Pocket notebook sighting

What’s this? The screenwriter is asleep in his bungalow? With nothing much by his typewriter? Well, maybe he’s got something in his notebook. Take a look, Mr. Producer. And please, start at the back for dramatic effect.

[Kirk Douglas as Jonathan Shields, Dick Powell as James Lee Bartlow, in The Bad and the Beautiful (dir. Vincent Minnelli, 1952). Click any image for a larger view.]

There are different guesses about who’s based on whom. The playwright Paul Eliot Green has been suggested as a model for the Southern academic and novelist James Lee Bartlow. But Green did most of his Hollywood work in the early 1930s. I think William Faulkner, who worked on and off in Hollywood from the early ’30s to the late ’50s, is a more recognizable choice.

More notebook sightings
All the King’s Men : Angels with Dirty Faces : Ball of Fire : The Big Clock : Bombshell : The Brasher Doubloon : Cat People : City Girl : Crossing Delancey : Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne : Dead End : The Devil and Miss Jones : Dragnet : Extras : Eyes in the Night : The Face Behind the Mask : Foreign Correspondent : Fury : Homicide : The Honeymooners : The House on 92nd Street : Journal d’un curé de campagne : Kid Glove Killer : The Last Laugh : Le Million : The Lodger : Ministry of Fear : Mr. Holmes : Murder at the Vanities : Murder by Contract : Murder, Inc. : The Mystery of the Wax Museum : Naked City : The Naked Edge : Now, Voyager : The Palm Beach Story : Perry Mason : Pickpocket : Pickup on South Street : Pushover : Quai des Orfèvres : The Racket : Railroaded! : Red-Headed Woman : Rififi : La roue : Route 66 : The Scarlet Claw : Sleeping Car to Trieste : The Small Back Room : The Sopranos : Spellbound : Stage Fright : State Fair : A Stranger in Town : Stranger Things : Sweet Smell of Success : Time Table : T-Men : To the Ends of the Earth : 20th Century Women : Union Station : Vice Squad : Walk East on Beacon! : Where the Sidewalk Ends : The Woman in the Window : You Only Live Once