Long Shots

LONG SHOTS
by
Edwin Corley

Doubleday & Company, Inc. – New York – 1981 Hardcover
 
May 9, 1947: Mitch Gardner, famed Hollywood screenwriter/director, has been summoned before the House Un-American Committee. Gardner and his wife, Kaye, had been enthusiastic, patriotic supporters of the U.S. war effort. But Gardner’s past doesn’t look quite right to the suspicious HUAC: he’d joined with Darryl Zanuck to produce war documentaries, one of which covered the Battle of Moscow. After his film of Russian bravery in the face of Nazi invasion had won wide acclaim, he produced a film called Shame on the subject of Japanese-Americans imprisoned in American concentration camps. It is his creation of these two brilliant films that brings him before the HUAC.
 
LONG SHOTS gives a panoramic view of the glittering but troubled Hollywood of the 1940s. Gardner’s relationship with Gable and Lombard, his friendship with Darryl Zanuck, Errol Flynn, and Alfred Hitchcock, his special sympathy for the plight of Japanese-Americans, his admiration for the Russian soldiers; all portrayed with sympathy and irony in this novel, remarkable for its historical perspectives and its fictional re-creation of real personalities.