![]() ![]() Read together, the two books form a kind of diptych of Hollywood's golden age. Fortunately, Irene does, in her autobiography, A Private View (1983). The book is revealing, but doesn't tell us much about the state of his marriage to Irene. His advice to the composer of Gone With the Wind was succinct: "Go mad with schmaltz in the last three reels." The extraordinary book Memo from David O Selznick (2000), a collection of the many memos of the movie mogul, reveals a near-maniac, bombed out of his mind on Benzedrine, issuing edicts on everything from Ingrid Bergman's eyebrows to Clark Gable's tailor. ![]() David launched the career of many actors, many of whom Myron just so happened to represent. ![]() The director and screenwriter Elia Kazan once compared the early years of Hollywood to the gold rush in Alaska, in which a bunch of "desperate men" engaged "in a bare-knuckle scramble over rugged terrain" – and the Selznicks were some of most desperate and bare-knuckledest among them. ![]() The boys may not have needed brains, but they certainly needed guts and plenty of determination. Lewis Selznick once famously remarked: "There's no business in the world in which a man needs so little brains as in the movies." David worked his way up from proofreader to script editor to producer, while his brother Myron became an agent. Selznick was a young film producer, the son of Lewis J Selznick, who was born in Kiev, Ukraine, emigrated to America and eventually became a head of a film studio. ![]()
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