Chip Jacobs - Strange As It Seems: The Impossible Life of Gordon Zahler

With both dramatic flair and detached fairness, Jacobs eloquently reveals the soul of a charismatic and courageous character. Had Gordons career taken place on the screen instead of behind it, he would have been the Christopher Reeve of his day.

Carol Haggas, Foreword

A witty, clear-eyed account of a charming and utterly impossible man whose ferocious willpower transformed his personal nightmare into a lifelong Technicolor hallucination.

A. J. Langguth, bestselling author of Patriots and Our Vietnam

FDRs body and Sammy Glicks brain? No, but closeand better. Chip Jacobs Mon Oncle dHollywoodis at least as good a story as anything he helped to put on film: welfare case to Oscar-caliber movies, costarring Ed Wood and Pope John XXIII, with snappy dialogue and auto crack-ups, lions and tiger rugs and TV bears.

Patt Morrison, award-winning

Los Angeles Times columnist and author

Though not about a celebrity or newsmaker, this life being told by Chip Jacobs is an extraordinary one in the history of Hollywood. The raw courage and almost unbelievable stamina of Gordon Zahlerabetted by both love and luckturns this irresistible biography into a page turner.

William Robert Faith, author of Bob Hope: A Life In Comedy

Praise for The Peoples Republic of Chemicals

An outstanding job of showing the causes and effects of the interdependency American consumers and Chinese manufacturers.

Foreword

The narratives power is as much due to its style as substance. The prose is sharp, vivid, and directa tonic to those seeking a straightforward take on this urgent subject while also making for a suprisingly enjoyable read.

Booklist

Praise for The Ascension of Jerry

Not just another Hollywood whodunit. In the end we find it is really about one mans search and struggle to find his own personal truths and redemption. Well-written an highly recommended.

Steve Hodel, bestselling author of Black Dahlia Avenger

A seductive tour of an LA rife with murder-for-hire plots, political corruption, and sociopathic schemesA terrific bookI couldnt put it down.

Stephen Jay Schwartz, bestselling author of Boulevard

An enticing true tale of getting ones life back in the midst ofskullduggery, highly recommended.

Midwest Book Review

Praise for Smogtown

[A] remarkably entertaining and informative chronicle of the birth andso farinexorable evolution of smogThis book is just amazing, a gripping story well told, with the requisite plucky scientists, hapless politicians, and a nebulous biochemical villain who just will not be stopped.

Booklist (starred review)

Style delivers substance in true Hollywood fashion, with character-driven plots draped in glamour and sensationthe history of smog has never been so sexy.

Los Angeles Times

The life of GordoN Zahler is simply so miraculous that it might as well be science fiction. Born into an entertainment family in suburban Los Angeles in the mid twenties, Zahler was a lovable prankster and class clown, exasperating his parents with his endless teenage feats of derring-do. He ran with a similar crowd of teenage boys that called themselves The Tarzans, and got into trouble everywhere, whether that was leaping off a catwalk into a domed swimming pool or anonymously ordering a case of bourbon to the doorstep of Sierra Madres teetotaling minister.

But Gordon Zahlers promising career as a public miscreant went pear-shaped one day in 1940 when he and his buddies where fooling around in their high school gym with a spring board. An unsteady jump on the board vaulted Gordon on a deadly trajectory that landed him squarely on his neck, severing his spine. He was fourteen years old. Thats when the miracles began.

Strange As It Seems, the journey of former nobody who defied odds and biases racked up against him to frolic in Hollywood, is vividly retold by his nephew, writer-journalist Chip Jacobs. More than just a biography, Jacobs portrait evokes an early Day of the Locust Hollywood where art and fortunes were made by a colorful set of foreigners, weirdos, obsessives, and freaks. During the fifties and sixties, Gordon Zahler became a kingpin in this milieu, as his music/sound effects post-production house scored films for low budget sci-fi films, genre movies like Sam Fullers Shock Corridor, Popeye and Bozo the Clown cartoons, and hundreds of other projects. Gordon, best known for his clever soundtrack on Ed Wood Jr.s infamous Plan 9 From Outer Space, was always a better story than the scripts he accentuated.

After Gordons freak accident, the Zahler family plunged deeply into debt caring for their beloved wild-child numb below the shoulders and suddenly in need of round-the-clock care. His sister (Chip Jacobs mother, Muriel) was a young single woman in her twenties who found her dreams of college dashed. Gordons father, Lee, was a moderately successful and extremely prolific Hollywood composer but his paycheck never stretched as far as the medical bills. Gordons mother, Rose, recognized that the young quadriplegic would need to live a life beyond all expectations in order for the family to survive and thrive.

And Gordon did not let them down.

Using his fathers music catalog from the hundreds of films he scored, Gordon assembled a music library that he offered to early TV and film producers desperate to score their work on the cheap. Propped up in a wheelchair, unable to dial a phone, eat on his own, or do much physically, he metamorphosed into a salesman using his outsized charm, wit, and self-confidence to impress his clients.

After cutting his teeth developing scores for a string of low budget sci-fi films featuring space vampires, miniaturized beings, man-eating hedges, and nuked Venutiansmany overseen by the likes of Wood, Arthur C. Pierce, and Roger CormanGordon was determined to broaden his firm, the General Music Company, into a robust entertainment conglomerate. His relentless networking paid off. Soon, he was furnishing music scores and special effects for big budget films, primetime network TV shows, and more. Eventually wealthy, with a house off the Sunset Strip, a devoted blonde trophy wife, and raucous, star-filled parties, Gordonninety-five-pound dynamobuilt an existence from scratch that mere able-bodied mortals could only dream about. How many of them could say Lucille Ball loved them, or they were partners with Walter Lantz, Woody Woodpeckers cartoonist and producer, or Ivan Tors, the brains behind Flipper, Gentle Ben, and the nature-drama field still red hot today?

Only the Hollywood recession and oil shocks of the early seventies could slow Gordons magic. As Tinseltown dried up, Gordon looked abroad for his blockbuster, seeing limitless opportunities in bringing television to South Africa, the last industrial nation not to have it. Bored confining himself to one area, he tried developing futuristic concepts, from audible books to talking gas-station pumps. Unfortunately, the gears moved slowly and his ticking time bomb of a body ran out of miracles. In the end, someone not expected to live two weeks with his injury lived an event-filled thirty-five years. But he lived them on his own terms. Eager never to be defined by his disability or be a poster boy for it, Gordon refused to allow a little condition like quadriplegia prevent him from continuing high jinks. So, he kept a powerboat for boozy excursions, traveled from Beirut to Thailand, was thrown out of moving cars, nearly died after being blessed by the pope, and had a Forest Gump-ian knack for being in dangerous places, including revolutionary Cuba and leopard-prowled wildlands, at the wrong time. Mostly, he refused to be cheated from sucking the marrow from his limited time on earth.

As a boy, Jacobs was not overly fond of a voluble relation with a spidery physique and witchy arms. As an adult hungry to understand his familys past, Jacobs trepidation gave way to awe and curiosity. Strange As It Seems is the culmination of one mans quest to live a life that was almost denied him, and anothers to bring that untold legend out of historys shadows.