Ashley Hoff Digs Into the Making of ‘Mommie Dearest’
metroweekly.comArriving, appropriately enough, in the wake of Mother’s Day, comes a new book toasting the mother of all Bad Mother movies, Mommie Dearest.Ashley Hoff’s With Love, Mommie Dearest: The Making of an Unintentional Camp Classic offers chapter after entertaining chapter digging into the making of the notorious 1981 drama starring Faye Dunaway, tearing down rose bushes, bearing walls, and some of the scenery as Hollywood film legend Joan Crawford.Based on the eponymous best-selling memoir by Christina Crawford, Joan’s adopted daughter, detailing years of emotional and physical abuse at the hands of her Oscar-winning mother, Mommie Dearest was supposed to be a serious exposé of child abuse.
Somehow, that’s not the movie that director Frank Perry and producer Frank Yablans wound up making, as is vividly chronicled in Hoff’s book.“Nobody sets out to make a failure,” says the author and Hollywood historian, whose previous book Match Game 101: A Backstage History of Match Game took a behind-the-scenes look at a different camp phenomenon.
Hoff also published My Huckleberry Friend: Holly Golightly and the Untold History of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, about another book-to-film adaptation that was, by all accounts, better received.
Yet, clearly, as Hoff writes, the Mommie Dearest filmmakers thought they had a hit on their hands.“It had everything going for it,” says Hoff. “It was based on a bestselling memoir.
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