Walking That Line

I’m on strike at the moment, and that moment may last a while. Might as well keep limber by making a few recommendations.

What I’m Watching

Rabbit Hole (Paramount+). I waited until all eight episodes of the first (only?) season of this show dropped to make sure it stuck the landing. It did, so now I can say this Kiefer Sutherland series is the best thing I’ve seen on TV in a while, and stronger than any thriller novel I’ve read recently. And I won’t tell you why.

Doing so would spoil the fun. More than one episode of Rabbit Hole ended with a reveal that had me saying “What the fuck?” aloud to my TV. But every twist feels organic, thanks to the show’s devilishly intricate structure and to its premise. Sutherland’s John Weir specializes in shaping perceptions to aid his corporate clients, his tactics and slippery morals perfectly illustrated in the extended sequence that opens the premiere episode; right off the bat, you’re advised not to trust what you see. An old friend hires Weir and his team for a job that ends with Weir framed for murder. Where the show goes from there is … well, you’ll have to watch for yourself.

Rabbit Hole is consistently funny, which shouldn’t have surprised me considering it’s the brainchild of Glen Ficarra and John Requa (Bad Santa). They write beautifully for Sutherland, wringing laughs out of his gruff persona. The show’s sensibility and Weir’s character are established in this early exchange between Weir and the FBI agent determined to take him down.

FBI Agent: Corporate espionage is a dirty way to get rich.
Weir: Espionage? What are you talking about? I’m not a spy.
FBI Agent: Manipulating people and situations to influence markets for client advantage is … what, then?
Weir: Consulting.

A sequence when Weir, the target of a city-wide manhunt, strolls into a New York police station to see the “evidence” against him is a marvel of low-tech deception and social engineering. And a running gag involving Kiefer and hammers got me every time.

But the show also succeeds as a thriller, tackling thorny topical subject matter in a manner that consistently raises the stakes. The supporting cast is richly idiosyncratic, and when the actor playing the show’s Big Bad finally showed their face, I was ecstatic. (And even that reveal has a reveal.) If the show doesn’t return, its sole season goes into the books a winner, ending on a perfect note of 1970s-style paranoia.

Paramount+ may be primarily known for Yellowstone and Star Trek spinoffs, but it’s also the home of The Offer (my favorite show of 2022) as well as the bonkers Catholic X-Files, better known as Evil. That’s a solid batting average for a streaming service.

Transatlantic (Netflix). I wrote about it in my guise as Renee Patrick, but nowhere near enough people are paying attention to this lush limited series, so I’ll also laud it here. It’s about the ragtag efforts of the Emergency Rescue Committee to transport artists from Europe to the United States in 1940. Like Rabbit Hole, it employs a tone you don’t expect; it’s light and even fizzy, which only lends the dark moments more impact. Watch it for Justine Seymour’s costumes, each and every one a knockout, and the haunting score by Mike Ladd & David Sztanke.

What I’m Reading

The Pitfall, by Jay Dratler (1947). The 1948 film noir Pitfall has been rediscovered, due in part to the efforts of my friend and colleague Eddie Muller. It also stands out by having a femme fatale who’s no seductress, but a woman simply trying to do her best. It’s not the fault of Mona, played by Lizabeth Scott, that men are drawn to her, like bored suburban family man/insurance investigator Forbes (Dick Powell) and sleazy stalker shamus Mac (Raymond Burr). The source novel is by Jay Dratler, who didn’t work on the film but whose own impressive string of noir credits includes the Hitchcock knockoff Fly-by-Night (1942) and Laura (1944). Dratler’s book is back in print, part of Stark House Press’s Film Noir Classics line. (Hat tip to Saturday Evening Post columnist Bob Sassone for reminding me about this series.) Reading it is an object lesson in adapting material, particularly under the strictures of the Production Code.

Which is ironic, given that in the novel, Forbes is no insurance man but a screenwriter. Mac isn’t a private eye but a Beverly Hills cop. He had a hand in arresting Mona’s purse-snatcher husband and wants to make a move on her, but knows he doesn’t stand a chance … unless his buddy Forbes, whose wife is currently very pregnant, sleeps with her first, then vouches for good ol’ Mac. Nothing that sleazy or disturbing occurs in the film version; in the 1940s, it never could. Mona remains the same, a goodhearted woman powerless before her power over men.

The book is packed with vintage Hollywood detail. Forbes says of Schwab’s: “It’s movie-town’s drugstore, and better stories are enacted at its counters and in the rear of the prescription counter than many a studio shapes into its best product.” Toiling on assignment at Fox while he agonizes over Mona, he thinks, “I knew I’d lick the story. I never met one that couldn’t be pounded into shape if you beat your head against it long enough and if you made real people live in it.” Dratler certainly did that here. The Pitfall is a close-quarters study of obsession, as short and sharp as a kidney punch. And it features an extended metaphor involving a centipede that’s still wriggling away in my brain.

What I’m Drinking

I discovered this Martinez riff courtesy of Cocktails with Suderman and was sold on it before sip #1 because:

a) it’s concocted by genius bartender Phil Ward, whom I’ve had the pleasure of seeing in action at the New York bars Death & Co. and Mayahuel and who has gifted us with modern classics like the Oaxaca Old Fashioned and the Final Ward;
b) it features the artichoke-heavy amaro Cynar, a personal favorite;
c) it’s named after a modern noir classic. Forget it, reader, it’s …

Cynartown

2 oz. London dry gin
¾ oz. sweet vermouth (Ward recommends Carpano Antica)
½ oz. Cynar

Stir. Strain. Garnish with a Luxardo maraschino cherry.

Demented and Sad, but Social

Last week, the thought came to me unbidden: Holy shit, I have a Post account!

It’s true. Back when Twitter first went into convulsions, Post seemed the most viable alternative. I set up shop, made the rounds, then promptly forgot about it. I’ll probably forget about it again soon enough.

Yesterday I nosed around Notes, Substack’s answer to Twitter. Could this be the future of social media? I have to say, it looks pretty good. It underscored how many writers I follow are already on Substack. And it has me pondering questions I have long put off: should I start a Substack of my own? Would anybody read it?

Anyway, that’s our first topic this morning. Give us a call. Our lines are open.

What I’m Reading

Oscar Wars: A History of Hollywood in Gold, Sweat, and Tears, by Michael Schulman (2023). I wrote a little about this book while disguised as Renee Patrick, mild-mannered crime novelist. (Subscribe to Renee’s occasional newsletter here.) Schulman, a New Yorker correspondent, analyzes the role that the Academy Awards have played during pivotal Hollywood moments. One of the best chapters reconsiders the 1989 ceremony, widely regarded as the worst Oscars ever. You know, the one featuring the opening number with Snow White and Rob Lowe, which is even longer than I remembered it being. (There was also a stupefying “Stars of Tomorrow” number, which is far worse.) Producer Allan Carr (Grease) bore the brunt of the nuclear-level negative reaction, which essentially ended his career. Schulman makes it plain that Carr, who had long dreamed of running the Oscars, sealed his fate by making the show partly about him. But he also highlights how much Carr got right, including several innovations that are now mainstays, and how tacky the telecast was before Carr got his hands on it. Although those two numbers are a lot to forgive.

Winning Fixes Everything: How Baseball’s Brightest Minds Created Sports’ Biggest Mess, by Evan Drellich (2023). If you’re a baseball fan you’re already aware of this book, the definitive chronicle of the Houston Astros’ legacy of cheating, particularly during 2017 when the team won the World Series. (Recent admissions from then-Astros player Evan Gattis aren’t helping the bad blood go away, as any Yankee or Dodger fan will attest.) But I’d also recommend it as an incisive case study about how cultures are built, and how toxic ones can eat away at institutions that appear not only healthy but successful. It’s also about the financialization of every aspect of public life. One Astros player described the team’s mentality—perhaps best exemplified by owner Jim Crane bringing in McKinsey to improve operations, because playing nine innings is exactly like selling widgets—this way: “They just take the human element out of baseball. It’s hard to play for a GM who just sees you as a number instead of a person.” Another choice quote: “The closer I get to the world of the thirty owners, many of them are among the worst people in the world.” Testify, unnamed baseball executive. What makes it all harder to swallow is that the Astros never stopped winning. They’re baseball’s current defending champions—yet in true McKinsey fashion, they parted ways with the GM brought in specifically to right the ship after he’d won them a second title. Sometimes the bastards don’t lose. They don’t even learn.

What I’m Watching

Turn Every Page: The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb (2022). When I finished reading Caro’s The Power Broker last year, I posted a photograph to mark the occasion. Caro’s four-and-hopefully-five volume biography of LBJ awaits, and this engaging documentary about his life’s work and his enduring relationship with his editor Gottlieb (made by Lizzie Gottlieb, his daughter) has me eager to read them. I was struck by the deep modesty of both men, and by Gottlieb’s belief that having unexpected and intense interests—he collects plastic handbags and consults with ballet companies—contributes to his acuity and the longevity of his career. Above all, it’s a portrait of a genteel literary life out of a bygone era. Every day Caro dons a suit and tie to walk to his office, where he puts in the hours at a typewriter and backs up his work using carbon paper. All I could think as I watched him was Who still makes carbon paper?

What I’m Drinking

Talk to bartenders and you’ll hear tell of the Great Chartreuse Shortage of 2023. This week, a friend told me that in the Seattle area, the price for a bottle has hit three figures. Jason Wilson has a nice overview of chartreuse and what brought its recent scarcity about. I’ve been rationing my own supply, recently dipping into my stash to make a Diamondback after Punch called for this boozy beauty to make a comeback. It’s always been a staple at the Chez K bar—it’s included in my cocktail book Down the Hatch, which I just realized is coming up on its tenth anniversary—but I make it with green, not yellow chartreuse, the way bartending legend Murray Stenson taught me when he was behind the stick at the Zig Zag Café.

1 ½ oz. rye whiskey
¾ oz. bonded applejack
¾ oz. green chartreuse

Stir. Strain. No garnish.

Probably Should’ve Mentioned This Earlier ...

... but Idle Gossip, the latest Lillian Frost & Edith Head mystery that I wrote with Rosemarie under our house pseudonym Renee Patrick, is now out. People seem to like it. Let Renee tell you all about it.

 

Reach for The Sharpest Needle

Tuesday was the official U.S. publication day for The Sharpest Needle, the fourth Lillian Frost and Edith Head mystery that I wrote with Rosemarie under our pen name of Renee Patrick. It’s set in 1939. The world is about to plunge into war, Orson Welles has recently arrived in Hollywood, and Lillian and Edith are asked by Marion Davies to get to the bottom of some poison pen letters she’s received. (Did you watch Mank? Then you’ll want to read this book. Did you not watch Mank? Then you’ll definitely want to read this book.)

I don’t want to appear immodest and big up Needle myself. Instead, I’ll tell you that Publishers Weekly called it “a tailor-made treat for film buffs” while Historical Novel Review said “the mystery has plenty of tantalizing sidetracks … carefully stitched and neatly sewn together.”

Rosemarie and I were interviewed by Library Journal.

Everything Zoomer has the book in terrific company as one of its recommended February reads.

Over at CrimeReads, I have a piece detailing a fascinating footnote unearthed in our research: the history of Welles’s unmade adaptation of the Nicholas Blake novel The Smiler with the Knife. He’s planning the film—about a fascist coup in the United States spearheaded by a flashy playboy businessman, if you can imagine such a thing—at the time The Sharpest Needle is set. Full of surprise cameos and an explanation of how the proposed project ended up shaping Citizen Kane. Go on, give it a read.

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)

Media Blitz

Two posts in a month? Something big must be happening.

And it is. Renee Patrick returns to Turner Classic Movies. Tune in this Sunday, October 29, as Rosemarie and I once again join our friend Eddie Muller on his show Noir Alley. Gaze upon us in spellbound wonder as we talk about the extraordinary career of Edith Head both before and after one of her films, 1946’s The Strange Love of Martha Ivers. Edith dressing not one but two red hot stone cold femmes fatale in Barbara Stanwyck and Lizabeth Scott, Kirk Douglas making his big-screen debut, and stories galore. That’s Sunday, October 29, at 10 am EST / 7 am PST.

A note on recording the show, especially if you’re on the West Coast. Strange Love runs 116 minutes. (Lots of twists.) Right now TCM has it in a two-hour time slot, so if you record that you’ll likely get the introduction but not the (shocking!) end of the film or the outro, where we dish about Edith some more. So you might want to set that DVR for an extra 15 minutes or so, just to be safe.

But that’s not all. While we were attending Bouchercon in Toronto, we had the pleasure of appearing on one of our favorite podcasts, Writer Types hosted by Eric Beetner and S.W. Lauden. It’s a jam-packed affair that includes friends like Bill Crider and our fellow Anthony Award nominees Bill Beverly, Art Taylor, and Jim Ziskin. Give a listen.

Coast to Coast

I’ve trumpeted this news on both my social media feed and my alter ego’s, and I sing it here from the rooftops. Because it is, in my world, a pretty big deal.

Renee Patrick is going to be on Turner Classic Movies. This Sunday, June 11, to be precise.

Rosemarie and I will be the guests of our friend and Film Noir Foundation cohort Eddie Muller on his TCM show Noir Alley. Eddie will be showing the brilliant 1944 film Phantom Lady, directed by Robert Siodmak from the novel by Cornell Woolrich. This one packs a wallop, full of astounding visuals and one did-I-just-see-that? scene after another. It’s worth getting up for. As a bonus, you get me and the missus, talking about the essential role costume design plays in the story as well as the real-life Tinseltown mystery connected to the film.

The fun begins Sunday, June 11, at 10:00 am Eastern, 7:00 am Pacific. So set the alarm or the DVR and get in on the action.

And if you can’t wait that long to see us, last month we appeared on Book Lust with Nancy Pearl. It was a pleasure to sit down with Nancy—librarian, NPR mainstay, and novelist—and talk about how Rosemarie and I got into the Renee Patrick business. As of today, our episode of Book Lust is available on YouTube and is presented here for your delectation.

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.

Books: Three for the Road

Thanks to a Design for Dying book tour that lasted much of May, I almost broke my Showgirls oath to post at least once a month. Here I am under the wire to recommend a troika of titles that kept me company while I was on the road.

Underground Airlines, Ben H. Winters. Late last year I devoured the entirety of Winters’ Last Policeman trilogy, genre-bending marvels that claimed both Edgar and Philip K. Dick awards. Even those books didn’t prepare me for Winters’ latest, due out on July 5 and destined to be a hot button topic for the rest of the summer. Airlines takes place in an alternate America where the Civil War never occurred, a twenty-first century where slavery remains legal in four states. Victor is a young black man who has made a devil’s bargain with a shadowy government agency to act as bounty hunter, tracking down fugitives from the South. Winters’ world-building is astonishing, creating a wholly believable society mere degrees from our own. But it’s Victor’s raw and potent story that carries us through this distorted and disturbing mirror image.

West of Eden: An American Place, by Jean Stein. Given the Lillian Frost/Edith Head series any book on Old Hollywood is going to command my attention, but this one-of-a-kind oral history is told from the inside. Stein recounts the sagas of five different Los Angeles families, including the Dohenys, who inspired There Will Be Blood and haunted Raymond Chandler; the Warners; and Jennifer Jones and David O. Selznick. The section on Jane Garland, the troubled daughter of a fortune-hunting mother who paid assorted California dreamers to keep her company, is like a real-life Ross Macdonald tale. Stein then turns her gaze toward her own clan; her father Jules founded MCA and played a pivotal role in building modern show business. A compulsively readable book about the price of privilege under the sun.

The Only Rule Is It Has To Work, by Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller. It’s a dream come true for a pair of hardcore baseball statheads: the chance to operate an actual team, albeit one in the independent leagues several rickety rungs below the minors. But in order to apply sabermetrics to the Sonoma Stompers, Lindbergh and Miller will have to win over rookies and lifers alike, plus learn some things about themselves and their beliefs. I heartily recommend this book to any baseball fan – it goes down much easier if you already know what wRC+ means – but don’t go in expecting a dry treatise heavy on objective analytics. This is powerful, moving stuff about theory and practice, dreams and reality, and the struggle to make tomorrow different from today.

Book: Ready When You Are, C.B. (Charles Brackett)

You know the old Hollywood joke, the one about the actress so dumb she slept with the writer. Here’s how famous the team of Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett were: when the two of them were just writers, producing some of the wittiest scripts of the Studio Era (Midnight, Ninotchka) before Wilder transitioned to the director’s chair and amassed one of the great résumés in film history, sleeping with one of them likely would have done an actress’ career some good.

And it probably would have been Wilder, if Brackett’s diaries are any indication. Charles Brackett kept meticulous track of his daily minutia, chronicling one of the most storied partnerships in movies. Film historian Anthony Slide has done an extraordinary job of excerpting those journals in the new Columbia University Press book It’s the Pictures That Got Small: Charles Brackett on Billy Wilder and Hollywood’s Golden Age (2014). Slide suggests that Brackett will become known as “America’s foremost, if not only, Hollywood diarist.” I’d give Brackett the title by knockout. This view from deep inside the studio system at its height is one of the best books ever about Hollywood, as well one of the finest on writing in years.

Brackett was on his second bid for screenwriting success when, in August 1936, he was paired with “jaunty young foreigner” Wilder to work on Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife for director Ernst Lubitsch. Brackett describes their first work session: “Wilder, who paces constantly, has over-extravagant ideas, but is stimulating.” Three weeks into the partnership, Brackett calls Wilder “a hard, conscientious worker, without a very sensitive ear for dialogue, but a beautiful constructionist. He has the passion for the official joke of a second-rate dialogist.” By November, Wilder is laying out his psychologically opportunistic approach to seducing women during their story sessions.

Like many a great twosome they made an odd couple. Wilder was earthy, European and liberal while the urbane, East Coast Brackett was a peripheral member of the Algonquin Round Table and maybe the only Alf Landon voter in Hollywood. In private Brackett comes across as a spectacularly dyspeptic figure, apparently not liking anyone (“Chaplin seems to me as repellent a human being as I’ve ever been in the same room with”) or anything (The Palm Beach Story is “the latest Preston Sturges opus and one of the weakest – disagreeable people, unappetizing situations, exaggerations”).

But reading his diaries – the entries here span the years 1932-1949 – provides a keen sense of the grind of working in the dream factory. The awareness of every perceived slight, the primacy of money as a way of gauging status, the near-hysterical faith in preview cards, and above all the constant nagging sensation that his work is subpar and anyway, he’s just wasting his time. The book contains a lot about the inner machinations of Hollywood organizations – Brackett served as president of both the Screen Writers Guild and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences – and surprisingly little about his wife Elizabeth, who battled alcoholism and depression and spent many years in institutions.

Writing for himself, Brackett holds nothing back, his entries often hilariously bitchy. On a dinner at Joan Crawford’s house: “A grim evening – all four adopted children as hors d’oeuvres.” Alfred Hitchcock is a “monstrous egotist.” Brackett visits the set of Wilder’s directorial debut The Major and the Minor to find co-star Ray Milland giving “a dry, wooden performance (his usual performance to speak the truth).” A few years later, Milland would win an Oscar for his harrowing work in Brackett-and-Wilder’s The Lost Weekend. The casual anti-Semitism of the era occasionally rears its head, and some of Brackett’s judgments seem unduly harsh –

On thinking about Billy’s attitude and that of all the Mittel Europeans I know towards their American citizenship, it seems to me this: they’ve come into a department store, been crazy about its stock, and put themselves down for a charge account. No more involvement than that.

Wilder remains the locus here, Brackett readily acknowledging he feels like a planet orbiting his partner’s star. When one of Brackett’s children runs off to get married in 1942, the story makes the newspapers. “I was surprised. Expected them to read: Billy Wilder disturbed because of elopement of daughter of collaborator.” By 1939 he’s prepared to end their relationship, fed up with Wilder’s manners. He later wrote: “I came to bed and found myself fretting at the prospect of becoming Billy’s stooge producer – a prospect I detest.” Brackett would prove no stooge as a producer, putting his stamp on films like Niagara, Titanic and The King and I after his break-up with Wilder.

Insights into their process and their quarrels – with each other and with directors and producers – are manifold. Both Brackett and Wilder lobbied to have Lucille Ball star in their script Ball of Fire, a truly tantalizing proposition. But Howard Hawks deemed her a second lead at best and insisted on Barbara Stanwyck, whom Brackett pronounces “a pleasant, heavy-faced girl, very wrong for Sugarpuss.” For decades the legend has held that Brackett didn’t want to pitch in with Wilder on Double Indemnity because he found James M. Cain’s story odious. Here, Brackett makes it plain that Wilder “was having a touch of claustrophobia at being tied down working with me” and welcomed the respite. He would consult with Wilder and his grudging new confederate Raymond Chandler on their adaptation and ultimately finds the film good, not great: “The direction is uneven and some of the writing extremely poor, and my black heart sang like a bird.”

The book and the Wilder/Brackett collaboration come to a close with Sunset Blvd. (1950). Even as their decade-plus-long partnership is torn asunder, Brackett can’t help marveling at Wilder’s inventiveness. The material has the pace of a thriller, frissons arising as ideas that will become part of film history bubble up half-formed, the two men setting aside their differences to express their joint frustration with their original choice of leading man, Montgomery Clift, who walked away from the film fearing it too closely mirrored aspects of his own life. “God help people who have to deal with the young Mr. C in a couple of years, maybe a shorter time than that.” Brackett was an unhappy but hugely productive man who’d already left behind a considerable body of work. This warts-and-all account of that working life may be his greatest legacy.