New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997. First Edition [Stated], First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. [16], 398, [2] pages. A collection of moguls, agents, directors, starlets, writers, gossip columnists, and a great film director named Rudolf Von Beckmann, all of whom converge on a small town to make a film. Leslie Donald Epstein (born May 4, 1938 in Los Angeles) is an American educator, essayist, and novelist. Epstein is currently Professor of English and Director of the Creative Writing Program at Boston University. His father Philip and uncle Julius were both noted screenwriters. Together, they won an Academy Award for the celebrated 1942 film Casablanca. Epstein went to Yale University. In 1960 he matriculated at Merton College, Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship; he attained a Diploma in Social Anthropology in 1962. He returned to the United States as a graduate student in Theatre Arts at UCLA.
Epstein has written nine novels including King of the Jews (1979), about Chaim Rumkowski, head of the Judenrat of the ód ghetto during World War II; and Pandaemonium (1997). His San Remo Drive: A Novel from Memory (2004) was based on his childhood growing up in Hollywood in the 1940s and 50s. Epstein's most recent novels are The Eighth Wonder of the World and Liebestod: Opera Buffa with Lieb Goldkorn. Epstein has written articles for Esquire, The Atlantic, Playboy, Harper's, The Yale Review, The Nation, The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post and The Boston Globe. For more than twenty years, Leslie Epstein has been the director of the Creative Writing Program at Boston University, where he joined the faculty in 1978. More