Thursday, January 22, 2015
8:00pm
Seth Grahame-Smith with Diablo Cody
On Writing: Books, Television and Film
Moss Theatre
New Roads School
3131 Olympic Boulevard
Santa Monica, CA 90404
PURCHASE TICKETS
$20 General Admission
$30 Reserved Seats
$43 Includes Grahame-Smith’s book + Reserved Seats
Seth Grahame-Smith’s latest book is The Last American Vampire. He is the author of the New York Times bestselling Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and Unholy Night. In addition to adapting the screenplay for Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, Seth also wrote Tim Burton’s film Dark Shadows. For more information, visit www.sethgs.com and follow him on Twitter at @sethgs.
Diablo Cody is the pen name for Brook Busey-Maurio. She is an screenwriter, producer and director. She achieved critical acclaim for her debut script Juno (2007), winning several awards including the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. She first became known for her candid chronicling of her year as a stripper in her blog and in her memoir Candy Girl: A Year in the Life of an Unlikely Stripper (2005). She is also known for creating, writing and producing Showtime’s television series United States of Tara (2009-2011) and for writing and producing the films Jennifer’s Body (2009) and Young Adult (2011). Her directorial debut, Paradise, was released in 2013. Follow her on Twitter at @diablocody.
In his new book, The Last American Vampire, Seth Grahame-Smith goes back into the research and vampirist lens that defined Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, but turned his attention to a new time period. The Last American Vampire is an ambitious, century-spanning, vampire alterna-history, reimagining 20th Century American history through the eyes of America’s oldest immortal, the vampire Henry Sturges.
In Reconstruction-era America, Henry is searching for renewed purpose in the wake of his friend Abraham Lincoln’s shocking death. His journey will first send him to England for an unexpected encounter with Jack the Ripper, then to New York City for the birth of a new American century, the dawn of the electric era of Tesla and Edison, and the blazing disaster of the 1937 Hindenburg crash. Along the way, Henry goes on the road in a Kerouac-influenced trip as Seth Grahame-Smith ingeniously weaves vampire history through Russia’s October Revolution, the First and Second World Wars, and the JFK assassination. The final, elegiac act ends in 2001 with the vampire species in steep decline, and a world-weary Henry retreating from civilization to an upstate New York mansion.