity, also cut because of bad previews? Why was Jimmy Stewart such a terrible pain in the neck during the filming of The Spirit of St. Louis? Who was the only star ever to get away with rewriting Billy's dialogue on the set? (Answer: Bing Crosby.) What was the real beginning of Billy Wilder's career as a journalist? Which Billy Wilder films never got made? (They include: a 1950s movie about an abortionist and a comedy for Julie Andrews.)

Built on extensive new research and interviews, On Sunset Boulevard combines detailed biography with in-depth criticism of Wilder's work, from his journalism in Vienna and Berlin (translated for the first time into English) to his German film scripts and Hollywood feature films. New interviews with people who knew and worked with him (from Susan Sarandon and Joan Fontaine to some unsung people who knew him way back when) round out this picture of one of the American cinema's most blazingly talented, articulate, and quirky filmmakers. As Billy says, "My life is an open book. A little pornographic maybe, but open."

Books

Queer Representations

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Queer Representations, edited by Martin Duberman, celebrates the eclectic nature of gay and lesbian culture and scholarship. The volume features 34 writers and academics, including Chris Straayer, David Halperin, Mandy Merk, Allen Ellenzweig, Joan Nestle, George Custen, Jill Johnston, Joe Keenan, Allen Ginsberg, Edmund White, Samuel Delany, and Dale Peck.

Ed Sikov's essay, "Laughing Hysterically," traces, in both broad strokes and pinpointed details, the way in which classical Hollywood comedies simultaneously repress and reveal gay identities, themes, and sensibilities. From Chaplin's City Lights through Hawks's Bringing Up Baby to the films of Frank Tashlin, Jerry Lewis, and Dean Martin, "Laughing Hysterically" shows that no amount of Hollywood censorship was ever able to erase gay men and gay ideas from American mass culture.

*The essay is drawn from a 45-minute presentation - illustrated with film clips - that I have delivered at the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at the City University of New York, Yale University, the University of Michigan, Colorado College, and the Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center in New York. Audiences have ranged from film students and gay academics to members of the wider community. For more information, please e-mail me at file:///C:/Dan/Ed_Sikov[1]/Ed%20Sikov/site/. By the way, I'm cheap. To quote Kirk Douglas at the end of Billy Wilder's Ace in the Hole, "I'm a thousand-dollar a day newspaperman - you can have me for nothing but travel expenses and a small honorarium."

Books

Friends and Lovers

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"Any gay reader is bound to find in this collection a glimmer of his own experience - a way to think about the accidental arrangements of our lives." — Genre

"An absorbing, fresh, and unpredictable collection." — Publishers Weekly

"These are impassioned accounts by men who have found or invented a haven for themselves and those they love... Reading this book, one is reminded that 'family' is those people with whom our sense of comradeship is the most enduring and alive." — Bernard Cooper

"In these moving and varied personal essays we see not only how gay men create families, but how these affections lash together communities that cross the boundaries of race, religion, class, and sexuality." — David Bergman

Friends and Lovers: Gay Men Write About the Families They Create, edited by John Preston and Michael Lowenthal, is a collection of essays by such writers as Andrew Holleran, Steven Saylor, Michael Nava, Michael Bronski, and Arnie Kantrowitz. Ed Sikov's essay, "Rock Climbing," is the story of his relationship with his boyfriend, Ethan Scheuer, and Ethan's family, from the time they all met through Ethan's illness and death from AIDS.

Books

Laughing Hysterically

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"Rejecting the notion that the 1950s was a bleak, conformist decade in the U.S., this engaging, sophisticated study argues that the era's film comedies reflect the period's underappreciated artistic and social rebelliousness." — Publishers Weekly

"Sikov is both provocative and delightfully funny.... An excellent addition to a neglected area of study." — Choice

"Scholarly but readable. That he's able to conduct in-depth scrutiny of [The Girl Can't Help It and Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?] without pretension is but one of Laughing Hysterically's worthy accomplishments." — Bay Area Reporter

Books

Boys Like Us

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"Editor Patrick Merla puts together a queer writers' Dream Team. The contributions by Edmund White, Philip Gambone, Christopher Bram, Michael Nava, Essex Hemphill, Tim Miller, and Ed Sikov are especially admirable." — Wayne Curtis, Lambda Book Report

"This isn't great gay writing; this is great writing, period." — Armistead Maupin

"Marvelously inventive, surprising, joyous, harrowing, and frequently lovely variations performed by master singers on a truly great theme." — Tony Kushner

"Touching, frequently funny, and never less than challenging." — Time Out

"Chemistry," Ed Sikov's essay, traces his ridiculously repressed college days at Haverford, his experimentation with mind-altering substances, and his eventual coming out in New York City, thanks to his straight best friend.

Screwball
out of print