Book reviews have been a staple of VideoAge‘s editorial topics almost from the beginning, and it is still one of the few TV trade publications that regularly features new books. Indeed, since 1989, eight years after the magazine first came out, the publication has delivered over 288 reviews of books on the business and art of film and TV entertainment.
And filmed entertainment subjects have been an endless source of book topics. After all, this is an industry that feeds itself. First comes a book, let’s say Daphne du Maurier’s 1952 tome The Birds. Then comes the movie, here Alfred Hitchcock’s 1963 film of the same name. And finally, there’s The Making of Hitchcock’s The Birds, a 2013 book by Tony Lee Moral.
Actually, “Hitch” is credited with the inspiration for the book-to-film film-to book trend, starting in 1966 with Hitchcock by Francois Truffaut, even though the very first of such books is reported to be Lillian Ross’s 1952 book Picture, adapted from her 1950 article in The New Yorker about actor/director John Huston’s film The Red Badge of Courage.
Today, books about Hitchcock are considered an industry unto itself, with tomes about everything — his surroundings, his actors, his screenwriters, his composers, his techniques… Just this year, three new books about Hitchcock came out: Rear Window (by Jennifer O’Callaghan), Criss-Cross (by Stephen Rebello), and Hitchcock & Herrmann (by Steven C. Smith). These are in addition to the aforementioned book about The Birds, and the slate of at least six previous books, including Robert Graysmith’s 2010 book The Girl in Alfred Hichcock’s Shower, about Marli Renfro, Janet Leigh’s body double in Psycho.
Film and TV topics continues to be an endless source of inspiration for books (Francis Ford Coppola is a living example), and sooner or later they all find a way into the pages of VideoAge.
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