Andrew Leman

Andrew Leman’s interest in the works and worlds of H. P. Lovecraft was first kindled by Sean Branney during their high school years, and that interest has grown into an ongoing 26-year creative partnership. Starting with their own high-intensity brand of live-action role-playing games, their efforts have expanded into music, film, radio drama, historical writing, and vintage document replicas.

As a founding member of the H. P. Lovecraft Historical Society, Leman has served as its president and an editor of its monthly publication, Strange Eons, and a developer of its massive website. He has written and produced numerous live-action gaming events, involving helicopters, herds of horses, mummified bodies, ancient documents, the CalTech seismology lab, and many other elaborations. He is the author of In the Time of Lovecraft, a non-scholarly history of the 1920s and '30s for HPL fans, and is the designer of highly authentic prop documents for Call of Cthulhu gamers. With Sean Branney, Leman wrote A Shoggoth on the Roof, a full-length Lovecraftian Broadway-style musical with a very troubled production history. He also co-wrote and produced A Very Scary Solstice and An Even Scarier Solstice, the immensely popular HPLHS Lovecraftian holiday albums/songbooks. Leman and Branney have also produced four episodes of the 1930s-style Dark Adventure Radio Theatre adaptations of classic Lovecraft tales, and they've developed a "meta-reality TV" show called Real Fear and a massive ARG known as The Call.

Leman wrote and directed the first HPLHS motion picture effort, The Testimony of Randolph Carter, and with Sean Branney he wrote and directed the short documentary A Shoggoth on the Roof featuring Stuart Gordon and Chris Sarandon. Leman directed and co-produced the HPLHS motion picture version of The Call of Cthulhu, which has been widely hailed as the best Lovecraftian film adaptation yet made, winning awards at numerous film festivals worldwide. He is the co-writer, co-producer and production designer for the next HPLHS film adaptation, The Whisperer in Darkness.

Leman has an MFA in acting from the University of Illinois, and worked as a professional actor in Chicago for several years before moving to Los Angeles. In L.A., Leman continues to work on the stage with Theatre Banshee, Moving Arts, Theatre/Theater and others, and has also worked as a designer of prop documents for motion pictures and television. He was the director of the graphics department for Ellis Props & Graphics, the oldest prop house in Hollywood, and his work appears on screen in What Lies Beneath, Scream 3, Galaxy Quest, Ali, “The West Wing,” and many others. In the course of designing prop documents, Leman frequently had need of vintage typefaces that were not available in digital form. He made the needed fonts himself, and now runs his own small digital type foundry, E-phemera Fonts, producing specialty type designs. You can see his fonts on posters at Whole Foods, packages at Trader Joe's, in numerous RPG books, graphic novels and video games, and on the cover of pretty much every Taylor Swift album, among other places.