'Vanity Fair's Tales of Hollywood' edited by Graydon Carter

That's nice stuff. There is sad stuff here too, most notably the brave, wan hope of some cinephiles that there exists, somewhere in Brazil, the director's cut of Orson Welles' "The Magnificent Ambersons." His editor, Robert Wise, remembered sending it to him and did not remember getting it back; possibly a studio manager in Rio vaulted it among other films left in his care. Or possibly not. We are left wondering whether it is a lost masterpiece or, more likely, a disappointment that the director distanced himself from by taking a government gig to make a South American documentary, which he also left unfinished, as he began his descent into perpetual disappointment.

But that's not what we're here for. We want to know, for example, how a nice little back-lot mini-epic called "Cleopatra," originally budgeted for around $3 million and possibly starring the likes of Susan Hayward, Stephen Boyd and Peter Finch, became the most scandalously over-budget, overblown epic in movie history, eventually costing $42 million or, in today's dollars, $300 million ($100,000 of which went for paper cups). And no, folks, it was not all Liz and Dick's fault. Yes, they were married to others at the time, which meant that sexual hanky-panky (not unknown on movie sets since Griffith's day) had to be managed more carefully than was possible in paparazzi-ridden Italy. But they did not cause the studio to build all its sets in rain-sodden England, which dictated their rebuilding in sunny Rome. Nor did they schedule a beach battle sequence too near the NATO firing range at Torre Astura, severely limiting the hours when the production could shoot. But they were convenient fall guys for a production that was, before the first camera turned, out of an incompetently managed studio's control.

And so it goes. Why would a studio entrust Gore Vidal's "Myra Breckinridge," a novel for which it had paid $900,000, to a writer-director named Michael Sarne, who had previously made only one modest film, which Vidal described as "40 commercials looking for a product"? Well, perhaps because sometimes apparent risk mismanagement works out just fine -- see the account of Mike Nichols doing "The Graduate." Or Mel Brooks stumbling through "The Producers" despite gossip that he didn't quite know where to put the camera and despite the mutual hatred that developed between him and his star, Zero Mostel. Or the tremblingly insecure John Schlesinger somehow driving "Midnight Cowboy" to gritty (and profitable) glory.