The vampire has always had audience appeal. What is amazing is that Hollywood shunned the King of Vampires for years fearing the story was too gruesome of any movie audience's palette. When Universal finally decided to make a screen production of the classic novel and successful Broadway play, they were not originally going to pursue Bela Lugosi for the part even though he had stunned audiences with his performance in the Broadway role for years. This MagicImage Filmbook traces the long trail of the classic 1931 production from legend to screenplay to film. Includes treatments, preliminary scripts even, for the first time anywhere, reproductions of some of Bram Stoker's original handwritten and typed draft manuscript for the novel. Special Introduction by Bela Lugosi and Preface by Carla Laemmle.
Born January 21, 1948
After 15 years as a professional musician (Philip J Riley played on 8 Grammy Award albums) - He switched to journalism when he found out that many silent films were lost and that the American Screenwriter was falling through the cracks of American Literary History - He wrote a series of Books all containing the origianl shooting scripts to promote awareness of the great American art, that of Screenwriter: For MGM a series on Lost Films like the 1927 "London After Midnight" and his Universal FilmScript Series which also included acknowledgments for the photograhers, designers, directors, musicians and other cast and crew members who were almost forgotten today. This series includes Classic Universal Titles.
His third series is an Alternate History of Classic Monster films; which contain the rare "lost" scripts for legenday titles such as: James Whale's Dracula's Daughter starring Bela Lugosi, Boris Karloff as Cagliostro and The Invisable Man, Lon Chaney as Dracula, Lon Chaney Jr in Wolfman vs Dracula. His publisher, BearManor media is now owner of MagicImage Film books and will be reprinting older volumes as well as continuing with new titles. It should be noted that Gregory Mank provided the production background on many of the titles and also George Turner, ASC magazine's editor.
His fourth series "NightMare Series" consists of reprints of original 50s and 60s horror film movie tie-ins novels by authors Dean Owen, Eunice Sudak, John Burke and others in titles, such as "Brides of Dracula', "The Revenge of Frankenstein" etc., and will continue with American International and Hammer Films titles, where the original pulp paper is deterorating, thus continuing their shelf life into the new century.
