In this first part of this special two-part blog article, I am thrilled to offer some background information on the making of my Winona Ryder biography that was published in the UK twenty years ago today in paperback by John Blake Publishing ...
My love of movies dates back to the early 1960s when I first went to the cinema, with my parents, to see Carry On Constable, or at least that is my recollection of the first time I was treated to a night out at the pictures, but then twenty-six years later something extraordinary happened, I went to see a movie called Lucas. As I watched the scenes that featured a total unknown
named Winona Ryder, I was moved by the vulnerability behind her huge
hypnotic brown eyes. She has captivated me ever since with her public
profile and each of the movies she has appeared in from the age of twelve. When I discovered in 1996, some ten years and almost twenty films later, that there had never been a biography about her, I felt compelled to write one, which then consumed the next two years of my life, and with running a Facebook fan page for the book, still does to this day.
Twenty years on from when it was published, I thought it would be interesting to reflect on what became a major turning point in my writing career as up to that point I had only written music reference books, with the exception of a lightly worded illustrated biography of the Rolling Stones first ten years, but now I was jumping in at the deep end to write a full length biography of my favourite actress. I also want to try and address some of the questions I am often asked about the book. Several questions persist. How and when did I get the idea to write the book, did I ask Winona to participate, how did I go about the research, who did I speak to, and when will I update the original book?
Strangely enough, I was hoping to publish a special 20th anniversary edition this month, but could not find a publishing home for it. The idea for the all new edition was to completely revise the existing book by doing a new volume which would have been divided into three parts. The first part would focus on revisions to the original manuscript that have come to light since the book was first published, the second part would have been the original biography as it was published in 1998, and the third part was to go from where the original book left off up to the present, Stranger Things, and her latest movie Destination Wedding. But every publisher that I approached with it didn't feel that now was the right time to be republishing, even with all the additional content and Winona's renewed profile. My feeling was and still is that there is no better time to re-access her life and career. As I told the editorial and sales teams, as an actress who changed the way cinema depicts women, and has championed for so many in the industry, she deserves a really good and up-to-date biography to be available, but sadly it was not to be. The new edition would have created a completely new portrait, which among other things would have told the exclusive untold story of her first and fascinating experience with the still camera some years before she was cast in her first movie, including my author interviews with photographer and stylist, take a fresh look at her early years from her first kiss on a playground carousel to her love of skateboarding and returning to the limelight in the medium she once swore she would never do, and to question why she still refuses to conform to the Hollywood ideal of fame.
So how did the book all come about in the first place? Well, the initial idea came from Hannah MacDonald, then the publishing editor at Virgin Publishing. I had called her to ask if she would be interested in commissioning me to write a biography of Olivia Newton-John. Hannah's reply was not really. She said she was looking for someone more current at that time, someone who was regarded as young, cool and hip, someone like Winona Ryder. What Hannah didn't know that just a few weeks before that call in June 1996, I had gone to see Winona's then latest film How To Make An American Quilt at the MGM multiplex in Eastbourne with my daughter Kim on National Cinema Day that was celebrating 100 years of cinema, when 742 cinemas across the UK showed selected films all day long and charged only one pound to see any film. There were over 150 films to chose from. As well as the current releases there were 27 previewing films and classics ranging from Casablanca to the Sound of Music, and one of the previewing films was Winona's movie. When we left the cinema I said to Kim, "It's no good, I have to write a book about her!" So can you imagine how excited I was when Hannah told me that Winona was the kind of biography subject they wanted to publish, and not ONJ. I was secretly thrilled and spent the rest of the call trying to persuade Hannah that I was the right person to write a book about Winona. I prepared a proposal, sent it to Hannah, which she presented at a number of publication meetings, but it was rejected, which although disappointing, still encouraged me to start touting it around other publishers.
Most rejected it in their belief that Winona, although ranked among the top ten box-office stars, and certainly one who encourages millions of fans, still didn’t have the profile to warrant a book. I remember one publisher telling me that most bestselling film biographies were the ones about the male heartthrobs, or if female, the ones with a reputed gay fan following, and as Winona didn’t fall into either category, I didn’t find anyone rushing to do my book. The only publisher that showed any real interest was Robert Smith who owned Smith Gryphon Publishing, and had been producing a steady flow of celebrity and true-crime bestsellers since 1990. Although he could see how passionate I was about Winona as a biography subject, and had liked the attention of detail in my Stones book, he was still unsure about commissioning me unless the book was authorised, and I already knew that wasn't going to happen. Like Robert, I was only too aware, how difficult it is to encourage someone like Winona to participate and contribute to a book project, and even though Robert shared my view that it is better for a celebrity to co-operate and/or authorise a biography to ensure accuracy, not many Hollywood stars and their publicists shared that view. Nevertheless I had a go. In fact, I approached Winona’s publicist several times with several ideas asking for Winona’s co-operation and an interview, but as I have explained in my author note, her publicist made it clear that they were uncomfortable with the idea of a biography at that stage. When Hannah moved from Virgin to Andre Deutsch, she came up with the idea of Winona writing her own film dairies for a year or so, with me editing, but even that was a no-no.
Out of all the publishers I approached, Robert was the most interested, and despite turning it down to start with unless I could get Winona involved, he did eventually come back to me about eight months later, when I was about to put the book on the back burner, with an offer for an unauthorised work, and gave me a weekend to consider his offer because if I was going to accept, he needed know two days later so he could include the book as one of the lead titles in his Autumn 1997 catalogue, which had to go to print the following week, so after chewing things over, and accepting his terms and conditions, I began writing in the early part of that April, and quickly got up to speed as the manuscript had to be delivered at the end of June for publication that October to coincide with the landmark release of Winona’s twentieth film, Alien Resurrection. But about two weeks before it was due to go to print, Robert told me that he was having to dissolve his Smith-Gryphon publishing operation. The company and his entire catalogue of books would be offered for sale to other publishing houses, so my book, then titled Winona Ryder: The Unauthorized Biography, became stagnant, and was seemingly caught in the middle of a liquidation trap.
After several offers were made to Robert's receivers, Smith Gryphon was eventually sold to Blake Publishing, who acquired the entire SG catalogue, but I still had no idea at that stage if they would publish my book or not, but as it turned out, once they had managed to rescue the book from Robert's printers, they scheduled a publication date for April 1998. The icing on the cake was the plan to publish it in hardback, now with two picture sections, rather than one, and with a new cover design. But their attempts to rush out my book didn’t really work out. WH Smith, then the biggest and most powerful bookseller in the UK were reluctant to order a hardback, and they also felt that they had not been given sufficient notice of publication, which was rather strange since Virgin’s sales teams had already been out selling the title for Smith Gryphon. Reluctantly Blake put publication back to September, and also decided to produce the book as a large format trade paperback instead of a hardback, simply because that's what WH Smith wanted and as they would be ordering more books than any other bookselling chain, Blake went along with their demands and decided to publish as a paperback edition only. The only differences would be the price and would now be in soft covers rather than a hardback. Even though I'd had my heart set on a hardback edition for April, there were advantages. with the delay and different format. I now had the opportunity to ensure that my book on Winona would be the most up-to-date published, which I think it was at that time since it ended with the story of Winona dating Matt Damon. Something that surprised Entertainment Weekly when they had been sent a proof copy for review and interviewed me for their magazine. They seemed genuinely amazed it was so up to date. The delay had allowed me to do that. It also give me the opportunity to do some fine tuning and polishing to other parts the manuscript. Not so good however was how we had to change the picture spreads due to some permission issues.
Most of the film companies were reluctant to grant permissions for some of the movie stills because the book was unauthorised, which was understandable. Although we could have licensed the stills from a number of picture agencies, my picture editor thought it was best not to since the film companies had objected to their use. I do remember calling Fox in the States to ask if we could use a publicity still from Alien Resurrection, whose response was yes as long as I got permission from Sigourney Weaver, Winona and the photographer, none of whom I had phone numbers for, and as Fox weren't about to share them with me, we didn't pursue it any further as it seemed out of our reach and a bit of a prohibitive exercise. With or without the Alien Resurrection shot, we lost a lot of images that we wanted to use. Mainly stills from Mermaids, Edward Scissorhands, The Age of Innocence, The House of the Spirits, Reality Bites, Little Women and The Crucible. It was very disappointing, but we managed to replace them with some relevant pictures, something that still had a connection wherever possible. For instance, we used Winona receiving her Golden Globe for The Age of Innocence, and Winona and Daniel Day-Lewis at The Crucible premiere in place of the actual movie stills.
In fact, I think we ended up with a selection of pictures that at that time hadn't been seen before, but then again it was in the pre-social media days and when the internet was still in its infancy, so yes, they were pretty rare for their day. Back then, I thought it made the plate section for the book far more interesting, personal and relative to the text. We actually ended up with some rather good shots. The most amazing find came from the Petaluma Argus-Courier who had shot Winona's very first publicity photo in her classroom at Petaluma Junior High in 1986. It's quite remarkable to look back on now because I don't remember there were any permission issues for the pictures in the Smith Gryphon version. Most of the photos had come from my private collection, and included some very iconic images of Winona, but I don't remember ever being questioned about ownership, but back in those days I was still a bit of a novice when it came to such things, and perhaps Robert wasn't too bothered about it either, or maybe, he thought I owned the photos or had clearance on them to use.
In the next part of this article, I revisit how I went about the research for the book, who I managed to speak to and interview, including a scheduled but cancelled phone interview with Winona, and look at the aftermath of the publication and how the book came a Daily Telegraph bestseller and got nominated for a literary prize!
Strangely enough, I was hoping to publish a special 20th anniversary edition this month, but could not find a publishing home for it. The idea for the all new edition was to completely revise the existing book by doing a new volume which would have been divided into three parts. The first part would focus on revisions to the original manuscript that have come to light since the book was first published, the second part would have been the original biography as it was published in 1998, and the third part was to go from where the original book left off up to the present, Stranger Things, and her latest movie Destination Wedding. But every publisher that I approached with it didn't feel that now was the right time to be republishing, even with all the additional content and Winona's renewed profile. My feeling was and still is that there is no better time to re-access her life and career. As I told the editorial and sales teams, as an actress who changed the way cinema depicts women, and has championed for so many in the industry, she deserves a really good and up-to-date biography to be available, but sadly it was not to be. The new edition would have created a completely new portrait, which among other things would have told the exclusive untold story of her first and fascinating experience with the still camera some years before she was cast in her first movie, including my author interviews with photographer and stylist, take a fresh look at her early years from her first kiss on a playground carousel to her love of skateboarding and returning to the limelight in the medium she once swore she would never do, and to question why she still refuses to conform to the Hollywood ideal of fame.
So how did the book all come about in the first place? Well, the initial idea came from Hannah MacDonald, then the publishing editor at Virgin Publishing. I had called her to ask if she would be interested in commissioning me to write a biography of Olivia Newton-John. Hannah's reply was not really. She said she was looking for someone more current at that time, someone who was regarded as young, cool and hip, someone like Winona Ryder. What Hannah didn't know that just a few weeks before that call in June 1996, I had gone to see Winona's then latest film How To Make An American Quilt at the MGM multiplex in Eastbourne with my daughter Kim on National Cinema Day that was celebrating 100 years of cinema, when 742 cinemas across the UK showed selected films all day long and charged only one pound to see any film. There were over 150 films to chose from. As well as the current releases there were 27 previewing films and classics ranging from Casablanca to the Sound of Music, and one of the previewing films was Winona's movie. When we left the cinema I said to Kim, "It's no good, I have to write a book about her!" So can you imagine how excited I was when Hannah told me that Winona was the kind of biography subject they wanted to publish, and not ONJ. I was secretly thrilled and spent the rest of the call trying to persuade Hannah that I was the right person to write a book about Winona. I prepared a proposal, sent it to Hannah, which she presented at a number of publication meetings, but it was rejected, which although disappointing, still encouraged me to start touting it around other publishers.
Most rejected it in their belief that Winona, although ranked among the top ten box-office stars, and certainly one who encourages millions of fans, still didn’t have the profile to warrant a book. I remember one publisher telling me that most bestselling film biographies were the ones about the male heartthrobs, or if female, the ones with a reputed gay fan following, and as Winona didn’t fall into either category, I didn’t find anyone rushing to do my book. The only publisher that showed any real interest was Robert Smith who owned Smith Gryphon Publishing, and had been producing a steady flow of celebrity and true-crime bestsellers since 1990. Although he could see how passionate I was about Winona as a biography subject, and had liked the attention of detail in my Stones book, he was still unsure about commissioning me unless the book was authorised, and I already knew that wasn't going to happen. Like Robert, I was only too aware, how difficult it is to encourage someone like Winona to participate and contribute to a book project, and even though Robert shared my view that it is better for a celebrity to co-operate and/or authorise a biography to ensure accuracy, not many Hollywood stars and their publicists shared that view. Nevertheless I had a go. In fact, I approached Winona’s publicist several times with several ideas asking for Winona’s co-operation and an interview, but as I have explained in my author note, her publicist made it clear that they were uncomfortable with the idea of a biography at that stage. When Hannah moved from Virgin to Andre Deutsch, she came up with the idea of Winona writing her own film dairies for a year or so, with me editing, but even that was a no-no.
Out of all the publishers I approached, Robert was the most interested, and despite turning it down to start with unless I could get Winona involved, he did eventually come back to me about eight months later, when I was about to put the book on the back burner, with an offer for an unauthorised work, and gave me a weekend to consider his offer because if I was going to accept, he needed know two days later so he could include the book as one of the lead titles in his Autumn 1997 catalogue, which had to go to print the following week, so after chewing things over, and accepting his terms and conditions, I began writing in the early part of that April, and quickly got up to speed as the manuscript had to be delivered at the end of June for publication that October to coincide with the landmark release of Winona’s twentieth film, Alien Resurrection. But about two weeks before it was due to go to print, Robert told me that he was having to dissolve his Smith-Gryphon publishing operation. The company and his entire catalogue of books would be offered for sale to other publishing houses, so my book, then titled Winona Ryder: The Unauthorized Biography, became stagnant, and was seemingly caught in the middle of a liquidation trap.
After several offers were made to Robert's receivers, Smith Gryphon was eventually sold to Blake Publishing, who acquired the entire SG catalogue, but I still had no idea at that stage if they would publish my book or not, but as it turned out, once they had managed to rescue the book from Robert's printers, they scheduled a publication date for April 1998. The icing on the cake was the plan to publish it in hardback, now with two picture sections, rather than one, and with a new cover design. But their attempts to rush out my book didn’t really work out. WH Smith, then the biggest and most powerful bookseller in the UK were reluctant to order a hardback, and they also felt that they had not been given sufficient notice of publication, which was rather strange since Virgin’s sales teams had already been out selling the title for Smith Gryphon. Reluctantly Blake put publication back to September, and also decided to produce the book as a large format trade paperback instead of a hardback, simply because that's what WH Smith wanted and as they would be ordering more books than any other bookselling chain, Blake went along with their demands and decided to publish as a paperback edition only. The only differences would be the price and would now be in soft covers rather than a hardback. Even though I'd had my heart set on a hardback edition for April, there were advantages. with the delay and different format. I now had the opportunity to ensure that my book on Winona would be the most up-to-date published, which I think it was at that time since it ended with the story of Winona dating Matt Damon. Something that surprised Entertainment Weekly when they had been sent a proof copy for review and interviewed me for their magazine. They seemed genuinely amazed it was so up to date. The delay had allowed me to do that. It also give me the opportunity to do some fine tuning and polishing to other parts the manuscript. Not so good however was how we had to change the picture spreads due to some permission issues.
Most of the film companies were reluctant to grant permissions for some of the movie stills because the book was unauthorised, which was understandable. Although we could have licensed the stills from a number of picture agencies, my picture editor thought it was best not to since the film companies had objected to their use. I do remember calling Fox in the States to ask if we could use a publicity still from Alien Resurrection, whose response was yes as long as I got permission from Sigourney Weaver, Winona and the photographer, none of whom I had phone numbers for, and as Fox weren't about to share them with me, we didn't pursue it any further as it seemed out of our reach and a bit of a prohibitive exercise. With or without the Alien Resurrection shot, we lost a lot of images that we wanted to use. Mainly stills from Mermaids, Edward Scissorhands, The Age of Innocence, The House of the Spirits, Reality Bites, Little Women and The Crucible. It was very disappointing, but we managed to replace them with some relevant pictures, something that still had a connection wherever possible. For instance, we used Winona receiving her Golden Globe for The Age of Innocence, and Winona and Daniel Day-Lewis at The Crucible premiere in place of the actual movie stills.
In fact, I think we ended up with a selection of pictures that at that time hadn't been seen before, but then again it was in the pre-social media days and when the internet was still in its infancy, so yes, they were pretty rare for their day. Back then, I thought it made the plate section for the book far more interesting, personal and relative to the text. We actually ended up with some rather good shots. The most amazing find came from the Petaluma Argus-Courier who had shot Winona's very first publicity photo in her classroom at Petaluma Junior High in 1986. It's quite remarkable to look back on now because I don't remember there were any permission issues for the pictures in the Smith Gryphon version. Most of the photos had come from my private collection, and included some very iconic images of Winona, but I don't remember ever being questioned about ownership, but back in those days I was still a bit of a novice when it came to such things, and perhaps Robert wasn't too bothered about it either, or maybe, he thought I owned the photos or had clearance on them to use.
In the next part of this article, I revisit how I went about the research for the book, who I managed to speak to and interview, including a scheduled but cancelled phone interview with Winona, and look at the aftermath of the publication and how the book came a Daily Telegraph bestseller and got nominated for a literary prize!
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| The cover for the Smith Gryphon version of my book |
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