Competing with Idiots
Herman and Joe Mankiewicz, a Dual Portrait
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- 7,49 €
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- 7,49 €
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Davis, the grandson of Herman Mankiewicz and great-nephew of Joe Mankiewicz, debuts with an uneven parsing of the lives of the famous screenwriters separately responsible for two of the greatest films of all time: Citizen Kane (1941) and All About Eve (1950), respectively. Davis's mother died in a car accident in 1974 when he was nine, leaving him to sort through the "titanic" legacies of his late grandfather Herman (1897–1953) and uncle Joe (1909–1993). "Her early death robbed this book of one of its most important voices—and set this book in motion." What emerges is a depressing story of two gifted but deeply troubled men who gave their families short shrift and disparaged others on a regular basis. (Herman's rage even caused a frightened New Yorker editor to hide from him in a coat closet.) Davis chronicles, mostly thirdhand, their long-running Hollywood sibling rivalry, but there aren't any new revelations here; even Davis's theory that All About Eve was inspired by Joe's envy of Herman gets dismissed as absurd by Joe's widow. And Davis's omniscient perspective—liberally describing others' inner thoughts—causes confusion about the authority of his narration. The success of the movie Mank (about Herman Mankiewicz) will attract some readers, but those already familiar with the contours of the brothers' stories may be disappointed.
