The Errol Flynn Blog

Here is a list (see attachment!) of what Peter's EF Club has on offer from his extraordinary Flynn Collection…

— David DeWitt

Hello to all my friends in Flynn,

Ernst here… better known as the purveyor of Peter's E.F. Club, a website I have been working on for the last year. For the past three years or so, I had been working on a Flynn film as a producer and writer, it was a film that would represent his last days in Vancouver in 1959. During that time, I collected hundreds of pieces of memorabilia for the purposes of research – books, movies, magazines, photos, posters, basically anything E.F.-related I could get my hands on.

For reasons I won't get into here, I removed myself from the project (which I think is still in development) but found myself left with all this amazing Flynn memorabilia, my closets had become a mini-museum of Errol. I felt it was a waste to have all this and not share it with the rest of the E.F. fans of the world, so I began to put together Peter's E.F. Club as a place to display it. I put in hundreds of hours transcribing the dozens of articles I had, and put together what I feel soon became one of the better info-filled E.F. sites on the 'web. I still have hundreds of photos and pictures I plan on uploading to the site, there just never seems to be enough time in the day.

But as I am not involved with this Errol film anymore, I have decided I cannot continue to justify the expense of this collection. Being a character actor, as I am, doesn't pay as regularly as some might think, and well, the bills need paid, so I have decided to put my collection on sale for serious fans of E.F.  I do not plan to make a profit from this sale, my hope is to only recoup my investment.

If you are interested in what I have (and you can get a pretty good idea by looking at the site), please e-mail me, and I'll kindly forward a list your way.

Thanks for the time, and for promoting my site…

Ernst


fl********@ce*********.com












Peter's E.F. Club

— Peters E.F. Club

By Prof. Lincoln Hurst

As promised, here are a few preliminary, personal thoughts on
HOLLYWOOD'S HELLFIRE CLUB. This, mind, you, is based on a VERY quick, preliminary reading.

First, on the negative side. The author seems to be a Hollywood beat reporter, not a scholar or a film historian. That was a huge disappointment to me. He begins his treatment of Flynn by applying to Flynn the dreadful Deitrich phrase, “Satan's Angel.” There are traces of Bret's influence here and there. The book is written in HOLLYWOOD BABYLON style, and focuses largely on the scandalous, the sensational, and the morbid. I had hoped for something more scholarly and less tabloid in approach; something like THE CASABLANCA MAN, or, in terms of Flynn's own life, your book, or Meyers's, or Valenti's. No such luck. The writer doesn't have those genes within him.

Nor could I could find one original fact or thought about Flynn; it is all culled from well-known, and well-worn, books and magazine articles, such as those by Meyers, and the autobiographies of Vincent Sherman, Rathbone, and a few others. The old Sherman story about the fake penis, Flynn, and Alan Hale (“I'll take a pound and a half!”) is of course trotted out. It's all pretty rudimentary stuff, and gives an overall tawdry impression of Flynn's life.

Flynn was, in short, a hellraiser, as befits the book's title. The author has totally missed the other Flynn, in my view – Flynn the quiet, reflective writer and percipient observer of life's drama, who is at the same time the acutely tragic Flynn. Had he dug a bit more, and not been so dedicated to shocking the senses out of his readers with morbidity and scandal, he might have found that other Flynn – at least a bit. The real Errol is notably absent here.

On the positive side, on a quick first reading I spotted only a few errors and mistypes – Aranella for Arnella (a confusion of Arabella Biship with Arnella?), the awkward and embarrassing running together of a long quote of Rathbone with the writer's own text (which should have been caught by an editor), the claim that Flynn wanted to be cremated and his ashes scattered at sea off the coast of Jamaica, the getting of a few dates wrong, etc. These are only slightly distracting and irritating.

Also positive, the author doesn't have the Bret disease of putting his foot in his mouth on every page. He also doesn't seem to be enamored with the idea that Flynn was bisexual or gay. Generally the photos are okay, a decent selection, but the ones of Flynn are all well-known. There are a few photos of the other Bundy people I hadn't seen. I did especially like one – a full-page close-up of Phyllis Decker. She's nice to look at. I'd seen a photo of her a long time ago, which led me to believe she was a looker, and the photos in this book support that. It's hard for me to put her together with Decker somehow. There's also a great pic of Barrymore and Fields, in profile, doing a mock stare-down. It delightfully illustrates the opposite extremes that the human nose can take.

Anyway, for those who like to read the tabloids at the supermarket, or who loved HOLLYWOOD BABYLON, or who know nothing at all about the lives of Decker, Barrymore, Flynn, Hartman, Fowler, Fields, Mitchell, Skelton, Carradine, etc. – this will be the book for them. But for those who already know a fair bit about these people, and have read Fowler's vastly superior MINUTES OF THE LAST MEETING, they will probably want to tear the cover off the book, frame it, and then throw the rest into the nearest trash bin.

Yours,
L

— David DeWitt