Paperbacks from Hell [N.F. - Literature, Art]

TOM HALLMAN

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Artist Tom Hallman spent almost two years courting art director James Plumeri at New American Library before getting his first assignment for a nonfiction book called Masquerade: The Amazing Camouflage Deceptions of World War II. After that he worked almost exclusively for Plumeri, learning from his mentor how to make a book’s cover stand out from a rack, how to do more with less, how the strong simple visual statement was the most powerful.

One thing that Plumeri believed with all his heart was that that digital tools could never do what cover artists did using traditional media. But as the graphics editing program Adobe Photoshop gained wider use in the 1990s, Hallman realized this software was going to change his industry forever. Artists like him who learned to use it found that they could speed up production but still be paid their usual rates, allowing them to rake in the bucks. Then publishers caught on. First the rates for the artists fell because the powers that be reasoned that something done quickly should be done cheaply. Then marketing departments started demanding artists to revise finished art because digital tools made last-minute changes easier to execute. Production schedules sped up and turnaround times were cut.

But despite the massive, disruptive impact, digital tools weren’t all bad.

“What’s internal to me is kept,” Hallman says. “And I don’t miss mixing paint. Besides, the way I painted, I’d be dead by now. It ruined my back.”

Stage Fright

Ah, the deceptive lure of show business. Hollywood may seem glamorous, but it’s not all salads served with imported Norwegian crackers and closets full of stylish silver jumpsuits. Breaking in is hard, and it can go wrong in so many ways. First, consider the pitfalls of securing financing. Say, for instance, you’re making an independent movie about a serial killer. There is a larger than average chance that your only backers will be serial killers who want to use your movie to conceal their crimes. Even worse, not only do they want script input, they also want to trick you into raping and murdering your son on camera (Below the Line, 1987).

And yet, the lure of show business is hard to resist, and that was especially so in the ’80s, when even a book about a snuff film like Below the Line spends much of its time laying out film financing and tax shelters in enough detail for any wannabe Bruckheimer to follow. The greatest show-biz seductress of them all was Judi Miller, the Aaron Spelling of horror novels. Both of her show-business slasher novels—Save the Last Dance for Me (1981) and Phantom of the Soap Opera (1988)—are aspirational movie-of-the-week catalogs of dreams seemingly designed to lure tourists to New York City, get them jobs in the entertainment industry, and murder them.

The only difference between the two books is that one is set in the world of ballet and the other is set in the world of daytime soap operas, which turn out to be remarkably similar. Each features psychopathic killers stalking the skinny and the beautiful, multiple red herrings, and guess-the-murderer plots. Soap opera stars take business meetings in the Russian Tea Room, drink strawberry margaritas, and order “the latest Thai delicacies.” Directors have their shirts unbuttoned to the navel and necks draped with gold chains. Wedding cakes are six feet tall, the best goodbye gift you can give your ballet teacher is a dramatic black cape, and if you’ve made it to the top, you probably have a heart-shaped bed.

It’s a sealed-off, snow-globe world of ’80s decadence, and it makes the killers seem even tackier. When we learn in Save the Last Dance that the psycho is murdering ballet students because his domineering mother grew too fat to be a ballerina, we nod because of course she did. Then we shiver as this loony takes his latest victim to Queens and makes her dance in a cold basement. She’ll ruin her feet! Then he makes her eat raw meat, lectures her for smoking, and forces her to learn terrible choreography, teaching every aspiring ballet dancer that the only fate worse than death is being trapped in one of the outer boroughs.