Join us at the
Coral Gables Art Cinema for Q&A with…
VICTORIA RISKIN
author of Fay Wray and Robert Riskin: A Hollywood Memoir
introducing the screenings of
King Kong & It Happened One Night
Sunday, October 6, 11am & 1:30pm
The Coral Gables Art Cinema
GRAB A $16 DOUBLE FEATURE PASS HERE
Her mother was King Kong’s love interest and her father, the Oscar-winning screenwriter of It Happened One Night. Victoria Riskin, author of Fay Wray and Robert Riskin: A Hollywood Memoir (Pantheon, $30), will introduce the screenings of King Kong and It Happened One Night as well as take questions from the audience.
A Hollywood love story and a dual biography of two famous figures, whose golden lives were lived at the center of Hollywood’s golden age, written by their daughter, an acclaimed writer and producer.
Fay Wray was most famous as the woman—the blonde in a diaphanous gown—who captured the heart of the mighty King Kong, the twenty-five-foot gorilla, as he placed her in his hand, on the ledge of the Empire State Building, putting Wray at the height of New York’s skyline and cinematic immortality.
Wray’s counterpart: Robert Riskin is considered one of the greatest screenwriters of all time. Academy Award–winning writer, producer, ten-year-long collaborator with Frank Capra on such pictures as American Madness, It Happened One Night, and Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, hailed by many, among them F. Scott Fitzgerald, as “among the best screenwriters in the business.” Riskin wrote female characters who were smart, sexy, and always resilient. There’s no better example of the Riskin character than in It Happened One Night—breezy, streetwise, optimistic, with a sense of humor that is subtle and sure.
Here are Wray’s and Riskin’s lives, their work, their fairy-tale marriage that ended so tragically. Here are their dual, quintessential American lives, ultimately and blissfully intertwined.
VICTORIA RISKIN adapted Willa Cather’s My Ántonia for television and was a producer of Carson McCullers’s The Member of the Wedding as well as The Last Best Year, based on her years as a psychologist. Riskin was president of the Writers Guild of America West and served for twelve years as a director of Human Rights Watch. She lives on Martha’s Vineyard with her husband, the writer David W. Rintels.