California Time

Victor England, the great film director, returns to Hollywood to finalize arrangements for his next production. Everything seems he has a firm contract with a studio that owes him a substantial debt of gratitude and whose top executives are good friends of his. Why, then, is he left to languish in the grand hotel owned by Verdugo, which in Spanish means executioner?

Frederic Raphael was born on August 14th 1931 in Chicago, and emigrated to England with his parents in 1938. He was educated at independent schools in Sussex and Surrey, before studying at St John's College, Cambridge. His career spans work as a screenwriter and a prolific novelist and journalist. In 1965 Raphael won an Oscar for the 1965 movie Darling, and two years later received an Oscar nomination for his screenplay for Two for the Road. He collaborated on the screenplay of Stanley Kubrick's last film Eyes Wide Shut, and wrote a controversial memoir of their time together, Eyes Wide Open in 1999.