”King Kong,” ”The Third Man,” ”Gone With the Wind,” ”Rebecca,”
”A Star Is Born,” ”Duel in the Sun,” ”David Copperfield,” ”Dinner at Eight”-the list of films bearing the David O. Selznick imprimatur is long and luminous. From the `20s to the `60s, Selznick, a second-generation mogul who reigned over Hollywood`s Golden Age, steered a multitude of classics-and more than a few clunkers-to the big screen.
The famed producer also wrote a multitude of memos, bedded a multitude of women, ingested a multitude of amphetamines and acculmulated a multitude of debts.
In ”Showman: The Life of David O. Selznick,” author David Thomson paints a fascinating portrait of the megalomaniacal, speed-freak genius, at once arrogant and insecure, whose shrewd moviemaking instincts were rivaled only by his disastrous lack of financial acumen.
Thomson, the film historian and novelist, began work on ”Showman” in 1986 with the full cooperation of Selznick`s two sons, Daniel and Jeffrey, and their mother, Selznick`s first wife, Irene Mayer Selznick (the daughter of Louis B. Mayer; she died in 1990). At Thomson`s disposal was a daunting trove of information: 57,000 pounds of papers stored in 6,000 boxes at the Selznick archives at the University of Texas.
”I`d been told how big it was,” Thomson says of the collection, ”but you don`t really understand the figures until you see the huge rooms full of material.”
Eventually, Thomson found a manageable course through the stuff, which he calls ”one of the great treasuries of documents as far as film history is concerned.” Selznick was a legendary memo-writer, and the archive is filled with his prolix epistles to King Vidor, Alfred Hitchcock and William Wyler.
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Selznick`s memoranda, says Thomson, were ”abolutely characteristic of the man. His memos were as important to him as his films, I would say.”
Thomson did not interview Jennifer Jones, the young beauty Selznick turned into a star-and later his wife. She refused his repeated requests.