Outtakes: Robert Tasker and Ernest Booth

I’ve been reading CrimeReads since it launched, so I was happy to make my debut there yesterday with a piece that recounts the amazing true story behind Script for Scandal, the third Lillian Frost and Edith Head mystery I co-wrote with Rosemarie under our pen name Renee Patrick. Robert Tasker and Ernest Booth were two ex-cons who became screenwriters during Hollywood’s Golden Age. A fictionalized counterpart drives the plot of Script for Scandal, but we couldn’t concoct anything as remarkable as their own lives. Head over to CrimeReads and see for yourself. In the meantime, here are a few additional photographs I turned up in my research.

1932’s Hell’s Highway, co-written by Tasker, was partially filmed in an actual prison. John Cromwell directed these scenes uncredited. (Los Angeles Times, July 26, 1932)

From the February 24, 1940 San Francisco Examiner, Booth and his wife Valverda at home in Santa Cruz marking the end of Booth’s parole and what should be the start of a successful writing career with no restrictions. It wasn’t to be.

Valverda stands by her husband as he faces a murder charge. (Los Angeles Times, September 14, 1941)

Dr. George Stricker revived by smelling salts after his late wife Florence Stricker’s safe deposit box is opened. Dr. Stricker, along with Booth, was considered a suspect in his wife’s murder. (Los Angeles Times, September 18, 1941)

The most Ellroy-esque shot of them all, with headline to match. Captain Vernon Rasmussen of the LAPD searches, ultimately in vain, for the murder weapon. (Los Angeles Times, September 21, 1941)

The Rundown

Hang on, let me blow the dust off the—there we go. That’s better.

Things have been hectic lately, what with the launch of the second Lillian Frost & Edith Head novel from Renee Patrick Dangerous to Know. My co-alter ego has the scoop, and believe me when I say there’s more in the works. All kinds of fun and games are coming, including a few things I can’t believe. I’m popping in amidst the promo push to recommend a few items for your delectation.

Under the Midnight Sun, Keigo Higashino (2016). Here’s how busy it’s been: a new Chinese adaptation of Higashino’s The Devotion of Suspect X—easily my favorite mystery novel of the past 20 years—was playing two blocks for me and I missed my chance to see it. Higashino’s latest is also his most ambitious, at least of the novels that have been published in the United States. It’s a sprawling crime story-cum-social novel, spanning decades and touching on, among other things, the growth of the Japanese computer industry. In 1973, a man is murdered and a woman identified as the likely killer. Each has a child. Higashino tracks this pair through the years, but never as the viewpoint characters. Instead, they’re at a remove, always seen through the prism of others who fall into their orbits. It’s a daring structural choice that for the most part deepens the intrigue. As is so often the case with Higashino, any reservations are swept away by a climax at once elegant and charged with emotion. It’s not Suspect X, but then nothing is.

Five Came Back, Netflix. I raved about Mark Harris’s book, which cast a clear eye on a long-overlooked piece of Hollywood history. The three-part documentary based on it has the added advantage of film clips, and pairs contemporary filmmakers with some surprisingly simpatico predecessors (Guillermo del Toro and Frank Capra make an inspired match) who walked away from their Hollywood careers during World War II to make propaganda films.

Cork Dork, Bianca Bosker (2017). I was occasionally frustrated, frequently spellbound, and always fascinated by this memoir from a reporter-turned-sommelier. I remain a cocktail fanatic, but this opened my eyes (and nose) to vino in a way few books have.

Brockmire, IFC. What threatened to be a one-joke character is the centerpiece of a soulful if deeply, deeply profane comedy, thanks to Hank Azaria’s performance and a low-rent atmosphere out of Slap Shot. Granted, it helps knowing that lifelong Mets fan Azaria based Jim Brockmire in part on the team’s original announcers, specifically Lindsey Nelson’s wardrobe and Bob Murphy’s cadences. Hearing him wax rhapsodic about rye whiskey in that home run call voice is all my worlds colliding. And pontifidrinking is real. Not that I’ve done it or anything.

Book: Five Came Back, by Mark Harris (2014)

Let’s dole out the superlatives early. Five Came Back is an essential for students of Hollywood and history, easily the best book I’ve read so far this year. In recounting the role of studio filmmakers in the Allied war effort, it represents the rare combination of a story that demands to be told and a writer who is more than up to the challenge.

The directors who chronicled World War II would not only shape how that conflict would be perceived by future generations, but how combat itself would be portrayed thereafter. Mark Harris (Pictures at a Revolution) wisely keeps the focus on a quintet of individuals, weaving their narratives together as he follows them before, during and immediately after the war. It’s still an epic tale, touching on all branches of the service and every theater of operations. It helps that each of the five men is a larger-than-life figure, entering the military with, as Harris notes, the experience of a private but the attitude of a general.

Frank Capra, who won three Best Director Oscars in the 1930s, didn’t go to war so much as to Washington, his stint as a bureaucrat only underscoring the muddiness of his personal politics. John Ford, who joined the Navy and led the photographic unit of the OSS, would do some of the best work of his career in the heat of battle only to be sent back to Hollywood in disgrace. John Huston had scored his first triumph with The Maltese Falcon in 1941 and initially regarded the war as an inconvenience to his rapid ascent. He blithely staged recreations for his “documentary” The Battle of San Pietro to get the footage he wanted, but the truths he told about the psychological traumas suffered by veterans in his long-censored Let There Be Light proved too hard for the government to hear. William Wyler welcomed these years as “an escape into reality.” His insistence on putting himself in harm’s way to follow aviators on their missions led to permanent injury, material he would then mine for the greatest film about the post-war period The Best Years of Our Lives. And the urbane George Stevens would be unable to return to his métier of comedy after being one of the first American officers to provide an eyewitness account of Nazi atrocities in the wake of the liberation of Dachau; he would go on to compile photograph evidence for the Nuremberg trials.

If the book has a hero it’s Lowell Mellett, the ex-newspaperman appointed as liaison between Washington and Hollywood for the Office of War Information. He played a long game, concerned about maintaining accuracy in what he acknowledged to be propaganda films and bearing the Allies’ eventual victory in mind when addressing issues of racism in how the Japanese were depicted.

Harris strips away any “Greatest Generation” sanctimony, honoring the accomplishments of these individuals while reveling in their humanity, their cantankerousness and foibles. American filmmakers coerced their British counterparts into a lopsided collaboration because U.K. efforts like Desert Victory far surpassed their own. Some things never change: audiences spurned most of these films in favor of newsreels because they craved immediacy and quickly grew bored with a steady diet of war dramas, craving the lighter fare no one felt comfortable making. While the directors lobbied to have their government-bankrolled productions considered for Academy Awards, fearful their careers would be in jeopardy once hostilities ended.

An astonishing array of talent participated in the propaganda campaign, names like Irwin Shaw and Eric Ambler popping up with regularity. Capra’s greatest contribution was an afterthought, approving the “Private Snafu” cartoons spearheaded by Chuck Jones and Theodor “Dr. Seuss” Geisel. I knew Louis Hayward as a serviceable player in lesser noirs like Repeat Performance and Walk a Crooked Mile; I had no inkling he won an Academy Award and the Bronze Star for making the harrowing With the Marines at Tarawa.

But the focus remains on these five men and their films. Even under extreme conditions, they brought their personalities to bear on their work. Ford captured riveting footage for 1942’s The Battle of Midway, but couldn’t resist adding a folksy voiceover by his Grapes of Wrath stars Henry Fonda and Jane Darwell. Wyler’s instinct for drama compelled him to shape The Memphis Belle: A Story of a Flying Fortress around a single B-17’s crew. The impact of those years transformed each of the directors, altering their subsequent films. Capra lost his way in the industry, Ford retreated to westerns, Huston gave vent to his innate cynicism. Five Came Back is a sprawling yet fleet book, compulsively readable and endlessly fascinating.