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Boots!

Where would we be without boos?

Where would we be without good?

No, Tender.

It's a rhetorical question, sir.

But where would we need without books?

From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm.

We're doing something virtually undone on Bookworm.

We're talking about movies today.

The film scholar and historian Joseph McBride has written a book about Ernst Lubbich called How Did Lubitsch Do It? It's published by

Columbia University Press, and it is said that now you say the name Ernst Lubits

and it elicits a blank stare.

But when I was a sophomore at the State University of New York at Buffalo, the film critic.

He was the critic for Esquire magazine and a brilliant political writer as well.

And a wit.

Dwight McDonald came and taught a class in film comedy, and he showed the film,

Trouble in Paradise.

As it happens, Trouble in Paradise is the first Lubbich film that

the film historian Joseph McBride, who wrote this book, How Did Lubbich Do It? It's the first

film he saw too. And anyone who's lucky enough to fall under the spell of Lubbich is transformed permanently.

Here in Los Angeles, from where the show emanates, we're about to have a Lubits

...