Frank Sanello(I)
- Writer
Frank Sanello is an author and journalist who writes about the
entertainment industry, cultural anthropology, politics, gay and other
social issues, and revisionist history. Born and raised in Joliet,
Illinois, he was salutatorian at Joliet Catholic High School, graduated
from the University of Chicago cum laude, BA, English literature and
the University of California, Los Angeles, MFA, screenwriting.
Sanello's master's thesis was a feature-length master scene screenplay,
"Juana la Loca," the allegedly mad daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella
of Spain and Columbus fame. Before becoming an author, Sanello wrote
for various media outlets: The New York Times Syndicate, the Los
Angeles Times, People and US Weekly, Penthouse, Red Book, USA Today,
the Boston Globe, the Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, the
French syndicate, Agence France-Press and his home town newspaper, the
Chicago Tribune. He was a segment producer at The Late Show starring
Joan Rivers. His two weekly columns about the entertainment industry
were syndicated internationally by United Media in the 1980s and 1990s.
The Chicago Sun-Times published Sanello's celebrity interviews During
that time, he interviewed dozens of film and TV executives and hundreds
of actors, producers and directors. Sanello's nonfiction books have
been translated into Chinese, Greek, French, Czech, Japanese and
Standard English for the British edition. Most prominent: The Opium
Wars: The Addiction of One Empire and the Corruption of Another
(Sourcebooks, 2002). The Opium Wars' publication in China was unusual
in that Chinese scholars and government censors typically reject
Western accounts of their history as biased and Eurocentric. The book
presented a more balanced account of the two conflicts fought between
Britain and China in the mid-19th century. Sanello's nonfiction The
Knights Templars: God's Warriors, the Devil's Bankers profited from its
thematic similarity to The The Da Vinci Codes's fictional account of
the Crusader monks and international financiers. Sanello's revisionist
account of the Templars debunked myths about their survival today as
Freemasons, and was translated and published in the Czech Republic and
elsewhere. The author-screenwriter has appeared on CNN, Bravo, Hard
Copy, Inside Edition, Geraldo, Leeza and French and Spanish TV for
segments or documentaries about the subjects of his celebrity
biographies. Sanello uses psychological theories to explain the often
inexplicable behavior of troubled actors and actresses. In his Eddie
Murphy: The Life and Times of a Comic on the Edge (Carol/Birchlane,
1998), Sanello speculates that the film star may be bipolar based on
the actor's own description of his volatile moods. After Murphy and a
transvestite prostitute were detained by West Hollywood Sheriff
deputies, media accounts also suggested the actor suffered from
manic-depression, the outdated term for bipolar disorder. As a gay
activist and author of Tweakers: How Crystal Meth Is Ravaging Gay
America (Alyson, 2005), Sanello has lectured on methamphetamine abuse
in the gay community and was a guest-speaker on the topic at a
conference and seminar in San Francisco. Tweakers was turned into a
feature-length documentary in 2007 which featured grim, on-camera
accounts of recovering and still suffering methamphetamine addicts,
adapted from case histories in Sanello's book. Sanello has taught
college-extension courses on how to write and publish a nonfiction
book. In March 2013, Sanello lectured at Temple Isaiah in Palm Springs,
CA, at a conference and discussion gathering sponsored by The Mensch
International Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to keeping the memory
of the Holocaust alive. Other lecturers at the conference: Stanley
Goldman, Professor of Law, Loyola Marymount, Gregory B. Wallance,
Holocaust author and business attorney in New York. The topic of
Sanello's lecture: Breckinridge Long and the US State Department's
Complicity in the Holocaust, based on an excerpt from the author's
Victims and Victimizers: Gays and Lesbians in the Third
Reich(CreateSpace, 2012) Prof. Goldman's lecture: The Jew Who Met
Himmler, based in part on his mother's experiences as a concentration
camp inmate. Wallance's lecture: America's Soul In the Balance: The
Holocaust, FDR's State Department, And The Moral Disgrace Of An
American Aristocracy (Greenleaf Publishing Group, 2012) See Frank
Sanello @ Amazon, Wikipedia, IMDb, goodreads, OpenLibrary, MLA, APA,
Turabian, Chicago, Red Room HistoryasFrontPagesNews.com