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836 reviews for:
The Lady from the Black Lagoon: Hollywood Monsters and the Lost Legacy of Milicent Patrick
Mallory O'Meara
4.11 AVERAGE
836 reviews for:
The Lady from the Black Lagoon: Hollywood Monsters and the Lost Legacy of Milicent Patrick
Mallory O'Meara
4.11 AVERAGE
Really enjoyed biographical content relating to Milicent, but the autobiographic anecdotes and commentary on modern Hollywood could have used more editing. The quality of writing between the two varied widely and it was really distracting. I wanted to push through but just couldn’t.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Sexual harassment
informative
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
The writing wasn’t very good. The book spent more time talking about the author than the person it was supposed to be about. The author also would go on tangents about sexism in Hollywood, which is fine, but it was all stuff I read in a twitter a thread in 2015. If you’re gonna make it a big part of your book, find something new to say about it. By the time this book came out, Weinstein had already been exposed. We all new Hollywood was sexist.
I made it to page 213 / 313, and it has taken me about a year to get this far. I'm allowing myself to reshelve it, and come back to it at some nebulous future point.
Having said that, it is well written, meticulously researched, and covers some important ground in history of horror movies and the artists who worked on them. What didn't work as much for me here as it has in other such works is the foregrounding of the author. I can't point at anything here that differs from, say, Stasiland, where the foregrounding of the author was an important part of my experience.
Having said that, it is well written, meticulously researched, and covers some important ground in history of horror movies and the artists who worked on them. What didn't work as much for me here as it has in other such works is the foregrounding of the author. I can't point at anything here that differs from, say, Stasiland, where the foregrounding of the author was an important part of my experience.
This is not so much about Milicent Patrick but about Mallory O'Meara's research trip to learn about Patrick. And, a lot about O'Meara's thoughts about sexism in Hollywood, complicated families, art, and the fact that she has blue hair and tattoos. I kind of wanted a different book, but I did enjoy getting to slightly know about Milicent.
adventurous
mysterious
reflective
slow-paced
I didn’t know what I was getting into with The Lady from the Black Lagoon. One of the members of the Nonfiction Book Club had put it up for voting as a selection and I hadn’t done much research on it beforehand. It did, however, get the rest of the group really excited (as the moderator I abstain from voting since a, I pick most of the books we vote on, and b, I think it’s more fair as the moderator that I don’t) and that, in turn, excited me.
The Lady from the Black Lagoon is really, at it’s core, Mallory’s memoir. Most subjects for full length biographies have more than a few lines in their Wikipedia pages, even if they haven’t been the subject of numerous articles or other books ahead of time. I have a feeling Milicent’s is now fleshed out because someone read, and loved Mallory’s The Lady from the Black Lagoon and decided to add more details.
Milicent was, by all accounts, a fascinating human being – one of the first female animators at Disney (Mallory goes into great detail about what constitutes being an animator and the idea of “first”), worked on some of the biggest cult horror films of the fifties, was screwed over by her father and boss at various points in her life, had a terrible track record with romantic relationships, and died in relative obscurity, but was loved dearly by her neice.
Milicent’s story is the stuff of long-form essays in The Atlantic or The New Yorker, not full length books. There’s just not enough to it unfortunately, so enter the real story here, Mallory’s. The Lady from the Black Lagoon is an interesting dual narrative and I would argue that Mallory herself could be described as the Lady from the Black Lagoon as the entire book starts with her recounting getting a tattoo of Milicent and the Monster (from The Creature from the Black Lagoon, the cover is designed by her tattoo artist) and the impact both had on her desire to get into the film industry, specifically as a producer of horror films.
Mallory then proceeds to tell Milicent’s tale alongside her own process of researching the very book she’s writing while sharing anecdotes of her own life, particularly as they relate to the under-representation of women in the film industry at large. And that, dear friends, is what ties Mallory and Milicent’s stories together more than their mutual love of horror films.
Every women has a story (if not many) of when she was degraded, talked down to, treated poorly, and more, by a man. Every. single. woman. My earliest memory of a time where this happened is from when I was seven. SEVEN. And it came from a fellow seven year old. Sexism is SO entrenched in our society that we in the Nonfiction Book Club, a group of predominantly women from middle class backgrounds of varying generations, all had to continuously remind ourselves that the way were think about Milicent’s experiences, the way we go about our lives as women, is rooted in sexism. We even participate in sexist behaviors AGAINST OUR OWN GENDER without even realizing it.
Just this week, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez stood up in the House of Representatives and stood up against the casual language used by men to exert their power and dominance over women. I couldn’t help but think that there are so many women who routinely call each other the same terms, because that’s how we talk down to those we don’t like. And I thought, on both counts, about Milicent. Her father, and boss at Universal Studios, did everything they could to silence and disadvantage her when the cards were already stacked against her.
At work, she was often the only woman and her contributions continuously downplayed, doubted, or straight up denied because of her gender. The head of the department launched a vicious campaign to discredit her while she was out on a promotional tour for The Creature from the Black Lagoon. And while I would have loved to see Milicent take a stand and fight harder for her career, I’m sad to say I wasn’t surprised at all that she faded away into the back pages of history, barely even a footnote in the movie’s story.
While I wish there had been more for Mallory to tell of Milicent’s story, I enjoyed the dual narrative and also greatly enjoyed Mallory’s performance reading the audiobook (as usual with book club books I did a mix of listening and reading). I recommend The Lady from the Black Lagoon ardently to film history enthusiasts, and to everyone who loves a good forgotten story now told.
emotional
informative
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
emotional
informative
inspiring
medium-paced