Elias Savada is an American

film historian The history of film chronicles the development of a visual art form created using film technologies that began in the late 19th century. The advent of film as an artistic medium is not clearly defined. However, the commercial, public scree ...

and critic. Since 1977, he has owned and operated the Motion Picture Information Service, which has provided customized

copyright A copyright is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the exclusive right to copy, distribute, adapt, display, and perform a creative work, usually for a limited time. The creative work may be in a literary, artistic, educatio ...

research reports to over 1,200 clients.

Biography

The son of New York record store owner Morton Savada, Savada is the founder of the Motion Picture Information Service, which provides copyright research for film and television show producers. He has been a member of the American Film Institute, and compiled the organization's ''Catalog of Motion Pictures Produced in the United States: Film Beginnings, 1893-1910'', which was published in 1995. His film reviews have appeared at online sites Film Threat and

Rotten Tomatoes Rotten Tomatoes is an American review-aggregation website for film and television. The company was launched in August 1998 by three undergraduate students at the University of California, Berkeley: Senh Duong, Patrick Y. Lee, and Stephen Wang ...

. Savada collaborated with fellow film historian David J. Skal on the 1995 book ''Dark Carnival: The Secret World of Tod Browning, Hollywood's Master of the Macabre''. The book was the first major biography of

Tod Browning Tod Browning (born Charles Albert Browning Jr.; July 12, 1880 – October 6, 1962) was an American film director, film actor, screenwriter, vaudeville performer, and carnival sideshow and circus entertainer. He directed a number of films of vari ...

, a horror film director known for his work on '' Freaks'', '' Dracula'', and several Lon Chaney Sr. films. A revised version is scheduled for publication in 2017 by

Centipede Press Centipede Press is an American independent book and periodical publisher focusing on horror, weird tales, crime narratives, science fiction, gothic novels, fantasy art, and studies of literature, music and film. Its earliest imprints were Cocytus ...

. Writing in the ''

Journal of Popular Film and Television ''Journal of Popular Film and Television'' is a quarterly peer-reviewed academic journal published by Routledge, which purchased it from Heldref Publications in 2009. Michael Marsden, who was the dean of the College of Arts & Sciences at Northern M ...

'', Martin F. Norden called ''Dark Carnival'' "a compelling, in-depth examination of one of America's first cult film directors". Steven Alford of the ''

Houston Chronicle The ''Houston Chronicle'' is the largest daily newspaper in Houston, Texas, United States. , it is the third-largest newspaper by Sunday circulation in the United States, behind only ''The New York Times'' and the ''Los Angeles Times''. With i ...

'' wrote that the book "succeeds in resurrecting the reputation of one of Hollywood's long-buried eccentrics".Steven E. Alford. "Filming Hollywood's nightmares". ''Houston Chronicle''. November 5, 1995. 23.

References

External links

Elias Savada
at

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Savada, Elias American film critics American biographers American film historians American male non-fiction writers Living people Year of birth missing (living people)