Competing with Idiots
Herman and Joe Mankiewicz, a Dual Portrait
(Sprache: Englisch)
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...
One most famous for having written Citizen Kane (with Orson...
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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
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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.
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Lese-Probe zu „Competing with Idiots “
Chapter OneROSEBUD
Maybe Rosebud was something he couldn t get or something he lost. Anyway, it wouldn t have explained anything. I don t think any word can explain a man s life. No, I guess Rosebud is just a piece in a jigsaw puzzle, a missing piece.
Citizen Kane
As a young boy, Herman Mankiewicz found himself in trouble nearly every day, and for one infraction or another, he often found himself virtually imprisoned in his room to think about what he had done. It was practically an afternoon ritual. But as he later told a psychoanalyst in Hollywood, what remained most vivid about those enforced solitary confinements was not the thought he gave to his alleged misdeeds or any shame over having committed these dastardly acts, or even the deep and profound rage at his father (or, less frequently, mother) for the enforced exile, though the anger was severe indeed and would remain with him forever, but the exquisite feelings he felt in being alone, the sights he saw and the smells and sounds that surrounded him outside his window in New York City. Most of all what he remembered was a powerful, almost primal urge to share those feelings with the whole world. He thought that if he were somehow able to convert his actual, entire experience the orange tint of the afternoon sun on the bricks on the building opposite his window, the sound of a breeze, the snapping sound of the lines of laundry in the tenement courtyard into something the whole world could also feel, life would be worth living. Anything else would be a misery. To share this life, he thought, to get the world to see through his eyes that was all he wanted in the world, but to his young mind it was also quite obviously an impossibility. How could one will the entire world to see what he saw? The situation made him deeply depressed.
So while Herman Mankiewicz later said that there was no better time to be born in New York City than 1897, he was equally convinced in the first few years of his life
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that he would rather have been anywhere else in the world. As well as a deep and urgent need to get the world to share his vision, the feeling of being in not quite the right spot was one that he would grow, painfully familiar with throughout his life. But what Herman didn t know, at least not in so many words, was that the trait was an inherited one, passed from generation to generation like blue eyes in a Norwegian family or red hair in a Scottish one, the not-quite-belonging trait, Mankiewiczian to the core. It was what Herman woke to every morning of his young life in New York City.
New York at the turn of the twentieth century was not so different from New York today, or at any point between then and now: the center of the world for those living there, a colorful, swirling, mad, loud, impossible, smelly place riven by wild class divisions and unacceptable cruelty jutting up against magnificent examples of the most graceful humanity imaginable; and for those elsewhere, a spot to be avoided, or at best tolerated if one had to pass through. The almost permanently discomfited expression on the face of Herman s dad, Professor Franz Mankiewicz, always suggested to Herman that he too wished to be elsewhere. He wished to be elsewhere than in New York in the first few years of Herman s life, wished to be other than a schoolteacher, wished to be married to a woman other than Herman s mother, wished to be born in a different century, a different country, into different skin.
Franz s discomfort had as much to do with the world as it did with himself. Like many dogmatic personalities, he was often bewildered by the realm outside his head. Raised in Frankfurt by a domineering father himself, Franz had inhaled a Teutonic sense of self-discipline and order, and the world s inability to follow along never ceased to amaze and infuriate him. As a schoolteacher, he wa
New York at the turn of the twentieth century was not so different from New York today, or at any point between then and now: the center of the world for those living there, a colorful, swirling, mad, loud, impossible, smelly place riven by wild class divisions and unacceptable cruelty jutting up against magnificent examples of the most graceful humanity imaginable; and for those elsewhere, a spot to be avoided, or at best tolerated if one had to pass through. The almost permanently discomfited expression on the face of Herman s dad, Professor Franz Mankiewicz, always suggested to Herman that he too wished to be elsewhere. He wished to be elsewhere than in New York in the first few years of Herman s life, wished to be other than a schoolteacher, wished to be married to a woman other than Herman s mother, wished to be born in a different century, a different country, into different skin.
Franz s discomfort had as much to do with the world as it did with himself. Like many dogmatic personalities, he was often bewildered by the realm outside his head. Raised in Frankfurt by a domineering father himself, Franz had inhaled a Teutonic sense of self-discipline and order, and the world s inability to follow along never ceased to amaze and infuriate him. As a schoolteacher, he wa
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Autoren-Porträt von Nick Davis
NICK DAVIS is a writer, director, and producer. His most recent film is Once Upon A Time in Queens about the 1986 Mets. He lives in New York City with his wife and daughters.
Bibliographische Angaben
- Autor: Nick Davis
- 2021, 384 Seiten, Maße: 17 x 24,2 cm, Gebunden, Englisch
- Verlag: KNOPF
- ISBN-10: 140004183X
- ISBN-13: 9781400041831
- Erscheinungsdatum: 07.09.2021
Sprache:
Englisch
Pressezitat
Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist[Davis s] perspective gives the book an intimacy that raises the emotional stakes, especially when it comes to dysfunctional family dynamics . . . He sharply depicts the brothers complex relationship how they helped each other but were also driven by a fierce and bitter rivalry. The Washington Post
A tasty combination of film history, family album and psychological study . . . intimate . . . a tragic story told with disarming brio. Los Angeles Times
No Hollywood figures have burned into memory more than the Mankiewiczs, dissolute and inspired Herman, driven and beglittered Joe. From a uniquely intimate viewpoint, Nick Davis gives us their story, and the larger story of their and his family. A wonderful book both for lovers of Hollywood lore and history and for anyone who ponders the many ways family heritage and sibling rivalry stress and shape our sensibilities. Adam Gopnik
Competing with Idiots is full of juicy Hollywood stories as it weaves an incredible tale about these two wildly different, but equally talented Mankiewicz brothers as told by Herman s grandson Nick Davis. Their working lives brought us well-known masterpieces like Citizen Kane (Herman wrote it) and All About Eve (Joe wrote and directed), but their personal lives were no less dramatic. A thrilling book. Maria Semple
Davis recounts the story of brothers Herman and Joseph L. Mankiewicz, whose names loom large in the annals of Hollywood history and in the author s own family . . . The brothers had a complex relationship, fraught with jealousy and competition but also love, and Davis recounts it with feeling, drawing on fastidious research. Movie fans and viewers of the recent Netflix film Mank will give two thumbs up to this carefully crafted, fascinating account of two legendary Hollywood figures. Library Journal
Fans of the movie Mank will be intrigued by this blend of memoir and biography from the
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grandson of Herman Mankiewicz and great-nephew of Joe . . . Davis capably summarizes the two men's careers . . . thoughtful and engaging. Booklist
A lively, anecdote-filled chronicle of the two men s lives as Hollywood movers and shakers . . . Davis gossipy dual biography reveals the brothers starkly different personalities and enduring demons. A portrait of eventful lives in Hollywood s golden age. Kirkus
A lively, anecdote-filled chronicle of the two men s lives as Hollywood movers and shakers . . . Davis gossipy dual biography reveals the brothers starkly different personalities and enduring demons. A portrait of eventful lives in Hollywood s golden age. Kirkus
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