O Brother, What Might Have Been

What Might Have Been opens a hidden door into the creative world of Preston Sturges, one of the great originals of American cinema, the trailblazing writer-director whose comedies The Lady Eve, Sullivan’s Travels and The Palm Beach Story brought a new sophistication to Hollywood in the early 1940s. This remarkable volume gathers three unproduced screenplays that span the breadth of his career-scripts that were written with the same verve, wit, and satiric brilliance as his best-known films, but which never made it to the screen.In Song of Joy (1936), Sturges crafts a razor-sharp satire of the movie business and its manic machinery, channeling his frustrations with studio absurdity into a vibrant, madcap tale of mistaken identity, opera stars and clueless executives. This previously lost link between The Good Fairy and Easy Living reveals the moment when Sturges truly found his comic voice.Nothing Doing (1949) finds Sturges returning to one of his favorite conceits: the reinvention of a man adrift. Here, a high-powered tycoon retreats to a small town under doctor’s orders, only to rebuild its economy and rediscover himself. With echoes of Sullivan’s Travels and The Sin of Harold Diddlebock, Sturges grapples with success, exhaustion and post-war America in a story that blends slapstick with soul-searching.In The Millionairess (1953-54), Sturges adapts George Bernard Shaw’s social comedy into a lively, visually inventive screenplay originally intended for Katharine Hepburn. The result is a richly cinematic transformation that deepens Shaw’s characters and sharpens the romantic tension, while offering Sturges’ signature mix of verbal fireworks, comic montage, and offbeat heart.With a foreword by Sturges’ son Tom and annotated with rich, illuminating introductory essays by Jay Rozgonyi, What Might Have Been is a poignant, hilarious and revelatory glimpse into the mind of one of American cinema’s greatest comic artists. A gift to cinephiles and a reminder of the dazzling energy and human insight that made Sturges a legend, it is also a loving act of restoration, a chance, at last, to read what he might have filmed - if only the world had let him.