SEASON OF THE GODS

In Matzen’s novel, a tenacious executive works behind the scenes, determined that she’ll make the greatest movie of all time.

Irene Lee heads the story department at Warner Bros., reading through the insurmountable pile of scripts sitting atop her desk. It’s not easy being the only female executive at the studio, especially in 1941, when Hollywood is beholden to the delicate egos of male studio heads. Irene is looking for a hit to prove her merit, and she thinks she may have found one in a play with the unassuming title Everybody Comes to Rick’s. “She couldn’t say it was all that good…But this play had power. It kept her attention from beginning to end and she found something compelling in the character of a cynical American hiding out in a Casablanca nightclub—tingles-along-the-spine, ringing-in-her-ears compelling.” Irene talks her boss, Hal Wallis, into hiring a famous (and famously difficult) screenwriting duo, brothers Julius and Philip Epstein, to turn the play into a script. Together, the three of them start to draft a script that Irene thinks may lead to her holy grail: the perfect movie. As America teeters on the edge of world war, the only problem will be getting the rest of the execs at Warner Bros. to share in her vision. In addition to political concerns and issues of censorship, Irene must navigate the tumultuous personalities that define Hollywood in its Golden Era, people like the dictatorial studio head Jack Warner, who rules his domain like a vengeful deity; Michael Curtiz, the brusque Hungarian director who hates dialogue; and Ingrid Bergman, the towering Swedish actress who’s recently forsaken the movies to live as a housewife in Rochester, New York. It’s a job that will push Irene to the limits of her wits—but hey, that’s show biz.

The novel is a loving homage to 1940s cinema, and Matzen excels in capturing the slang and speech rhythms of the day (or, at least, of the movies from that era). The humor, too, feels of that time, as when Jack Warner considers an actress for a role: “He had no problem hiring Claire Trevor, who was a fine actress and a babe. In fact, he’d bang her in a minute. No, wait; he did bang her in a minute, Warner remembered…But that was neither here nor there, and Ann didn’t need to know anything about Claire Trevor. Who Jack nailed was none of his wife’s business.” The plot is intricately tied up with the film Casablanca, so much so that anyone who isn’t intimately familiar with the movie may have trouble feeling completely invested, given the book’s nearly 500-page length. For those who know and love the film, however, Matzen has crafted an impressive dramatization of its birth, centering the work of the real-life Irene Lee (nee Levine). Readers will marvel at how much filmmaking has changed in the last 80 years—and how much it hasn’t.

An epic industry novel about the making of a Hollywood classic.