Five Screenplays: The Great McGinty / Christmas in July / The Lady Eve / Sullivan's Travels / Hail the Conquering Hero

by Preston Sturges, Brian Henderson (Editor)

Here are five comic masterpieces by Preston Sturges, who has been called "Hollywood's greatest writer-director, with emphasis on the former." The scripts are drawn from the great period between 1939 and 1944, which Andrew Sarris called "one of the most brilliant and most bizarre bursts of creation in the history of cinema."

They are astonishingly readable and deliciously funny. Brian Henderson's introduction provides an overview of Sturges criticism and brief biographical material. Each script is preceded by a prefatory essay discussing its evolution. The insights provided by this volume will be useful to film students and aspiring screenwriters, and fascinating to anyone interested in screen comedy. Virtually all the illustrations, showing Sturges at work, are published here for the first time.

The collection includes The Great McGinty, Christmas in July, The Lady Eve, Sullivan's Travels, and Hail the Conquering Hero .

Genres: Film, Humor

848 pages, Paperback

First published May 15, 1985

Reviews

[Rolls]

Who says people won't read a collection of screenplays? They will when the writer is the Shakespeare of film comedy. Like the Coens? Read Sturges. Like Billy Wilder? Read Sturges? Like Wes Anderson? READ STURGES!

[Joseph Frankel]

Five of the cleverest, most readable, screenplays by one of Hollywood’s greatest comedy filmmakers. The accompanying essays, detailing the stages of story and script development for each film, are among the most insightful and well-researched I have ever read. They show a great creative mind at work and help to illuminate “what it takes” to write a movie.

[Nathan]

Preston Sturges is almost certainly the best comedy writer of the sound era. If you ever have any desire to write comedy, you could not find any way to help yourself more than reading these screenplays.

[Cameron K]

Paperback from Corner Stone Bookshop in Plattsburgh

Didn’t read Hail the Conquering Hero. I’ve also been reading the 2024 Oscar nominated screenplays. Too many screenplays!!! Gonna try a fiction book to refresh my reading.

[Kari]

I loved this so much and wish there were process books like this for everyone (but especially Nora Ephron)!!

[Alexa]

I didn't read the last screenplay, Sullivan's Travels, because I want to see the movie first. Tons of notes about the development of each script.