That’s Really Scary, Boys and Girls

It’s been a few years since The Stewardess Is Flying the Plane came out, but I still get asked to talk about ’70s Hollywood every once in a while. Recently, I did an e-mail interview with Brian Solomon, the editor of The Vault of Horror, where we talked about how the changes to the business and the culture of American movies affected the horror genre. During our back-and-forth, I reaffirmed the awesomeness of The Exorcist (not that William Friedkin needs my help, but hey) and put in a good word for one of my favorite films in any genre from the decade, Larry Cohen’s God Told Me To.

I also noted in passing that one of the biggest signs of the impact of 1970s horror films is the extent to which, it seems, every last one of them is getting remade, and in the days since I sent along my responses, I’ve been thinking of two films that fall into that category that I could have mentioned but didn’t. George Romero’s The Crazies is another one of my all-category favorites from the decade, a perfect time-capsule of the prevailing mood of the period that society was just barely holding it together and everything could degenerate into chaos without warning; a new version of that film is coming out next month. Then there’s Race with the Devil, the one where Warren Oates, Peter Fonda, Loretta Swit, and Lara Parker get chased around the South by devil worshippers—it’s unclear in the film whether they actually have any magical powers, although I suspect they don’t; as I said in Stewardess, though, it’s scary enough just to be chased across the South by guys wearing hoods. Apparently there’s a remake in the works and projected to come out some time next year. I’m not sure there’s a pressing need—the original was satisfactory in and of itself—but honestly I’ve felt that way about most of these remakes.

21 January 2010 | interviews |

Emma McLaughlin & Nicola Kraus: Nanny’s Back, But On Their Terms

After the success of The Nanny Diaries back in 2002, there was strong interest in the publishing world in an immediate sequel, even though, as Nicola Kraus (left) recalled over a recent lunch, “we were clear that Nanny would never nanny again, and we thought that was the end of the story.” Her co-author, Emma McLaughlin, elaborated; various publishers offered significant incentives for a sequel, but there were conditions: “They all wanted Nanny to get her comeuppance,” she explained; either Nanny would start her own agency where the nannies on the staff would put her through hell, or she’d have to hire a nanny who would put her through hell. “We walked away from those leads because we stood by what Nanny had said at the end of the book,” McLaughlin added. “And we didn’t get into writing to set up a franchise. We didn’t want to come back to Nanny unless we had something new to say about her.”

“It was a hard decision,” McLaughlin admitted. “It was a lot of money, enough that we would have been set –” “But it would’ve been a bad book,” Kraus chimed in. It wasn’t until two years ago that they hit upon the idea of Grayer, the pre-adolescent boy from The Nanny Diaries, discovering the videotape Nanny made at the end of that book and tracking her down for a confrontation. The question then became: What would happen? “It was different than any of the other books we’ve written since, in that from the beginning we knew all the characters very well,” Kraus said. “The real work of it was finding the story that would weave the characters back together.”

I wondered what the pair thought about the success of nonfiction like 740 Park in the years after The Nanny Diaries, as it seemed to me like a continuation of the fascination with a certain class of Manhattan (and by extension American) elites. Kraus acknowledged the point, then added that they’d been fascinated by the recent trial and conviction of Brooke Astor’s son for bilking her of millions while she was alive then forging alterations to her will. “How would the dysfunctions we depicted in the first novel play out over generations?” she asked rhetorically. “How would the economy falling apart affect a class of people who have chosen money over love?” And thus: Nanny Returns.

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10 January 2010 | interviews |