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His greatest hit, ironically, was the largest factor in his undoing. Gone With the Wind was a typical Selznick production: lavish, wildly over budget, a reflection of his essentially feminine sensibility (and thus never quite satisfactory as an epic). He platooned writers and directors on and off the film, eventually reducing everyone (including himself) to gibbering exhaustion. But it worked at some sub-aesthetic level, remaining perhaps the most beloved and popular film ever made. Unfortunately, its success was unduplicable. Selznick correctly predicted that his obituaries would revolve around it. As did the rest of his life, while he vainly sought, with such unlikely projects as Since You Went Away and Duel in the Sun, to recapture the magic.
He divorced Irene, replaced her with his "discovery," Jennifer Jones, whose career (along with his own, now bound up with hers) he mismanaged. His frenetic and unfocused nature drove him into marginality and premature death. Another irony: the Selznick movies that have lasted best are ones made while his attention was diverted (A Star Is Born, The Third Man) or while strong directors (like Hitchcock on Rebecca) fended off his fussiness. In short, his was not a great career, but out of it Thomson has fashioned a great, and finally tragic, biography. Selznick may have squandered his life, but he did so with fascinating energy and in ways that tell us much about how time, talent and power can be wasted in Hollywood, a town where self-indulgence has always been the most readily available form of lunacy.