Renée Farrington
In Words & Pictures

My Book

It took eleven years to finish an eighty-year tale about a baby called “Potsy” born to a cartoon-animating father and a fantasy-loving mother. It’s a whimsical picture storybook that chronicles growing up on the “wrong” side of the Hollywood Sign. Scenes picture a childhood playing near where my father drew Donald Duck for Walt Disney, starring a cast of characters including grade school classmates Natalie Wood and Miss Burbank Debbie Reynolds. My stories, and the movie clips allow you to truly view the early days of La La Land (written accounts in the book!) My adventures far from the shadow of the Sign prove that T.S. Eliot was right: “We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”

Birth of a Book

We celebrated the publication of Renée Farrington’s memoir, In the Shadow of the Sign - My Life in Pictures as a live stream Zoom event (video recording below). Renée delightfully guided us through a decade-long journey, taking an idea born in the OLLI Writers’ Circle and maneuvering through and around numerous obstacles on her way to becoming a published author. In the Shadow of the Sign is a whimsical picture storybook that chronicles growing up on the “wrong” side of the Hollywood Sign during the early years of Los Angeles. View the recording below.

Words and Pictures in Motion

My father documented my first years in 8-millimeter movies entitled Renée, A Record of Our Girl. The series alternates between black and white and color stories, all creatively produced and introduced with hand-lettered signs in the place of sound. Watch some of my memories while the moving pictures bring to life some of the scenes from In the Shadow of the Sign.

For a scene-by-scene narration (much of it excerpted from the book), click here.