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Chasing the Panther cover art

Chasing the Panther

Written by: Carolyn Pfeiffer, Gregory Collins - contributor
Narrated by: Devon O'day
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Publisher's Summary

A cinematic and vibrant coming-of-age memoir, Chasing the Panther captures the thrilling and, at times, heartbreaking early years of Carolyn Pfeiffer, a pioneering film producer and one of Hollywood's first female executives—a “mini-mogul” in the words of the Wall Street Journal.

For a moment in the 1980s, Carolyn Pfeiffer was the only woman in Hollywood who could greenlight a movie. Working with directors like Sam Shepard and Wes Craven, and with actors like River Phoenix and Bette Davis, she had a hand in producing or distributing many landmark films, among them Ridley Scott's The Duellists, Alan Rudolph's Choose Me, and the Academy Award-winning Kiss of the Spider Woman. However, long before establishing herself as a player in the world of film, Carolyn was a horseback-riding tomboy who dreamed of exploring the world beyond her small hometown. Her journey turned out to be a tale fit for the movies.

As a young girl jumping from rock to rock in a rural North Carolina town, Carolyn felt a calling she couldn’t articulate but that she nonetheless understood: it was a tug on her heart, a yearning for something more. When she could, she set out for New York City, a refuge for young women exercising their independence and resisting the pressures of marriage and motherhood. There, swept up in the glamorous world of beat poets and millionaires, Carolyn brushed shoulders with a young Burt Reynolds and became fast friends with an English journalist named Penny.

As the turbulent 1960s dawned, Carolyn booked a one-way passage to Europe. Her plan was to visit Penny and to travel around Europe for the summer but, instead, the world opened up to her in ways she never could have imagined. She found herself on set with Italy’s great filmmakers, in the couture houses of Paris’ fashion icons, and swept up in the youthful energy flooding London. She learned about film and found work on iconic movies like Federico Fellini’s 8 ½, Luchino Visconti’s The Leopard, and David Lean's Doctor Zhivago, and she came to befriend and work alongside luminaries like the Beatles, Tennessee Williams, Francoise Truffaut, and Barbra Streisand. Amid these adventures and misadventures, Carolyn fell in and out of love, and was beset by tragedies and triumphs that resoundingly affirmed what she'd known since girlhood—that she was always destined for something more.

Set against the dazzling backdrop of Fellini's Rome, the Paris of the French New Wave, and Swinging London, Chasing the Panther comes across like a true-to-life novel revealing Carolyn’s unforgettable journey to find her place in the world.

Photos are included in the audiobook companion PDF download.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

©2022 Carolyn Pfeiffer (P)2022 Harper Horizon

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What a wonderful story!

I just love to read stories by women who are free, honest, and creative! Carolyn Pfeiffer is all of those!

She writes about a life that she determined by always moving where her desire for freedom and her love of difference took her.

Her upbringing taught her to be free in her mind, even as she lived in one of the most racist, sexist parts of the USA.

She met good people and good people recognized her as a good person.

She writes so well about her sexuality, her emotional life, her rich understanding of her needs and those of her lovers, that it is fascinating. When a woman can speak so honestly it blasts away centuries of sexism. I am sure this book will be banned in places like Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia, where women are cows. I suspect it would even face censorship in the Southern USA, that lovely place of hatred for social and sexual freedom. We live in times where books like this can be written and published and we should value them, and writers like Pfeiffer, very, very much!

I think this book is a rich, honest, fascinating Post-WW II history of an incredible time in movie history, the history of women, and certainly, the charmed life of Carolyn Pfeiffer. There is a reason we fought that war and this books reveals what happens when freedom is defended: people get to live richer, happier, fulfilled lives!!

What a wonderful, creative, happy, lucky, woman! Thank you, Ms Pfeiffer, for sharing your story!!!

The narrator has a wonderful tone, but her knowledge of pronunciation of various foreign names and words is a little mangled. I think an editor might have been a little more aware of pronunciations to prevent the narrator making these little gaffes.

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