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General News: Cornwall Author Publishes Book About Bruce Dern
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| Fryer and his book on Bruce Dern |
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| Fryer and his book on Jack Nicholson |
June 26, 2007
As film students in Los Angeles in the late 1960s, Chris Fryer and his friend Bob Crane dreamed up an idea. Why not try to interview the actor Jack Nicholson for their school project on anti-heroes in contemporary movies? The teacher gave his OK to their plan and they set off to track down the actor.
“We got Jack’s home phone number, “ Chris Fryer recalled recently. “He answered the phone and said ‘what do you want?’”
Nicholson had just made the film Easy Rider after a dozen or so flicks throughout the 1960s with titles like Rebel Rousers and Back Door to Hell. He was on the verge of becoming a Hollywood celebrity but he told the two college kids that he would sit down with them for an interview.
Fryer and Crane also tracked down a lot of the actors who appeared in films with Nicholson or directors who had worked with him and got them to talk. Among those were Karen Black, Sally Struthers, Ann-Margaret, Hal Ashby, Robert Evans, Dennis Hopper and Bruce Dern.
The duo received an A for the project and then decided to try to publish it. The result is the book “Jack Nicholson: Face to Face.”
Fast-forward 30+ years. Chris Fryer has been living a relatively quiet life in Cornwall, writing screen plays and, with his wife, pursuing an interest in birds that has taken him to several remote corners of the world.
“Bob called me and proposed that we do a book about Bruce Dern,” Chris says. “Dern had the best stories of all the people we had interviewed for the earlier book and we had maintained a relationship with him over the years.”
Dern’s reactions was “who’d want to read a book about me?” Plenty of people, according to Chris, who recounted Dern’s early start on Broadway in 1959 and his move to film.
Dern, he said, had worked with film giants Elia Kazan, Hitchcock and Bette Davis. The actor gained legions of admirers for the role he played in Coming Home as the Army officer returning from Vietnam to find his wife (Jane Fonda) having an affair with a disabled war veteran (Jon Voight).
Dern earned a reputation as a character actor, appearing in dozens of films throughout his ongoing career. Last year, he appeared in the Astronaut Farmer and created a new character on the HBO series Big Love.
Once they got a green light, Fryer and Crane conducted a series of interviews with Dern, who is a great storyteller. Then they took all 60 hours of recorded interviews and shaped them into a book.
In April of this year the book, “Things I’ve Said But Probably Shouldn’t Have: An Unrepentant Memoir” was published by John Wiley & Sons. It has been well-received, especially in the film world of southern California, where it hit the bestseller list of the Los Angeles Times earlier this month.
So what’s next for Cornwall author Cris Fryer? He’s not saying at the moment.
In fact, he is not even showing his face much around here. He sat for an interview at 2 Alices Coffee Lounge and yes, that’s him in the photos behind his books. He is also pictured on the back on the Jack Nicholson book, looking every bit the southern Californian surfer kid that still lurks within him today.
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