9781474451062 - Chapter 1.Pdf

Produced by Irving Thalberg 66311_Salzberg.indd311_Salzberg.indd i 221/04/201/04/20 66:34:34 PPMM 66311_Salzberg.indd311_Salzberg.indd iiii 221/04/201/04/20 66:34:34 PPMM Produced by Irving Thalberg Theory of Studio-Era Filmmaking Ana Salzberg 66311_Salzberg.indd311_Salzberg.indd iiiiii 221/04/201/04/20 66:34:34 PPMM Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com © Ana Salzberg, 2020 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in 11/13 Monotype Ehrhardt by IDSUK (DataConnection) Ltd, and printed and bound in Great Britain A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 4744 5104 8 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 4744 5106 2 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 5107 9 (epub) The right of Ana Salzberg to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498). 66311_Salzberg.indd311_Salzberg.indd iivv 221/04/201/04/20 66:34:34 PPMM Contents Acknowledgments vi 1 Opening Credits 1 2 Oblique Casting and Early MGM 25 3 One Great Scene: Thalberg’s Silent Spectacles 48 4 Entertainment Value and Sound Cinema 70 5 Love Stories and General Principles: The Development of the Production Code 94 6 The Intelligent Producer and the Restructuring of MGM 118 7 “What can we do to make the picture better?” 145 8 Conclusion: Once a Star, Always a Star 177 Works Cited 195 Index 202 66311_Salzberg.indd311_Salzberg.indd v 221/04/201/04/20 66:34:34 PPMM Acknowledgments would like to thank Gillian Leslie of Edinburgh University Press for her I support of this project from its beginnings; Elizabeth Ezra, for her friend- ship and encouragement; and my colleagues in the School of Humanities, Uni- versity of Dundee, for their camaraderie. Many people have offered support at key points in the writing of this book. Kristine Krueger and Janet Lorenz of the Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, have been very helpful over the past few years. Profound appreciation goes to Ned Comstock, of the USC Cinematic Arts Library, for sharing Thalberg treasures with me. My research on Thalberg’s role in the development of the Production Code could not have been carried out without the gracious help of Professor Richard Maltby and the MPPDA Digital Archive of Flinders University; the latter is an extraordinary resource for film scholarship. Cinema: Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image kindly granted per- mission for me to reprint parts of “Seduction Incarnate: Pre-Production Code Hollywood and Possessive Spectatorship” (vol. 3, 2012). Produced by Irving Thalberg is dedicated to my parents and husband; each is a wonder to me, and I could not love them more. Richard and Janice Salzberg are my greatest teachers: elegant, wise, and touched with grace. I am honored to be their daughter. Alex Thomson read this manuscript with his characteristic insight and generous spirit, and I am forever grateful to him. I cherish our story conferences and every moment together. 66311_Salzberg.indd311_Salzberg.indd vvii 221/04/201/04/20 66:34:34 PPMM CHAPTER 1 Opening Credits ollywood lore has it that Irving Thalberg had a habit of tossing a coin Hin the air during story conferences. Writer Anita Loos describes him as “boyishly flip[ping] a big silver dollar” (1974: 36) while discussing the making of Red-Headed Woman (dir. Conway, 1932); film critic Bosley Crowther relates that Thalberg would “sit there flipping a gold coin [. .] while his associates talked” (1957: 182); and in still another account, biographer Bob Thomas details meet- ings in which Thalberg would “flip [. .] a twenty-dollar gold piece into the air, often letting it clatter on the top of his glass-covered desk” (1969: 111). As the head of production at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Thalberg brought the studio to critical and commercial prestige in the 1920s and 1930s. He fostered the careers of legendary performers like Lon Chaney, Joan Crawford, Greta Garbo, John Gilbert, Jean Harlow, and his wife Norma Shearer, thus establishing MGM as the studio with (as their slogan went) “More stars than there are in the heavens.” Thalberg also led a coterie of associate producers known as the “Thalberg men” (Marx 1975: 252), advising them as they refined their filmmaking style across a number of genres. Finally, Thalberg guided MGM through the production of era-defining films, from romantic dramas (including Flesh and the Devil, dir. Brown, 1927; Grand Hotel, dir. Goulding, 1932) and period epics (Ben-Hur, dir. Niblo, 1925; Mutiny on the Bounty, dir. Lloyd, 1935), horror films (Freaks, dir. Browning, 1932) and comedies (A Night at the Opera, dir. Wood, 1935). Yet in the chronicles of Thalberg’s time at the studio, the grand scale of these accom- plishments is juxtaposed with the minutiae of his idiosyncrasies—among these, of course, the continual flipping of the coin. As New Hollywood producer Robert Evans would write in his 2013 memoir, “Thalberg’s talent was mythical [. .] [N]o one ever filled the immense void he left [. .]” (210). His untimely death from pneumonia in 1936 at the age of 37 ended one of the most illustrious careers in Hollywood history. From the begin- ning of the 1920s, Thalberg occupied positions of authority in the film industry: 66311_Salzberg.indd311_Salzberg.indd 1 221/04/201/04/20 66:34:34 PPMM 2 PRODUCED BY IRVING THALBERG by the age of 20, he was general manager of Universal Pictures—four years before he and Louis B. Mayer founded MGM in 1924. Thalberg’s fame was established early; in a 1926 profile, for instance, Dorothy Herzog described him as no less than “a combined Horatio Alger hero, Peter Pan, Napoleon, Falstaff and J. Pierpont Morgan” (66). According to Herzog, Thalberg “has a decisive mind, mellowed with imagination and fine sensibilities. He knows when a person is good or a picture is good. He gets a ‘hunch’ when he is right” (131). But Thalberg married intuition with pragmatism, a balance that would characterize his approach to production at MGM. When asked by story editor Samuel Marx to define “box office,” the producer “thought for a moment, then said, ‘A combination of a star and a title that the public wants to see’ ” (qtd. in Marx 1975: 217). As F. Scott Fitzgerald would write in his unfinished roman à clef The Last Tycoon (1941), Thalberg remains in the cultural imagination one of the few producers who could “keep the whole equation of pictures in their heads” (1993: 3). Fitzgerald began work on The Last Tycoon after Thalberg’s passing, inspired by the working relationship they had shared during the former’s brief role as an MGM screenwriter (xxii, xxv). The experience was not a happy one— among other conflicts, Thalberg did not like Fitzgerald’s script for Red-Headed Woman—but he would remember the fascination that the producer held. As Fitzgerald remarked, “[Thalberg’s] final collapse is the death of an enemy for me, though I liked the guy enormously” (1993: xxii). Through the character of producer Monroe Stahr, Fitzgerald explored the creative impetus that drove Thalberg, as well as the allure of his personal presence: he was a figure who “had a long time ago run ahead through trackless wastes of perception into fields where very few men were able to follow him” (18). Since 1936, though, many have tried to “follow” Thalberg—not simply in relation to his cinematic success, but like Fitzgerald, in terms of making sense of his legacy. In the preface to his definitive biography, published in 2010, Mark A. Vieira makes explicit his aim to literally “follow” Thalberg: If you were to be transported from 2010 to 1930 [. .] [w]hat insight would you gain about his production methods if you could go from the purchase of a play all the way to the premiere of the film he made from it? What would you learn by sitting next to him in a story conference? (2010: xv) Indeed, factored into the whole equation of Thalberg scholarship across the decades is a kind of detective work, a piecing together of clues from personal accounts to make cohesive the mythical talent’s short life. As Vieira points out, “The human being behind the legend has eluded most historians. How did he accomplish all he did in his short lifetime? Who was he?” (xv) And so from Thalberg’s single act of flipping a coin in the air—sometimes silver, sometimes gold—there emerge a number of interpretations. For Loos, 66311_Salzberg.indd311_Salzberg.indd 2 221/04/201/04/20 66:34:34 PPMM OPENING CREDITS 3 it speaks to his youthful charm; for Crowther, it is a prelude to a story about Thalberg’s “deference” to his colleagues (1957: 182). “[A] group of supervi- sors decided they’d had about enough of that nervous coin-flipping habit,” relates Crowther, and in response, “Thalberg grinned and put his coin back” (182). For still another chronicler, the coin symbolizes the strain under which Thalberg functioned towards the end of his life: The tension showed; his hands shook, and he developed a habit of tossing a twenty-dollar gold piece up and down. He never stopped; he caught and tossed it again and again [.

Load more