Screen Saver: Private Stories of Public Hollywood

by Nat Segaloff

How do the most glamorous people in Hollywood behave when they’re not in Hollywood? They run the gamut, and Nat Segaloff followed them for twenty-five years. He started in the staid and stuffy (but also politically tinged and rapidly evolving) city of Boston, Massachusetts, then picked up the trail in Los Angeles. In Screen Private Stories of Public Hollywood, he writes about the celebrities he worked with when they thought they were out of the public eye. Read Why Film Critic is one of the most dangerous jobs in journalism! How Deep Throat almost got un-banned in Boston! Pointers on how to lie, cheat, and steal in Hollywood! What really happens on those glitzy Hollywood press junkets! Personal stories about Hollywood in transition during the last great age of American cinema. Read the scoop about the Bad, the Beautiful, the Boring, and the Blessed as seen by the publicist who kept it out of the papers and then became a reporter who put it back in. About the Nat Segaloff is a movie publicist who crossed the professional street to become a film critic and journalist—a move that gave him insight into the ways of Hollywood but made him an infidel to the studios he used to work for. His previous BearManor titles are Final The Last Films of 50 Great Directors, Stirling The Fingers of God, and Mr. Huston/Mr. Life, Death, and Making John Huston’s Last Film. His next project is the biography of Harlan Ellison.

302 pages, Paperback

Published August 5, 2016

About the author

Nat Segaloff is a writer-producer-journalist. He covered the film industry for The Boston Herald, but has also variously been a studio publicist (Fox, UA, Columbia), college teacher (Boston University, Boston College), and broadcaster (Group W, CBS, Storer). He is the author of twenty books including Hurricane Billy: The Stormy Life and Films of William Friedkin, Arthur Penn: American Director and Final Cuts: The Last Films of 50 Great Directors in addition to career monographs on Stirling Silliphant, Walon Green, Paul Mazursky and John Milius. His writing has appeared in such varied periodicals as Film Comment, Written By, International Documentary, Animation Magazine, The Christian Science Monitor, Time Out (US), MacWorld and American Movie Classics Magazine. He was also senior reviewer for AudiobookCafe.com and contributing writer to Moving Pictures magazine.

In 1996 he formed the multi-media production company Alien Voices with actors Leonard Nimoy and actor John de Lancie and produced five best-selling, fully dramatized audio plays for Simon & Schuster: The Time Machine, Journey to the Center of the Earth, The Lost World, The Invisible Man and The First Men in the Moon, all of which feature Star Trek casts.

Reviews

[Daniel A. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Based on the recommendations of my good friends Daniel M. Kimmel and Michael A. Ventrella—whose taste in books I often concur with—I gave Nat Segaloff's Screen Saver: Private Stories of Public Hollywood a sincere try, particularly as I've found Segaloff's Final Cuts: The Last Films of 50 Great Directors rather interesting. But while I gave Screen Saver several dozen pages to grab me, it just . . . didn't. I do respect Dan and Mike's opinions on the book; I just get the impression that Screen Saver isn't for me, for whatever reason.

[Daniel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nat Segaloff is a friend and colleague who has put together a marvelous collection of stories about being a publicist and film critic in Boston in the 1970s and 1980s. There are plenty of celebrity anecdotes and profiles, but there's also a unique glimpse of how film promotion was done in a period of transition in the industry. As such, it provides a glimpse of an aspect of the film business rarely noted, making this an important addition to the literature.

[Michael Ventrella · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great fun, lots of trivia, interesting anecdotes -- for anyone who loves movies