Back to the Book

In case you're wondering, our renewed work on the book is going well. After successfully locking down VW #124, we finally got back into it around the middle of last week, with Donna indexing the photo captions and me compiling the Bava filmography. Both tasks are now practically completed; I still need to add a few recently uncovered titles to the filmography -- including a musical short from the late 1940s that escaped the world's notice (as a Bava credit) until I found a 16mm print on eBay.

This week, while Donna moves on to her next task, it's my turn to go through a PDF of the layout to see if I still like the photo captions, if there are any illustrations I care to replace with more recent acquisitions, and to add whatever last-minute text needs including. New material does continue to be discovered -- like some matte paintings in THE INVINCIBLE GLADIATOR, for example, which Richard Harrison confirmed for me were the work of Bava, and a new (2005) miniseries version of HERCULES that was shown on the Sci Fi Channel last night. A misguided mess, it made the Kevin Sorbo series look as classic as the Steve Reeves movies by comparison. I'll have to at least mention it, because a project like this means that the peplum films that Bava helped to launch in the 1950s are continuing to send ripples through entertainment we're seeing today.