Stephen Rebello EP68 The Jay Michael Show

Stephen Rebello was born in Fall River, Massachusetts and grew up in nearby Somerset. His mother was a hairdresser, his father a millworker; both were movie-lovers. As Evelyn and Arthur Rebello's only child, he was shamelessly over-indulged. He spent many of his waking hours with his nose stuck in a book and/or with his ears covered in headphones listening obsessively to every kind of music imaginable. HIs posterior was also often parked in a fifth row center seat at the double and triple-features playing at southern New England's grandest movie palaces and fleapits alike. He has transcendent memories of discovering Dickens, Bradbury, John Cheever and Shirley Jackson, the music of Beatles, Stones, and the folk movement, alongside movies from Hitchcock, Fellini, Antonioni, David Lean, Fred Zinnemann, Richard Lester, Louis Malle, Visconti, and Arthur Penn. His childhood and adolescence were exceptionally nice. Easily-pleased rich folks paid him to vocalize at parties and weddings, even after hearing him sing on a weekly radio show. Later, even richer people paid him to model expensive boys wear for local clothing stores. Sometimes the owners of those stores let him keep those threads — in exchange for mentioning where he got them. Four years at Somerset High School weren't so terrible, either. At least two of those years were spent madly in love (nope, still not telling) and the other two were finally spent achieving academic excellence. Between part-time jobs sorting returned albums in a record factory and slinging sandwiches in an Italian deli (despite being unable to pronounce half of the menu items and being hated by his co-worker), he plotted his getaway. He graduated UMass Dartmouth with double majors in literature and psychology. After two years of counseling patients and families at a Fall River, Massachusetts hospital and rehabilitation facility, he moved to Boston where he earned an MSW from Simmons College School of Social Work. While working as a supervising clinical social worker at a Harvard University-affiliated hospital, he began post-grad classes in psychology at Harvard. Off the clock, he was treating private clients and writing constantly – fiction, movie reviews, the works. While on semester break and on vacation in Los Angeles, his boyhood idol Alfred Hitchcock granted an in-person interview at his offices at Universal. The interview, published originally in the Boston underground favorite The Real Paper, turned out to be Hitchcock's very last and subsequently got syndicated worldwide. Rebello decided to spend a year trying his hand at writing for a living and, relocating to Santa Monica, California, he got globe-hopping assignments from American Film, Cinefantastique, Cosmopolitan, GQ, The Los Angeles Times, Movieline (where he was Editor at Large), Playboy (Contributing Editor), Saturday Review, Southwest Art, Vibe and other national and international magazines many of which have since gone (sadly) extinct. (Don't blame Rebello.) The legendary Irene Mayer Selznick in The New York Times reviewed Rebello's 1988 debut non-fiction book Reel Art: Great Posters From the Golden Age of the Silver Screen and, at an event held at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the book was honored as one of the best ever written on the subject of Hollywood. Website: https://www.stephen-rebello.com/bio Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/stephen.rebello©The Jay Michael ShowWatch this episode on YouTube! https://youtu.be/xynRtlQH3XY