What a sensational find! The diaries of Charles Brackett, best remembered today as Billy Wilder's collaborator - but also a top level producer at Fox for many years, plus a member of the smart New York sophisticate set of the 20s and 30s. The result is one of the best books about Golden Era Hollywood screenwriting I've ever read.
We start in 1935, with Brackett unhappy with his Hollywood existence, fretting about money and his career, making oblique references to his wife's illness (she was an alcoholic), worried about his talent and whether he's a sell out. There's a series of unsuccessful/unsatisfactory script assignments, work on his play and novel, before he's teamed up with Wilder and his career starts to flourish.
Naturally there's plenty of insight into work with Wilder - maddening, furiously talented, acerbically funny, womanising (his technique to pick up women - no kiss at all until the end of the second date, just asking lots of questions - then kiss madly, runaway, go to a phone booth and say "I can't do this it's too dangerous..." then apparently it's on for young and old), egotistical, fight happy. You can just picture it.
There's also fascinating insights into other aspects of Hollywood at the time - Marc Connelly refusing to believe his wife has left him, Brackett's swipes at the dullness of Phil Dunne (both personally and his writing) and Ray Milland's acting, Franchot Tone arguing over every comma of the script of Five Graves to Cairo, being threatened with Alan Ladd's casting in various projects, hating the thought of Helen Walker in The Uninvited, John Farrow cracking jokes about Loretta Young at the commissary. It's very reassuring to see how often Brackett and Wilder were rewritten and worried about jobs.
Less fun is Brackett's consistent casual anti-Semitism - entirely typical of men from his class and age. He seemed to enjoy being a solitary Republican among left leaning screenwriters; he also must have been good company, despite all this neurosis, because he's always going to a party.
Slide's introduction goes into detail about the Brackett-was-gay rumours, tracking their source and pointing out they are hard to prove (diaries don't indicate much gay activity but not indicate a high hetero sex drive either, and he never ever mentions his wife's alcoholism). Then he, correctly, swings the focus back to Brackett the writer and producer.
It's a wonderful, wonderful book - my only quib is it cuts out when he and Wilder break up. I would have loved to have read his account of working at 20th Century Fox - with Zanuck, Monroe, etc.
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