Pulp Fiction Art: Cheap Thrills & Painted Nightmares

In Pulp Fiction Art, filmmaker Jamie McDonald examines some fascinating artifacts from America's pop-culture heritage: the lurid pulp magazines of the 1920s-1940s, which offered escapist fiction for the masses in an inexpensive wood pulp package. Long gone from the nation's newsstands, the pulps today are kept alive in the national zeitgeist only through the efforts of a relatively small coterie of fans who collect the few surviving originals and reprint the wildest and weirdest of the classic stories. McDonald focuses on the garish, provocative covers that adorned these trashy publications, with the bulk of his film given over to a conversation with former Madison Avenue executive and art historian Robert Lesser (who owns the largest collection of original pulp-cover paintings, only a tiny fraction of which survive), an erudite if eccentric character who grandiosely holds forth on this peculiarly American form of art. Recommended. Aud: P. (E. Hulse)