Mabel and Me

Mabel and Me:
A Novel About the Movies

by Jon Boorstin

It's 1912 in Hollywood, the birth of the Movies, and Mabel Normand, beautiful and funny, the model of the modern comedy star, is shocking the world. This intimate novel takes us inside the earliest days of motion pictures, and together with the Queen of Comedy—a flapper a decade before flappers, the first to have her name in the title of a picture—we become obsessed with motion pictures, in love with their mesmerizing power. As sharply observed as it is historically accurate, Mabel and Me is the tale of a young man's coming of age with the Movies, and his passionate, destructive, and ultimately liberating love for the queen of slapstick—Mabel Normand. Their story is the birth of our media age.

Jon Boorstin's first novel, Pay or Play, was called "the definitive sendup of Hollywood" by Publishers Weekly in a starred review. His second, The Newsboys' Lodging-House, was a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers book and won the New York Society Library Award for Historical Fiction. He's also written a book of practical film theory, The Hollywood Eye, which has found its way to film schools as Making Movies Work. The work of an Oscar®-nominated documentary filmmaker and longtime screenwriter and producer, Mabel and Me is the culmination of Boorstin's lifelong affair with the Movies. He lives in Los Angeles.

  • 308 pages
  • 6"x9"
  • hardcover; ISBN 978-1-62640-016-0; $27.00
  • *** also available as an e-book; click to order from iTunes | Amazon ***