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Q.Joi Lansing was a real actress, right?
A.Yes. She was born in Salt Lake City in 1928, came to Hollywood in 1940, broke into the business as a model when she was still in high school and had a career in movies and television that lasted almost twenty-five years. She died of cancer in 1972.
Q. She's not particularly well known.
A. No, she was a perpetual starlet. Most of her career was spent at the edge of the screen, more a witness to film history than someone who made it.
Q. How did she become the focus of "Comfort and Joi"?
A. Like the narrator of the book, I turned around one day and realized, thanks to eBay, I'd collected a stack of magazines and stills of Joi Lansing as well as some of her obscure movies. eBay lets you reassemble your childhood piece-by-piece, unaware of any pattern until the stuff starts showing up at your doorstep. As the narrator says, "Obsessions sneak up on you, like snowdrifts."
Q.How was she part of your childhood?
A.I went to the movies and watched television as a kid and there she was: This amazing, idealized woman who burned into the hard wiring of my brain. She might have been nameless at the time, but she was unforgettable.
Q. That's "How," but "Why" Joi Lansing and not some other bombshell?
A. The book grew out of that question. Why did this actress stick in my mind? So, I gave my low-grade obsession to a fictional narrator, loaded him up with all my stills and tapes and DVDs and sent him to a borrowed house on the California coast during a gray November weekend to see what he'd come up with.
Q. And what did he come up with?
A. Well, he tries to write a serious study of Joi's "oeuvre," but it's not easy to apply serious theories of film criticism to movies like "Big Foot." When theory fails him, he tries to understand her in terms of his own experiences with the movies and how that experience has changed over the years.
Q.So there's more going on here than one man's fascination with an obscure pin-up girl.
A.The pin-up girl became a way into a sort of cinematic stream of consciousness. One of the reasons I wrote this book was to stir the reader into thinking about the movies they grew-up with, that serve as landmarks in their lives. Our personal memories ride along a parallel track with our movie memories. Sometimes we jump the track between the two.
Q.But movies are just movies.
A.I suppose to some they're just entertainment, but to the rest of us they're sources of moral instruction and myth, dramatic windows that let us try on all sorts of experiences and emotions.
Q.You love the movies.
A.I love them for the pleasure and guidance I've gotten from them, and that gratitude is one of the reasons for writing this book. And I love them the way an archeologist loves the commonplace and disposal things you find at a dig, the spoons and bowls that tell the story of an entire culture.
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