By STUART GORDON (FAB Press; 2023)
The long-in-coming memoir of filmmaker Stuart Gordon (1947-2020), this was a book he spent a great deal of his final years writing (and which was subjected to heavy editing by a crew that included Nat Segaloff and Tim Lucas). A big deal? Absolutely. One of the most memorable publications of 2023? Right again.
Stuart Gordon’s film credits included modern genre classics like RE-ANIMATOR (1985), FROM BEYOND (1986), CASTLE FREAK (1995) and DAGON (2001), as well quite a few plays staged by the Gordon-run Organic Theater Company. Along the way he interacted with many interesting people and endured many hardships, all of which are enumerated quite engagingly in NAKED THEATER AND UNCENSORED HORROR.
Of Gordon’s Chicago-based childhood we get only a two-page remembrance of the untimely death of his father Bernard L. Gordon, which occurred when Gordon was fourteen. From there the book jumps to 1965, when the eighteen-year-old Gordon and his high school chum Dennis Paoli left home to attend the University of Wisconsin. It was then and there that Gordon met Carolyn Purdy, who’d become his wife (in a union that produced three daughters and lasted until his death), and a year later found what initially seemed the other major love of his life: theater.
Gordon’s early attempts at stage directing caused ruckuses that mirrored the civil unrest of the late 1960s. In the case of Gordon’s 1968 staging of PETER PAN, which he conceived as “an allegory about the National Democratic Convention” that involved the cast going au natural, obscenity charges followed.
In 1970 Gordon moved the Organic Theater Company to his hometown of Chicago, where he debuted his staging of THE WONDERFUL ICE CREAM SUIT by Ray Bradbury, and also SEXUAL PERVERSITY IN CHICAGO, written by “a young local playwright who seemed to have written a new script every other day” named David Mamet. Other famous folk associated with Organic included Dennis Franz, Joe Mantegna, John Heard and future HENRY: PORTRAIT OF A SERIAL KILLER co-star Tom Towles. Success, unfortunately, proved elusive, and a more lucrative artistic calling sounded when in 1983 Gordon was introduced to H.P. Lovecraft’s tale “Herbert West, Re-Animator.”
This led to the Paoli scripted RE-ANIMATOR, Gordon’s feature film debut. It was followed by a string of Gordon helmed genre films that pushed his taste for macabre excess to a level his theater work never allowed for. Most of those films, alas, were threadbare efforts that wound up going the straight-to-video route.
Re-Animator Trailer
That was despite a brush with Disney, for whom Gordon, unexpectedly enough, was set to helm HONEY, I SHRUNK THE KIDS (1989) until he was overcome by stress and forced to drop out. Gordon worked with Disney once again on the 1998 film version of THE WONDERFUL ICE CREAM SUIT, but it proved an ill-fated production that initiated a civil war in the upper ranks of the Mouse Factory. Gordon’s final credit was 2007’s reality-based thriller STUCK, which like most of his films was a low-budget affair whose distribution was scattershot.
Despite all the upheavals of Stuart Gordon’s life the outlook displayed in these pages is resolutely upbeat. That outlook encompasses an admirably blunt recognition of Gordon’s many failures and setbacks, and the inclusion of many juicy never-before-told showbiz anecdotes (my favorite being a meeting with Francis Ford Coppola in which Gordon admitted to having once masqueraded as the great man, to which Coppola relied “You’re much too fat to be me”). The book may ultimately be a bit overlong, and even a mite unwieldy, with a lot of lengthy proud father divergences about Gordon’s daughters and their accomplishments, and off-topic recollections about the many exotic locales he’s visited. But this must nonetheless be crowned the ultimate print resource on a vital talent who (despite what some jerks might have you believe) left behind an extremely rich and varied body of work.