A New Unauthorized Eric Bogosian Biography Examines His Five-Decade Vampire Star Image

An independent archival research project has begun for “Eric Bogosian Is a Real Vampire and So Can You: A 1990s-Style Unauthorized Biography,” a forthcoming nonfiction book examining actor and playwright Eric Bogosian’s public work and persona through the cultural history of the vampire.

The study begins in the 1970s, when Bogosian arrived in New York and had a life-changing encounter with Frank Langella’s Dracula on Broadway. That period also coincides with a transformation of the vampire in popular culture. After Hollywood’s Production Code was replaced by the ratings system in 1968, filmmakers had greater latitude to depict sexuality and violence on screen. The Gothic monster of the nineteenth century was increasingly represented as an erotic and psychologically-inhabited character. In parallel, literary fiction like Interview with the Vampire shifted narrative authority toward the vampire’s interior life.

The book is theoretically situated in Star Studies, which decenters the primacy of private life as the “truth” of a celebrity and instead approaches an actor’s cultural identity as a “star text” continuously produced and negotiated across public materials. Methodologically, it uses archival research to trace intertextual linkages across that public corpus, with particular attention to the liminality between performed character and autobiographical self.

The title’s use of “real vampire” is an interpretive framework for extending the inquiry into self-authorship. Is it necessary to decide a priori whether the vampire is a metaphor, performance, identity or a combination depending on context? Moreover, how do inherited cultural icons become resources through which audiences imagine their own narrative identities? The project examines the movement between those categories across Bogosian’s work and public image.
The project is currently in the research and development phase.