David O. Selznick

With these words, the reader is ushered into an isolated gray stone mansion on the windswept Cornish coast, as the second Mrs. Maxim de Winter recalls the chilling events that transpired as she began her new life as the young bride of a husband she barely knew. For in every corner of every room were phantoms of a time dead but not forgotten—a past devotedly preserved by the sinister housekeeper, Mrs. Danvers: a suite immaculate and untouched, clothing laid out and ready to be worn, but not by any of the great house's current occupants. With an eerie presentiment of evil tightening her heart, the second Mrs. de Winter walked in the shadow of her mysterious predecessor, determined to uncover the darkest secrets and shattering truths about Maxim's first wife—the late and hauntingly beautiful Rebecca.

Beautiful half-breed Pearl Chavez becomes the ward of her dead father's first love and finds herself torn between her sons, one good and the other bad.

The sometimes heroic, sometimes infamous deeds of legendary Mexican bandit and patriot Pancho Villa are brought to life in this biographical film.

The memos which David Selznick wrote over 36 years, filling 2000 file boxes, are actually the autobiography of Selznick's career and kingpindom in Hollywood -- he was an extraordinarily capable, overbearing man with a tenacious sense of detail and a considerable degree of taste. Mr. Belhmer has edited the recorded material (there was even a memo covering his funeral) re the years when he moved in and out of studios (MGM, Paramount, RKO, his own Selznick International); when he wrote forthrightly on the offensive or defensive to everyone -- almost nothing here is of a personal nature, only an occasional letter to Irene, his first wife; and particularly about his selection of vehicles and talent -- hire Hammett ""another Van Dine"" or Hepburn in spite of ""Ye gods, that horse face"" or Bergman or Capote. His major films included Anna Karenina and Tale of Two Cities and especially Gone With the Wind, and there are more than 100 pages devoted to what Belhmer (he does an introduction here) calls that ""manual of vicissitude and hazard."" Selznick rightly cavils over the script or Gable's accent or the costumes which must look more ""worn."" The other major film was Rebecca and Selznick is heard complaining that Hitchcock lumbered much too slowly through the production, in a costly fashion, although in his conversations with Truffaut Hitchcock reverses the charge. From 1948 on, and a short temporary period of retirement, Selznick did much less, less well, even with his second wife Jennifer Jones (or because of? that terrible Farewell to Arms remake?) by his side. This book's selection as the Literary Guild entry assumes an audience beyond that of the film buff although Selznick has none of the flamboyance of say Harry Cohn. But it's a splice of his impressive life.

An American housewife (Jennifer Jones) vacationing in Italy reluctantly decides to put an end to her brief affair with an Italian academic (Montgomery Clift). She flees to Rome's Stazione Termini, where she bids him farewell, but he begs her to stay. The film's plot is simple; its production was not. The troubled collaboration between director Vittorio De Sica and producer David O. Selznick resulted in two cuts of the same film. De Sica's version, Terminal Station, was screened at a length of one-and-a-half hours, but after disappointing previews, Selznick severely re-edited it and changed the title to Indiscretion of an American Wife without De Sica's permission.

Aside from the fact that they are brothers, Peter and Ivan Koubek seem to have little in common. Peter is a Dublin lawyer in his thirties—successful, competent, and apparently unassailable. But in the wake of their father’s death, he’s medicating himself to sleep and struggling to manage his relationships with two very different women—his enduring first love, Sylvia, and Naomi, a college student for whom life is one long joke. Ivan is a twenty-two-year-old competitive chess player. He has always seen himself as socially awkward, a loner, the antithesis of his glib elder brother. Now, in the early weeks of his bereavement, Ivan meets Margaret, an older woman emerging from her own turbulent past, and their lives become rapidly and intensely intertwined. For two grieving brothers and the people they love, this is a new interlude—a period of desire, despair, and possibility; a chance to find out how much one life might hold inside itself without breaking.