Just Tell Me When to Cry by Richard Fleischer

(hb; 1993: memoir)

From the back cover

“Richard Fleischer has directed almost fifty films. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, The Vikings, Compulsion, Doctor Dolittle, The Boston Strangler, Tora!Tora! Tora!, and The New Centurions are only a few of his hits. He first went to Hollywood in 1945 and over the years worked with and for John Wayne, Walt Disney, Howard Hughes, Robert Mitchum, Rex Harrison, James Mason, Kirk Douglas, Darryl Zanuck, Sidney Poitier, Charlton Heston, Jane Russell, Tony Curtis, Laurence Olivier, Akira Kurosawa, and Orson Welles, among others. Richard Fleischer tells of his forty-five plus years in the ego capital of the world by relating a series of the best stories you'll ever hear (and have never heard before) about legendary personalities and how they behaved (and misbehaved) during the course of making a movie.”

Review

Fleischer’s informative account of his filmic dealings in Hollywood and Europe is entertaining, briskly told, hilarious, troubling (e.g., when he dealt with HUAC) and consistently excellent. His writing is reader-friendly with its succinct (line or two) filmmaking explanations, which do not disrupt Cry’s storytelling. This is a great read with a lot of laughs, especially if you are a fan of old-time Hollywood. It is also one of my favorite reads of 2018, one worth owning.