Stuart Gordon’s Memoir Details Cult Horror Director’s Monster Creations, Family Life, and Passion For Grand Storytelling

variety.com:

Stuart Gordon is known as a master of horror, earning the title from his work on such seminal 1980s genre films as “Re-Animator,” “From Beyond” and “Dolls.” But the director, who died in March 2020, was also a master storyteller — so his family can be forgiven for sometimes wondering if he was prone to fabulation. “I would compare it to the movie ‘Big Fish’ in how someone might exaggerate,” recalls Jillian Gordon, one of his three daughters. “He would tell you these stories and you’d think, ‘Is that really what happened?’ It was only after he passed and I was going through his emails and archives that I realized it was all true.”Indeed, Gordon made movies, but his own life had enough twists, turns and serendipitous encounters to be its own film.

And now those stranger-than-fiction tales will be shared with audiences when his memoir, “Naked Theater and & Uncensored Horror,” is published in September by FAB Press.

For horror fans, the book contains plenty of behind-the-scenes tales about the making of Gordon’s cult classics — and comes with an afterword from his “Re-Animator” star and frequent collaborator Jeffrey Combs.

But readers will also learn the stories of Gordon’s early years in experimental theater — from his nude production of “Peter Pan” in college, which found him arrested on obscenity charges, to founding Chicago’s Organic Theater Company, where he collaborated with burgeoning actors and future household names like Dennis Franz and Joe Mantegna and directed the first production of David Mamet’s breakthrough play “Sexual Perversity in Chicago.”Told with the offbeat humor and style that was a signature of so much of Gordon’s work, the memoir doesn’t just focus on the horror.