Comfort and Joi

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Summary: Comfort and Joi
Review: A playwright and Emmy winner for his work on the series thirtysomething, Joseph Dougherty has written extensively for television and the theater. But his new book, Comfort and Joi, chronicles a long weekend when he entertains a personal fantasy, an investigation into the life and career of Joi Lansing. His friends think he's nuts to write a book about a platinum-blonde bombshell nobody's ever heard of, who received third or fourth (or no) billing in movies which, for the most part, no one cares about.

Armed with a laptop and a bag full of videotapes and DVDs, Dougherty is less concerned with piecing together a formal biography than evaluating his own reaction to celebrity, entertainment, middle age, and an actress he describes as "a beautiful beacon in a Sargasso of bad filmmaking." He doesn't track down surviving relatives and old co-stars to reconstruct her life. (Just forty-three-years-old, Lansing died in 1972 from breast cancer.) What he ends up with is a conjectural, bittersweet, and often funny obituary - for Joi, for Hollywood, for his own vaporized past, its ideals and principles recently bulldozed into submission by a callous generation eager to dismiss "everything that came before as worthless, slow and reeking of the grave."
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