The Late Projectionist

by Daedalus Howell

A comic "portrait of the artist" as a young cineaste-gone-wrong, The Late Projectionist chronicles the exploits of a nose-thumbing grouser about Ingmar Bergman's films, aspiring small town libertine and petty criminal who finds that love does not redeem so much as waylay wicked intentions. Our hero is a self-professed "screen memoirist," cafe bon vivant and Swedish B-film aficionado caught in a quagmire of betrayal, intrigue and comic misadventure as he pursues a lucrative antiquarian book caper (and the fetching demoiselle who threatens its success). At once a sexy, madcap kunstlerroman-gone-awry and indicting riff on a generation's malaise, The Late Projectionist takes a telepathic peek into the bizarre inner-lives of steamy baristas, self-mutilating poets, solvent-slugging actors and a movie theater projectionist whose agenda far surpasses what's on the marquee.

156 pages, Paperback

First published June 11, 1999

About the author

Daedalus Howell is the editor of the Pacific Sun and North Bay Bohemian newspapers. He is the writer-director of the feature film Pill Head and the author, most recently, of Quantum Deadline. His mordant wit and penchant for plot twists will next reveal themselves in a new crime (fiction) series.

Reviews

[Terry · Rating 3 out of 5]

Is it possible to write conscious juvenilia?
Lumaville looms out of the river (but is it a river or merely a tidal estuary?) mist, except what do you call that mist that's really horrible smelling and looks like it's alive, maybe even sentient? Effluvial vapors? Don't fall in!
This is a metafiction after the fashion, I suppose, of I-never-met-a-fiction-I-did/didn't-like. The streets are almost on a real map and the buildings could probably be plotted as well. The people? Rooted in fact, probably; you have only to sort through the akas and the fkas. The plot. As contrived as any reality show.