Sidney Kingsley

Not long after the death of his American agent, Paul Reynolds, Wodehouse appointed Meredith as his agent, and he became the first client of the Scott Meredith Literary Agency.

Scott had founded the agency with his brother Sidney, and alongside their actual client base, would run a regular school for writers, which claimed to offer a direct route to story sales, featuring guest lecturers such as the detective novelist John Dixon Carr.

Based out of their office in 1650 Broadway, near to the Brill Building and also home to many songwriters, the agency serviced both their professional clients and offered a fee-based service for unestablished writers who would seek the agency's advice on their output for a base rate, in the mid-50s, of $5 plus another $1 per thousand words.

In some very rare cases, the agency would take the manuscript and attempt to sell it, but generally your $5 plus would earn you a reply from the agency outlining the problems with the work, written by an office staffer and signed Scott Meredith, but usually by his brother.

The agency also funnelled a lot of work to the popular pulps of the day, particularly Manhunt, which appeared to be a separate entity, but was in fact a Scott Meredith-edited publication, not under his own name of course, and so the agency could also take a cut of the fee they paid the writers if they happened to be agency clients.

On the subject of names, the Merediths were born with a surname Feldman, and it was they who suggested to various clients that a change of name would suit their careers, or at least deflect from them some of the anti-ethnic prejudices that were all too common in business.

That's me.

Um, so this was also, ah, based on a play by Sidney Kingsley.

Mm-hmm.

Ah, screenplay was by Lillian Hellman and of course, as you mentioned, directed by William Wyler.

Yeah.

I'm so sorry.

A Broadway play, and this was, that was the one by Sidney Kingsley, which kind of paves the way for what this movie is.

Because we have talked a lot about how there are movies that are made from, ah, plays and Broadway plays that just feel like Disraeli.