"This will bring us back together again. Just the way we used to be." - Walter Burns, His Girl Friday Celebrated for its humor, spontaneity, unpredictability, and quick tempo "overlapping" dialogue, His Girl Friday is a noteworthy 1940 American screwball (a subgenre of romantic) comedy film directed by Howard Hawks, starring Hollywood legends, Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell, with Ralph Bellamy and Gene Lockhart. Wanting to win back his ex-wife "Hildy" Johnson (Russell), who is also his star reporter, newspaper editor Walter Burns (Grant) tries to convince her to cover one more story together, and he gets them enmeshed in a prominent murder case. The script for His Girl Friday was written by Charles Lederer and famous writer and director Ben Hecht (uncredited), and is based on Hecht's prominent 1928 play, The Front Page, that he co-wrote with Charles MacArthur.The film, ranked in the past in the top 100 films by The American Film Institute, features numerous special techniques, including the use of rapid, often witty, overlapping lines to make conversations in the screenplay sound more real-life. In this beautifully designed book edition of the original film screenplay, the original dialogue from the film is reproduced complete with an accompanying commentary that enables the reader to understand the splendor of this Hollywood classic. Considered an overall favorite of leading Hollywood critics, and the legendary director Quentin Tarantino, His Girl Friday is also held in popular esteem - enjoying a Rotten Tomatoes approval rating of 99% based on 100 reviews, with an average rating of 9 out of 10.

"Celebrated stage actress Mona Zahid wakes up on Thanksgiving morning to the clamor of guests packed into her Manhattan apartment and to a wave of dread: her in-laws are lurking on the other side of the bedroom door; she's still fighting with her husband; and in just a few weeks she will begin rehearsals as Shakespeare's Cleopatra, the hardest role in theater. In an impulsive burst, Mona bounds out the door with the family dog in tow ("I forgot the parsley!" is her lame excuse) to find her estranged mentor, Milton Katz, who was recently forced out of the legendary theater company he founded amid accusations of sexual misconduct. Mona's escape turns into an overnight adventure that brings her face-to-face with her past, with her creative power and its limitations, and ultimately, with all the people she has ever loved. Beguilingly approachable and intricately constructed, at once funny and sad and wise, Mona Acts Out is a novel about acting and telling the truth, about how we play roles to get through our days, and how the great roles teach us how to live."--Amazon