The wild backstory of ‘Mommie Dearest’ & how it became an unintentional camp classic
The following is an excerpt from the new book With Love, Mommie Dearest: The Making of an Unintentional Camp Classic by Hollywood historian A.
Ashley Hoff, available now through Chicago Review Press.When she died in 1977, Joan Crawford was remembered as an icon of Hollywood’s Golden Age—until publication the following year of her daughter’s memoir, Mommie Dearest.Based on new interviews with people connected to the book and the film, Hoff explores the phenomenon, the camp, and the very real social issues addressed by the book and the film.Subscribe to our newsletter for your front-row seat to all things entertainment with a sprinkle of everything else queer.A post shared by A.
Ashley Hoff (@doubleahoff)AUGUST 1981Producer Frank Yablans knew he had gold, absolute cinematic gold. Yablans was hand-carrying a print of Mommie Dearest across the country for a pair of special advance screenings he arranged for New York critics and “influencers,” the East Coast columnists and opinion makers who might recognize and promote the movie’s importance.Film critic Roger Ebert described him thus: “Yablans, a wiry, balding man with an excess of energy, used to be the studio head at Paramount before he left to become an independent producer.
He averages about one film every two years, and his credits range from The Other Side of Midnight to North Dallas Forty. He thinks Mommie Dearest is the sort of movie that the big Hollywood studios were born to make.”He began in film distribution, a scrappy guy with nothing but plain old chutzpah and a drive to succeed, delivering cans of film from movie house to movie house, and here he was all these years later, doing the exact same thing.
