Competing with Idiots

A fascinating, complex dual biography of Hollywood's most dazzling--and famous--brothers, and a dark, riveting portrait of competition, love, and enmity that ultimately undid them both.

One most famous for having written Citizen Kane (with Orson Welles, most recently portrayed in David Fincher's acclaimed Netflix film, Mank); the other, All About Eve; one, who only wrote screenplays but believed himself to be a serious playwright, slowly dying of alcoholism and disappointment; the other, a four-time Academy Award-winning director, auteur, sorcerer, and seducer of leading ladies, one of Hollywood's most literate and intelligent filmmakers.

Herman Mankiewicz brought us the Marx Brothers' Monkey Business, Horse Feathers, Duck Soup, W. C. Fields's Million Dollar Legs, wrote screenplays for Dinner at Eight, Pride of the Yankees, cowrote Citizen Kane (Pauline Kael proclaimed that the script was mostly Herman's), and eighty-nine others . . . Talented, witty (Alexander Woollcott thought him the funniest man who ever lived, ), huge-hearted, wildly immature, a figure of renown and success.