James
Robert Parish, the author of more than one hundred books about
show business and Hollywood celebrities, took a coincidental and
circuitous route to a prolific writing life that has included
groundbreaking film reference works, revealing biographies of
actors and actresses, and lively pop culture compendiums. Few
writers have shown such industrious devotion to their subject
matter and even fewer are still going strong after more than thirty
years.
Parish got his start as a pop culture chronicler almost by accident.
In the 1960s, the future author was visiting Los Angeles on a
semester break from college in Philadelphia. While shopping at
a Hollywood bookstore, he filled out a photo purchase request
form with the names of his movie star favorites, mentioning his
partiality for 1930s celebrity, Kay Francis. A few weeks later,
he returned East and to his summer position as prop master at
the Cape Playhouse, the famous star-package theater located in
Dennis, Massachusetts. One day that July he received a note from
Gene Ringgold, an employee at the Hollywood Boulevard shop, telling
Parish that not only did the store now have Kay Francis photos
available for sale, but also asking whether he knew that Ms. Francis
was vacationing at a resort only fifteen miles from the Cape Playhouse.
That
memorable summer, the budding researcher met the elusive Ms. Francis
and built a pen-pal relationship with Ringgold. The latter suggested
that he and Jim collaborate on an article on Francis for Films
in Review, the movie history monthly. The published piece
was the start of Jim's writing career.
While attending the University of Pennsylvania Law School, Jim
remained devoted to show business, spending his summers at the
Cape Playhouse working with such celebrities as Tallulah Bankhead,
Myrna Loy, Art Carney, William Bendix, and Hermione Gingold.
Most
law school graduates undertake a cram course seminar before tackling
the bar test. Many evenings while Parish was studying for the
New York Bar, he missed many of these classes, instead attending
a Greta Garbo film festival on Manhattan's West Side, or spending
weekends at the Cape Playhouse assisting with the opening of the
new season. After passing the exam and, later, being sworn in
as a member of the New York Bar, Parish began working for a copyright
law firm in New York City. Thereafter, he founded his own research
company, Entertainment Copyright Research Co. Inc.
A few years later, his response to an advertisement in Films
in Review magazine again changed Jim's career path. An established
writer, the late Paul Michael, had been contracted to write the
American Movies Reference Book, but required an associate
to organize, staff, and assist in the writing of the tome. The
book went on to win an American Library Association prize. It
was the start of Jim's professional writing career, one that has
spanned some 105 books (major biographies and big reference books)
to date.
One
of his most challenging early projects in these years before personal
computers was creating Actors TV Credits. Long frustrated
that there was no source available which listed an actor's television
credits, Parish spent months at the Lincoln Center Library for
the Performing Arts typing thousands of index cards from his perusal
of every issue of TV Guide magazine from 1950 to that time. The
resultant volume was the first in a series of volumes documenting
actors TV work and, in turn, it became a mainstay for industry
research.
Since
then, Parish has authored or co-authored such entries as The
MGM Stock Company, The Debonairs, The Great Spy Pictures, Prison
Pictures from Hollywood, The Elvis Presley Scrapbook, Liza Minnelli,
The "Murder She Wrote" Casebook, and The
Great Detective Pictures. His recent books include Fiasco:
A History of Hollywood's Iconic Flops, The
Hollywood Book of Scandals, The Hollywood Book of Extravagance, Career Opportunities in Library and Information Sciences, Career Opportunities in the Energy Industry, and biographies of Mel Brooks, Katharine
Hepburn, Whitney Houston,
Whoopi Goldberg, Rosie O'Donnell, Jet Li, Jason Biggs, and Gus
Van Sant, as well as such big reference tomes as The
Encyclopedia of Ethnic Groups in Hollywood, Hollywood Songsters,
The Hollywood Book of Death, and Hollywood Divas.
A
great believer in assisting novice authors as they break into
the profession, he has helped hundreds of individuals gain their
first writing credentials. In this capacity, he has served as
acquisition editor and consultant for several publishers and was
series editor of Greenwood Press's acclaimed Bio-Bibliographies
in the Performing Arts. He is known to many who write about and
do research on the entertainment industry as a living database
of Hollywood legend and lore, fact and anecdote.
A long-time resident of Studio City, California, Mr. Parish is
a sought-after authority and consultant for TV documentaries and
biographies, and has appeared frequently on NBC Dateline,
A&E Biography, E! TV's Mysteries & Scandals
and E!
TV's True Hollywood Stories,
Court TV's Hollywood Justice, Fox Cable News' Rita
Cosby Show, ABC's Cops on the Screen and other national
news shows and specials dealing with the performing arts, as well
as specials and series episodes produced by England's BBC, Granada
TV, and Channel 4.
James
Robert Parish, the author of more than one hundred books about
show business and Hollywood celebrities, took a coincidental and
circuitous route to a prolific writing life that has included
groundbreaking film reference works, revealing biographies of
actors and actresses, and lively pop culture compendiums. Few
writers have shown such industrious devotion to their subject
matter and even fewer are still going strong after more than thirty
years.
That
memorable summer, the budding researcher met the elusive Ms. Francis
and built a pen-pal relationship with Ringgold. The latter suggested
that he and Jim collaborate on an article on Francis for Films
in Review, the movie history monthly. The published piece
was the start of Jim's writing career.
Most
law school graduates undertake a cram course seminar before tackling
the bar test. Many evenings while Parish was studying for the
New York Bar, he missed many of these classes, instead attending
a Greta Garbo film festival on Manhattan's West Side, or spending
weekends at the Cape Playhouse assisting with the opening of the
new season. After passing the exam and, later, being sworn in
as a member of the New York Bar, Parish began working for a copyright
law firm in New York City. Thereafter, he founded his own research
company, Entertainment Copyright Research Co. Inc.
One
of his most challenging early projects in these years before personal
computers was creating Actors TV Credits. Long frustrated
that there was no source available which listed an actor's television
credits, Parish spent months at the Lincoln Center Library for
the Performing Arts typing thousands of index cards from his perusal
of every issue of TV Guide magazine from 1950 to that time. The
resultant volume was the first in a series of volumes documenting
actors TV work and, in turn, it became a mainstay for industry
research.
A
great believer in assisting novice authors as they break into
the profession, he has helped hundreds of individuals gain their
first writing credentials. In this capacity, he has served as
acquisition editor and consultant for several publishers and was
series editor of Greenwood Press's acclaimed Bio-Bibliographies
in the Performing Arts. He is known to many who write about and
do research on the entertainment industry as a living database
of Hollywood legend and lore, fact and anecdote.