“The American film industry released hundreds of war-themed pictures between 1941 and 1945. A few, like Air Force (1943) and Objective: Burma! (1945), were passably realistic portraits of men at war. Most of the rest, like Casablanca (1942), were propaganda-tinged romances. But all had in common the fact that they were made not by the U.S. government but by commercial film studios. While their content was vetted by the Office of War Information’s Bureau of Motion Pictures, the Roosevelt administration made no attempt to take over the industry or supervise its operations other than at a distance…”

“Few friendships have been more intimate–or less likely–than that of Paddy Chayefsky, who wrote Marty and Network, and Bob Fosse, the director and choreographer of the film version of Cabaret and the original Broadway production of Chicago. Beyond the bare fact of their both having been in show business, it is hard at first glance to see what they had in common. Chayefsky was an idealistic, sexually inhibited New York Jew full of angry political passions that infused much of his later work; Fosse was an apolitical sensualist from the Midwest who sloughed off his Methodist background to lead a life in which sex and drugs played almost as large a part as dance. Yet the two men were close, so much so that Fosse, at Chayefsky’s request, danced a soft-shoe at his friend’s funeral…”

“What kind of artist was Norman Rockwell? Not until his later years does anyone seem to have asked that question other than in passing. It was taken for granted, even by Rockwell, that he was an illustrator–a painter whose canvases were commissioned by magazine editors and advertising agencies for purely commercial purposes…”

“How long should a biography be? Most modern readers seem to agree that the story of anyone other than a major world-historical figure or an artist of the highest significance can be adequately told in a single volume of roughly 400 pages. This is especially true of artists whose work is more interesting than their lives or personalities, as is typically the case with film actors. It is rare to encounter a movie star who, like James Stewart, also led a consequential life off-screen (he commanded a bomber squadron during World War II). Far more common are performers such as Fred Astaire or Humphrey Bogart whose ‘real’ lives are to be found in their films and whose private lives, though not without interest, do not lend themselves to memorable extended discussion…”

“Fifty years ago, Norman Mailer was, after J.D. Salinger, postwar America’s most famous writer of literary fiction. Today Mailer’s name no longer figures other than sporadically on lists of important postwar writers. It is instructive to recall that in 1959, he counted himself among ‘the strong talents of my generation, those few of us who have wide minds in a narrow overdeveloped time.’ This brash claim was typical of Mailer, and he would have expected nothing less six years after his death than the publication of two or three thousand-page biographies…”

“When Nora Ephron died in 2012, many who wrote to mourn her passing gave the impression of feeling they had lost someone close to them–regardless of whether or not they had known her personally. Nowhere was that feeling more common than in New York. Though she was the child of a pair of Hollywood screenwriters, grew up in Beverly Hills, and later directed eight of her own scripts, Ephron moved back to Manhattan after graduating from college and stayed there for most of the rest of her life. For New Yorkers of her generation–she was born in 1941–her essays and films, like those of Woody Allen, were a touchstone of identity and urban-nationalist pride…”

“The history of the Broadway musical in the 20th century is also a not-so-secret history of the parallel project of Jewish assimilation in America. Nearly all the best-remembered golden-age musicals were written in whole or part by first- and second-generation Jewish immigrants, but scarcely any of them had explicitly Jewish subject matter–or, in most cases, recognizably Jewish characters. Their creators, most notably Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, preferred to write deracinated, determinedly optimistic fables of the American dream in action…”

“By the time Leonard Bernstein died in 1990, he was unquestionably America’s best-known classical musician. Yet his achievements were viewed with persistent skepticism by critics and scholars. They acknowledged his wide-ranging talents–he was equally gifted as a conductor, a pianist, and a composer of music for both the concert hall and the musical-comedy stage–but his underlying seriousness was always in question…”