Word: curtizisms
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...show, refining some as the war mood changed ("Dressed Up to Kill" was softened to "Dressed Up to Win"). He not only supervised the production but traveled with it, singing "Oh! How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning" at each performance, as well as in Michael Curtiz' lively film version. Berlin again waived all royalties from his tireless work, and "This Is the Army" raised more than $10 million for the Army War Relief...
...with film experience, often becomes the target of his own satire. At the center of the story is S.O. Letterman, a movie producer who starts off high-minded and ends with his eye on the box office. Letterman does not give a rat's rump for historical truth. Tim Curtiz, a London-based journalist taking a crack at a lucrative script-writing assignment, does. The subject of the movie, called Masai Dreams, is a striking French anthropologist named Claudia Cohn-Casson, whose work among the Masai, and whose fate at the hands of the Nazis, illustrate the collapse...
...Curtiz pieces the Cohn-Casson story together from interviews with people who knew her in the '30s. An old Masai spiritual leader tells of his nephew who may have been Claudia's lover. A former British army officer describes his romance with Cohn-Casson and her return to Paris during the final months of World War II. Why would an intelligent, worldly Jew deliberately return to Hitler's Europe? While Curtiz is pursuing the answer in Kenya and Tanzania, Letterman is busy in Paris checking out every aspect of a celebrated French actress. She turns out to be a transsexual...
...droll. But he can't resist tarting up his tale with a bit of porn and pretense. He gravely quotes Elie Wiesel on how Auschwitz negates any attempt to fictionalize it, and then includes fictional scenes of the Holocaust. And did Cartwright really have to call his journalist hero Curtiz, which sounds like Joseph Conrad's Kurtz? Can't anybody write about Africa without invoking Heart of Darkness...
...this backstage story there are no villains, unless it is the lumbering behemoth that Hollywood filmmaking has become. In the '30s a director like Michael Curtiz made six or seven pictures a year. Even today, TV can crank out a news-based movie (on Tonya Harding or the Waco siege) within a couple of months of the event. But in theatrical features, where everyone is conscious of art, ego and the roll of megamillion-dollar dice, the average film takes a couple of years from first draft to opening...