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julian "bud" lesser,
’36, has a new line on his resume. He has co-written
the definitive chronicle of the classic Tarzan movies
produced by his father, Sol, from 1938 to 1958. The
book is not on sale in the United States, but early
reports from Julian’s collaborator, film critic
Reiner Boller, suggest a welcome reception for Tarzan
Und Hollywood: Von Johnny Weissmuller bis Gordon Scott—Die
klassichen Tarzan-Filme von Produzent Sol Lesser
(Schwarzkopf & Schwarzkopf, 2004). In keeping with
strong German interest in the genre, the 400-plus-page,
5-pound tome is extravagantly illustrated with posters
and stills featuring the numerous actors who played
the jungle hero, Jane and their coterie in more than
two dozen features.
Proving you can’t judge a book by its title, the
last quarter of the volume is devoted to Sol’s
career apart from Tarzan—he produced more than
70 other movies, from westerns and adventures to dramas—and
to the life and times of Julian, no slouch himself as
a producer of films and the TV series Bold Journey
and I Search for Adventure. Posters and stills
of these mingle with family photos and candid shots
of the Lessers—Sol with his friend Charlie Chaplin;
young Julian playing marbles with Jackie Coogan.
But it’s not all Hollywood, all the time. “I
saw to it that my bio includes three photos of the 1930s
Stanford campus, me in it of course,” Julian says.
Two pictures show him with his Stanford gymnastics teammates
in 1935; the third has him doing an impressively stable
handstand atop the spare tire mounted on his DeSoto
roadster, parked by the Old Student Union.
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