Kritzerland is proud to present Bruce Kimmel’s latest novel:

PREVIEW HARVEY

Once upon a time there were Major Studio Previews. They were highly kept secrets and the people attending wouldn’t know what the preview was. Sometimes you’d get a winner and sometimes you’d get a stinker – it was the luck of the draw.

Harvey Minton, is a self-confessed preview nut. In 1954, at fourteen years of age, he sees his first Major Studio Preview, and from that moment on there is no looking back as he becomes obsessed with going to as many Major Studio Previews as he can, year after year. Along the way, he meets director Blake Edwards at a preview in 1960 and he becomes Edwards’ good luck charm. He meets Jerry Lewis at a preview and Lewis gives him the nickname he’ll become known by – Preview Harvey. We also meet Harvey’s mother and father, follow his travails growing up as a self-described 5’3” turtle, getting his one and only job at a famous record store in Hollywood, and all his lovingly described Major Studio Previews over the course of three decades, until that all changed and morphed into something completely different in the late 1970s.

So, come along on Preview Harvey’s journey as he becomes a legendary fixture at previews, beloved by the studios, who basically adopt him. Told in his own non-stop, unique way, thanks to a series of cassettes he makes in 1968 recounting his life seeing previews, Preview Harvey is a warm, funny, and loving look back at a time when moviegoing was the national pastime and nothing was more fun than attending a Major Studio Preview and seeing a movie before anyone else did. Reading this book just might make you wish that you could go back to those glory days before streaming and cable and multiplexes and Rotten Tomatoes and the internet, back to movie palaces and double bills and, of course, Major Studio Previews.

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ADVANCE PRAISE FOR PREVIEW HARVEY

“By letting autistic Harvey Minton tell his story in his own jumbled, repetitive-phrased, stream of consciousness narrative, author Kimmel has created a fascinatingly unique, sweetly naïve  character who discovers early on that his ticket to happiness is attending Major Studio Previews. His story, set mainly in the 1960s, is essentially an entertaining lesson in
self-preservation, and there are the added attractions of Harvey’s refreshingly unsentimental family life, his film reviews and theater descriptions, his take on Hollywood’s reflection of the changing times. And there are amusing cameos by writer-director Blake Edwards, producer Robert Evans and comic Jerry Lewis who provides the faithful moviegoer with the moniker Preview Harvey.” 

— Dick Lochte, author of The Neon Smile

“Hollywood is full of fringe characters and Bruce Kimmel has now written a delightful book about one such character known as Preview Harvey, a small man in an ever-present baseball cap who lives for attending every Major Studio Preview possible from the 1950s until the 1980s, when Major Studio Previews stopped being what they used to be.”

— John Landis, director of Animal House, The Blues Brothers,
An American Werewolf in London  

“I grew up going to Major Studio Previews and this book was a real trip back to those days, when we never knew what movie we were going to see. Bruce Kimmel, who also grew up going to Major Studio Previews, has created a wonderful character in Harvey Minton aka Preview Harvey, a unique individual obsessed with Major Studio Previews. Told in Preview Harvey’s own words that he’s recorded on a series of audio cassettes, the novel is very funny and filled with the movies of our lives and Preview Harvey’s love affair with Major Studio Previews. You’ll love meeting Harvey, his parents, his fellow preview nuts, and reading this book you’ll not only wish you were there, but you are there!”

— Marc Wanamaker, author, Hollywood historian,
and owner of Bison Archives, the largest collection
of historical Hollywood photographs in the world.

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All copies purchased through Kritzerland come signed by the author.

PREVIEW HARVEY is priced at $27.00, plus shipping.

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