Goldberg. Lee Goldberg.

The prolific crime novelist began his professional writing career as many scribes do: at the college paper. Whereas I had to report on the facility management department at the University of Oklahoma, Goldberg leveraged UCLA’s ink to write about his first love: 007, if you haven’t guessed by now.

The resulting interviews and articles from those pages — as well as Starlog, Cinefantastique and Prevue magazines — come collected in the slim, but satisfying The James Bond Films 1962-1989: Interviews with the Actors, Writers and Producers.

Four consecutive outings make up the bulk of the 120-page paperback: the “unofficial” Sean Connery comeback, Never Say Never Again; Roger Moore’s final outing, A View to a Kill (a set visit to which kicks off the contents); and both Timothy Daltons, The Living Daylights and Licence to Kill.

However, the best chapter involves none of the above. It’s an interview with Richard Maibaum, screenwriter of much of the franchise since its ’62 start. On the eve of Octopussy’s release, Maibaum redefines “candid” by trash-talking everything from the one-liners and scripts he didn’t write to, heck, leading man Roger Moore! I have no idea what Maibaum was thinking (or drinking?), but with such self-bloviating, I’m surprised producer Albert R. Broccoli didn’t can him. It’s the kind of interview studios wouldn’t let happen in today’s environment of fanboy-baiting paid junkets. (Journalism is dead, folks.)

Goldberg unearths another massive ego when he interviews George Lazenby, the infamous one-time Bond, still with a huge chip on both shoulders. By contrast, the other one-timer, Barry Nelson — the first onscreen 007, thanks to a 1954 live TV presentation of Casino Royale — has the right attitude. So does regular screenwriter Tom Mankiewicz, who correctly dubs the Bond series as “the Rolls Royce of action films.”

Goldberg’s book is quite a time capsule for James Bond fans, offering glimpses at select films through major creative talents. What it’s not is a front-to-back narrative, so don’t expect that; do expect a little repetition, necessary for piece-by-piece context — these are reprints, after all. Being a sucker for the 007 movies, I regularly buy books about them … only to usually emerge disappointed. That’s not the case with The James Bond Films 1962-1989, thanks to Goldberg’s access, insight and skill, approaching the work as one should: a writer first, a fan second. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Two things about the title of TV Gothic: The Golden Age of Small Screen Horror could limit the trade paperback’s potentially fervent audience. First, “TV Gothic” suggests it only covers Gothic horror, whereas author Howard Maxford covers horror in general.

Second, “The Golden Age” suggests it covers only a finite range of years — possibly the 1970s, based on the Salem’s Lot image adorning the front — but in truth, Maxford truly scours tube history for seemingly every relevant show to hit the airwaves shortly after the medium’s inception. A boo show here and a boo show there, everywhere a boo show — many more exist than you think, and while some may merit a mere sentence or two, inclusion is the name of Maxford’s game. If the subject interests you, roll the dice!

Now, if you’re hoping for an episode guide of the genre’s most prominent series, don’t, because TV Gothic is not that book. (However, that book already exists, as John Kenneth Muir’s Terror Television, highly recommended and also from McFarland & Company.) It’s also not an encyclopedia as Maxford’s 2018 book, Hammer Complete: The Films, the Personnel, the Company (yep, McFarland again), was.

So what is this one? Reading TV Gothic is akin to sitting Maxford in the comfiest chair possible and asking him to tell you the complete story of the previous millennium’s cathode-ray chillers. The result: a fact dump that might annoy if it weren’t so damned thoroughly, meticulously researched. He includes everything you expect: Dark Shadows, those wonderful ’70s made-for-TV movies, Kolchak: The Night Stalker, all the anthologies, The X-Files, the UK Christmas ghost stories and the kiddie cartoons. Each short-lived show I recall from my youth — Cliffhangers, Darkroom, et al. — is covered.

Along the way are more shows since forgotten, if you noticed them at all — Shirley Temple’s Storybook, anyone? TV Gothic is such a wealth of information, it should be unbelievable … yet here it is. My largest point of dissent is that Maxford stops at 2000, other than including a list in the appendix. Certainly I’m not the only one wanting to reminisce about Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace and Harper’s Island? —Rod Lott

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In 1981, my fifth-grade homeroom teacher postponed class to warn us about a clown seen around Oklahoma City school playgrounds. “If he offers you candy or stamps with cartoon characters on it, don’t take it!” she said sternly. “It’s laced with acid.”

We were scared straight, plus downright scared. Children, parents, teachers and authority figures nationwide were. The clown didn’t exist, but the “satanic panic” did, and kid-friendly tabs of LSD were one whispered method of indoctrination. As Rick Emerson delineate in his new nonfiction book, we have the bestselling “diary,” Go Ask Alice, to thank. Or “thank,” because while the book helped some YA readers, its anonymous author, Beatrice Sparks, lived on lies to fuel a delusional ego and desperate need for attention, no matter the lives she destroyed and discarded along the way.

I’ve never read Go Ask Alice or seen the 1973 Emmy-nominated telepic it spawned, starring William Shatner and Andy Griffith. But being familiar with both and living through the resulting hysteria that pilloried everything from rock music to Dungeons & Dragons, Emerson’s Unmask Alice: LSD, Satanic Panic, and the Imposter Behind the World’s Most Notorious Diaries held an undeniable lure. It’s unmissable.

Published in 1971, Go Ask Alice recalled a normal suburban teenage girl’s descent into drugs and ultimately death, via the journal entries she left behind. America was horrified — and gripped. The big problem is, it was all made up, which Sparks failed to inform her publisher, not that the publisher did anything about all the red flags. The bigger problem is, she didn’t stop there.

Emerson uses Unmask Alice as a triple-purpose biography, charting three lives: that of Sparks; her book, formed from such external cultural forces as Art Linkletter, Charles Manson and Richard Nixon; and poor Alden Niel Barrett, whose abrupt existence was essentially stolen by Sparks for her family-wrecking follow-up. While Emerson does a terrific job in chasing each inexorably linked strand to its end, sharing Barrett’s story — and restoring the reputation of him and his parents — appears to hold the most amount of passion for the author.

Emerson’s hit-the-pavement research keeps Unmask Alice grounded in facts while a fiction-like knack for storytelling never fails to drive you forward. He employs what I call “the Dan Brown method” of structuring chapters, often limiting them to a super-short three or four pages. That way, to paraphrase Lay’s Potato Chips tagline, betcha can’t read just one. I sure couldn’t. —Rod Lott

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Writes Jon Lewis in his introduction to his new book, “In counterculture Hollywood there were any number of road trips, and most of them … led nowhere, at least nowhere good.” The next 251 pages prove that true. But out of “nowhere good” comes greatness, because Road Trip to Nowhere: Hollywood Encounters the Counterculture is the smartest, most fascinating film book 2022 has brought.

Don’t be put off by its publication from University of California Press or Lewis’ day job as a college film professor; it’s as accessible as it is intelligent (mangling of Cybill Shepherd’s name as “Cybil Shepard” aside).

The second word of Road Trip to Nowhere’s title should be plural, for its structure is vignette-driven: four separate essays with the commonality of time, place and mood. At roughly 60 pages apiece, do the individual pieces of Lewis’ quartet flow into a whole? Not really. Do I care? Not a whit. Each chapter is utterly fascinating and intoxicating in its mix of criticism and cultural history, reminiscent of the pleasures of Charles Taylor’s Opening Wednesday at a Theater or Drive-In Near You: The Shadow Cinema of the American ’70s.

Lewis starts with the stories behind a pair of key youthquake movies. The first, Dennis Hopper’s independent Easy Rider, proved such a from-nowhere hit, it sent an empty-handed studio system into panic mode. The second, Michelangelo Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point, is one of the panic-spawned results — and proof the suits didn’t have a clue at how out of touch they were with the a-changin’ times. (For those interested in more on Zabriskie and the literal cult from which its doomed lead was cast, I highly recommend Ryan H. Walsh’s Astral Weeks: A Secret History of 1968.)

Next, “Christopher Jones Does Not Want to Be a Movie Star” chronicles the quick rise and quicker flameout of Jones, a troubled youth briefly turned into AIP’s top dog at the box office, thanks to a resemblance to James Dean — all in the face, not talent. After climbing from B-movie maven Samuel Z. Arkoff to A-list director David Lean, he walked away from it all … and into homelessness, yet another sad casualty of Tinseltown.

Chapter three is similar, but charts the paths of four actresses of varying fame: Jean Seberg, Jane Fonda, Dolores Hart and Barbara Loden. That only two got happy endings says a great deal about the system’s meat-grinding machinations; that one of those happy endings required getting thee to a nunnery says a great deal more.

Finally, Lewis considers Charles Manson. And really, how could he not? As Lewis posits, “Being counterculture in Hollywood meant one thing before August 1969 and something else again afterward.” Rather than simply revisit the details of Sharon Tate’s slaughter, Lewis tells a cautionary tale of Hollywood with “unsavory characters” in its orbit, from Manson back to the horrific dissection of Black Dahlia Elizabeth Short in 1947 and the unsolved murder of actor William Desmond Taylor in 1922. The line from one to the next is so smoothly drawn, it may as well be the Pacific Coast Highway.

With Road Trip to Nowhere somehow being my first exposure to Lewis, I grew anxious when I hit its halfway point, facing an inevitably end. Immediately, I ordered two more Lewis titles of film history, Hard-Boiled Hollywood and Hollywood v. Hard Core. For Road Trip, I can think of no finer praise than that. To borrow chapter four’s last line, “The defense rests.” —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Paul Downey’s The Shark Is Roaring achieves the impossible: making me want to rewatch Jaws: The Revenge. Subtitled, simply enough, The Story of Jaws: The Revenge, the BearManor Media trade paperback dives deep deep deep into everything you never knew about the 1987 sequel because, well, who wanted to?

Obviously, Downey did. Even if, like me, you dislike or perhaps downright loathe the franchise-killing third sequel, its backstory is undeniably entertaining; there’s more to tell than Michael Caine’s oft-repeated crack about the house he earned for time served. As the author details, the project was a rush job with a mere nine-month turnaround to meet the cart-before-horse date Universal had staked in 1987’s summer-movie calendar. Initial chapters weigh too heavily on a press kit-style recitation of facts and figures before getting to the good stuff of shooting down rumors and amplifying lesser-known info. Hey, who knew Miracle Mile’s Steve De Jarnatt was hired to write a script?

Reviews of Revenge were — how to put this? — unkind. Downey reprints excerpts of critical reaction for the record, your honor, with Roger Ebert’s diss of the shark looking like “canvas with acne” being particularly choice. Even Jaws: The Revenge director Joseph Sargent gets his own licks in, via an existing interview: “How do grown men with rather good credentials in terms of their training, their worldliness, how do we get involved with something that idiotic? It still puzzles me.”

Downey offers oodles of differences between the script and screen, as well what changes between the feature’s various cuts. For example, a BBC broadcast in an improper ratio inadvertently revealed wires and other nuts-and-bolts evidence never meant to be glimpsed; meanwhile, the AMC cable cut carries a title card seemingly written by Criswell: “When there is no factor motivating an event, no case of cause creating effect; what triggered the action? Fate or circumstance?” Such a philosophical/metaphysical question surely was better suited for Hank Searls’ infamously voodoo-driven novelization, also discussed at length.

I wish The Shark Is Roaring carried a narrative throughline, but at least its topic-organized contents makes it a breezy, in-and-out read for lunch hours. Late chapters veer into Jaws cash-in video games and post-Revenge shark movies. Unfortunately, among these pages is an overly snide guest chapter from podcaster and moviemaker B. Harrison Smith, delivering a “fuck you” (his words) to the film. That the writer and director of Zombie Killers: Elephant’s Graveyard rants about “demanding better of our entertainment” than this “lowest of shit food” delivers is hypocritical at best, and sours Downey’s otherwise fairly fun party. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon or BearManor Media.