House of Dan Curtis, Second Edition - Jeff Thompson

The award-winning auteur producer-director Dan Curtis made television history with the epic miniseries The Winds of War and War and Remembrance, the horror movies The Night Stalker and Trilogy of Terror, and the cult-classic Gothic serial Dark Shadows.  Curtis also generated a large body of work in the mystery genre.     This book provides information about all four dozen of Dan Curtis’s productions, from Challenge Golf (1963) to Our Fathers (2005), in chapters devoted to Curtis’s horrors (The Night Strangler), epics (Intruders), dramas (The Love Letter), pilots (The Big Easy), and mysteries.  Among those mysteries are seven Wide World Mystery episodes that Dan Curtis produced, co-wrote, and/or directed, as well as The Great Ice Rip-Off, Express to Terror, and more.  Also included is information about more than fifteen Dan Curtis productions that were planned but never produced, such as The Last of the Crazy People and I Love Harrisburg in the Springtime.     The revised second edition of House of Dan Curtis features seventy-five photographs, new information about Master of Dark Shadows: The Gothic World of Dan Curtis, a preface by My Music producer Jim Pierson, and a foreword by James Storm, the Bold and the Beautiful star who first appeared in six projects from the production house of Dan Curtis (Dark Shadows, Night of Dark Shadows, Scream of the Wolf, Wide World Mystery, Trilogy of Terror, and The Kansas City Massacre).  Director Ansel H. Faraj (Doctor Mabuse, Loon Lake) provides an afterword.        JEFF THOMPSON has taught English at Tennessee State University since 1985.  He writes articles about education, film, television, comic books, music, and popular culture for magazines, books, and websites.  He is the Rondo Award-nominated author of The Television Horrors of Dan Curtis: Dark Shadows, The Night Stalker, and Other Productions, 1966-2006 (McFarland, 2009; 2nd ed., 2019) and Nights of Dan Curtis: The Television Epics of the Dark Shadows Auteur (Ideas into Books, 2016; 2nd ed., 2020).        On the cover: Charles Macaulay (left) and George Maharis play brothers in the 1974 Wide World Mystery production Come Die with Me, produced by Dan Curtis and directed by Burt Brinckerhoff.