(Bought at a used-book store in upstate NY for 50 cents.) Tom Dardis' scholarly study of five distinguished authors who tried their hand at screenwriting during Hollywood's Golden Age is informative if a trifle dry. There's little juice in his chronicling of the quintet's struggles with studio bosses, directors, and, in some cases, alcoholism and depression. It's a scholarly book and also a study of the conflict between art and commerce. All of the authors, to one degree or another, were dependent on their movie money for survival. It's somewhat astonishing to read that literary giants like Fitzgerald and Faulkner had to scramble for cinema dollars in order to pay their bills because the sales of their books, now regarded as classics, were so meager. Though Dardis offers plentiful details such as salary figures and specific studio assignments, he misses the essence of his subjects. I didn't feel I knew any of them any better once I'd finished the book.
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