Leslie Beckmann - AbeBooks

Hardcover. Condition: Very good. Dust Jacket Condition: Very good. Max Beckmann (Jacket artwork) and Ilene Epstein (a (illustrator). [16], 398, [2] pages. A collection of moguls, agents, directors, starlets, writers, gossip columnists, and a great film director named Rudolf Von Beckmann, all of whom converge on a small town to make a film. Leslie Donald Epstein (born May 4, 1938 in Los Angeles) is an American educator, essayist, and novelist. Epstein is currently Professor of English and Director of the Creative Writing Program at Boston University. His father Philip and uncle Julius were both noted screenwriters. Together, they won an Academy Award for the celebrated 1942 film Casablanca. Epstein went to Yale University. In 1960 he matriculated at Merton College, Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship; he attained a Diploma in Social Anthropology in 1962. He returned to the United States as a graduate student in Theatre Arts at UCLA. Epstein has written nine novels including King of the Jews (1979), about Chaim Rumkowski, head of the Judenrat of the ód ghetto during World War II; and Pandaemonium (1997). His San Remo Drive: A Novel from Memory (2004) was based on his childhood growing up in Hollywood in the 1940s and 50s. Epstein's most recent novels are The Eighth Wonder of the World and Liebestod: Opera Buffa with Lieb Goldkorn. Epstein has written articles for Esquire, The Atlantic, Playboy, Harper's, The Yale Review, The Nation, The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post and The Boston Globe. For more than twenty years, Leslie Epstein has been the director of the Creative Writing Program at Boston University, where he joined the faculty in 1978. Derived from a Publishers Weekly article: With chutzpah worthy of the early movie moguls he so richly describes, Epstein stages a darkly comic fantasia about Hollywood and Nazis, power and imagination. Narrated by a wry, mildly tragic Peter Lorre, the tale begins in 1938 in Austria, where Rudolph Von Beckmann, a legendary stage and screen director who demands loyalty and adoration from his employees, arrives at the Salzburg Festival to present his production of Antigone. But while "Von B" and his cast are in Austria, Hitler annexes the country, and Joseph Goebbels demands that Von B fire all Jews in his production. After Von B cravenly obliges, Goebbels strips him of his many false faces (the director is secretly Jewish) and blackmails him into handing over starlet Magdalena Mezaray for Hitler's pleasure. Two years later, in Hollywood, Lorre, sick of playing secret agent Mr. Moto, is on hand when Von B arrives to make a western. Lorre and others, including Mezaray (freed from Hitler's orbit by a movie studio's lavish payoff), sign on to the project, which is being shot in an isolated Nevada ghost town. But Von B is really shooting Antigone in the guise of a kitschy western, and he intends the film to be an indictment of Hitler. The great irony is that Von B runs his shoot the way Hitler ran Germany, leading his troupe to disaster. Piling his narrative high with Hollywood knowledge and bracing portrayals of real personalities, Epstein delivers his tale on a grand scale that shuttles between broad humor and moral seriousness. What keeps it all from unraveling is the ever-worldly voice of the appealingly anti-heroic Lorre. FYI: Epstein grew up in Hollywood, where his father, Philip, and his Uncle Julius together wrote such memorable films as Casablanca and Yankee Doodle Dandy. First Edition [Stated], First Printing [Stated].