Private Down Under by James Patterson

Private Down Under by James Patterson

Once I lived in a laudanum-fueled hallucination where, curious as usual, I cornered a raging badger thrashing to death an unfortunate hare in a stand of scrub oaks. Turning on me, it roared louder than a whole pride of lions in the Serengeti. I peed my pants. My heart cramped, wringing itself out like a sponge. Having made the stupid mistake of following the angry beast and facing it in a Mexican standoff no more than three feet apart, I fled in slow motion, as if in a dream, screaming for help I feared would never come. Now the badger was all over me, and I felt its tetanus-loaded fangs sink into my flesh. Suddenly, my father rushed out of the garage armed only with a hoe. As I awoke from my hellish nightmare I managed a sigh of relief. There was not a single wound on me. Daddy and his hoe had succeeded in slinging the furious, furry demon far out into the stratosphere. The flailing badger was now a Michelin-suited Russian cosmonaut with two fuzzy ears illuminated against a backdrop of stars shining through its clear space helmet, a tether attaching its belly to the Mother Ship, and its four outstretched limbs spiraling farther and farther away from our galaxy.

Michael White is one of the most inspirational producers of our time, responsible for changing the face of Britain's cultural scene in the 1970s. White has been involved in an amazingly wide range of shows, many of them hits, some of them disastrous failures, all of them unusual. His career encompasses the plays of Athol Fugard, Joe Orton's Loot, Oh! Calcutta!, the catastrophic Jeeves, the money-spinning Sleuth, The Threepenny Opera, starring Vanessa Redgrave, The Rocky Horror Show, and movies ranging from My Dinner with Andre to Monty Python cannot, by the wildest stretch of the imagination, be dubbed conventional.

In this autobiography, originally published as Empty Seats in 1984, Michael White tells many marvelous stories and asks some wonderful questions. Why did Orson Welles make a one-armed Peter Daubeny carry his suitcases? What really happened during a performance of The Dirtiest Show in Town? What did Peter Sellers do to Spike Milligan's roast chicken? What were Kenneth Tynan, Joe Orton, and Dame Edna Everage really like? The reader discovers how a play is put on, what kind of money is involved, what techniques are used. You, too, White seems to say, can be a producer. And this is how you set about it. Drawing on all too many experiences he might prefer to forget, White would no doubt add, And that way madness lies.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780750540018
ISBN 10	075054001X
Title	Private Down Under
Author	James Patterson
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Magna Large Print Books
Year published	2015-06-01
Number of pages	288
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.