New York Film Historian

Saul Austerlitz

will read from and discuss his new book

Another Fine Mess:

 A History of American Film Comedy

Tuesday,  September 14, 7pm

Charlie Chaplin. Buster Keaton. The Marx Brothers. Billy Wilder. Woody Allen. The Coen brothers. Where would the American film be without them? And yet, the cinematic genre they all represent -- comedy -- has perennially received short shrift from critics, film buffs, and the Academy Awards. Another Fine Mess: A History of American Film Comedy is an attempt to right that wrong. Running the gamut of film history, from City Lights to Knocked Up, Another Fine Mess retells the story of American film from the perspective of its unwanted stepbrother -- the comedy. In 30 chapters, each devoted to a single performer or director, Another Fine Mess retraces the steps of the American comedy film, filling in the gaps and following the connections that link Mae West to Doris Day, or W.C. Fields to Will Ferrell.

Another Fine Mess is an attempt to rectify the legacy of inattention, by studying the American comedy film, not only as a worthy cinematic genre, but as a craft in which the members of the guild are influenced by their predecessors, and in turn, influence their successors. The first book of its kind in more than a generation, Another Fine Mess is an all-expenses-paid tour of the American comedy, encompassing the masterpieces, the box-offices smashes, and all the little-known gems in between.

Saul Austerlitz  has been published in the Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Boston Globe, Slate, Village Voice, The National, San Francisco Chronicle, Spin, Rolling Stone, Paste, and other publications. He is the author of Money for Nothing: A History of the Music Video from the Beatles to the White Stripes. Money for Nothing is being made into a forthcoming documentary film, for which he has written the script.

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Professor

Yunte Huang

will discuss his critically acclaimed new book

CHARLIE  CHAN:
 The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective
and his Rendezvous with American History

Charlie Chan promises to be a landmark work in twentieth-century American racial history. Chronicling the fraught narrative of one of Hollywood's most enduring cinematic detectives, Yunte Huang uncovers the untold story of the real "Charlie Chan," a bullwhip-wielding, five-foot Chinese-American detective whose raids on opium dens and gambling parlors transformed him into a Hawaiian legend. Huang, in fact, has created a historic drama where none was known to exist, brilliantly juxtaposing Chang Apana’s personal story against a larger backdrop of territorial Hawaii, torn apart by virulent racism. As Huang demonstrates, Apana’s bravado and heroism inspired not only E. D. Biggers, a Harvard graduate turned celebrity mystery sleuth, to write six best-selling Charlie Chan novels, but Hollywood to manufacture over forty internationally popular Chan movies starring a wisecracking, grammatically challenged detective with a knack for turning Oriental wisdom into singsong Chinatown blues. Examining hundreds of biographical, literary, and cinematic sources, both in English and in his native Chinese, Huang has created with Charlie Chan a literary tour-de-force that places “the honorable detective” on a larger stage, in the process presenting Asian-American history in a way it has never been told before.

"An ingenious and absorbing book, that provides a convincing new mode for examining the Chinese experience through both Chinese and Western eyes. It will permanently change the way we tell this troubled yet gripping story."—Jonathan Spence, author of The Search for Modern China and Return to Dragon Mountain

Yunte Huang came to the U.S. in 1991 after graduating from Peking University with a B.A. in English. He received his Ph.D. from the Poetics Program at SUNY-Buffalo in 1999 and taught as an Assistant Professor of English at Harvard University from 1999-2003. He is the author of Transpacific Imaginations: History, Literature, Counterpoetics (2008), CRIBS (2005), Transpacific Displacement: Ethnography, Translation, and Intertextual Travel in Twentieth-Century American Literature (2002), and Shi: A Radical Reading of Chinese Poetry (1997); the translator into Chinese of Ezra Pound's The Pisan Cantos; and is currently Professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara.