John Huston, who died on August 28, 1987, was the subject of what is perhaps the best novel about moviemaking ever written, Peter Viertel's White Hunter, Black Heart. It was published in 1953, when Viertel's emotions about working with Huston on the rewrite of the script for The African Queen (1951) were still raw: Huston is its hero and its villain. The portrait of him is marvelously, scathingly full, and convincing. It fits with what we intuit from the movies he made, and it fits with the drawling courtliness he had in his TV appearances, his patriarchal innocence as Noah in The Bible, and the curdled face he presented to us in his decaying-old-sinner roles in films such as Chinatown and Winter Kills.

Viertel's account ties it all together, and when you look at Huston in one of his later, gloating roles you can understand Viertel's obsession with him. More wide-ranging than other "Hollywood" novels, White Hunter, Black Heart is a running argument between the screenwriter, Pete, and his intimidating boss, the director, John, about art and the movies, passion and responsibility, money and race and destructiveness. It's like My Dinner with Andre, except that it isn't friendly and civilized, and the two men express their polar points of view in the middle of action—it's like My Dinner with Andre crossed with a Hemingway novel.