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Five Conversations About Peter Sellers
Five Conversations About Peter Sellers is an essay that begins as an exploration of the author’s burgeoning obsession with Peter Sellers, and specifically his role in hijacking and derailing production of the spy spoof, Casino Royale, in the late ‘60s. But what begins as a reported piece on how the film set erupted into chaos, quickly devolves into its own chaos as the essay splits into 5 different narrators, each with their own idea of what the essay is actually about. Is it about how Peter Sellers and his oversize ego ruined Casino Royale? Is it about how society has too long allowed horrible men to run the world? Is it an exploration of the nature of the essay as a creative form? Or is Peter Sellers and his genius at impersonation actually a vehicle through which the author probes her own shifting identity as a bi-ethnic person? The answer is…yes.
Praise
“Elizabeth Gonzalez James has written a book born from the beating heart of her obsession(s). A hybrid essay that both is and is not about Peter Sellers and the disastrous making of the 1967 Casino Royale film, Five Conversations About Peter Sellers offers insights into authenticity and identity, art and culture, and the legacies of terrible men. Gonzalez James recognizes that the value of such inquiry rises more from asking questions than in finding answers. This book doesn’t seek to make order from the drama and mayhem—both of old Hollywood and within the five narrators who come from one person—but instead embraces a new way to dwell in the chaos.” — Samantha Edmonds, author of The Space Poet