INTO THE DARK Book Event- June 4, 2016 at Stookey's Club Moderne - San Francisco

Matías Bombal of Matías Bombal's Hollywood (www.mabhollywood.com) invites you to Stookey's Club Moderne in San Francisco for a singular evening of cocktails and film noir with author Mark A. Vieira.

Presented by Stookey's Club Moderne and Green Apple Books.

What is the true story of film noir? Mark A. Vieira tells you, using unpublished images and unheard voices to

transport you to the 1940s. He lets the genre tell the story in its own voice. He shows its birth and growth,

profiling eighty-two films with pithy, nasty quotes from filmmakers, journalists, and exhibitors.

Into the Dark: The Hidden World of Film Noir, 1941 to 1950 (Running Press; May 24, 2016; Hardcover

$40.00/ISBN: 978-0762455232) by Mark A. Vieira is time travel, a ticket to a smoky, glamorous world.

You see Stanley Kramer get financing for Champion from lettuce growers, you hear Bette Davis fighting to get

out of Beyond the Forest, you visit Clifton Webb in the bathtub on the set of Laura, and you watch Joan

Crawford’s Mildred Pierce come unglued in front of a preview audience. Into the Dark is the first book to re-

create the environment that spawned film noir. Do movie audiences say “Eek!” when a femme fatale is

caught? They did in 1944. Into the Dark tells how Double Indemnity grabbed a nervous audience in Brooklyn.

There was a consensus in 1944: something different was coming from Hollywood. Edwin Schallert wrote in

the Los Angeles Times that the trend toward “honesty” had begun in 1941—with Citizen Kane and The

Maltese Falcon. When critics wrote about “crime,” “mystery,” and “hard-boiled” films, these films were cited as

the first—so 2016 marks the seventy-fifth anniversary of film noir!

Into the Dark is the first noir book to display the wit and warmth of its artists. Hedda Hopper reports on Citizen

Kane, calling Orson Welles “Little Orson Annie.” Bosley Crowther calls Joan Crawford in Possessed a “ghost

wailing for a demon lover beneath a waning moon.” Hollywood legends Barbara Stanwyck and Orson Welles

speak about film noir, putting a frame on the flashback. Into the Dark: The Hidden World of Film Noir, 1941

to 1950 conveys the mystery, glamour, humor, and irony that make film noir a surpassingly popular genre.

About the Author:

Mark A. Vieira is a photographer and Hollywood historian. He makes glamour portraits with the camera used by George Hurrell, Hollywood’s master photographer. Vieira has written fifteen books about classic Hollywood. His subjects include Cecil B. DeMille, Boris Karloff, Greta Garbo, Tony Curtis, Irving Thalberg, and Jean Harlow.