PATRICK LUCANIO

 

Author-lecturer Patrick Lucanio (Loo-can-ee-o) holds a doctorate in telecommunications and film from the University of Oregon where he once served as a visiting professor of film studies teaching film history and science fiction and horror films.  He also holds a master's degree in humanities and one in film history.  He has taught at the university level for 20 years including 17 years at Western Oregon University where in addition to teaching writing and literature he served for two years as director of student media.  He currently serves as an adjunct instructor in film studies at Lane Community College in Eugene, Oregon. 

 

Professionally, Dr. Lucanio has been a newspaper reporter and public high school teacher.  He has authored numerous articles on film and broadcasting history and genre studies including “Shooting for the Stars: Captain Video, the Rocket Rangers, and America’s Conquest of Space” in 1950s Rocketman TV Series and Their Fans (2012) edited by Cynthia J. Miller and A. Bowdoin Van Riper.  He is the author of Them or Us, a scholarly analysis of 1950s monster movies, and With Fire and Sword, the first historical treatise of "peplum" films, i.e., foreign-made films featuring American body-builders.  He authored a history of the Frederic Ziv radio and television syndication company for Science Fiction Theatre: A History of the Television Program 1955-1957 (2011) by Martin Grams.  

 

He served as a technical consultant for the BBC-4 Scotland radio documentary Celluloid Scientists in 2001.  He has co-authored with longtime friend Gary Coville three works on genre history:  American Science Fiction Television Series of the 1950s; Jack the Ripper: His Life and Crimes in Popular Entertainment; and Smokin' Rockets: The Romance of Technology in Film, Radio and Television in the 1950s.  The latter, along with Them or Us, was the inspiration for the 2008 documentary Monsters from the Id, for which he was an on-screen contributor.

 

Currently, Dr. Lucanio edits Radiogram, a 16-page monthly newsletter of the Society to Preserve and Encourage Radio Drama, Variety and Comedy (SPERDVAC) based in Los Angeles. 

 

Although Dr. Lucanio specializes in film and literary theory and criticism he also applies such knowledge to creative works of his own.  He has taught motion picture production, scriptwriting, and video production at both the University of Oregon and Western Oregon University.  He has served as a technical adviser on low- budget production techniques for various student and independent productions.  He has written and directed stage plays, and in 2000 he produced a feature-length pastiche of 1950s science fiction films titled Killers from Mars, a work that he dubbed "the first 1950s science fiction thriller since 1950."  As P. J. London, he writes fiction including the Ethan Wolf whodunit series available on Kindle ebooks.  He is also an actor and voice-over talent.