"American Twilight" Excerpt: Final Chapter, "Tobe Hooper and the American Twilight" (Christopher Sharrett)

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"My point is that Hooper, like these other men, was constrained by money, his greatness hampered by money issues – although his first masterpiece was as low-rent as one could imagine. Still, that kind of cinema, with its intelligence and wit, may thrive precisely because of its status in its day, a “poverty row” piece of lowbrow drivel never to be taken seriously except by a few nuts who like to overthink such things. 
 

(...)
 
Hooper was as aware of the end of the American utopian aspiration as Romero, his greatest colleague. His ability to realize fully all of his visions was more limited than Romero’s, but what he did achieve is remarkable."

Sharrett, 2021

"American Twilight" Excerpt: Introduction

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"The Song Is Love, named after the 1967 song by the trio, is an inspired combination of political documentary and experimental portraiture, organized around personal statements by each band member. Mixing performance footage with candid interviews, musings by the band members in nature and backstage, and footage of the members marching and speaking at political rallies, the film is a meditation on America’s troubled politics, at home and abroad. Interviewed about the film, Hooper averred, “It’s not a documentary, […] and it’s not necessarily ABOUT Peter, Paul and Mary, although they are featured in it” (quoted in Worley 1970).
 

Several candid moments serve as structuring set pieces, in which the three artists discuss freedom of artistic expression, and the political limitations on that freedom. Hooper parallels these intimate statements with the band members’ more public-facing protests for equal rights.
 

(...)
 

Such feelings about the freedom and power of art against the expectations of the industry seem portentously relevant to Hooper’s own career, since the director was politically and artistically second-guessed at every turn. Though Hooper could not have predicted his future struggles inside and outside the Hollywood juggernaut, he fashioned a documentary that consciously blended the politics of freedom and equality with investigations of free artistic self-expression under stress."

Woofter/Dodson, 2021

IT'S COMING. IT'S HERE.

 

The first academic collection of essays devoted to Tobe Hooper's career - entitled American Twilight: The Cinema of Tobe Hooper - has finally been curated and assembled by editors Kristopher Woofter and Will Dodson (who contribute their own essays within the book) and released by the University of Texas Press publishing outfit.

Released in June 2021, it is still fresh in the minds of its readers and non-readers (I am lucky to have counted myself in the former group since May, after receiving an early copy in the mail, a real moment of hope and beauty in difficult times) and nonpareil in its in-depth analyses and contributions to a scholasticism of a marginal career and what Hooper means to the landscape of genre.  Promotions are planned and it is an illustrious initiation to upcoming Hooper releases, such as I'm Dangerous Tonight coming to Blu-Ray from Kino Lorber, a possible Poltergeist 4K release for its 40th Anniversary, and a book on the making of Spontaneous Combustion by writer Stan Giesea.

For information and purchasing options: UTPress Book Listing / Amazon / Kindle