Lady Chatterley's Legacy in the Movies: Sex, Brains, and Body Guys

Acknowledgments

This book has grown out of work we have been doing together for ten years, and there are many more people than we could ever thank who have helped and encouraged us with feedback on conference papers, journal articles, and book chapters over the years. We are especially grateful to Bill Luhr, Bob Eberwein, and Santi Fouz-Hernández. We’d also like to thank the editors who have published the revised and expanded versions of our conference papers. Leslie Mitchner at Rutgers University Press read an early draft of the manuscript , and we benefited immensely from her insightful suggestions. We also want to thank Leah Abriani, Peter Lehman’s research assistant at Arizona State University, for her excellent help in the preparation of the manuscript, the compilation of the Works Cited, the index, and her general interest in and enthusiasm for the project. We owe a special thanks to film and television writer-producer-director Zalman King, who is, in our view, the creator of the body-guy film genre, the subject of this book. Zalman has been kind and generous with us, granting interviews and inviting us into his home as guests on several occasions. Most important, he has listened to our analyses and critiques and responded with great candor, always participating in a spirited, positive exchange of ideas. We hope our book supplies a historical and cultural framework in which to appreciate , understand, and even constructively critique his films and other films of the genre he presciently founded. From Peter Lehman: I would like to thank Melanie Magisos for once again cheerfully putting up with the many hours that my devotion to writing requires and to watching and talking about countless movies and TV shows with me. Without her support I couldn’t do it. I also want to thank Robert Flynt, to whom I have dedicated my work on this book, for his friendship and for his work. I have spent so much time looking at images of the male body and the male nude only to come away with the feeling that I’ve seen it all before and to xi Acknowledgments Prelims.qxd 6/10/10 7:01 PM Page xi lament the limitations of the assumptions about masculinity and male sexuality that cling to those images. But Bob’s work is fresh, challenging, complex, ambiguous, and, rarest of all things in this field, mature. He is the most important photographer of his generation and one of the most important in the history of his medium working in the male nude. And he is a great lunch companion , with a wonderful appetite for both good food and good conversation. From Susan Hunt: I would like to thank Michael Hart for his many generous “read-throughs,” excellent editing suggestions, and stimulating insights about movies that sometimes made him squirm. His eternal optimism has helped me throughout the process. Thanks also to friends from the various communities in my life for their support and understanding, especially Jay Atkinson and Russ and Dorothy Balisok. Gene Hart and Toodie Beutler deserve a special mention for listening to me say “one more chapter” for months. I’m grateful to my department chairs Barbara Baird, Alex Kritselis, and Frank Dawson for the “flex” time to develop this book. And, of course, my students at Santa Monica and Pasadena City Colleges have always been a source of inspiration— a special appreciation goes out to Ikko Suzuki and Yuta Okamura. Although this book includes no reprints, we have drawn on some previously published essays and would like to acknowledge the following: “Exposing the Body Guy: The Return of the Repressed in Twentynine Palms,” in Mysterious Skin: Male Bodies in Contemporary Cinema, edited by Santiago Fouz-Hernández (London: I. B. Tauris, 2009), 207–19; “The Naked and the Dead: The Jewish Male Body and Masculinity in Sunshine and Enemy at the Gates,” in The Persistence of Whiteness: Race and Contemporary Hollywood Cinema, edited by Daniel Bernardi (New York: Routledge, 2008), 157–64; “‘Something and Someone Else’: The Mind, the Body, and Sexuality in Titanic,” in Titanic: Anatomy of a Blockbuster, edited by Gaylyn Studlar and Kevin S. Sandler (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1999), 89–107; “Passion and Passion for Learning in The Governess,” Jump Cut 44 (2001): www.ejumpcut.org/ home.html. acknowledgments xii Prelims.qxd 6/10/10 7:01 PM Page xii h Lady Chatterley’s...