The Times Square Story (Paperback)

Photocelebration of Times Square at its sleaziest with subfictional lyrical intertexts that sound like Ed Wood writing low-budget pages of Jack Kerouac with a storyline held together by lint about a country guy having his eyes blown out by Times Square's wattage and going weak in the knees while directors producing grunge films that make Plan 9 from Outer Space sound like la creme supreme in one 96-page run-on photo sequence and sentence without periods or wide commercial potential offers jaded drug addicts who meet transplanted Corsican mobsters laughing in dark glasses while the producer hustles the no-rent actors in his big stable and makes a thriller almost too glassy-eyed even for Times Square and the reader sits staring into space or at a dying vacuum tube while smoke rings pour from the sailor's mouth on the Camels sign and snowbirds and used-up dips blackmail small-time perverts for years and freelance photographers peddle to girlie magazines pictures of schoolteachers who have taken up stripping and then when the sun comes up it's all over and the wide-eyed kid can't believe it's over and sits back in his flop in the Dixie Hotel listening to Clifford Brown with Strings. Somewhat less coherent than O'Brien's The Phantom Empire (1993) but with a hip verve that may appeal to lovers of trasho mondo and hot-wax torture scenes. (Kirkus Reviews)

" . . . so this picture we're talking about is The Times Square Story this is New York, show biz, crossroads of the world, entertainment capital, international center for scope and variety and pacing, everything open after midnight, not just a bunch of dumb gangsters pushing people around, this one has jazz, exotic nightlife, hipster talk, blacks tights, psychoanalysis . . . " Imagine Damon Runyon on speed, with a graduate degree in cultural studies and access to the world's most extensive video archive of low-budget exploitation films, and you'll get some idea of the ultra-hip mind-movie that is Geoffrey O'Brien's The Times Square Story. It evokes the one-time glitter, the glamour, and the grunge of this fabled piece of real estate before it became Disneyfied - its grind houses and strip joints and freak shows and novelty stores and night clubs and peep shows and fleabag hotels. The Times Square Story also celebrates the world of below-the-line filmmaking as the kid, the producer, the broken-down actor, and Miss Columbus 1952 struggle to bring Fury of Macumba to the big screen-their artistic impulses crippled by financial reality and human frailty. With more than fifty evocative photographs from the golden era of this mythic patch of asphalt, The Times Square Story is a roller-coaster ride through gaudy, seedy, glorious cultural territory.

General

Imprint:	W W Norton & Co Inc
Country of origin:	United States
Release date:	March 1999
First published:	October 1998
Authors:	Geoffrey O'Brien
Dimensions:	203 x 203 x 10mm (L x W x T)
Format:	Paperback
Pages:	96
ISBN-13:	978-0-393-31846-3
Categories:	Books > Fiction > General & literary fiction > Modern fiction
LSN:	0-393-31846-X
Barcode:	9780393318463

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