30.12.70: Richard Zanuck has been fired by Fox. It now becomes clear that Darryl was behind the torpedoing of Guilt. The final thumbs-down came after R.Z.'s trip to Europe to see his father (and his father's mistress). Darryl reminds one of the old Ruhr steel-masters. How can you help admiring the nauseating resolution of a man in his late sixties who embraces the loneliness of throwing away his own son? What self-sufficiency!

The first that Dick Zanuck and David Brown knew of their eviction was when their names were painted out in the parking lot. A quarrel between Dick and Darryl ended with D.Z. asking David Brown what he thought. David said he agreed with Dick. Darryl never spoke to him again. Dick was accused of being responsible for Tora, Tora, Tora. In fact, it was Darryl's project. It manifestly shared paternity with The Longest Day, with which D.Z. saved Fox the last time it was in a hole. The real bone of contention is said to be Darryl's reportedly Lesbian mistress, who treats him badly. Richard Z. refused to renew her option; hence his father his.

A Sunday Telegraph Book of the Year, 2004

'My notebooks are my conscience,' writes Frederic Raphael. 'They contain a writer's letters to himself.' This second volume of his notebooks covers the first three years of the 1970s: years of slump, treacheries and deceits in the film world, of literary achievement and private tragi-comedies - the storm that washes away weeks of hard work in the garden of the Raphaels' French farmhouse, the serious accident in which his father nearly dies, before being unexpectedly restored to alarmingly irascible life.

Raphael's sharp wit spares no one, not the sacred monsters of the movie business and the literary world, nor the incidental characters whose unguarded stories and personalities become the material for fiction. Least of all does he spare himself. Rough Copy is a self-portrait of a writer whose precision and honesty are both entertaining and searching.

Introduction

1970
1971
1972
1973

Index