Hill of Beans
A Novel of War and Celluloid
The film Casablanca opens with the words, "With the coming of the Second World War, many eyes in imprisoned Europe turned hopefully, or desperately, toward the freedom of the Americas." Leslie Epstein’s Hill of Beans is the story of how one nation, one industry, and in particular one man responded to that desperate hope. That man is Jack Warner. His impossible goal is to make world events—most importantly, the invasion of North Africa by British and American forces in 1942—coincide with the release of his new film about a group of refugees marooned in Morocco. Arrayed against him are Stalin and Hitler, as well as Josef Goebbels, Franklin Roosevelt, a powerful gossip columnist, and above all a beautiful young woman with a terrible secret. His only weapons are his hutzpah and his heroism as he struggles to bring cinema and city, conflict and conference together in an epic command performance.
Hill of Beans is the novel that Leslie Epstein—the son and nephew of Philip and Julius Epstein, the screenwriters of Casablanca—was born to write.
Hill of Beans is a provocative read about the complexity of Hollywood.
The novel is a tragicomic tightrope act, a fantastical oral history told from the perspectives of an array of players in and out of the Casablanca saga.
It's a blisteringly funny, fictional farce using the film's famous production woes as the backdrop for a bawdy espionage adventure boasting an all-star cast of world leaders and movie-industry icons, with the fate of the free world hanging in the balance.'--Sean Burns, WBUR The ARTery
Like its predecessors, Leslie Epstein’s twelfth book is filled with unique energy and megaphone voice that never stops from the first page to last.
Not unlike Casablanca itself, Epstein’s distinct narrative elements coalesce to deliver a cinematic reading experience.
Weaves history and real life characters seamlessly into the fabric of fiction with a typical tight focus on the evils of the Holocaust and its repercussions across time.
This sense of the utterly serious and the humorously ironic, so present in the writing of Leslie Epstein’s father and uncle, carries through into his own writing as well. Subtitled A Novel of War and Celluloid, Hill of Beans is filled not only with imaginatively rich accounts of the political history of the era, but it overflows with fascinating film sagas.
Leslie Epstein’s new novel is a behind-the-scenes Hollywood comedy involving his father and uncle, real-life Hollywood screenwriters. It’s also a scathing look at 1940s global realpolitik, from the terrible machinations inside Hitler’s Third Reich to scenes of FDR, Churchill, and Stalin mixing wisecracks and threats in summits and screenings alike.
Comedic and elegiac, farcical and tragic, complex and engrossing, Leslie Epstein’s Hill of Beans is an energetic and entertaining depiction of the symbiotic relationship between moviemaking and warmongering. This detailed and imaginative representation of Hollywood dynamics and military events, before and during World War II, is revealed through the minds and motives of multiple characters.
Leslie Epstein spins a captivating tale, a supple mix of history and fiction that will delight lovers of wartime drama, studio lore, and the outsize personalities of old Hollywood.
Packed with a master’s class worth of history and whiplash and laugh-out-loud funny Judaic black humor, Hill of Beans is a Pynchonesque blend of the serious and the absurd, not so much counterfactual as factual-plus—a novel that weaves a must-read, behind-the-scenes story of America making war while Hollywood makes movies.
Leslie Epstein is an award-winning author who has written eleven other books of fiction, including the celebrated novels San Remo Drive and King of the Jews. He teaches at Boston University, where he directed the Creative Writing Program for thirty-six years.
Acknowledgments
Preview: It Happens in the Movies
Part One. To the Garden
Chapter One. Salute, Goddammit!
Chapter Two. Gloria Palast
Chapter Three. Magic Hands
Chapter Four. Aboard the Europa
Chapter Five. A Bulgarian!
Chapter Six. Screen Test
Chapter Seven. Union Station
Chapter Eight. The Führer’s Decision
Part Two. Fighting
Chapter Nine. Scoop of the Century
Chapter Ten. Sneak Peek
Chapter Eleven. Good Picture-Making, Take One: Black and Blue
Chapter Twelve. Krokodil
Chapter Thirteen. Good Picture-Making, Take Two: A Poodle
Chapter Fourteen. Seas of Sand
Chapter Fifteen. Good Picture-Making, Take Three: Sucker Punch
Chapter Sixteen. Lost in a Harem
Chapter Seventeen. Good Picture-Making, Take Four: Thanksgiving
Chapter Eighteen. Pipe. Cigarette. Cigar
Part Three. Casablanca
Chapter Nineteen. Dixie Clipper
Chapter Twenty. A Shift in the Wind
Chapter Twenty-One. In the Van
Chapter Twenty-Two. Eight Hours
Chapter Twenty-Three. Command Performance
Part Four. Outtakes
Chapter Twenty-Four. That’s All, Folks
Appendix One. A Cast of Thousands
Appendix Two. Coming Soon to a Theater Near You
