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A fascinating and lively history of Hollywood and WWII. Now a NETFLIX original, featuring interviews with some of the best directors of our generation, including Steven Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola and Guillermo del Toro
NOW A NETFLIX ORIGINAL SERIES, featuring interviews with Steven Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola and Guillermo del Toro
Before the Second World War the Hollywood box office was booming, but the business was accused of being too foreign, too Jewish, too ‘un-American’. Then the war changed everything. With Pearl Harbor came the opportunity for Hollywood to prove its critics wrong.
America’s most legendary directors played a huge role in the war effort: John Ford, William Wyler, John Huston, Frank Capra, and George Stevens. Between them they shaped the public perception of almost every major moment of the war. With characteristic insight and expert knowledge Harris tells the untold story of how Hollywood changed World War II, and how World War II changed Hollywood.
“The bombs fall on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941 and Hollywood rolls up its sleeves and swaps the diplomatic velvet glove for the patriotic steel fist … A story well worth telling”
observer
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“A captivating history … makes you want to revisit many of the films”
daily Telegraph
“Mark Harris conducts a fastidious investigation into the five top filmmakers who put their careers on hold to help the war effort … Fascinating”
total Film
“Harris deftly threads the story of each man into the wider canvases of Hollywood and the war”
scotland On Sunday
“Gripping … reveals how an elite squad of Hollywood’s greatest directors recorded the bravest - and bloodiest - actions of World War II”
mail On Sunday
Mark Harris
Mark Harris is the author of Scenes From A Revolution: The Birth of the New Hollywood, which was a New York Times notable book of the year and was named one of the ten best non-fiction books of the decade by Salon. An editor-at-large for Entertainment Weekly, a columnist for Grantland and a contributing editor for New York Magazine, he has written about pop culture and film history for many other publications, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, Time, and GQ. A graduate of Yale University, he lives in New York City with his husband, Tony Kushner.