CZAR OF NOIR: EDDIE MULLER STEPS FROM THE SHADOWS (One Hour). Written & Directed by John Stanley. Produced by Wayne Hess and Stanley. A documentary-interview profiling America's leading expert on film noir. Muller is ... more »creator of Noir City, a festival held annually in five cities including San Francisco, as well as creator of the Film Noir Foundation, which raises money to save threatened films from extinction. Bonus Features: THE GRAND INQUISITOR (2008, 21 minutes). A horror-mystery tale written and directed by Eddie Muller. Starring famed noir actress Marsha Hunt and Leah Dashe. THE MAKING OF THE GRAND INQUISITOR, a behind-the-scenes documentary edited by Wayne Hess. Film Noir, a type of crime film in black-and-white that flourished at the major Hollywood studios in the 1940s and 1950s, has become one of the most popular genres to a legion of dedicated followers all across America. Contributing to that popularity is the Noir Film Festival, which for ten years has been presented in five major cities by Eddie Muller, a one-time San Franciscan (now living in Alameda) who grew up seeing these films about the dark side to the American dream. Gritty, hard-hitting glimpses into the underbelly of American culture as criminals, femme fatales, immoral private eyes and corrupt cops step into the deepest of shadows to pursue greed, lust and power. Muller, whose voice has delivered countless commentaries for commercial film-noir DVD releases, is also creator of the Film Noir Foundation, a non-profit organization responsible for salvaging noir films that would have otherwise been lost and unseen. Examples are CRY DANGER and THE PROWLER, among many. CZAR OF NOIR details the history of noir in American cinema but also reveals the obsessed, personal side to Eddie: how he was first introduced by his father, a San Francisco journalist who specialized in boxing, to a world that was purely noir. Eddie went on to write five non-fiction books about the history of noir and is also author of the best-selling autobiography of actor Tab Hunter. In an in-depth interview with one-time Creature Features host John Stanley, Eddie describes the history of noir set against an array of dynamic film clips from such classics as THE MALTESE FALCON, THIEVES HIGHWAY, THE BIG COMBO, GILDA and THE BIG SLEEP. Ironically, Eddie first met Stanley when he was an entertainment writer for the San Francisco Chronicle, and credits Stanley with inspiring him to want to write about noir. Bonus features: Eddie s 21-minute 2008 horror-mystery short, THE GRAND INQUISITOR, starring film-noir actress Marsha Hunt (star of 1948's RAW DEAL, among dozens of others), depicts a strange woman living alone in a disheveled home that might have once been the secret haven of a serial murderer. THE MAKING OF THE GRAND INQUISTOR is a behind-the-scenes documentary featuring interviews with Hunt and her co-star Leah Dashe.« less
