Lawrence H. Suid -Suid on Suid

Lawrence Suid and Bob Hope, 1985

     I am a military historian, film biographer, occasional professor, and television consultant. I hope you will want to explore the many aspects of my life and work.
     Shortly before my 28th birthday, a close friend observed that if I had not published my first book by then, I would never have my work in print. Guts & Glory, a study of the symbiotic relationship between the film industry and the United States armed services, appeared two months before my 40th birthday.

Since then, I have written a history of the Army’s nuclear power program, a history of Armed Forces Radio and Television Service, a volume of documents on propaganda in film, Sailing on the Silver Screen, and in 2002, a revised, expanded edition of Guts & Glory, which carried the history of the mutual exploitation by the military and Hollywood through Pearl Harbor to We Were Soldiers and Windtalkers in 2002.

For all my books, I have conducted interviews, now numbering more than 1,000. These have included ones with John Wayne, Bob Hope, Neil Armstrong, Frank Capra, William Wellman, Jerry Bruckheimer, Michael Bay, Curtis LeMay, Jimmy Doolittle, and David Shoup. As I recount in my article “Beating the Grim Reaper,” I often reached a person just in time, but sometimes, I arrived too late.
Since completing Stars and Stripes on Screen, in 2005. Dolores and I have been researching and writing the first full - length biography of Fred Zinnemann, the director of such movies as High Noon, From Here to Eternity, Oklahoma, The Nun’s Story, A Man for All Seasons, The Day of the Jackal, and Julia.

Lawrence Suid and John Wayne, 1974

After that book is completed, I hope to write a history of the changing images of Germany and the Holocaust in Hollywood films. My premise is that the Cold War actually started on November 5, 1943, when the War Department directed the motion picture industry to stop making atrocity movies. And, from the beginning of 1944, at least into the 1970s, Hollywood portrayed only “good” Germans and blamed the Holocaust on Hitler and his few Nazi henchmen.

By the time the book appears, I hope to be spending at least half of every year on a narrow boat cruising the English canals from London to York and from Wales to the English Channel. I will be happy to share my experiences on the canals or discuss any of my work with you.

Lawrence H. Suid. Any reproduction must be with the author's written consent.

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