Tom Lisanti grew up on Long Island and was a kid during the sixties.  His parents, Vincent and Joan Lisanti, were movie buffs and would load Tom and his siblings Joe and Lorraine into the family station wagon and head off to the drive-in practically every summer weekend.  Tom remembers nodding off during Mary Poppins and Paint Your Wagon, seeing his first pair of tits (Britt Ekland’s) in The Night They Raided Minsky’s, and feeling saddened for the family gunned down by the Mexicans in A Fistful of Dollars.  A new sister, Donna, and many other movies followed: Love Story, The Boatniks, Patton, Beneath the Planet of the Apes, Airport, Skyjacked, and then the one that would change his life forever, The Poseidon Adventure.  The movie, and especially the capsizing scene, mesmerized the eleven-year-old.  He began reading about and collecting everything he could on The Poseidon Adventure and his favorite actor from it, Carol Lynley.

 

More drive-in movie nights followed in-between Tom spending his afternoons watching the ABC-TV 4:30 Movie, which featured Gidget Week, Beach Party Week, Elvis Week, Biker Film Week, etc.  While Tom’s neighborhood buddies could tell you how many career home runs NY Yankee Bobby Mercer hit, Tom was able to list off the complete cast of Beach Blanket Bingo right down to background surfer boys and beach girls—Ed Garner, Salli Sachse and Mary Hughes.   

Tom’s first signs of writing talent occurred around this time when the short story he wrote about three students who steal the answers to their final exam and then have a change of heart was read aloud to the junior high school student body.  He never tried to develop his writing skills even when he won Mepham High School’s award for Outstanding English Student due to the many creative writing projects he submitted.  In college he was so focused on creating a story treatment for his proposed soap opera, Roxbury Heights, for a TV writing class that he flunked his major, accounting. 

Tom didn’t write anything creative for over ten years.  Then in 1994 while working as Business Manager for The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, he was recruited to help organize an exhibition entitled, Screams on Screen: 100 Years of Horror Movies due to his vast movie knowledge.  A huge Carol Lynley fan, Tom made sure she was highlighted in the exhibition due to her horror movie appearances in The Shuttered Room, The Night Stalker, and The Cat and the Canary.  He wrote many of the captions and the writing bug resurfaced.  An article on Carol Lynley for his friend Louis Paul’s small video fanzine morphed into an interview with the actress herself for Filmfax magazine.   

Interviews with sixties starlets Pamela Tiffin, Chris Noel, Deanna Lund of Land of the Giants, Diane McBain, and Linda Harrison of Planet of the Apes quickly followed.  These articles appeared in Filmfax, Outré, Films of the Golden Age, or Femme Fatales.  Tom eventually decided to take the advice of friends and family and compile them into a book.  Tom rewrote the above interviews and combined them with new ones for his first book, Fantasy Femmes of Sixties Cinema: Interviews with 20 Actresses from Biker, Beach & Elvis Movies (2001) released by McFarland and Company, Inc. 
The book was a hit and an idea for a second book on spy gals came to him while he was finishing up Fantasy Femmes.  He held back some anecdotes on spy movie or TV appearances from the fantasy femmes and worked with Louis Paul, an authority on foreign spy films, to write Film Fatales: Women in Espionage Films and Television, 1962-193. 

Fantasy Femmes received excellent reviews and became one of McFarland’s fastest selling books.  Tom proposed a sequel and Drive-in Dream Girls: A Galaxy of B-Movie Starlets of the Sixties was born.  This book also featured interviews with 20 actresses plus profiles on 30 additional B-movie starlets who passed on being interviewed or who Tom could not locate.  This too received positive notices with Paper magazine featuring it in their August 2003 issue, What’s Hot Now! 

Hollywood Surf and Beach Movies: The First Wave, 1959-1969, was a departure from his previous three.  It featured profiles on 32 sizzling fun-in-the-sun teenage epics from Gidget to the Beach Party movies to The Sweet Ride plus a few offshoots in the snow combining credits, plot synopses, memorable lines, actor biographies, and behind-the-scenes gossip from actors who worked on the movies. The book was his most well-reviewed being named one of the “10 Best Film Reference Books” of 2006 by Classic Images magazine. 

Currently, Tom has been concentrating on writing for his web site blog and for the hip new magazine, Retro Cinema.  His latest book Glamour Girls of Sixties Hollywood was just released and he is collaborating with former Sixties starlet Gail Gerber on her memoir Strange Love: Terry Southern, Hollywood, and Me about her 35 colorful years with author (Candy, The Magic Christian) and screenwriter (Dr. Strangelove, The Loved One, Easy Rider), Terry Southern.