Nominate a Biography: what authors say
A Grand Guy: The Art and Life of Terry Southern by Lee Hill*
As a writer, I have found biographies of various film figures essential in my first step to researching a writing project. In the case of my biography of screenwriter and novelist Terry Southern, biographies of figures he knew during his life, from Stanley Kubrick to Kenneth Tynan, helped to flesh out the context of his times or point me into a direction I might have otherwise overlooked.
In some cases, a biography takes the place of a lack of existing information in another medium, a radio/TV interview or magazine article, or a monograph on an actor/film-maker's work.
My biography of Terry Southern grew out of a combination of deep curiousity and a lack of new information about a favorite writer. I used my position at the time as an arts magazine editor to track down Southern for a long overdue interview. The interview turned into a series of phone conversations and letters followed by two month long visits at the author's home in 1993. I also accessed his papers and without fully realizing it found myself immersed in interviewing as many of his friends, family, and colleagues as possible. Before Southern's death in 1995, I had interviewed and spoke to him at length which gave my book a quality unusual to most biographies. Many biographies are written at a considerable distance from their subject because the subject is no longer alive or cooperation is not forthcoming from the individual, his family or estate.
I wrote my biography out of a deep love and appreciation for my subject and his accomplishments which I felt had been overshadowed by time and the vagaries of fashion. As it turned out when my biography appeared, many of his books were reprinted about the same time and a posthumous collection and book of letters have appeared in the last year. Biographies are important in stimulating or reviving interest in overlooked or neglected areas of film history. They can also be important in correcting a bias or error that has occured in previous accounts. For example, my biography also led me to write the bfi book on Easy Rider which revealed the extent to which Terry Southern and others contributed to the script and final film. Previous accounts had overemphasised the role of Dennis Hopper, the actor/director, to the exclusion of Southern, Peter Fonda, Jack Nicholson, cinematographer Lazlo Kovacs and an editing collective.
The bfi Library and its collections allowed me to compare scripts of Easy Rider and even locate an unproduced script of Candy by Southern. The clipping library also contained a few treasures - such as a rare interview with Francis Wyndham and Southern - but it does need to updated to a better technology than the microfiche system. The library is also a congenial and convenient place to work thanks to its staff and ready access to film related books and magazines.
As to how I conducted my research...in addition to interviews in person and library research, I wrote to people and spoke to individuals by phone. I also travelled to as many of the locations where my subject lived as humanly and financially possible. Biographies tend to be cost intensive the thorough one's research. Access to scripts, manuscripts, letters by Southern and his many friends and colleagues were also essential. And last but not least any audio-visual evidence of a life - photographs, film, radio/TV interviews, home movies or personal recordings - can be particularly useful in giving life to the past and making places and faces more vivid.
There were over a hundred non-fiction books listed in my bibliography for A Grand Guy that were useful, but I have found biographies by John Baxter and Patrick McGilligan useful models to telling a life story vividly. Alexander Walker's Hollywood England and Peter Biskind's Easy Riders Raging Bulls are biographies of a specific periods in film history I return to on a regular basis. There are lots of biographies that remain to be written...I look forward to a good one on Antonioni in due course. And last but not least, Brad Stevens book on Monte Hellman which came out in the last year is a particularly good example of a biography of a talented, but overlooked film-maker. Without such books, film history would have some serious gaps.
*Permission granted by the publishers, Bloomsbury
