Neil Gaiman and Louise Brooks, and Kathy Acker too

With Netflix's new production of Neil Gaiman's The Sandman receiving so much publicity of late, I thought I would write a post recounting just some of the many and various connections between Neil Gaiman and Louise Brooks. Here are a few.... 

As readers of this blog may know, Neil Gaiman is well aware of the actress and may be described as a bit of a fan. He has mentioned Brooks on his blog, in tweets, and in interviews, and she also receives shout-outs in his graphic novels and works of fiction. As a matter of fact, in a 1999 interview, Gaiman was asked which actors, specifically which dead actors, he might like to cast in film adaptions of his works. He answered, "Oh, that's fun. If I could cast it with all dead actors, I'd have Peter Sellars playing... an awful lot of the parts! [laughs] Hm... Oh, that's a nice one. I dunno, that really moves into dream casting. You could get the young Brigitte Bardot playing Door, and Alec Guiness playing anybody Peter Sellars isn't. The young Alec Guiness, not an Obi-Wan Kenobi. And maybe Louise Brooks playing Hunter. Or anything, really, I don't mind what Louise Brooks plays; if all she wanted to do was hang around the set and make tea, I'd be there!" 

In a 2003 interview, Gaiman was asked " If you could pick your neighbors (living, dead, real or fictional), who would live to your right, to your left, across from you and below you?" He answered, ".... Underneath ... just random, unpredictable dead people. It'd be fun to go down into the cellar and talk with them. Cleopatra and Dracula and Louise Brooks and the rest ...."

One well known character in The Sandman is named "Death." Originally, Gaiman considered having Death look like Louise Brooks "with a sort of short, black bob, and much more stylish," according to illustrator Mike Dringenberg. Because of her striking Lulu-like look, there has been speculation that she is in fact based on Brooks. But that is not quite true, almost. Regarding the character, Neil Gaiman once wrote, "Mike Dringenberg was at that time the inker of SANDMAN (Sam Keith was penciling). He read my description of Death in the original SANDMAN outline and decided that she should look less like a young Nico or Louise Brooks (as I had suggested) and more like his friend Cinnamon. Mike did a drawing of her - the same drawing that appeared as a pinup in SANDMAN, and later as a T-shirt and a watch face." (Spoiler alert, the character named Death no longer resembles LB.)

Brooks gets a shout out in Gaiman's Smoke and Mirrors ("She was, from the photographs, not a contemporary beauty. She lacked the transcendence of a Louise Brooks, the sex appeal of a Marilyn Monroe....") And, Brooks is referenced in Gaiman's most celebrated novel, American Gods, which was also turned into a popular TV series. In American Gods, the character named Czernobog, an ancient Slavic god, is visiting Cherryvale, Kansas - Brooks' birthplace, and that is where he refers to Louise Brooks as "the greatest movie star of all time. She was the greatest there ever was."

I have had the pleasure of meeting Neil Gaiman on a few occasions, and even  produced a couple of events with the author, where I had the honor of introducing him. He is a good guy.

Gaiman has great fans - and his events were some of my favorites of the many I put on. Below is a picture - from long ago and far away - of me and my wife and author Neil Gaiman. Some may recognize the t-shirt I am wearing.

On some of the occasions when I had the opportunity to speak with Gaiman, we chatted a bit about Louise Brooks. At that is when he autographed the cover of one of his graphic novels, The Books of Magic, which I believe contains a character inspired, at least in part, by Brooks.... Gaiman signed the cover, "For Thomas in memoriam Lulu..."

Back in 2010, when I was writing for examiner.com, I penned a piece titled “Louise Brooks’ private journals to be revealed.” It was about the unsealing of Brooks' notebooks 25 years after her passing. Remarkably, my piece was tweeted about by the Pulitzer Prize winning film critic Roger Ebert, and writer Neil Gaiman!

 That's not the only time Gaiman has tweeted about Brooks. In 2021, he stated....

There are other connections and cross-references between Neil Gaiman and Louise Brooks, but these were the one's that I could come-up with easily without digging too deeply through my files - both digital and paper. But one last connection.... Notably, Neil Gaiman's bestselling novel, American Gods, is dedicated to Kathy Acker (1947-1997), the novelist and literary provocateur. She also happened to be a customer at the bookstore where I worked. I produced a couple of events with her, as well, and once went out drinking with her. She was pretty cool, especially when she would pull up out front of the store on her motorcycle all clad in leather.

Sometime before her death, I had a chance to ask Acker about one of her least known texts, Lulu Unchained. Acker was well regarded as an experimental novelist, and some of her best known works like Great Expectations (1983) and Don Quixote: Which Was a Dream (1986), riff on earlier literary texts. That's the case with Lulu Unchained, which riffs off of Frank Wedekind's Lulu plays and Alban Berg's later opera. Acker told me Lulu Unchained was partly an homage to Louise Brooks and her role as Lulu in Pandora’s Box. I wonder if Neil Gaiman was at it staging at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London in July 1985.

That was long ago and far away.

This blog is authored by Thomas Gladysz, Director of the Louise Brooks Society (www.pandorasbox.com). Original contents copyright © 2022. Further use prohibited.