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Billy Wilder was convinced that Charles Jackson's novel The Lost Weekend would make an engrossing movie. Wilder phoned Paramount executive Buddy De Sylva and requested that the studio purchase the screen rights to the book. De Sylva put down fifty thousand dollars for The Lost Weekend. After the conference, Wilder commented to a journalist that The Lost Weekend was not going to be the ordinary Hollywood fare. It would be the first mainstream film to take alcoholism seriously. The Lost Weekend was to some degree influenced by the years that Wilder spent in Berlin during the heyday of the expressionist movement, which made a significant impact on German cinema. It is also an intense and intricate story of spiritual meltdown, told with invisible dexterity and emotional acuity. In addition, one of Wilder's chores was to collaborate on a documentary about the concentration camps, to be titled Die Todesmühlen (Death Mills).

Charles Jackson’s novel The Lost Weekend is usually seen as an indictment of alcoholics, an accurate depiction of their self-deceptions and lying to others, with an accusation that drinking is no more than an escape, a failure to face up to personal and social responsibility. As with other books with protagonists who commit to drinking, possible reasons are given for the failing self (suppressed homosexuality; relationship with the parents; unsuccessful career), but such interpretations miss the significance of repetition in this novel: the drinker continually faces his demons in a manner that London’s John Barleycorn argues is more truthful than the evasions of everyday sobriety. Unlike the Hollywood film version of the novel (which brought ‘alcoholism’ as a serious issue into the cultural mainstream), Jackson’s narrative is unusual in that rather than offering an ending which sees the death of the drinker or his reformation, it shows the character wondering what all the fuss is about and preparing himself for another binge. The chapter analyses the novel’s various conceptualisations of self and alcohol, its knowing engagement with psychiatry and psychology, the figure of the writer-drinker, and also covers its treatment of temporality.

In these diary entries written between January and December 1945, Hollywood screenwriter Charles Brackett lists his activities: talking to Henry Ginsberg, who asked Brackett to give the script for To Each His Own to Mitchell Leisen; seeing the first full rough cut of the picture The Lost Weekend; working with Billy Wilder on Bill of Goods; discussing Dr. Knock with Wilder and Jose Ferrer; going to a board meeting at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences; having breakfast with Mervyn LeRoy; going to a preview of The Lost Weekend in San Bernardino, California; having a talk with John Lund; having lunch with Sheila Graham and Harry Mines; lunching with director George Cukor; driving to Long Beach to a showing of To Each His Own; learning the news of Paramount being picketed shut by the Conference of Studio Unions; and having lunch with Katherine Ann Porter, who was put on The Duchess of Suds.

This chapter explores the temporal structure of etiology, taking alcohol as its case study. Almost all acquired etiologies of sexual aberration operate under the assumption that heterosexuality or the normal operation of the sexual instinct precedes the etiological event that leads to sexual deviation or aberration. Acquired etiology, thus, is the central mechanism of sexology’s sequencing practices. Reading the works of Iwan Bloch, Magnus Hirschfeld, Stella Browne, Edmund Bergler, and Auguste Forel, this chapter argues that sexologists have a difficult time establishing the sexual sequencing of homosexuality and alcohol. That is, they struggle to determine whether alcoholism causes homosexuality, homosexuality causes alcoholism, or whether they are simultaneous comorbidities. Tracking this inability to order cause and effect, this chapter suggests that sexuality is written under the sign of what Michel Foucault would call “decompartmentalization." That is, sexuality by the middle of the twentieth century has not yet been compartmentalized around object choice and incorporates a number of categories and patterns that will come to be written out of the sphere of the sexual: criminality, alcoholism, gambling, lying, and other vices.

In these diary entries written between January and December 1946, Hollywood screenwriter Charles Brackett lists his activities: going to a preview of To Each His Own; having lunch with Billy Wilder and Joan Fontaine; lunched with Ruth Waterbury; having dinner with David Selznick for Henry Luce of Life and Time; winning an Academy award for “Best Written Screenplay of 1945” for The Lost Weekend with Wilder, who also won as “Best Director”; attending a luncheon for Joe Breen of the Production Code Administration; going to a Screen Writers Guild luncheon meeting; going to Ernst Lubitsch's house with Richard Haydn; perfecting a full slogan for Paramount called “The Strawless Brick Company Doesn't Make Better Mousetraps”; driving to Long Beach for the preview of The Emperor Waltz; and having a conference with Frank Butler and D. A. Doran, who were wildly enthusiastic about Sorry, Wrong Number and also eager for Brackett to go ahead with The Giaconda Smile.

This chapter examines Ray Bradbury's growing interest in the human mind during the war years and how it reflected in his writings. As he embarked on an exploration of personality disorders, Bradbury discovered Karen Horney's The Neurotic Personality of Our Time (1937). Horney's book enabled Bradbury to understand the often destructive cycle of anxiety and hostility that underlies all neuroses. His characters, both in his genre fiction and in the broader fantasy fiction that followed, represent the full range of neurotic behavioral manifestations. This chapter discusses Bradbury's readings related to psychology, including Charles Jackson's The Lost Weekend, recommended to him by Henry Kuttner. It also considers Bradbury's incorporation of a wide range of psychoanalytical scenes into his stories and novels as he continued to search for answers to two questions: how do we know what is real, and how do we know what is human?