Bradford Tatum

Bradford Tatum works as an actor, screenwriter, and novelist, often drawing on cinema and performance history. Only the Dead Know Burbank, published by Harper Perennial in 2016, is his first novel. It follows Maddy Ulm, a woman whose unnaturally long life carries her from a childhood in Europe to the developing film industry in California. Her path intersects with early horror cinema, studio culture, and artists whose experiments helped define the look of twentieth-century screen fantasy. Tatum’s own experience before cameras and in screen production gives the book a fitting professional backdrop, but its focus remains Maddy’s changing identity and her complicated place among generations of filmmakers. Two major trade reviews classify the novel as a historically grounded fantasy about old Hollywood. Its title points to Burbank as more than a location: the city becomes an archive of reinvention, ambition, memory, and illusion.