People, I have been busy. Book news, and a cat picture, below…
But first… has anyone here seen Queen Kelly? This is the legendary collaboration between Erich von Stroheim, Gloria Swanson and Joseph P. Kennedy: an epic film set in two continents, an illicit romance, a story of innocence and experience. Notoriously, the film was never completed. The cameras began turning in 1928, Stroheim was fired in 1929, and the project was eventually dropped in 1930…
Last summer, Dennis Doros and Amy Heller of Milestone Film & Video debuted their new “reimagining”, or reconstruction of the film, from the best nitrate sources, which gives us the best possible sense of what the film could have been – if Swanson and Kennedy had not sacked Stroheim after ten weeks of audacious, perfectionist filmmaking. The reimagining debuted at the Venice Film Festival and has played various venues around the world since, mostly in the States. It is beautiful. I wrote about it for the Guardian here. I am fairly confident that it will be coming to a festival or cinema near you soon. Possibly even a Blu-ray player – that would be very nice.
I had nothing to do with that, but I have been busy, as I say, researching and writing the saga of Queen Kelly: how it can to be made, how and why it was abandoned and how Gloria Swanson spent the rest of her life trying to reclaim it. This is film history as a rollercoaster ride. The things I learned surprised me, and the questions that it raised continue to trouble me. This is a story about the sharp end of silent Hollywood. The book is called The Curse of Queen Kelly and it will be available from Sticking Place Books from 27 March – Gloria Swanson’s birthday.
Here is the official blurb from the publisher. Definitely one of the best back-cover blurbs I have ever read, written by Sticking Place Books supremo Paul Cronin.
“One of the greatest films never finished. One of Hollywood’s most dangerous alliances. One enduring legend.
“In the late 1920s, at the height of silent cinema’s reckless glamour, three formidable figures set out to make an impossible film. Gloria Swanson, the era’s most dazzling star. Erich von Stroheim, cinema’s most obsessive and uncompromising auteur. And Joseph P. Kennedy, a ruthless financier with ambitions far beyond Hollywood. The result was Queen Kelly—a production so extravagant, scandalous, and volatile that it collapsed before completion, leaving behind fragments, myths, and a curse that would haunt everyone involved.
“In The Curse of Queen Kelly, Pamela Hutchinson reconstructs the full, astonishing saga of this infamous film: a tale of artistic obsession, moral panic, sexual politics, power struggles, and personal betrayal. Drawing on archival research and vivid storytelling, she traces how a doomed collaboration became one of cinema history’s most notorious cautionary tales—and how Swanson spent decades fighting to preserve its legacy.
“Part film history, part Hollywood tragedy, The Curse of Queen Kelly is a gripping account of creative ambition pushed to the brink, and a meditation on what survives when a film is torn apart but refuses to die.”
And here is what some eminent and trustworthy people had to say about the manuscript:
“This Curse is an astonishment of richly lurid film history, maniacally researched and lusciously, propulsively written, the story of three luminous legends tangling and untangling their great mythic lives across the most wondrous half-century of cinematic invention. I drank down this intoxicating account of Swanson, Stroheim and Kennedy in avid gulps, my eyes bulging with revelation at every turn of the page. Long live Queen Kelly!”
Guy Maddin, filmmaker
This is the definitive account of a dream project that went down in flames. Queen Kelly has already come back from the dead, but this fabulous book goes further in reconstructing the entire cursed saga: the feuds, the folly and the missed chances to set it right.”
Tim Robey, author of Box-Office Poison: Hollywood’s Story in a Century of Flops
“Pamela Hutchinson’s brilliant history of Queen Kelly‘s legendarily messy production and astonishing afterlife is anchored by three of the most titanically large egos ever seen in Hollywood—star Gloria Swanson, her producer/lover Joseph P. Kennedy, and director Erich von Stroheim. Hutchinson expertly weaves their often conflicting motivations into a tale of ambition, hubris, and sex, a marvellous concoction illuminating a notorious film that’s worthy of critical reexamination.”
Mike Mashon, Library of Congress Moving Image Section Head (retired)
You can read more about The Curse of Queen Kelly at the Sticking Place Books website. The order links will go live (there and here) on 27 March, when we can all charge our glasses with some bootleg champagne, and raise a toast to birthday girl Gloria Swanson, saying, “Majesty, me foot! Long live Queen Kelly!”
I learned some valuable lessons during the writing of this book. First: never let your cat sit on your keyboard. An hour or so after Lana sat for this charming portrait, a whole chapter vanished into the ether, lost like the missing reels of Greed…
Also, even when the curse of Queen Kelly strikes and the deadline looms, there is very little that a cup of tea and a slice of this delicious vegan marble cake can’t solve. Gloria would not approve of the sugar content, but it really helped…
Thanks for reading!
