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837 reviews for:
The Lady from the Black Lagoon: Hollywood Monsters and the Lost Legacy of Milicent Patrick
Mallory O'Meara
4.11 AVERAGE
837 reviews for:
The Lady from the Black Lagoon: Hollywood Monsters and the Lost Legacy of Milicent Patrick
Mallory O'Meara
4.11 AVERAGE
funny
hopeful
informative
inspiring
medium-paced
Content Warnings
Graphic: Suicide
Moderate: Misogyny, Sexism
Minor: Alcoholism, Racial slurs, Rape, Sexual assault, Sexual violence, Terminal illness, Toxic relationship
I thoroughly enjoyed this interesting biography about a fascinating lady. Milicent Patrick led such an interesting life, and O’Meara did a great job bringing her accomplishments and little-known career to light. Some reviews criticize the book for going on long tangents, and I do agree with that. While I love history and I enjoyed learning more about Milicent’s father and Hollywood history, I feel like a lot of that information was added in as filler because not enough information was available about Milicent. I do also feel that O’Meara made some assumptions about certain people and their feelings through a modern-day lens, which I found entertaining but at times kind of inappropriate for a biography. Besides that, I learned a lot and I enjoyed the audiobook version read by O’Meara!
This was fascinating. Definitely a must read for film buffs.
While I am not a horror fan or an old movie buff, I'm always in favor of women getting credit for their contributions, even if it's years afterwards. Mallory O'Meara has a wonderfully witty voice in her writing, and her love of monsters and the film craft surrounding that comes through in a way that adds to the greater story of Milicent Patrick's life. If you pick this up, I recommend getting a physical version, as the pictures included are wonderful to refer to.
Rating: 3* of five
It's not that this is a bad book...it's that it's not a good biography. If you're marketing a book as a bio, make it one. The digressions, the disquisitions, the divagations all got in the way of Milicent Patrick's life. Of course it's clearly true that Patrick left little to no footprint to report on. A lot of that is down to sexism and professional jealousy. So don't market this as a bio of someone whose life story is so minimally documented. Make it a chapter in a polemic about women in the film industry being denied their proper credit.
Here's another example:
The Disney Studio probably wouldn't exist without the hearty help and unstinting financial generosity of Nelbert Chouinard of the Chouinard Art Institute, today called CalArts. Follow those links...Chouinard's legacy is immense, her biography paltry. It is a travesty. Here's a subject for O'Meara's talents as a researcher and tone as a writer...women buried by Time and Patriarchy. Polemical listicles, capsule bios, indignation at the self-evident, undeniable injustice of it.
The writing is so...let me be kind...unpretentious that it loses authority, which makes a difference in biography. Edmund Morris was playful about parts of Teddy Roosevelt's life and personality (see Theodore Rex particularly) without losing an overall voice that conveyed how deeply serious he was and how well he knew his subject. Do you get that sense about O'Meara's writing, using this representative squib on Milicent's mother's travails moving her family from South to North America?
It's okay, it's about a person whose life was stolen from her by her gender role in a world even more unfair than out stinkingly unequal one, and I just don't think it's a whole entire book's worth of biography. There are too many side bios of William Randolph Hearst and Julia Morgan and La Chouinard and...well, you get my drift.
It's a solid B. Good effort, properly identified topic and subject, unfocused and scattershot while being entertaining.
Milicent’s incredible life should have earned her an honored place in film history. But few even recognize her name. There’s still time to change that.
It's not that this is a bad book...it's that it's not a good biography. If you're marketing a book as a bio, make it one. The digressions, the disquisitions, the divagations all got in the way of Milicent Patrick's life. Of course it's clearly true that Patrick left little to no footprint to report on. A lot of that is down to sexism and professional jealousy. So don't market this as a bio of someone whose life story is so minimally documented. Make it a chapter in a polemic about women in the film industry being denied their proper credit.
Here's another example:
There are few women with as great an influence on Southern California’s reputation as a hub of twentieth-century American art than Nelbert Chouinard. She was, as they say, one bad motherfucker.
The Disney Studio probably wouldn't exist without the hearty help and unstinting financial generosity of Nelbert Chouinard of the Chouinard Art Institute, today called CalArts. Follow those links...Chouinard's legacy is immense, her biography paltry. It is a travesty. Here's a subject for O'Meara's talents as a researcher and tone as a writer...women buried by Time and Patriarchy. Polemical listicles, capsule bios, indignation at the self-evident, undeniable injustice of it.
The writing is so...let me be kind...unpretentious that it loses authority, which makes a difference in biography. Edmund Morris was playful about parts of Teddy Roosevelt's life and personality (see Theodore Rex particularly) without losing an overall voice that conveyed how deeply serious he was and how well he knew his subject. Do you get that sense about O'Meara's writing, using this representative squib on Milicent's mother's travails moving her family from South to North America?
If you have ever looked with pity at a mother consoling a crying baby on a flight, imagine Elise traveling by car, train and ship through four countries with a baby, two small children and no disposable diapers or air conditioning.
It's okay, it's about a person whose life was stolen from her by her gender role in a world even more unfair than out stinkingly unequal one, and I just don't think it's a whole entire book's worth of biography. There are too many side bios of William Randolph Hearst and Julia Morgan and La Chouinard and...well, you get my drift.
It's a solid B. Good effort, properly identified topic and subject, unfocused and scattershot while being entertaining.
Great study of Millicent Patrick and her contribution to cinema history.
A sometimes hilarious, sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes infurating look at hollywwod in parallel 1940-1960 and now. It is nonfiction written in a very accessible conversational style. The use of footnotes is particularly entertaining. Go read it.
Those of us who grew up watching monster movies on Creature Features are well acquainted with The Creature From The Black Lagoon. He’s far and away my most favorite Universal Studios monster! Imagine loving this creature my whole life and never knowing he was the product of the imagination of a woman! When I heard about the new book THE LADY FROM THE BLACK LAGOON and that it told the truth behind the “Gill Man,” I flipped! Why had I never heard about Milicent Patrick?
Back in the 1950s, when it was extremely hard for women to rise to the top of their field, Milicent Patrick was a talented artist that had her career ruined by a jealous male co-worker. This book sets the record straight.
Mallory O’Meara wrote this book after two years of research. She is a horror film producer in Los Angeles.
O’Meara gives a good accounting of Patrick’s life, from growing up near Hearst Castle as it was being built to her relationships near the end of her life.
The focus is of course Patrick’s time in the film industry, where she painted animation cels, did minor acting, and created monsters.
Unfortunately, the way O’Meara inserts explanations for the reader about the ins and outs of the movie industry was almost more than I could bear. Mind you, she is still in her twenties and yet she is talking down to us as if we are in high school, using footnotes to describe what a “screen credit” is and “in the film industry, the word key before any job title usually means that that person is the head of whatever they are doing.” Really? I imagine that if you are interested in reading this book you would be a) a moviegoer and/or b) a monster movie fan in particular, so most likely you don’t need this kind of elementary education.
I did find the information on Milicent Patrick interesting and entertaining and I’m appreciative that O’Meara had the dedication to do the huge research necessary to find information on someone that most people have never heard of.
At the end there is quite a bit of discussion on women’s oppression and the #MeToo movement. There are statements of encouragement from other women in the film industry. The book is complete with a list of sources and an index. A few photos of Milicent are sprinkled throughout
It’s hard for me to put a rating on this because I liked the story of Milicent Patrick but I loathed the instructional tone. Teenagers would probably love it. Older people might find it an interesting quick read.
Back in the 1950s, when it was extremely hard for women to rise to the top of their field, Milicent Patrick was a talented artist that had her career ruined by a jealous male co-worker. This book sets the record straight.
Mallory O’Meara wrote this book after two years of research. She is a horror film producer in Los Angeles.
O’Meara gives a good accounting of Patrick’s life, from growing up near Hearst Castle as it was being built to her relationships near the end of her life.
The focus is of course Patrick’s time in the film industry, where she painted animation cels, did minor acting, and created monsters.
Unfortunately, the way O’Meara inserts explanations for the reader about the ins and outs of the movie industry was almost more than I could bear. Mind you, she is still in her twenties and yet she is talking down to us as if we are in high school, using footnotes to describe what a “screen credit” is and “in the film industry, the word key before any job title usually means that that person is the head of whatever they are doing.” Really? I imagine that if you are interested in reading this book you would be a) a moviegoer and/or b) a monster movie fan in particular, so most likely you don’t need this kind of elementary education.
I did find the information on Milicent Patrick interesting and entertaining and I’m appreciative that O’Meara had the dedication to do the huge research necessary to find information on someone that most people have never heard of.
At the end there is quite a bit of discussion on women’s oppression and the #MeToo movement. There are statements of encouragement from other women in the film industry. The book is complete with a list of sources and an index. A few photos of Milicent are sprinkled throughout
It’s hard for me to put a rating on this because I liked the story of Milicent Patrick but I loathed the instructional tone. Teenagers would probably love it. Older people might find it an interesting quick read.
It might be more of a memoir of doing the research to find Milicent Patrick than a super in-depth look at the life of Milicent Patrick, but I still really enjoyed it. I appreciated O'Meara's inside look at horror and Hollywood from the perspective of a woman who works on movies, and for the most part I felt like the parts of the book that were about the current state of the industry followed the relevant parts of Milicent's life. Although I found the section about Milicent's father to be the least interesting, I'm glad it was there since it gave a lot of valuable information and context for why she led the life she did.
A feminist paean to a complex and talented woman,or, really, two. I found myself pulling for the author as she struggled to perform some pretty in-depth research without any prior training. Her. Love of the subject always won out and makes you root for her and Milicent all the way through. Much that was sad, but overall, uplifting