Details

Subject(s)

• Mankiewicz, Herman J. (Herman Jacob) 1897-1953 [Browse]
• Mankiewicz, Joseph L. [Browse]
• Motion picture producers and directors—United States—Biography [Browse]

Series

Hollywood legends series [More in this series]

Summary note

"Herman J. (1897-1953) and Joseph L. Mankiewicz (1909-1993) wrote, produced, and directed over 150 pictures. With Orson Welles, Herman wrote the screenplay for Citizen Kane and shared the picture's only Academy Award. Joe earned the second pair of his four Oscars for writing and directing All About Eve, which also won Best Picture. Despite triumphs as diverse as Monkey Business and Cleopatra and Pride of the Yankees and Guys and Dolls, the witty, intellectual brothers spent their Hollywood years deeply discontented and yearning for what they did not have--a career in New York theater. Herman, formerly an Algonquin Round Table habitué, New York Times and New Yorker theater critic, and playwright-collaborator with George S. Kaufman, never reconciled himself to screenwriting. He gambled away his prodigious earnings, was fired from all the major studios, and drank himself to death at fifty-five. While Herman drifted downward, Joe rose to become a critical and financial success as a writer, producer, and director, though his constant philandering with prominent stars like Joan Crawford, Judy Garland, and Gene Tierney distressed his emotionally fragile wife who eventually committed suicide. He wrecked his own health using uppers and downers in order to direct Cleopatra by day and finish writing it at night, only to be very publicly fired by Darryl F. Zanuck, an experience from which he never fully recovered. For this first dual portrait of the Mankiewicz brothers, Sydney Ladensohn Stern draws on interviews, letters, diaries, and other documents still in private hands to provide a uniquely intimate behind-the-scenes chronicle of the lives, loves, work, and relationship between these complex men."--Provided by publisher.

Notes

"First printing 2019."

Bibliographic references

Includes bibliographical references (pages 439-442), filmography (pages 431-438) and index.

Contents

• Prologue
• The end: Joe, 1993
• The beginning: Herman, 1926
• The real beginning: Pop, 1891
• Herman
• Herman's life begins
• Glorious adventures
• Central Park West Voltaire
• The Mankiewicz brothers of Hollywood
• In pursuit of a lump sum
• Gold safe, however
• Mad dogs
• The Tiffany of studios
• Joe's black years
• Citizen Kane
• Apprentice director
• Promised land
• All about Eve
• Breaking away
• Exit Herman
• Joe
• Hollywood Cinderella: a cautionary fairy tale
• New York crooks and showgirls: an American fairy tale
• Joe rewrites Graham Greene
• Exit Rosa
• Southern gothic horror story
• The toughest three pictures I ever made
• The honey pot(boiler)
• Ironic western
• Of page and screen
• Honors but no dough
• Epilogue
• What they wrought
• Appendix: family tree
• Notes
• Filmography
• Select bibliography
• Acknowledgments
• Photo credits
• Index.

Show 37 more Contents items

ISBN

• 9781617032677 ((hardcover ; : alk. paper))
• 1617032670

LCCN

2019009744

OCLC

1098219735

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