Talking Sixties Drive-In Movies

by Tom Lisanti

This is the HARDBACK version.



Talking Sixties Drive-in Movies is a collection of profiles, interviews, and tributes about actors and films popular with the drive-in movie crowd during the sixties. Interviewees include Arlene Charles, Nancy Czar, Gail Gerber, Christopher Riordan, and Irene Tsu talking Elvis Presley musicals; Bobbi Shaw and Steven Rogers talking beach party movies; Jan Watson and Diane Bond talking spy spoofs; Nicoletta Machiavelli talking spaghetti westerns; Mimsy Farmer and Maggie Thrett talking alienated youth movies; and Valerie Starrett talking biker films. Some of the chapters center on one movie or a genre while others are career profiles with a main focus on one or two drive-in movies.

314 pages, Hardcover

Published March 1, 2017

About the author

Tom Lisanti is an award-winning author/film historian specializing in1960s/1970s film and television. He began writing professionally in 1998. His latest books are Texas: An Oral History of Daytime TV's Answer to Dallas from BearManor Media; Dueling Harlows: The Race to Bring the Actress's Life to the Silver Screen from McFarland & Company; and Ryan's Hope: An Oral History of Daytime's Groundbreaking Soap from Citadel Press/Kensington Books.

In 2010, Tom co-wrote with former actress Gail Gerber her memoir Trippin' with Terry Southern: What I Think I Remember, which won the Independent Publisher Book Award Silver Medal for Best Memoir of 2010. He recently made appearances on the NYC cable access talk show, The Diana Montford Show; PBS's Steve Beverly's TV Classics; The Playboy Murders; and co-hosted with Ben Mankiewicz a week of 1960s beach movies on TCM. Tom is also featured in the documentary The Green Girl. He has been interviewed on a number of YouTube Programs (The Locher Room, The Jim Masters Show, The Michael Fairman Channel, Soaps dot com, The Avrum Rosensweig Show); radio shows (TV Confidential, Nutmeg Chatter. The Online Movie Show with Phil Hall, WNYC's SoundCheck); and podcasts (Forgotten Hollywood, The San Francisco Experience, Forgotten Films; Junot Files; NitrateVille; Ticklish Films) talking about his books.

Tom also has written for such magazines as Cinema Retro, Cinema of the '70s, Films of the Golden Age; and Scary Monsters.

Follow Tom on Facebook, Twitter (X), Instagram, and Threads. He resides in New York.

Reviews

[Frank · Rating 3 out of 5]

Tom Lisanti is a sensitive interviewer who treats his subjects with the respect they deserve. But boy does Bear Manor need a good line editor and fact checker. The interviews are enjoyable, even if they're with people from films you don't much care about, and the interview with Christopher Riordan is a gem. But the book is filled with typos, there's lots of bad grammar and some of the facts are just wrong.

[Squeeb (Jake) · Rating 3 out of 5]

A fun read that helped me find a lot of new titles to explore, for which I am grateful. One note is that the editing on this book was quite poor, lots of typos and errors in general which made it a little hard to follow at times. With that in mind, I can’t dislike anything that is clearly made with a lot of love infused into it.