A Life in the Cinema (eBook)

A Life In the Cinema
by Mick Garris

Introduction by Stephen King, Afterword by Tobe Hooper, Cover Art by Clive Barker

About the Book:
A Life In the Cinema is the first book from award-winning filmmaker Mick Garris. This collection of eight prickly tales and a screenplay reach under the skin of real life and reel life to take you places you never realized you wanted to go. The title story, "A Life in the Cinema" and its sequel, "Starfucker", are set in the author's hometown of Hollywood, and provide a yellow-jaundiced look at a world you only thought was glamorous.

As Stephen King, in his introduction, says: "Here is a real Hollywood insider writing about the real inside world of filmmaking: the good, the bad, and the cheesy. These stories are both erotic and cynical, but they are above all well and fiercely told-when he's yarning about the tarnished tinsel underbelly of the town he knows (and clearly loves) the best, Mick Garris writes like a combination of Robert Bloch and James Ellroy, hardboiled noir with a ghastly little prick of the devil's own pitchfork."

Not all of the stories are Hollywood-based: Garris includes tales of a grandmother who is just as loving in death as she was in life, a geriatric trailer park with a randy secret, wistful and impossible love with a twist, the wrong kind of baby-love, and a deathly brush with fame. The book is capped with a screenplay by Garris, as well as "Chocolate", the story it's based on, providing, as King puts it, "a textbook seminar in the art and craft of adapting one's own work."

So welcome to a dark side of Hollywood you've never seen before...

Award-winning filmmaker Mick Garris has written or co-authored numerous feature films and teleplays, and he is Creator and Executive Producer of Showtime’s Masters of Horror series, as well as creator of the NBC series, Fear itself.

A Life in the Cinema, his first book, was a collection of short stories and a screenplay based on one of the included stories.

His first novel, Development Hell, was published by Cemetery Dance in 2006.

His screenplay and much supporting material for Riding the Bullet was published by Lonely Road Books in 2010.

He has also published short fiction in numerous books and magazines, and he is currently prepping a feature film based on Stephen King’s bestselling novel Bag of Bones.

Garris lives in Studio City, California, with his wife, Cynthia, an actress, musician, composer and muse.  

"You want to see Hollywood’s dark side? Read Mick Garris’ Development Hell. Garris has earned the right to tell this story from years of working in the creative salt mines of Tinsel Town. He finally gets to show us the way it looks from the inside, and it isn’t pretty. This is a sharp, funny and chilling book; an unflinching report from the ego-haunted wasteland behind the face lifts and million-dollar smiles."
— Clive Barker, #1 bestselling author of The Books of Blood, Coldheart Canyon, and Weaveworld

"Development Hell is an imaginative and bizarrely funny cross between dark fantasy, Hollywood satire, and hip pop-culture-infused fiction. Wildly entertaining, it is also terrifying—the terror arising not only from the plot, but also from the fact that, as a Hollywood insider, Garris makes it feel all too real…"
— Ridley Pearson, #1 bestselling author of The Diary of Ellen Rimbauer, The Art of Deception, Middle of Nowhere, and The First Victim

"Mick Garris stakes Hollywood’s vain heart with a wit that X-rays, vivisects and soars. His debut novel is fierce poison; unmerciful and hilarious. The writing is wicked, acrobatic abracadabra."
— Richard Christian Matheson, author of Created By and Dystopia

"Mick Garris, the nicest and least offensive of men, exhibits none of those finer tendencies in Development Hell: The Nine Lives of a Hollywood Player. In the studio-speak of movie executives taking a meeting, it would be described as 'The Twilight Zone meets David Lynch on steroids,' but that would be selling it short. It's a wildly original, vicious, and twisted gut-punch of a book that makes my worst day in Hollywood look like a pleasant trip to Disneyland. Garris claws at the walls of the film biz as if it were a padded cell and he himself a howling lunatic who's missed his medication. I love it."
— Frank Darabont, Director of The Green Mile and The Shawshank Redemption