Meet Nelson Pressley, author of Fonda on Film at Bethany Beach Books on Wednesday, June 17th at 6:30pm.
Nelson Pressley is the author of Fonda on Film: The Political Movies of Jane Fonda, released March 2026 from Chicago Review Press. He was a longtime Washington Post theater critic / arts contributor and a staff critic from 2013-19, is the author of the 2014 book American Playwriting and the Anti-Political Prejudice and the David Mamet chapter for Modern American Drama: Playwriting in the 1980s, and has written for American Theatre, the Sondheim Review, The Eugene O’Neill Review and Irish Theatre Magazine. His undergrad degree included a concentration in Film Studies, and he subsidized part of his graduate work by managing Washington, D.C. video stores in the heyday of home movie rentals. He lives in Delaware.
Fonda on Film
As much coverage as Jane Fonda has elicited through the years, the stories often skim past her prime filmmaking core.
Fonda on Film spotlights the signature political films Fonda generated in the 1970s--Coming Home, The China Syndrome, 9 to 5, and more--that are still underappreciated even as Fonda endures as one of the world's most admired and controversial performers.
This is a movie book about a mega-celebrity, an origin story voyaging through Fonda's learning years in the 1960s and the calculated payoff of the 1970s. She emerged as a Hollywood scion challenged to prove herself while trying to rise above ingenue roles and sex-angst melodramas. Splitting time between the United States and France to stretch her range, Fonda broke through as the perky newlywed of Barefoot in the Park, the sci-fi pinup Barbarella, and the Oscar-winning star of the sleek Klute.
And then Fonda earned her activist stripes with the Vietnam vets' Winter Soldier hearings and her alt-USO F.T.A. tour. She survived the "Hanoi Jane" flap and, by the mid-1970s, transformed into a singular star on an unparalleled moviemaking mission.
Fonda's long post-Klute break ended with bold comeback hits--comedy and economic justice in Fun with Dick and Jane, high drama and political commitment with Julia. Over the following half decade, Fonda's production company generated the purposeful movies that still underpin her actor-activist persona, including the groundbreaking Coming Home on Vietnam, the timely The China Syndrome on nuclear power and the still-relevant 9 to 5 on workplace equality.
Her more recent work protesting the Iraq War in 2005 and ringleading the 2019-20 Fire Drill Fridays campaigns on Capitol Hill illustrates Fonda's political method--and how it guided her movie work.
Fonda on Film is a movie buff's book, and a portrait of an iconic activist-artist bridging the gap between streets and screens.