BIO

Mick LaSalle

Mick LaSalle is the author of Complicated Women: Sex and Power in Pre-Code Hollywood, a history/critical study of the actresses who worked during the pre-censorship "pre-Code'' era of 1929-1934. The book was published in September, 2000 by St. Martin's Press.

Entertainment Weekly called it "sophisticated and provocative" and Liz Smith called it "a brilliant work." The book was praised in The New York Times, The New York Daily News, The Boston Globe, Variety, Time Magazine, Elle and other prominent publications. It was lauded by film historians, such as David Thomson and Molly Haskell. Scott Eyman called it "a breakthrough work of film scholarship."

The book was "Book of the Month" on Turner Classic Movies in October, 2000 and was the subject of a film series on that station. A Timeline Films documentary, based on the book, aired on TCM in May of 2003. LaSalle co-wrote the screenplay and served as Associate Producer. That same month, LaSalle's follow-up book, Dangerous Men: Pre-Code Hollywood and the Birth of the Modern Man was also named TCM's "Book of the Month.''

LaSalle is the film critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, the eleventh biggest daily newspaper in the United States and the second largest west of the Mississippi. Between 1994 and 1999, he was the on-air film critic for the ABC affiliate in San Francisco, KGO.

He has lectured on film subjects at various film festivals, including those in the Hamptons, Denver, Las Vegas and Mill Valley and at New York's Film Forum and San Francisco's Castro Theatre. He was a panelist at the 2006 Venice Film Festival. For several years he taught a film course at the University of California in Berkeley. His master's thesis in English was "Greta Garbo's Transformation of the Femme Fatale" (East Carolina University, 1987). As a senior in college, he presented a paper, "Male-Female Relationships in the Films of the 1930s," at the Communication, Language and Gender Conference (West Virginia State University, 1981). He teaches courses at Stanford University.

He was born in Brooklyn, New York and grew up in Staten Island.