Mallory O'MearaReseñas

A feminist paean to a complex and talented woman,or, really, two. I found myself pulling for the author as she struggled to perform some pretty in-depth research without any prior training. Her. Love of the subject always won out and makes you root for her and Milicent all the way through. Much that was sad, but overall, uplifting

3.5 stars, rounding up to 4- I do like this and for a biography of someone so obscured Mallory does excellent digging (with notes when she's unable to verify things). However, I recognize the author asides in footnotes and casual conversational tone could be off-putting to readers and I almost feel like I should include the caveat that I do listen to Reading Glasses so I've heard Mallory speak before.

There are two narratives here: the framing is Mallory O'Meara's interest in Milicent Patrick as a fellow woman in the horror film industry and digging through research to find her, and then the story of Milicent's life from being raised at Hearst Castle while her father built it to being pioneer in many ways in the entertainment industry. Milicent changed names periodically which obfuscated the trail, and the credit for designing Gill Man was hidden by an egotistical department head. Despite decades separating us from Patrick's working years, the entertainment industry still has a long way to go in terms of equitable, safe working environments where the work of marginalized folx is respected.

I find Mallory personable, like this is another podcast episode and she's amiably telling me about how her research quest is going. i recognize that's not everyone's cup of tea! It makes for a breezy read though.

Additional caveat: I actually still haven't seen Creature from the Black Lagoon or its sequels, though I did watch The Shape of Water and Lindsay Ellis's vid on why we love monster boyfriend stories- suggest that next if you're interested in the topic.

This book is amazing. I am a lifelong fan of The Creature From the Black Lagoon and reading the story of Milicent Patrick was a journey well worth taking. Her design of the creature was perfection. This book was full of joy for me. Watching horror movies as a kid are some of my only fond memories. Watching Creature From the Black Lagoon was what made me a lifelong movie fan.

I actually learned a lot from this book and not just about women and booze - I learned a lot about the history of alcohol and was super intrigued throughout the whole book. Mallory O'Meara does an excellent job of giving readers the history of women and booze while also highlighting some extremely influential women along the way. There were so many interesting tid bits about how alcohol was made - where customs and laws came from - and of course - how women got the short end of the stick time and time again. Women do not get nearly enough credit for their impact and are even now still overshadowed by their male counterpoints. I think this book is important for anyone who likes learning about history and drinking. A fun and extremely enlightening read!

This was an amazing listen, and I loved everything about it. Milicent Patrick had a fascinating life, but I most loved how Mallory O’Meara shared her own story and her journey to writing this book; the way she researched was truly inspiring for me as a layperson who just wants to keep finding out more. There’s so much here about women through the years and how they have to continually deal with bad men, and I appreciated the calling out of them and oof Hollywood seems like it sucks. I loved having the ebook also nearby to check out the photos, and I loved all the footnotes as only a few made it into the audiobook.

A worthy tale, certainly, both the historical section and O'Meara's personal journey, but 100% of my issues with it have to do with O'Meara's inexperience as a journalist; she projects wildly and draws larger generalizations where they may not be warranted.

I'm not, to be clear, talking about generalizations about sexism and sexual harassment in Hollywood. I'm certain that part is true. But much of the analysis of Patrick's motivations seem to be drawn from O'Meara's personal experience rather than any evidence, barring documents and letters that she didn't directly mention in the text. Shorter version, this needed a lot of footnotes to make the assertions that it does.

That said, worth reading if you have an interest in Hollywood of years gone by, or want to read about the story of Millicent Patrick, who was unjustly denied credit for her achievements for many years.

I'm not a huge fan of the Hollywood scene. I'm not enamored of any part of the industry. When this book was selected for my women's history book club, I sighed. I could think of a thousand other books I wanted to read. It wasn't as bad as I feared, but neither was it great. The book's subject was makeup artist and animator Milicent Patrick who went by various names over her life. Her most famous creation was the Creature from the Black Lagoon. While the author dug into Milicent's background, her research could have been improved by paying for genealogical services--whether in the form of digging into the lives of the FAN Club or just expert consultation. Toward the end she did consult "the Mormons," but it is obvious she neglected some of the things she couldn't find earlier when she did consult them and that she put too much stock into trees that may or may not meet standards. Still the author found quite a bit of information through newspapers, interviews, and even some corporate archives. Fans of monster movies or animators may enjoy this, but it's a safe pass for most readers.

Artist, background actor, and model Milicent Patrick left her mark on the film industry with her design for the Creature from the Black Lagoon. Patrick worked in special effects and makeup design before film credits started acknowledging the contributions of special effects teams. She was also a woman in a man’s world. As a result, Patrick’s contribution to the design of the Creature had been all but forgotten until author O’Meara made it her mission to give Patrick the credit she deserves.

Author O’Meara writes passionately about her subject, but the telling suffers from O’Meara’s inexperience as a researcher. (O’Meara worked as a veterinary technician before changing careers to film production.) She relied mainly on interviews to gather information. Occasionally someone would steer her toward archival material, but she admits to spending only a few hours in libraries and archives. Since O’Meara is challenging the historical narrative, she should have supplied source notes to back up her claims. (There is a bibliography, and there are endnotes, but the endnotes are commentary, not source notes.) Several times she mentioned that she was unable to find information about some of the people who surrounded Patrick. I was able to quickly find information about several of these individuals using sources O’Meara said she had used - Ancestry.com, Newspapers.com, and FamilySearch. O’Meara will likely regret not discovering that Patrick’s first husband Paul’s first wife was an animator at Disney. That tidbit adds a new dimension to their relationship triangle, and could explain Paul and Milicent’s abrupt departure from Disney. Guardedly recommended.

This book was an epic read! In short, it goes through the history of “girly” drinks but once you get to reading, it’s so much more. The author’s sarcasm and wit are a highlight throughout the book. There were many times I found myself laughing at a story that the author had included. The Prohibition chapter was my favorite but overall this is one of the best nonfiction books I’ve read this year. If you like alcohol and history, I highly recommend this book!

An absolute stunner of a book. This just joined the lineup of my favorite books of all time, that's how amazing I found it. The narration of the audiobook was perfect in every way. If there was an option to put in more than five stars I would do it so if you are waffling on whether to read it or not let me help you out, read it!

A fascinating history of how women have been integral to the use and role of alcohol in human (and pre-human) society.

Fascinating, rollicking ride through world history.

Who knew! Those were the first words that came to my mind when I finished reading O’Meara’s smart, original, and completely absorbing book exploring the story of how women were originally in charge of the production and distribution of alcohol, and how eventually denied this role due to patriarchy and thus mostly written out of history.

An engaging blend of mystery, history, and appealing wily influential women across different continents, cultures, and countries makes for an informative, accessible, and plain fascinating read!

I appreciated the journey from the beginnings of the business of alcohol to the present time when women are once again asserting and gaining the long overdue recognition being in the forefront in the business of alcohol.

I recommend this book to those who are interested in women’s history, the business of alcohol, or just occasionally enjoy an alcoholic drink!

I made it to page 213 / 313, and it took me about a year to get that far. I'm allowing myself to reshelve it, and come back to it at some nebulous future point.

Having said that, it is well written, meticulously researched, and covers some important ground in history of horror movies and the artists who worked on them. What didn't work as much for me here as it has in other such works is the foregrounding of the author. I can't point at anything here that differs from, say, Stasiland, where the foregrounding of the author was an important part of my experience. Here, I found that the author's experience was intrusive.

I loved this book. I’m not a drinker, but it doesn’t matter because the history here (covering thousands of years of alcohol) and amazing women make this a perfectly engaging read (or listen in my case). The history is so much fun (minus the rampant misogyny of course—men still suck and pretty much always have), and I loved learning so many new-to-me stories such as how much Hildegarde of Bingen was into brewing (and drinking) beer.

Also shoutout to Susan W. who apparently was a cocktail aficionado without me realizing it. In December of 2017, she introduced us to a Cosmopolitan in Rochester, New York, at a Christmas party. So when I turned 21 in January of 1998 the next month, I had to explain to the bartender at a piano bar in Asheville, North Carolina, how to make it (because he’d never heard of it). In my memories I assumed Susan heard about it from SatC, but apparently it wasn’t introduced there (and to the mainstream world) until 1999. My only pre-trend accomplishment in my life.

My review of this book can be found on my Youtube Vlog at:

https://youtu.be/1AXYlOoqLVg

Enjoy!

https://nwhyte.livejournal.com/3423925.html

A completely fascinating book. I am ashamed to say that I had never heard of Milicent Patrick, nor have I even seen The Creature from the Black Lagoon, in which she created the eponymous Creature. Mallory O'Meara recounts both Milicent Patrick's story and her own quest for information about this important creator who was written out of history, culminating in her efforts to trace and contact Milicent Patrick's surviving relatives. It's ultimately a sad story - after being fired for not being invisible enough in 1953, she lived another forty-five years without being able to do the work she was best at, doing odd bits and pieces of work in southern California. An important story.

Interesting. good book club discussions

3.5. I liked the Hollywood history and #metoo content, but horror and the post-studio era aren't really my genres. Milicent and the author were both likable and interesting, though.

(Summer reading: a non-fiction book.)

This was so interesting and engaging. It left me wanting to learn more about Hollywood monster creation, horror movies, and O'Meara's film work, and was super satisfying story-wise. Highly recommend!

This is a biography of a little-known woman named Milicent Patrick, who worked as one of the first woman animator at Disney (on Fantasia), then became a model and background actress, then a costume designer, famously designing the eponymous Creature from the Black Lagoon. O'Meara's thorough biography is entertaining and tragic, the vibrancy of its central figure bleeding through on the page despite the many enigmas surrounding her. There are lots of interesting facts her to annoy your friends with! O'Meara also details her own history of interest in Patrick, which was sometimes interesting; I liked her explanations of the research she did. On the other hand, her personal stories sometimes seemed to boil down to, "I too have experienced sexism," to which my reaction was that I was here to read about Milicent Patrick, not Mallory O'Meara.

I am so surprised by how much this book pulled me in and kept me entertained. It’s non-fiction! I had some people tell me they didn’t like it in audiobooks because the reader is the author, and she is not a professional and you could tell. To me, it was like having a conversation with a friend, and actually made me want to keep going.

I love the old universal monster movies. I never really thought about who did all the designs and made all the costumes. I guess I just assumed it was men, so to find out that a Woman had a big part in the design of the Creature From the Black Lagoon and never got credit for it pisses me off.

Milicent had an amazing life. It may not seem like it all the time, but she has one of a kind experiences and rightfully deserved her own book.

I also really enjoyed the author injecting themself into the story. Either to tell the reader/listener what parts of the research were hard, or what parts make her jump for joy, or even her own experiences in the modern horror world.

This book was eye opening in many different ways, and I found myself learning and taking in way more than normal when listening to audiobooks. All in all this was a lot of fun, and very entertaining. And I would read what the author puts out next. Hopefully still in the horror history genera.

#Booked2020
#Popsugar
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Rating: 3* of five

Milicent’s incredible life should have earned her an honored place in film history. But few even recognize her name. There’s still time to change that.

It's not that this is a bad book...it's that it's not a good biography. If you're marketing a book as a bio, make it one. The digressions, the disquisitions, the divagations all got in the way of Milicent Patrick's life. Of course it's clearly true that Patrick left little to no footprint to report on. A lot of that is down to sexism and professional jealousy. So don't market this as a bio of someone whose life story is so minimally documented. Make it a chapter in a polemic about women in the film industry being denied their proper credit.

Here's another example:

There are few women with as great an influence on Southern California’s reputation as a hub of twentieth-century American art than Nelbert Chouinard. She was, as they say, one bad motherfucker.

The Disney Studio probably wouldn't exist without the hearty help and unstinting financial generosity of Nelbert Chouinard of the Chouinard Art Institute, today called CalArts. Follow those links...Chouinard's legacy is immense, her biography paltry. It is a travesty. Here's a subject for O'Meara's talents as a researcher and tone as a writer...women buried by Time and Patriarchy. Polemical listicles, capsule bios, indignation at the self-evident, undeniable injustice of it.

The writing is so...let me be kind...unpretentious that it loses authority, which makes a difference in biography. Edmund Morris was playful about parts of Teddy Roosevelt's life and personality (see Theodore Rex particularly) without losing an overall voice that conveyed how deeply serious he was and how well he knew his subject. Do you get that sense about O'Meara's writing, using this representative squib on Milicent's mother's travails moving her family from South to North America?

If you have ever looked with pity at a mother consoling a crying baby on a flight, imagine Elise traveling by car, train and ship through four countries with a baby, two small children and no disposable diapers or air conditioning.

It's okay, it's about a person whose life was stolen from her by her gender role in a world even more unfair than out stinkingly unequal one, and I just don't think it's a whole entire book's worth of biography. There are too many side bios of William Randolph Hearst and Julia Morgan and La Chouinard and...well, you get my drift.

It's a solid B. Good effort, properly identified topic and subject, unfocused and scattershot while being entertaining.

I adored this book! I quickly learned how little I actually knew about Hollywood and its classic monsters and how much more I WANTED to learn. Boss babe, Mallory O'Meara (I seriously need to be friends with this chick), had always been enamored with the creature from the black lagoon and as a young goth and film industry worker she set out to learn more about the woman who created the iconic monster. Researching the woman behind the monster became an obsession and it led Mallory on a chase through old Hollywood, its sexism, horror tropes, and double standards. Milicent Patrick was a woman ahead of her time who got hardly any credit for her work as an artist. She created countless monsters, portraits, and even worked as an animator for Disney, but men always took credit for her work. Little is know about her, but O'Meara spends years putting together the bigger picture and attempts to give Milicent the credit and fame that she's owed. Witty, fascinating, and hard to put down. A book that horror nerds, Hollywood fans, and feminists will enjoy.