With Love, Mommie Dearest: The Making of an Unintentional Camp Classic

Hoff (Match Game 101) describes how producers of the notorious film Mommie Dearest—loved by audiences and panned by critics—never anticipated that this badly cut Hollywood reel (based on Christina Crawford’s memoir about her abusive mother, actor Joan Crawford) would result in such attention. With the perfect blend of expression and reportage, narrator Kim Niemi discloses that Christina Crawford didn’t write the script, nor did she hire a director who would have sensitively approached this story about child abuse. When Faye Dunaway got the lead role, the film’s fate to become an over-the-top milestone of mother-daughter cinema was sealed. Listeners will shake their heads, if not laugh out loud, at how the film’s cast and crew and industry moguls believed they were creating a compelling drama about the family of a Golden Age film icon. Hoff’s dramatic exposé, which covers both the film and Christina Crawford’s no-holds-barred memoir, reveals how reputations were destroyed through this single project.