1 option
Competing with idiots : Herman and Joe Mankiewicz, a dual portrait / Nick Davis.
- Format:
- Book
- Author/Creator:
- Davis, Nick, 1965- author.
- Language:
- English
- Subjects (All):
- Mankiewicz, Joseph L.
- Mankiewicz, Herman J. (Herman Jacob), 1897-1953.
- Mankiewicz, Herman J.
- Motion picture producers and directors--United States--Biography.
- Motion picture producers and directors.
- United States.
- Screenwriters--United States--Biography.
- Screenwriters.
- Motion pictures--United States--History--20th century.
- Motion pictures.
- History.
- Genre:
- Biographies.
- Physical Description:
- 1 online resource : illustrations
- Place of Publication:
- New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2021.
- System Details:
- text file
- Summary:
- A fascinating, complex dual biography of Hollywood's most dazzling--and famous--brothers, and a dark, riveting portrait of competition, love, and enmity that ultimately undid them both. One most famous for having written Citizen Kane (with Orson Welles, as most recently portrayed in David Fincher's acclaimed Netflix film, Mank ); the other, All About Eve; one, who only wrote screenplays but believed himself to be a serious playwright, slowly dying of alcoholism and disappointment; the other, a four-time Academy Award-winning director, auteur, sorcerer, and seducer of leading ladies, one of Hollywood's most literate and intelligent filmmakers. Herman Mankiewicz brought us the Marx Brothers' Monkey Business, Horse Feathers, Duck Soup, W. C. Fields's Million Dollar Legs, wrote screenplays for Dinner at Eight, Pride of the Yankees, cowrote Citizen Kane (Pauline Kael proclaimed that the script was mostly Herman's), and eighty-nine others ... Talented, witty (Alexander Woollcott thought him "the funniest man who ever lived,"), huge-hearted, wildly immature, a figure of renown and success. Herman went to Hollywood in 1926, was almost immediately successful (his telegram to Hecht back east: "MILLIONS ARE TO BE GRABBED OUT HERE AND YOUR ONLY COMPETITION IS IDIOTS. DON'T LET THIS GET AROUND."), becoming one of the highest-paid screenwriters in Hollywood ... Joe, eleven years younger, focused, organized, a disciplined writer, with a far more distinguished career, surpassing his worshipped older brother ... producing The Philadelphia Story, writing and directing A Letter to Three Wives and All About Eve, both of which won him Oscars for writing and directing ( All About Eve received a record fourteen Oscar nominations), before seeing his career upended by the spectacular fiasco of Cleopatra ... In this large, moving portrait, meticulously woven together by the grandson of Herman, great-nephew of Joe, we see the lives of these two men--their dreams and desires, their fears and feuds, struggling to free themselves from their dark past; and the driving forces that kept them bound to a system they loved and hated.
- Contents:
- Rosebud
- Gertrude Slescynski
- The New Yorker
- Yes, the New Yorker
- Hollywood
- Trapped
- Monkeybitch
- American
- A new heart
- Ships in the night
- Eve
- No Way Out
- Hooray for the Bulldog
- Man about town
- A river in Egypt
- Legacy.
- Notes:
- "This Is A Borzoi Book"
- Includes bibliographical references and filmography.
- Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, MI Available via World Wide Web.
- Description based on online resource; title from digital title page (viewed on September 22, 2021).
- Other Format:
- Print version: Davis, Nick, 1965- Competing with idiots
- ISBN:
- 9780593319703
- 0593319702
- Publisher Number:
- 40030736486
- Access Restriction:
- Restricted for use by site license.
The Penn Libraries is committed to describing library materials using current, accurate, and responsible language. If you discover outdated or inaccurate language, please fill out this feedback form to report it and suggest alternative language.