Sunset boulevard

Thursday

Taki

My unforgettable night with a musical genius

Nostalgia barged in like gangbusters. What brought it on was a brief article about the most charming and enchanting of young women, Nancy Olson. Seventy-two years ago, she was in that rare gem of a movie, Sunset Boulevard, playing the rosy-cheeked screenwriter who was the love interest of William Holden, the writer who was handsome but entrapped by Norma Desmond, aka Gloria Swanson. Nancy’s blue eyes shimmered, and her figure was to die for, but what made her memorable was that she was as American as apple pie. Innocence trumped sex in her case, and apparently she was as decent and as intelligent as the ingénue she played in that

Thursday

Jonathan Coe

Billy Wilder — the making of a great film director

Before Billy Wilder became the celebrated director of films such as Sunset Boulevard, Some Like It Hot and The Apartment he was a busy jobbing screenwriter at UFA Studios in Berlin in the early 1930s, writing or co-writing the scenarios to more than 20 movies. And before that, he was a journalist. Starting in Vienna in the mid-1920s, where his earliest assignments included setting the crossword puzzle (a charming example is included in this volume), he quickly moved on to Berlin and became a prolific writer of occasional pieces for papers such as Der Querschnitt and the Berliner Börsen Courier. Selections of these articles have been published before but are

Thursday

Tanya Gold

The journalists who scripted the golden age of Hollywood

When talkies appeared in 1927, Hollywood went searching for talkers to write them. It turned to men like Herman J. Mankiewicz: to journalists. The greatest screenwriters of the golden age were journalists first; unlike novelists, they thrived in Hollywood — at least professionally. Good films and good journalism need brevity; novels don’t. Reading about F. Scott Fitzgerald struggling at MGM, 12 years after The Great Gatsby, is brutal, like trying to watch a man learn to walk. The film Mank, by David Fincher, tells the story of how Mankiewicz and Orson Welles created Citizen Kane — for which they shared an Oscar for the screenplay in 1942 — and how