Cover
MICHAEL SRAGOW film / biography “Sragow is immensely attentive to Fleming’s films, and he traces in detail the fortunes of all the people connected to them, but his book is held together by what can only be called the romance of movie-making in the studio era—the large, free, harddrinking life that the men (but rarely the women) enjoyed when movies were still made quickly and relatively cheaply, craft was spoken of with respect, and art was barely mentioned.”—DAVID DENBY, New Yorker “Michael Sragow’s Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master is certainly among the best film-director biographies ever published. Mr. Sragow captures the man, a life and an era that is, as the title of Fleming’s most famous film put it, ‘gone with the wind.’ . . . .The human being behind the films emerges as someone you would like to have known and clearly would have liked a lot, as Mr. Sragow obviously does. What more could you want from a biography than for it to make the dead come alive again?” —PETER BOGDANOVICH, Wall Street Journal “Not only persuasive in its argument that Victor Fleming was one of the unsung titans of his era, An American Movie Master also makes for a fascinating case study in how power was acquired, wielded, and lost during the 1930s and ’40s. . . . For readers with a limited knowledge of the movie industry, its transition from silent to talkies, and the rise of the big studio picture, Sragow’s thorough scene-setting could double as a cinematic history lesson—illuminating the many famous lives that Fleming touched (and helped to shape), and the ways in which sets, casts, contracts, and careers worked during Hollywood’s grand glory days.”—S. JAMES SNYDER, Time “Victor Fleming strides through Michael Sragow’s eponymous biography with the panache of Rhett Butler—and no wonder, since the director helped forge Clark Gable’s onscreen persona with Red Dust and Test Pilot years before they reunited for Gone With the Wind.”—Los Angeles Times BEST REMEMBERED for the iconic classics Gone with the Wind (1939) and The Wizard of Oz (1939), director Victor Fleming (1889–1949) also counted successful films such as Red Dust (1932), Captains Courageous (1937), Test Pilot (1938), and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1941), and the groundbreaking Joan of Arc (1948) among his more than forty directing credits. In this acclaimed biography, author Michael Sragow paints a comprehensive portrait of the talented and charismatic man who helped create enduring screen personas for stars such as Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy, and Gary Cooper. Michael Sragow is the movie critic for the Orange County Register and contributes regularly to the New Yorker. He edited two volumes of James Agee’s work for the Library of America and also edited Produced and Abandoned: The National Society of Film Critics Write on the Best Films You’ve Never Seen. ISBN: 978-0-8131-4441-2 9 780813 144412 9 0 0 0 0 SRAGOW AN AMERICAN MOVIE MASTER ...
OR
