Frank Sanello

Frank Sanello is an author and journalist who writes about the entertainment industry, cultural anthropology, politics, gay and other social issues, and revisionist history. Born and raised in Joliet, Illinois, he was salutatorian at Joliet Catholic High School, graduated from the University of Chicago cum laude, BA, English literature and the University of California, Los Angeles, MFA, screenwriting. Sanello's master's thesis was a feature-length master scene screenplay, "Juana la Loca," the allegedly mad daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain and Columbus fame. Before becoming an author, Sanello wrote for various media outlets: The New York Times Syndicate, the Los Angeles Times, People and US Weekly, Penthouse, Red Book, USA Today, the Boston Globe, the Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, the French syndicate, Agence France-Press and his home town newspaper, the Chicago Tribune. He was a segment producer at The Late Show starring Joan Rivers. His two weekly columns about the entertainment industry were syndicated internationally by United Media in the 1980s and 1990s. The Chicago Sun-Times published Sanello's celebrity interviews During that time, he interviewed dozens of film and TV executives and hundreds of actors, producers and directors. Sanello's nonfiction books have been translated into Chinese, Greek, French, Czech, Japanese and Standard English for the British edition. Most prominent: The Opium Wars: The Addiction of One Empire and the Corruption of Another (Sourcebooks, 2002). The Opium Wars' publication in China was unusual in that Chinese scholars and government censors typically reject Western accounts of their history as biased and Eurocentric. The book presented a more balanced account of the two conflicts fought between Britain and China in the mid-19th century. Sanello's nonfiction The Knights Templars: God's Warriors, the Devil's Bankers profited from its thematic similarity to The The Da Vinci Codes's fictional account of the Crusader monks and international financiers. Sanello's revisionist account of the Templars debunked myths about their survival today as Freemasons, and was translated and published in the Czech Republic and elsewhere. The author-screenwriter has appeared on CNN, Bravo, Hard Copy, Inside Edition, Geraldo, Leeza and French and Spanish TV for segments or documentaries about the subjects of his celebrity biographies. Sanello uses psychological theories to explain the often inexplicable behavior of troubled actors and actresses. In his Eddie Murphy: The Life and Times of a Comic on the Edge (Carol/Birchlane, 1998), Sanello speculates that the film star may be bipolar based on the actor's own description of his volatile moods. After Murphy and a transvestite prostitute were detained by West Hollywood Sheriff deputies, media accounts also suggested the actor suffered from manic-depression, the outdated term for bipolar disorder. As a gay activist and author of Tweakers: How Crystal Meth Is Ravaging Gay America (Alyson, 2005), Sanello has lectured on methamphetamine abuse in the gay community and was a guest-speaker on the topic at a conference and seminar in San Francisco. Tweakers was turned into a feature-length documentary in 2007 which featured grim, on-camera accounts of recovering and still suffering methamphetamine addicts, adapted from case histories in Sanello's book. Sanello has taught college-extension courses on how to write and publish a nonfiction book. In March 2013, Sanello lectured at Temple Isaiah in Palm Springs, CA, at a conference and discussion gathering sponsored by The Mensch International Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to keeping the memory of the Holocaust alive. Other lecturers at the conference: Stanley Goldman, Professor of Law, Loyola Marymount, Gregory B. Wallance, Holocaust author and business attorney in New York. The topic of Sanello's lecture: Breckinridge Long and the US State Department's Complicity in the Holocaust, based on an excerpt from the author's Victims and Victimizers: Gays and Lesbians in the Third Reich(CreateSpace, 2012) Prof. Goldman's lecture: The Jew Who Met Himmler, based in part on his mother's experiences as a concentration camp inmate. Wallance's lecture: America's Soul In the Balance: The Holocaust, FDR's State Department, And The Moral Disgrace Of An American Aristocracy (Greenleaf Publishing Group, 2012) See Frank Sanello @ Amazon, Wikipedia, IMDb, goodreads, OpenLibrary, MLA, APA, Turabian, Chicago, Red Room HistoryasFrontPagesNews.com