Post #417103 by BC-Da-Da on Mon, Nov 3, 2008 5:30 PM

I don't really know how to post a picture, but I have it here on my desktop. I have about 50 pictures, ads and newsprint items on the Cafe Frankenstein. It's certainly captured my imagination.

I also have pictures of all the other places that Burt Shonberg created murals. Each one is just as cryptic and fascinating, though Michael Shley, who owned the Xanadu Coffeehouse on Melrose (birthplace of the L.A. Free Press), and later owned the Frankenstein... said that Cafe Frankenstein was really Burt Shonberg's masterpiece.

I really enjoyed meeting George Clayton Johnson, who co-owned the Frankenstein. He gave me a collection of his short stories that he self-published in a rare volume, and though he wrote "Logan's Run" and many episodes of "The Twilight Zone," the Frankenstein monster has continued to hold great fascination for him.

I'll see how much I can stretch the information on Cafe Frankenstein for my next book, but it's so full of information on jazz, protest music, gay and political activism, coffeehouses and art galleries, circa 1941-66... it's just hard to tell the story of how a city was moved on it's axis by the arts community, ithout devoting a whole chapter to just one place. But I would like to at least get a more literary version of that Wikipedia entry into the book text, with five or six cherry pictures of the place. it definitely warrants it, and along with "Famous Monsters of Filmland," I think you're right, Sven... very iconic of '60s identity. Much like surfers, rat finks, beatniks and rebellious wanderers of all types.

Damn, I wish you still had a copy of that movie!