Comfort and Joi [Paperback]

Joseph Dougherty (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 17, 2004

"She was one of the working stiff actors who made American movies a sort of extended family for me. If I don't do this for her, who will?"

Memory and movies collide when the narrator of Comfort and Joi, award-winning screenwriter Joseph Dougherty's imaginative blend of fiction and film fact, sets out to document the life and work of bosomy blonde bombshell Joi Lansing, a minor glamour girl who appeared in such "classics" as Hillbillys in a Haunted House and Queen of Outer Space.

Alone in a borrowed house on the California coast during a winter weekend, he indulges his fascination with the pin-up who rose from extra girl to work with Orson Welles, only to end her career in grade-z horror pictures.

Offbeat movie history from the fringes of Hollywood triggers haunting personal memories as he follows this "beautiful beacon in a Sargasso of bad filmmaking" and finds an unexpected path to his own past.

"Dougherty is a humanist who argues that each of us has to look, listen, choose, and commit. His work is as encouraging as it is enlightening."
--Douglas Heil, Prime-Time Authorship

Editorial Reviews

Review

A Book about Hollywood and Pop Culture like no other. -- The Fedora Chronicles

A meditation on movie love structured as tautly as a good noir screenplay. -- Fearless Reviews

Joseph Dougherty is a fantastically gifted writer. His observations are haunting, funny, and completely original. -- Christopher Guest

Part biography, part memoir. It's a refreshing blend of Hollywood history and personal reflection. -- Java's Bachelor Pad

Sultry, seductive, remarkably mesmerizing. -- Books to Watch Out For

About the Author

Joseph Dougherty?s plays have been produced at Lincoln Center and Manhattan Theatre Club. His Emmy winning work in television includes the groundbreaking series thirtysomething and the HBO movie Attack of the Fifty-Foot Woman. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife Beverly and their exceptional standard poodle, Oso.

Product Details

• Paperback: 140 pages
• Publisher: iUniverse, Inc. (December 17, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 059533590X
• ISBN-13: 978-0595335909
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,301,522 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Joseph Dougherty received Drama Desk and Critics Outer Circle nominations for his play "Digby" produced at Manhattan Theatre Club. He wrote the libretto for the Tony winning musical "My Favorite Year" presented at Lincoln Center. An Emmy and Humanitas Prize winner for his work on the groundbreaking series "thirtysomething," he has written several movies for HBO including the Emmy winning "Cast a Deadly Spell," with Fred Ward and Julianne Moore, which was nominated for the Ray Bradbury Award by the Mystery Writers of America, and the remake of "Attack of the Fifty Foot Woman," starring Daryl Hannah and directed by Christopher Guest. He has contributed as a writer and director to several popular television series including "Once and Again," "Judging Amy," "Saving Grace" starring Holly Hunter and "Pretty Little Liars." He is the creator of "Handwritten Theatre," a podcast of downloadable drama, as well as co-founder of the online literary magazine, "Hot Valley Writers." His books, "Psychopomp," "Trunk Piece," "Comfort and Joi," and the published edition of the "Handwritten Theatre" plays, are available at Amazon.com

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Comfort and Joi, February 3, 2005

By 

Flickhead.com (Anytown, U.S.A.) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Comfort and Joi (Paperback)

A playwright and Emmy winner for his work on the series thirtysomething, Joseph Dougherty has written extensively for television and the theater. But his new book, Comfort and Joi, chronicles a long weekend when he entertains a personal fantasy, an investigation into the life and career of Joi Lansing. His friends think he's nuts to write a book about a platinum-blonde bombshell nobody's ever heard of, who received third or fourth (or no) billing in movies which, for the most part, no one cares about.

Armed with a laptop and a bag full of videotapes and DVDs, Dougherty is less concerned with piecing together a formal biography than evaluating his own reaction to celebrity, entertainment, middle age, and an actress he describes as "a beautiful beacon in a Sargasso of bad filmmaking." He doesn't track down surviving relatives and old co-stars to reconstruct her life. (Just forty-three-years-old, Lansing died in 1972 from breast cancer.) What he ends up with is a conjectural, bittersweet, and often funny obituary - for Joi, for Hollywood, for his own vaporized past, its ideals and principles recently bulldozed into submission by a callous generation eager to dismiss "everything that came before as worthless, slow and reeking of the grave."
[...]

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A strange book, April 17, 2009

By 

James D. Crabtree "Doc Crabtree" (Fort Leavenworth, Kansas) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Comfort and Joi (Paperback)

I give this book three stars because the author has done some excellent research and has presented it well in this book. However, the set-up to me doesn't make much sense and the phrase "I spent the weekend with a Hollywood starlet" makes it sound as if the author actually met Joi. While the cover artwork is excellent I wish we could have seen some stills from her films or some of the photos the author describes at length in the book.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Very Interesting Read, October 24, 2009

By 

Shatzi Crabtree (KS) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Comfort and Joi (Paperback)

For the fans of Joi Lansing, you'll enJOY this book. There isn't much written about her, but the author admits his own fascination and weaves his personal life in while reconstructing hers. She was more visible in film than I thought. I have only seen her on Scopitones. A very good read about a forgotten star.