Elias Savada

The son of New York record store owner Morton Savada,^[1] Savada is the founder of the Motion Picture Information Service, which provides copyright research for film and television show producers. He has been a member of the American Film Institute, and compiled the organization's Catalog of Motion Pictures Produced in the United States: Film Beginnings, 1893-1910, which was published in 1995. His film reviews have appeared at online sites Film Threat and Rotten Tomatoes.^[2]

Savada collaborated with fellow film historian David J. Skal on the 1995 book Dark Carnival: The Secret World of Tod Browning, Hollywood's Master of the Macabre. The book was the first major biography of Tod Browning, a horror film director known for his work on Freaks, Dracula, and several Lon Chaney Sr. films.

A revised version is scheduled for publication in 2017 by Centipede Press.^[3] Writing in the Journal of Popular Film and Television, Martin F. Norden called Dark Carnival "a compelling, in-depth examination of one of America's first cult film directors".^[4] Steven Alford of the Houston Chronicle wrote that the book "succeeds in resurrecting the reputation of one of Hollywood's long-buried eccentrics".^[5]

• Elias Savada at Rotten Tomatoes
• Elias Savada at IMDb