You're Not Dead Until You're Forgotten: A Memoir - Hardcover

Dunning, John; Brownstein, Bill

3.5

10 ratings by Goodreads

9780773544024: You're Not Dead Until You're Forgotten: A Memoir

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 077354402X ISBN 13: 9780773544024

Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2014

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Much to his chagrin, John Dunning was born into the movie business. But once he came to accept his career fate, he developed a great passion for making movies, and ultimately became Canada's pre-eminent B-movie producer, with a knack for developing young talent. In You?re Not Dead until You?re Forgotten, Dunning, in forthright and charming fashion, recounts his rough-and-tumble upbringing in the Montreal suburb of Verdun in the 1930s, his modest start in the film industry behind the candy counter of his family's movie theatre, and later, his ventures into film distribution and production. In the 1960s Dunning, along with financial wizard Andr� Link, founded Cinepix, which eventually merged into the Lionsgate Entertainment film colossus. Specializing in such exploitation genres as raucous comedy, groundbreaking Qu�b�cois "maple syrup porn" and horror films, Cinepix churned out cult classics like Val�rie, Shivers, Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS, and Meatballs. Dunning's detailed recollections of making these movies provide a rare, candid, and witty take on how the film industry really works. Driven to succeed in the face of arbitrary censors, parochial Canadian critics, and controlling government funding agencies, Dunning and Link developed a formula for producing controversial, moneymaking movies, and helped launch the careers of such luminaries-to-be as David Cronenberg, Ivan Reitman, and Don Carmody. Cronenberg has called John Dunning "the unacknowledged godfather of an entire generation of Canadian filmmakers." Illustrated with personal photos and film stills, You?re Not Dead Until You?re Forgotten finally gives this pioneer Canadian filmmaker his long-overdue spotlight.

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About the Author:

John Dunning (1927-2011) was a film producer who was inducted into the Canadian Film and Television Hall of Fame in 2007. Bill Brownstein is a columnist with the Montreal Gazette and author of books including Schwartz's Hebrew Delicatessen, Montreal 24, Sex Carnival, and Down the Tube.

Review:

?The best filmmaker memoirs are the ones that feel like movies themselves .? To these ranks we can now add You?re Not Dead until You?re Forgotten. Written with the assistance of Montreal Gazette columnist Bill Brownstein, the book is fast, frank, and endearing.? Adam Nayman, Quill & Quire

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