Robert Keser wrote:

> (Did you interview them in
> person, or was it an exchange of letters?)

Phone. Separately. Several times.


> Sternberg was so irksome and
> hard to get along with that even someone as phlegmatic as
> Clive Brooks would start dissing him as "von"! (That's in
> one of the Director's Guild Oral History books).


Lots of people dissed JVS. Lots of people didn't. I have a copy of an
unpublished int with Brooks (part of which I published in Cahiers); he
appears to have liked and admired JVS, which doesn't mean that he didn't
find things to diss about him.

I know two big books about John Ford where the authors went around and
collected every dissing story they could find and strung them together.
Funny thing, they didn't bother going around and collecting every
complimentary story, leaving the impression that there weren't any such
things to be found -- whereas the truth is closer to one diss-able
event for every 99 laudible events.

No one has bothered with JVS in a million years, except in Dietrich's
shadow, and in some wonderful passages in Maria Riva's book, in which a
very different man emerges than the one created by the cess pools of
journalism and rumor.