Michael Korda (nephew of Alexander Korda, a Hungarian immigrant who started London Film Productions and brought British films onto the world stage) has been here at Telluride with a biography he’s written about the Korda brothers. The book is Charmed Lives: A Family Romance and the Telluride Film Festival calls it, “perhaps the most entertaining book yet written on the art and commerce of filmmaking.”

I sat in on a Q&A between Korda and Leonard Maltin. The stories shared about the Korda brothers are remarkable and quirky. My favorite: Zoltan Korda, who was vehemently anti-British, directed some of the most patriotic British films of all time, like The Four Feathers (1939). He shot scene after scene sympathizing with the natives the British were killing, only to be charmed by his brother Alex into cutting them one by one during post-production.

It sounds like Charmed Lives is a must read. I’m also hankering to see The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933) and Rembrandt (1936) if for no other reason than to see what Michael Korda describes as “the crispness of a well organized story,” the very quality he ascribes to the great films of his father’s and uncles’ era.