Brothers Mankiewicz: Hope, Heartbreak, and Hollywood Classics

Brothers Mankiewicz: Hope, Heartbreak, and Hollywood Classics - Paperback

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Brothers Mankiewicz: Hope, Heartbreak, and Hollywood Classics
  • Brothers Mankiewicz: Hope, Heartbreak, and Hollywood Classics
Brothers Mankiewicz: Hope, Heartbreak, and Hollywood Classics - Paperback

Brothers Mankiewicz: Hope, Heartbreak, and Hollywood Classics - Paperback

by Sydney Ladensohn Stern
$50.40
$50.40
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Hardcover $90.00 Paperback $50.40

Book Overview

Winner of the 2020 Peter C. Rollins Book Award
Longlisted for the 2020 Moving Image Book Award by the Kraszna-Krausz Foundation
Named a 2019 Richard Wall Memorial Award Finalist by the Theatre Library Association

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 Joe never fully recovered.

For this award-winning 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.
ISBN9781496840851
Author Sydney Ladensohn Stern
PublisherUniversity Press of Mississippi
GenreBiography and Arts
FormatPaperback
PublishedFebruary 2022
LanguageENG- English
Pages480
Weight1.0 lb
Target AudienceAdults
Print SizeStandard Print

Related Subjects

Biography & Autobiography Nonfiction Performing Arts

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More by Sydney Ladensohn Stern

Brothers Mankiewicz: Hope, Heartbreak, and Hollywood Classics

Brothers Mankiewicz: Hope, Heartbreak, and Hollywood Classics - Paperback

Brothers Mankiewicz: Hope, Heartbreak, and Hollywood Classics - Paperback

By Sydney Ladensohn Stern

About Sydney Ladensohn Stern

Sydney Ladensohn Stern is the author of two other books: The Brothers Mankiewicz: Hope, Heartbreak, and Hollywood Classics and Toyland: The High-Stakes Game of the Toy Industry. She worked as a reporter for Fortune and Money magazines, and her writing has appeared in many other outlets, including the New York Times. She lives with her husband in New York City, where she is also involved in the leadership of two biographers' groups, Women Writing Women's Lives and the biography seminar of New York University.

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