Sam Woolf is a Toronto-based freelance writer and critic with We Got This Covered.
November 6, 2014
John Dunning's memoir, You’re Not Dead until You’re Forgotten, paints a portrait of a man who would have preferred to remain out of the public eye. Born in 1927 in Montreal’s Verdun suburb (“the Brooklyn of Montreal,” to hear him tell it), Dunning had a life marked by poor health, frequent automobile accidents, and a crippling stage fright that plagued him until his death in 2011. The memoir, unfinished at the time of his passing, has been collected by Bill Brownstein and bookended with testimonials from Brownstein and a coterie of industry names who owe at least part of their fame to Dunning, one-half of a pair dubbed “the Roger Cormans of Canada.”