With Eisenstein in Hollywood [antikvár]

Why this Book? Eisenstein has been a long time dead. The events this book describes took place a generation ago. Perhaps it now comes too late. The author has been pressed to write of his time in Hollywood for many years. American scandalmongers, friends and contemporaries of Eisenstein in several countries, more youthful worshippers of the legend, have all requested it — but altogether these do not add up to an excuse. Perhaps nowadays there are not very many left who are still interested in this story. Nevertheless there were reasons why it could not be written before. One was moral, the other practical. Europeans have always felt that there was something comical and rather undignified in Hollywood in its heyday. We would arrive, adventurous flies ready to grow fat on the rich carrion we anticipated, and then, if something went wrong, we could always come back and raise a laugh about the foibles of our hosts. I felt this acutely. After all, many ridiculous things happened and I could not see any way of telling of them without appearing to be disagreeable to those who, after all, had only been kind to us according to their lights. Now, with distance, the risk of pain to anyone is much abated and age has taught me that we, rather than playing heroes, will look as absurd as anybody else. Second, if there has ever been any reason for recording the story it must have been to include the scenarios we all three wrote together. They, after all, are the essential 11