Jungle Book
Julian "Bud" Lesser, ’36, has a new line on his resume. He has co-written the definitive chronicle of the classic Tarzan movies produced by his father, Sol, from 1938 to 1958. The book is not on sale in the United States, but early reports from Julian’s collaborator, film critic Reiner Boller, suggest a welcome reception for Tarzan Und Hollywood: Von Johnny Weissmuller bis Gordon Scott—Die klassichen Tarzan-Filme von Produzent Sol Lesser (Schwarzkopf & Schwarzkopf, 2004). In keeping with strong German interest in the genre, the 400-plus-page, 5-pound tome is extravagantly illustrated with posters and stills featuring the numerous actors who played the jungle hero, Jane and their coterie in more than two dozen features.
Proving you can’t judge a book by its title, the last quarter of the volume is devoted to Sol’s career apart from Tarzan—he produced more than 70 other movies, from westerns and adventures to dramas—and to the life and times of Julian, no slouch himself as a producer of films and the TV series Bold Journey and I Search for Adventure. Posters and stills of these mingle with family photos and candid shots of the Lessers—Sol with his friend Charlie Chaplin; young Julian playing marbles with Jackie Coogan.
But it’s not all Hollywood, all the time. “I saw to it that my bio includes three photos of the 1930s Stanford campus, me in it of course,” Julian says. Two pictures show him with his Stanford gymnastics teammates in 1935; the third has him doing an impressively stable handstand atop the spare tire mounted on his DeSoto roadster, parked by the Old Student Union.
