Geoffrey O’Brien
Geoffrey O’Brien’s books include Dream Time: Chapters from the Sixties (1988), The Phantom Empire (1993), The Browser's Ecstasy (2000), Sonata for Jukebox (2004), The Fall of the House of Walworth (2010), and Stolen Glimpses, Captive Shadows: Writing on Film 2002-2012 (2013). He has published eight collections of poetry, most recently The Blue Hill (2018). He lives in Brooklyn.
from Arabian Nights of 1934
By Geoffrey O’BrienArabian Nights of 1934 is a journey through the counter-reality embodied in American movies of the early 1930s, leading up to the enforcement of the Production Code in July 1934. It distills a thousand and one nights of Depression-era movie-going—situations, images, cityscapes, jokes and retorts and frantic outbursts—into a streamlined parallel life, the stories bleeding into one another as they did in the minds of the viewers whom they helped sustain.
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