Writing about movies, monsters, cinematic events and other wild trips
My outstanding co-author, Jez Conolly, has written a piece for the Liverpool University Press blog to explain our motivation for writing about the film SECONDS.
We’d both love it if you’d read the blog article but even more if you’d buy the book we’ve written and breathe further life into a remarkable film that never got the attention it deserves.
Want to know more about John Frankenheimer’s criminally overlooked monolith of paranoia, SECONDS (1966)?
SECONDS by Jez Conolly and Emma Westwood, part of the Constellations series of sci-fi cinema books, is available from your favourite book pusher but you can also buy direct from the publisher, Liverpool University Press.
It may be the best film you’ve never seen. So watch now then digest this tasty monograph.
This book has been brewing for a while now, so I couldn’t think of a better way to end 2020 than to announce SECONDS is now available for pre-order (with a proposed release date of 21st April 2021).
It’s been such an amazing experience co-authoring with Jez Conolly and following his creative lead with this project. Hopefully, we can introduce SECONDS to a new audience and give the film at least some of the acclaim it deserves.
Viva Rock Hudson!
FINALLY, I can share the news that Jez Conolly and I are in the final stages of a book for Auteur Publishing’s Constellations science fiction imprint on John Frankenheimer’s much-underrated masterpiece, SECONDS, from 1966.
We’ve been at it across the past 12 months, working away quietly under wraps. But, the manuscript has now been sent to our publisher, John Atkinson. This thing is real!
I can’t thank Jez enough for (a) asking me to be his co-author and (b) providing such beautiful writing to encourage me (hopefully) to be better. I would dare to even call the experience ‘transformative’.
I’m so looking forward to giving SECONDS the attention this magnificent film deserves. It is really something very, very special, which our book is attempting to fully capture for the first time in long-form print.
Thank you, too, to Salome Jens, who is resplendent in the role of Nora Marcus, and who kindly agreed to be interviewed as part of our research.
It was a pleasure to host a panel on bears in cinema following the Cinemaniacs screening of Prophecy earlier this year.
For those who weren’t in attendance, we created a Facebook live video that is now immortalised on the Diabolique website. Please watch it, and be aware that the screen will turn from landscape to portrait at about the three-minute mark.
Thanks to Lee Gambin, Clem Bastow and Christian McCrea for being so wonderful.
On Saturday 17th March 2018, I get to introduce John Frankenheimer’s little-screened eco-monster thriller, Prophecy, at the Backlot Studios in Melbourne.
Following the screening, I will be hosting a panel featuring a menagerie of experts – Lee Gambin, Clem Bastow and Christian McCrea – discussing the subject of bears in cinema. And that’s not human bears but actual bears with claws and fur all over them.
I highly doubt there’s been a screening and panel anywhere in the world quite like this one. Here is the video evidence of it.
EMMA WESTWOOD 