“Tonight I want to welcome you to a showing of a naughty little number I made with my own money – $800,000 of it.”
– Gloria Swanson introducing Queen Kelly in 1967

Silent cinema icon Gloria Swanson was born on this day in 1899. Today, 127 years later, is the publication day for my new book The Curse of Queen Kelly. The title of the book is taken from a phrase Swanson herself used for the disastrous production of her film Queen Kelly, directed, until she fired him, by the great Erich von Stroheim.

My book, published today by Sticking Place Books, tells the full story of how Swanson and Stroheim – and Joseph P. Kennedy became tangled up together in the attempt to make an impossible film. And it tells exactly what happened next, to this brilliant, transgressive and enduring unfinished film.

There are a number of ways you could choose to celebrate this auspicious date:

1. Remove the elastic from your underwear, and just see how that pans out.
2. Drink champagne in the bath with your cat.
3. Spend $800,000 on a film you can’t finish and nobody wants to distribute.
4. Order your copy of The Curse of Queen Kelly direct from Sticking Place Books.

The choice is entirely yours. Two sounds fun, but I recommend option four. It’s a story with amazing characters, plenty of twists and some great pictures – if I do say so myself.

If you order the book and you do enjoy it, I would greatly appreciate you spreading the word on social media, on Goodreads or Amazon, or wherever the mood takes you. Tag me, I am PamHutch on Bluesky or @Pam_Hutch on Instagram. Sticking Place Books is also on both Bluesky and Instagram.

LIke Guy Maddin here:

“This Curse is an astonishment of richly lurid film history, maniacally researched and lusciously, propulsively written, the story of three luminous legends tangling and untangling their great mythic lives across the most wondrous half-century of cinematic invention. I drank down this intoxicating account of Swanson, Stroheim and Kennedy in avid gulps, my eyes bulging with revelation at every turn of the page. Long live Queen Kelly!”
– Guy Maddin

Thanks so much for reading, and I hope that you enjoy The Curse of Queen Kelly.

• Order The Curse of Queen Kelly from Sticking Place Books here.
• For more about Queen Kelly, click here, or here for my Guardian piece from last summer.