In 1941, when Preston Sturges, the master of the screwball comedy, won the first Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, he stumbled onstage and attempted a joke. Sturges, who won for “The Great McGinty”—a satire about a poor man, in an unnamed American city, who fails upward until he becomes governor—wasn’t fond of institutions and their puffed-up accolades, and his speech, which ridiculed the ceremony, was particularly on brand. “Mr. Sturges was so overcome by the mere possibility of winning an Oscar,” he said, “that he was unable to come here tonight, and asked me to accept in his stead.” The room went quiet, Sturges recalled, and he slunk back to his table. His gag had bombed.
Or had it? In truth, everyone in the room likely knew who Sturges was. By the time he made “The Great McGinty,” he was one of the highest-paid men in Hollywood, pulling in ludicrous sums for a single screenplay. His contract with Paramount insured that he could direct his own scripts, minting him as one of cinema’s first major auteurs. In 1940, he had released two films (“McGinty” and “Christmas in July”), shot another (“The Lady Eve”), and opened the Players Club, a rowdy, two-story restaurant and night club on Sunset Boulevard, where he held court among industry nabobs. If Sturges’s speech was coolly received, it was not, as he suggested, because “nobody knew what I looked like.” The more probable reason is that, in a room packed with vain celebrities, nobody found it even slightly amusing that a person, when offered a moment of glory, might pretend to be someone else.
Bu hikaye The New Yorker dergisinin April 10, 2023 sayısından alınmıştır.
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Bu hikaye The New Yorker dergisinin April 10, 2023 sayısından alınmıştır.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.
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President for Sale - A survey of today's political ads.
On a mid-October Sunday not long ago sun high, wind cool-I was in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, for a book festival, and I took a stroll. There were few people on the streets-like the population of a lot of capital cities, Harrisburg's swells on weekdays with lawyers and lobbyists and legislative staffers, and dwindles on the weekends. But, on the façades of small businesses and in the doorways of private homes, I could see evidence of political activity. Across from the sparkling Susquehanna River, there was a row of Democratic lawn signs: Malcolm Kenyatta for auditor general, Bob Casey for U.S. Senate, and, most important, in white letters atop a periwinkle not unlike that of the sky, Kamala Harris for President.
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