Seven Keys to Baldpate

Write the stuff of popular fiction and nothing but the best is none too good for you, “write one of those HIGH-BROW books in twenty-four hours” on a weighty bet and it’s Baldpate Inn for you, “the lonesomest spot on earth,” by Cohan out of Biggers, starring himself as George Washington Magee, author of The Scarlet Satchel, “the season won’t open for a month.”

depuis minuit

jusqu’à minuit

... says Beckett. “Truth is always stranger than fiction,” says Magee.

Hal Erickson of Rovi has the plot wrong, “writer’s block.”

Variety thought it was good enough but not the play, Motion Picture News would not concede the point, even without “the dialogue when it was spoken.”

One of the keys to Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining.

Naturally there’s a question of graft, and a phony ghost. “If you ladies will go into the parlor I’ll either kill it or cure it.” Traction Company (Citizen Kane) bribe money for the mayor, to be more precise (the “ghost” lost his wife to a “travelling man”, so plays the fool thus frightfully).

No end of action, no end of keys (though Magee has the only one), as soon as he sits down at the typewriter.

Hitchcock seems to recall it in Number Seventeen.

A passel of thieves, and murderers to boot, ready to frame the author. “I’ve written it by the yard, myself.”

As funny a thing as ever filmed, a veritable key to Stanley Kramer’s It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World.

Composition of this masterpiece takes all of twenty-three hours and fifty-five minutes, “going to sell over a million copies.”