Competing with Idiots

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 bea 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, and eighty-nine others . . . Talented, witty, huge-hearted, wildly immature, a figure of renown and success. Herman went to Hollywood in 1926, was almost immediately successful, 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 spectacularfiasco 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 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.