Nice Guys Don’t Work In Hollywood: The Adventures of an Aesthete in the Movie Businessby Curtis Harrington (Drag City, paper, 272 pp.).
Review by James Marshall
Fans of esoteric film trash will be delighted to know that before passing director Curtis Harrington (1926-2007) left us with this dirt-filled and conversationally written volume about his five decades in Hollywood and beyond.
For a little over a year, I worked with Legs McNeil, co-author of Please Kill Me and legendary writer who was part of the New York City punk scene in the '70s. I've known Legs since I was a teenager, though it wasn't until I'd written a birthday message to him on PopMatters in early 2011 that we cooked up the idea of working together on a project. That project, Resident Punk, was Legs' autobiography, combining his own writing about his life with my biographical passages. The project is currently on hold, though I'm hopeful we'll pick it up again soon.