Author gets wired into 'Mommie Dearest' for a book on the campy classic

Author A. Ashley Hoff met Christina Crawford, who wrote the tell-all exposé about her movie-star mother Joan Crawford, at a 1998 screening of the book’s movie adaptation, “Mommie Dearest,” at the Music Box Theatre.

Hoff, who grew up in suburban Peoria and graduated from Columbia College Chicago in 1996, had dragged his friend to the North Side theater to introduce him to the classic film, which was intended to be Oscar bait but instead was panned by critics and laughed at by audiences for its dramatic portrayals of the abuse Christina Crawford said she experienced at the hands of her adoptive mother.

“It was Mother’s Day and Christina Crawford was publicizing the 20th anniversary edition of her original memoir,” Hoff said. “The theater was packed, but I found it kind of creepy because we’re all sitting in the theater and laughing while Christina is in the lobby.”

Hoff snuck out and approached Christina Crawford, who told him she does not care for the movie, but she recognizes that her book and the film’s popularity brought conversations about child abuse into the mainstream, Hoff said.

Now, Hoff is returning to the Music Box on June 4 for a screening of “Mommie Dearest” and Q&A about his new book, “With Love, Mommie Dearest: The Making of an Unintentional Camp Classic.”

“With Love, Mommie Dearest,” which was published May 7 by Chicago Review Press, details the creation of the film, featuring interviews and archival quotes from dozens of people who worked on the production.

“I certainly did not know at that initial screening that I’d end up writing a book on this subject, but here we are,” said Hoff, who now lives in Los Angeles. “To have this book and take it back to the Music Box is going to feel like a homecoming moment.”

The first time Hoff saw “Mommie Dearest,” he was “horrified,” he said.

“I was a teenager and I saw it on cable,” Hoff said. “It was cut to ribbons and interspersed with commercial interruptions that cut out all the campy scenes. The movie looked more like a horror film to me.”

“Mommie Dearest,” which stars Faye Dunaway as Joan Crawford, was meant to be a serious film shining light on the issue of child abuse. Instead, it was both critically panned and a commercial success as people flocked to theaters to laugh at its most dramatic scenes and hosted “Rocky Horror Picture Show”-esque screenings where viewers waved wire hangers in the air during one of its most infamous scenes.

Hoff later saw the full cut on DVD and the camp factor “clicked” for him, he said.

“With Love, Mommie Dearest” details how once the movie’s executives saw how audiences were receiving the film, they quickly changed its marketing campaign to be “in” on the joke. Within a week of its release, Paramount dropped its dramatic movie poster portraying Dunaway-as-Joan in favor of a cartoonish wire hanger and the message, “No wire hangers … Ever!” evoking the exaggerated scene in which Joan Crawford strikes her daughter with one.

“Director Frank Perry really thought they were making some kind of statement about alcoholism and child abuse, but almost immediately it turned out that they weren’t,” said comedy writer Bruce Vilanch, who lived with Faye Dunaway’s agent at the time and wrote the forward to Hoff’s book. “They changed the ad campaign because they realized what they had gotten.”

Dunaway, who turned 40 over the course of filming “Mommie Dearest,” was looking to usher in a revival of her career, which had stalled after hit movies like the Oscar-winning “Network,” released in 1976, Hoff explains in the book.

Hoff draws parallels between Dunaway and Crawford, who is depicted in “Mommie Dearest” as a fading movie star struggling with alcoholism and aging in Hollywood.

Film writer Richard Knight Jr., who is moderating the Q&A with Hoff at the Music Box and has hosted several Mother’s Day screenings of “Mommie Dearest,” said the comparisons between Dunaway and Crawford became more apparent to him reading Hoff’s book.

“Something in Faye Dunaway recognized something in Joan Crawford, and she went for it,” Knight said. “Ashley talks about it in his book, but she gives this operatic performance that had some people defending her as brave enough to go balls to the wall.”

Dunaway and Crawford also represent major turning points in Hollywood, Hoff said. Joan Crawford’s decline represented the end of Hollywood’s Golden Age, while Dunaway’s happened at the end of the American New Wave.

“I came to realize I was writing about the changing of the guard in Hollywood and the end of two eras in filmmaking,” Hoff said.

Dunaway has made it clear she does not enjoy discussing “Mommie Dearest,” Hoff said. He sent her reps a message letting them know he was writing this book, but they never responded.

However, Dunaway does address the subject in “Faye,” an upcoming HBO documentary unveiled last month at the Cannes Film Festival. According to Deadline, she defends her decision to take the role but says she ultimately regrets the project.

“I think the documentary is meant to show that Faye Dunaway is more than just simply ‘Mommie Dearest,’” Hoff said. “I hope audiences do realize that, but I wish she was able to simply embrace the movie like people have for 43 years.”