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.
