In 1938, when she (Leni Riefenstahl) came to Los Angeles in the hope of scoring a big-money contract, she was given short shrift. Having denied that the Nazis were anti-Semitic even as footage of their Kristallnacht campaign was being shown around the world, she was told by an unnamed “refugee director”—Billy Wilder?—that the only thing she “could interest Americans in would be movies of an autopsy performed on her boyfriend’s brain.”