Brothers Mankiewicz

<b>Winner of the 2020 Peter C. Rollins Book Award</b><b></b><br><b>Longlisted for the 2020 Moving Image Book Award by the </b><b>Kraszna-Krausz Foundation</b><br><b>Named a 2019 Richard Wall Memorial Award Finalist by the Theatre Library Association</b> <p/>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 <i>Citizen Kane</i> and shared the picture's only Academy Award. Joe earned the second pair of his four Oscars for writing and directing <i>All About Eve</i> which also won Best Picture. <p/> Despite triumphs as diverse as <i>Monkey Business </i>and <i>Cleopatra</i> and <i>Pride of the Yankees</i> and <i>Guys and Dolls</i> 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 <i>New York Times </i>and <i>New Yorker</i> 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 <i>Cleopatra </i>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. <p/> 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.