This Day in Film History (Louis B. Mayer Loses MGM Showdown)

June 22, 1951—Loews Inc. announced the results of a long-rumored feud in its Hollywood subsidiary, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM): production chief Dore Schary would replace Louis B. Mayer (pictured) as head of the largest of Hollywood’s seven major studios.

The press release mentioned that Mayer was becoming an independent producer, but it was inconceivable to longtime employees—including many who came out the following day to bid him goodbye—that the mogul would voluntarily end his 27-year reign, including a stretch when he was the highest-paid man in America.

Those suspicions proved correct: Mayer had traveled from his Hollywood offices to the studio’s New York-based financial directorate to present an ultimatum to Loews President Nicholas Schenck: It’s either Schary or me. Instead, Schenck called his bluff and forced his resignation.

Forget about Schary: Mayer had also talked down his boss so much that it would have been a miracle for word of the backbiting not to reach Schenk eventually.

They spoke constantly—"two or three times a day in an age when coast-to-coast telephone calls were not so easily made as they are today,” according to David McClintick’s account of a later Tinseltown-New York power struggle, Indecent Exposure—but were seldom on each other’s wavelengths.  Mayer referred to him variously as “The General," "Nick Skunk," “the smiler and the killer," and “the big cheese.”

Ironically, Mayer had brought back to MGM the number-two he came to loathe. A former screenwriter, Schary was chafing as production chief at RKO after its acquisition by the increasingly eccentric Howard Hughes when he was invited back to the lot he had once known as his professional home.

Schary’s key demand for his return—that he bring along his pet project, Battleground—sparked conflict between himself and his new boss.

One of the most grittily realistic WWII dramas released in the early postwar period, it was anathema to Mayer, a mogul not just of old-fashioned tastes but even Victorian ones. If his movie factory could have churned out only musicals and Mickey Rooney’s Andy Hardy series, he probably wouldn’t have minded very much. 

In contrast to Mayer’s conservative Republican sympathies, Schary—two decades younger—was an industrial-strength New Deal Democrat who wanted more socially conscious fare like Battleground that sent a message.

Battleground’s triumph with critics and, more important, the public (it was one of the top box-office hits of 1949) boosted Schary’s cachet with Schenck while undermining Mayer’s.

With television emerging as a rival medium, lost court cases weakening studio control over stars and movie houses, and international Communism threatening audience optimism across the country, Mayer no longer seemed in touch with public tastes. The question was, would Schary?

Mayer might have been wrong about the commercial prospects for Battleground, but turned out to be right about another war film on the bubble in his final days at MGM: John Huston’s adaptation of Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage. Even with an authentic war hero, Audie Murphy, as the lead, audiences stayed away, proving Mayer’s contention that they would find it too depressing.

In the long run, Schenck might have been correct that Mayer was too old and set in his ways to continue running MGM, but it did not mean that Schary was the right leader to steer the studio through its choppy new waters. 

A highly capable scriptwriter and playwright (as he would show in a few years with his biopic about polio-stricken Franklin Roosevelt, Sunrise at Campobello), he proved less adept at managing talent or sensing what audiences wanted. Any positive impression generated by his geniality faded once his corporate mismanagement became apparent.

In contrast, even before he participated in the 1924 merger that established MGM, Mayer had been involved with the movie industry in multiple capacities, so he knew the business thoroughly.

While Schary soon frustrated the studio’s musical hands with his complete lack of interest in the genre, Mayer valued their contributions.

And, while Schary would in a few short years drive away stars like Clark Gable from their longtime home, Mayer, for all his paternalism, sincerely wanted to prove there was no hype in MGM’s longtime slogan, “More stars than there are in the heavens.”

There was no ultimate victor in the MGM showdown. In late 1955, Schenck would be kicked upstairs when Arthur Loew Sr. became president of his family company. Among Lowe Sr.’s most notable moves in his single year at MGM was firing Schary, who spent his remaining quarter-century of life doing what he probably was most cut out for to begin with: writing.

As for Mayer, he was able neither to make a go at independent producing nor in regaining control of MGM when the studio’s declining finances wore down investors’ patience. 

When he died in 1957, though some deplored his penny-pinching tendencies, others would have agreed with one of his stars, Katharine Hepburn, when she wrote in her autobiography, “L.B. Mayer was a shrewd man with enormous understanding of an artist. He was not stupid, not crude. He was a very sensible fellow, and extremely honest.”

This Day in Literary History (Death of Christopher Isherwood, ‘Cabaret’ Chronicler)

Jan. 4, 1986—Anglo-American novelist, playwright, screenwriter, memoirist, and diarist Christopher Isherwood died of prostate cancer at age 81 in Santa Monica, CA.

Thousands of Broadway playgoers and even more movie and TV fans may have seen the Cabaret without associating it with Isherwood, whose Berlin Stories (1930) inspired the musical about decadent Weimar Germany. 

The latter came from the first decade of his writing career, when as part of the “Auden Circle” of modernist British and Irish writers, he became associated with left-wing politics and was hailed as “the hope of English fiction” by critic Cyril Connolly.

After emigrating to America with W.H. Auden as Britain was on the brink of war in 1939—a move denounced as cowardice in the face of the Nazi threat by the pair’s critics—Isherwood moved his career and lifestyle in entirely new directions—including, for that atheist, a conversion to Hinduism (and even a brief time as a monk in the 1940s) and three decades of what he cheerfully admitted was hackwork as a Hollywood screenwriter.

Most significantly, following his decision to publicly acknowledge his own sexual orientation in 1971, he emerged as a godfather figure to gay authors, including the likes of Truman Capote, Edmund White, Armistead Maupin, Patricia Highsmith, and Gore Vidal.

Did Isherwood deserve Vidal’s praise in a December 1976 New York Review of Books assessment as “the best prose writer in English”? I’m inclined to see that as exaggeration—or, more charitably, an expression of Vidal’s gratitude for championing his work early in his career. Even so, Isherwood is an important writer and his work contains considerable merit.

The clarity, even transparency, of his prose masked how complex his artistic vision could be, just as his much-discussed wit and charm often obscured his complicated personality.

Perhaps the most famous line in all of his work, from Berlin Stories—“I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking”—encourages a sense of his objectivity. That is crucial because, as an early practitioner of metafiction, Isherwood frequently created a persona explicitly named “Christopher Isherwood.”

Conversely, his memoirs, which readers would normally view as more reality-based than his fiction, employed composite characters, chronicled events out of sequence, or reshaped them differently from the actual occurrences as recorded in his diaries.

Isherwood’s style is uncluttered, concise and graceful, adding to the believability of both his fiction and nonfiction. Whether in bohemian Berlin of the interwar period or the European emigres and New Age devotees of Southern California’s postwar era, his nonjudgmental “eye” takes in all it sees.

Though influential and helpful to many people, Isherwood was not always admirable. Interviews and documentary evidence from his extensive diaries led biographers Peter Parker and Katherine Bucknell to conclude that he could also be drunken, neurotic, promiscuous (an estimated 400 lovers by age 44), and even antisemitic. 

(He told a listener that "Hitler killed 600,000 homosexuals." When this young Jewish producer responded that "Hitler killed 6 million Jews," Isherwood said acidly, "What are you? In real estate?")

I find Isherwood’s relationship to Hollywood particularly fascinating. His movie and TV assignments often involved subjects he surely did not find congenial (for example, as I mentioned in this post from 17 years ago about “Silent Night” composer Franz Gruber).

But what Hollywood chronicler Tom Dardis called “Some Time in the Sun” for famous novelists-turned-screenwriters like F. Scott Fitzgerald not only gave Isherwood a lifestyle far more comfortable than he had enjoyed in Britain but also fueled his creativity. 

Prater Violet (1945), for example, is still considered one of the best fictional representations of the Hollywood “dream factory.”

When it came time to adapt Cabaret from stage to screen, director Bob Fosse made an unexpectedly felicitous decision, by casting Michael York—practically a dead ringer for the young Isherwood—in the role of the author’s alter ego “Brian.”

Quote of the Day (Nick Pinkerton, on ‘Dodgy’ Investing in Films)

“The [movie] business is, and has always been, a dodgy boondoggle; not for nothing were the old-money WASPs at the East Coast banks reticent to put capital behind fledgling Hollywood. When [American film director Abel] Ferrara was starting out, private investment in low-budget films was spurred by tax loopholes, a way for doctors, dentists, and racketeers to get rid of extra cash that would otherwise wind up in Uncle Sam’s grubby mitts. Fortunes could be made, even if they rarely wound up in the hands of the ‘talent,’ and were made just often enough to keep alive financiers’ delusions of having money down on what could be the next sleeper hit…a situation that can’t be said to persist today, when persuading someone to back an independent film is essentially a matter of finding a credulous dupe to give you a pile of cash to set fire to. In terms of its risk-to-reward ratio, investing in an independent film ranks somewhere in the neighborhood of accepting the hand of a Nigerian prince who has introduced himself to you via cold email. To be a successful independent filmmaker—that is, one who is even sporadically employed—is, in essence, to be a bit of a con man.”— American film critics, screenwriter, and editor Nick Pinkerton, “A Rake’s Progress” (review of Abel Ferrara’s memoir Scene), Harper’s Magazine, November 2025

Quote of the Day (Mary Astor, on What ‘Old Moviemakers’ Gave Audiences)

“Whatever we did—we old moviemakers—we gave people a lot of fun. Through depressions and wars and calamities, we gave them the sense of glory, of a future that would be braver than today.''—Oscar-winning American actress, novelist, and memoirist Mary Astor (1906-1987), A Life on Film (1971)

The image accompanying this post shows Mary Astor in Dodsworth, released in 1936. She played the luminous woman who gave the movie’s disillusioned title character “a future that would be braver than today.''

Quote of the Day (F. Scott Fitzgerald, Comparing Writers and Actors)

“Writers aren’t people exactly. Or, if they’re any good, they’re a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person. It’s like actors, who try so pathetically not to look in mirrors. Who lean backward trying—only to see their faces in the reflecting chandeliers.” — American novelist and short-story writer F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940), The Last Tycoon, edited by Edmund Wilson (1941)

My favorite author, F. Scott Fitzgerald, was born on this day in 1896 in St. Paul, MN. Though his prose is marked by the feathery style of poetry, his literary aspirations revolved, to one extent or another, around acting:

*In the short story “The Captured Shadow,” his youthful alter ego, Basil Duke Lee, casts a girl he has a crush on as the lead of a play he’s written;

*As a student at the now-defunct Cardinal Newman Prep in Hackensack, NJ, he loved the opportunity to take the train into New York to catch plays;

*In college, he wrote music and lyrics for the Princeton Triangle Club, the university's undergraduate musical comedy troupe;

*In 1923, hoping for a Broadway smash, he wrote (and invested money in) his only published play, The Vegetable, only to see it die after a single performance in Atlantic City;

*Though no record of it has ever been found, the actress Lois Moran claimed to have arranged a screen test for the author—which, predictably, did not work out well; and

*In his later years, as he struggled with creditors and alcoholism, Fitzgerald found much-needed temporary employment (and eventual heartbreak) as a Hollywood screenwriter.

Well, no matter. To his credit, Fitzgerald recognized the potential for motion pictures as a new art form, and even in its unfinished form The Last Tycoon may well still be the best novel ever written about Hollywood.

(For an interesting take on a surprising Fitzgeraldian influence on a recent film-- Damien Chazelle’s sprawling examination of the transition from the silent to sound eras, Babylon—see Kathy Fennessy’s December 2022 post from the “Seattle Film Blog.”)

Quote of the Day (Richard Russo, on Half of a Movie Buddy Team)

“[Actor William] Nolan was the reliable, competent American Everyman, the Nick Carraway who would never understand or accept or like himself half as much as Gatsby did. The Milton of my fourteen pages was a lot like me, a man cautious by nature and experience, who knew himself too well to be much of a fan and, as a result, was often too grateful for the good opinion of others.”—American Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and screenwriter Richard Russo, “Milton and Marcus,” in Trajectory: Stories (2017)

The news of Robert Redford’s passing this week prompted me to read at last the novella “Milton and Marcus,” in the story collection Trajectory by Richard Russo. Somehow I had never gotten around to perusing the book after buying it eight years ago, even though I’d heard it was a roman a clef (i.e., a story about real people or events, but overlaid by thinly fictionalized names and details) about his adventures as a screenwriter for Paul Newman and Robert Redford.

Once I started reading it, it turned out to be every bit as dishy as I’d been led to expect—and every bit as funny, compassionate, and rueful as the fiction that has brought Russo critical and popular acclaim.

The novella’s narrator (only referred to by the nickname “Hotshot” by one of the two movie stars in the story) is a less successful alter ego of Russo: a novelist and screenwriter whose career is on the wane. I knew that Russo had worked several times with Newman (called here Wendell Pierce, or “Wendy”) but I’d been unsure of any Russo collaboration with Newman’s two-time co-star and longtime friend, Redford (called “William Nolan” in this story).

Then, according to this 2012 Albany Times-Union article, I discovered that Russo had been working on the screenplay for the 2015 Redford film A Walk in the Woods. Yet final writing credit for the movie went to Michael Arndt (under the pseudonym “Rick Kerb”) and Bill Holderman, rather than Russo.

Clearly, at some point, Russo’s and Redford’s views on the first draft had diverged and the novelist was no longer associated with the project.

Until the appearance of either a Russo reminiscence or a full-scale Redford biography appears, all we have about what transpired during the script’s development is conjecture.

But “Milton and Marcus” offers a clue: Redford had a fragment of a script early on, solicited Russo’s ideas for expanding it some years after Newman had died, but chose to use the contributions of other writers whose services he had engaged in the meantime.

Ultimately, “Milton and Marcus” becomes a story of charisma, loyalty, self-absorption, and desire—sometimes on the part of writers as much as actors. “Wendy” is depicted more affectionately than “Regular Bill” (the nickname for the Redford character, who was called “Ordinary Bob” by many in the film industry).

But much of the intrinsic interest in the tale also comes from inferring the parallels between its characters and their real-life counterparts:

*Wendy and “Regular Bill” score huge successes in their younger years with a few “buddy” movies, as did Newman and Redford with Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Sting (in the image accompanying this post, of course);

*Wendy engages in a fruitless, decades-long attempt to find another script for himself and Nolan to work with, as Newman did with Redford;

*Wendy thought before his death that the script idea by “Hotshot” (his nickname for the Russo alter ego) might appeal to Nolan’s “left-wing” tendencies; Redford was similarly a longtime progressive, particularly as it related to environmentalism;

*An associate of “Regular Bill” chuckles about the star’s penchant for fast driving; and yesterday’s New York Times obit noted that Redford in one year, the star received eight tickets for speeding in a Utah canyon;

*Nolan lives in Utah, as did Redford;

*To the surprise of many, a decade after Newman’s death, Nick Nolte replaced him on A Walk in the Woods; Nolan’s eventual co-star for “Milton and Marcus,” Gene Handy, possesses a similar gravelly voice, reputation as a dedicated actor, and tendency towards hard living that landed him in rehab;

*“Regular Bill” convenes his group to talk about “Hotshot’s” script while in post production on Desperation Alley, “which was rumored to be overbudget and behind schedule”; similar speculation swirled around a 2007 film that Redford directed, Lions for Lambs, whose $15 million in US and Canadian gross revenues fell well short of its $35 million budget.

As Wendy aged, Russo implies, he took increasingly riskier roles, while for Nolan, the notion of leading a “regular” existence, or even taking roles of “regular” people, had become unattainable.

I believe that in the case of Redford, this was largely true—by the mid-Seventies, he had stopped taking the edgy parts he had often taken as a younger, hungrier actor (as in Inside Daisy Clover, where he played a bisexual character). As a director, however, the opposite was true. The Milagro Beanfield War, for instance, was the first big-budget Hollywood production with a largely Hispanic cast, while his establishment of the Sundance Institute boosted the production of independent films.

Following Redford’s death, tributes have flowed in for the star, from both film colleagues and from people whose lives were touched by his activism. Moviegoers, unlike entertainment industry professionals, are less familiar with idols’ complex personalities and working methods. “Milton and Marcus” is an insightful reminder of how those who enter their turbulent orbit experience them at close range.

Flashback, November, 1964: O’Hara Reaffirms Short-Story Mastery With ‘The Horse Knows the Way’

The publication of the latest short fiction collection from John O’Hara, The Horse Knows the Way, in November 1964 should have been cause for unalloyed delight for author and publisher alike. Its 28 tales, like his other work, not only garnered unusually high sales for short fiction but cemented his status as a master of the form.

Instead, O’Hara inadvertently provided more fodder for his detractors. In a foreword, describing his need to get down on paper all he knew about how the people of his town lived, he concluded, “I have work to do, and I am afraid not to do it.”

More than a few critics, however—led by those in the highly influential New York Review of Books and The New York Times Book Review—transposed the key words at the end to read, “not afraid to do it.”

Just the kind of braggadocio you’d expect from O’Hara, they noted.

Predictably, that observation only increased the fury of a man who perceived slights everywhere he turned. It also reinforced why he requested that his publisher, Random House, officially release his books on Thanksgiving: Because, unlike reviewers in the more high-profile Sunday Times Book Review, he would get a respectful hearing from the paper's daily critic, Charles Poore (who thought highly enough of his work and character that he delivered the eulogy after O'Hara died in 1970). 

Worse, like so much else associated with this gifted but touchy writer, the mangled quotation originated from anything but a close reading of O'Hara's work.

Consider, for instance, Adrian Mitchell’s dismissal of the volume in The New York Times Book Review: “It’s not the flat, monochrome characters but the author’s flat, monochrome vision of their world which is so often discouraging.”

But this largely forgotten British novelist, poet, and critic missed what other authors (including E.L. Doctorow, whose left-wing politics was diametrically opposed to that of the increasingly conservative O’Hara’s) have picked up on: that, while O’Hara’s prose might be prismatic, his presentation is anything but. 

With abrupt, often stunning endings, his stories send readers scurrying back through these works, trying to pick up on the clues they missed earlier.

It was true that O’Hara could be his own worst enemy: openly craving the Nobel Prize, for instance, or an honorary degree from Yale University, an institution of higher learning he’d been unable to attend because of the financial complications following the death of his father. Asked why the school had never awarded him that degree, the president at the time, Kingman Brewster, responded simply, “Because he asked.”

But at his best—and the stories in The Horse Knows the Way are consistently good—they fulfill his intention of trying to tell the truth about his time.

Roughly speaking, his short stories occur in three locales, the places where he had spent most of his time: New York, Hollywood, and Gibbsville, PA (the fictional stand-in for his hometown, Pottsville). Like much of his other Hollywood fiction, an example from The Horse Knows the Way, “The Answer Depends,” spotlights the kind of actors who populate much of the fare on Turner Classic Movies.

But my favorite stories from the book are set in Gibbsville, whose physical and emotional geography he knew with bone-deep understanding. These are the stories to seek out in this volume: "At the Window," "The Hardware Man," "The Victim," "The House on the Corner," "Aunt Fran," and "All Tied Up."

“For a while, at least,” O’Hara warned his loyal readers, “this will be my last book of short stories.” It wasn’t so much that he had descended into sloth, however, as that he decided to focus his energy on other projects.

One, the novel The Lockwood Concern, which appeared the following year, at least earned some critical plaudits as among his better entries in the long form in the last part of his life.

The other activity, a syndicated column for Newsday, lasted only a year, and did nothing but swell his reputation for bumptiousness and bellyaching about his lack of respect.

Fortunately, he returned to the short story genre in 1966 with Waiting for Winter, whose title strongly hinted at his increasing concern for aging and mortality.

The Horse Knows the Way appeared midway through a decade of flabbergasting productivity in the short-story form for O'Hara: from 1960 to 1968, seven collections of 137 tales, bringing his career total to more than 400. 

Other writers (like my favorite, F. Scott Fitzgerald) impress with their shimmering style, but they never took the measure of so many people from so many walks of life as O'Hara. These late stories, like his earlier ones, rely heavily on dialogue. 

But, because O'Hara feared that younger readers would be more likely to miss the resonances of his tales set decades earlier, they are often more ruminating, even melancholy, as in this passage from "The Answer Depends":

"I don't try to follow the plot lines of Ned Revere's films. In a few minutes after one of his pictures has begun to roll, I am in a daze of recollection, of remembering Ned as a gay companion: irresponsible, Quixotic, romantic, attractive to men as well as to women, and with no illusions then as to his stature as an artist."

Surveying where life has left them, the narrator, a retired actor named "Bobby," concludes: "I don't know who is better off: me, at my TV, with memories as fresh as the news in the morning paper, or Ned, scornful of those pleasant and profitable days, and with the lingering bitter taste of that one success on Broadway."

Quote of the Day (Joan Didion, on Hollywood’s Spirit)

“The place [Hollywood] makes everyone a gambler. Its spirit is speedy, obsessive, immaterial. The action itself is the art form.”—American essayist, novelist, and screenwriter Joan Didion (1934-2021), “Hollywood: Having Fun,” The New York Review of Books, Mar. 22, 1973

Quote of the Day (Truman Capote, on Postwar Hollywood)

“A primary complaint here [Hollywood] is overpopulation; old-guard natives tell me the terrain is bulging with ‘undesirable’ elements, hordes of ex-soldiers, workers who moved here during the war, and those spiritual Okies, the young and footloose; yet walking around I sometimes have the feeling of one who awakened some eerie morning into a hushed, deserted world where overnight, like sailors aboard the Marie Celeste, all souls had disappeared. There is an air of Sunday vacancy; here where no one walks cars glide in a constant shiny silent stream, my shadow, moving down the stark white street, is like the one living element of a Chirico. It is not the comfortable silence felt in small American towns, though the physical atmosphere of stoops and yards and hedges is very often the same; the difference is that in real small towns you can be pretty sure what sorts of people there are hiding beyond those numbered doors, but here, where all seems transient, ephemeral, there is no general pattern to the population, and nothing is intended—this street, that house, mushrooms of accident, and a crack in the wall, which might somewhere else have charm, only strikes an ugly note prophesying doom.” —American fiction writer and essayist Truman Capote (1924-1984), “Hollywood” (1947), republished in Portraits and Observations: The Essays of Truman Capote (2007)

The pursuit of fame can bring the unwary to a desolate place—a lesson that Truman Capote, born 100 years ago today in New Orleans, learned firsthand but, to his loss and literature’s, managed to forget.

When I considered my choices for a post commemorating Capote’s centennial, I thought of either a quote from his own work, giving a taste of his impeccable writing style, or one from someone else about the author of In Cold Blood. Rather than choose one to the exclusion of the other, I decided to take both.

The paragraph opening this post is an example of the first option; the following, from an April 1988 Esquire essay by his Hamptons neighbor, A Separate Peace novelist John Knowles, of the second:

“Truman Capote really was alone, and he knew it. No one anywhere on earth can have looked like him, with his odd Pekingese features, or above all sounded like him when he spoke. This very short, thick-legged person with his big head and yellow, later gray bangs, speaking in a tissue-paper thin, whiny lisp, was not at all like anybody else. Clothes were not manufactured that fit him; no voice anywhere echoed his. When he would merely enter a room or utter a few words, strangers stopped short, jerked their heads around to behold him, usually—until he became so famous—with at least a tinge of mockery, or hostility.”

Few writers have so adeptly captured Capote’s oddness, vulnerability, and sense of remove better than Knowles—or how, “as a form of self-protection, Truman made himself the only writer in the world after Ernest Hemingway whom the man in the street recognized on sight.”

The name of the other author that Knowles drops in that sentence is a signal of what’s to come: a writer who, believing he wears “the invisible, protective shield of celebrity,” instead falls victim to his self-created legend.

By the mid-1960s, it was hard to miss Capote and his work, with adaptations not only of In Cold Blood but also Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and, for television, A Christmas Memory and The Thanksgiving Visitor. And, of course, there was the masked “Black and White Ball” that Capote ostensibly threw for Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham, but which also, not so coincidentally, raised his own profile.

A decade later, something was amiss. Most observers trace Capote’s decline to his disastrous publication of the “La Côte Basque 1965” chapter of his projected roman a clef, Answered Prayers.

But the ostracism that Capote suffered at the hands of the high-society “swans” he betrayed only accelerated deterioration that had set in already, in much the same way that two plane crashes only a day apart that Hemingway survived in 1954 marked the point of no return for a creative and psychological degeneration previously in motion.

There were distractions aplenty that Capote didn’t need in the Seventies: 

*a 1978 appearance on the egregious Gong Show imitation, The Cheap Show; 

*his feature-film debut as an actor, Murder by Death, which was so disastrous that screenwriter spent virtually the entire production unsuccessfully pressing to have him replaced by "any actual member of the Screen Actors Guild";

*his frequent presence as a guest on The Tonight Show; and

*a 1978 interview with Stanley Siegel that turned so rambling, incoherent and disastrous that the morning talk-show host asked on the air if the author was "feeling all right."

As with Hemingway, while the discipline of sitting down at a typewriter remained intact for Capote, an essential creative skill had been dulled by the years of substance abuse: the creative faculty that would enable him to detect and fix what was wrong with a day’s work and push it to completion.

Nearly four decades after Capote journeyed to Hollywood, he met his end there in the home of one of its denizens: one of the few female friends not to desert him in the wake of Answered Prayers, Johnny Carson’s ex-wife Joanne.

For most of his career, Capote’s work was a model for how to write. His death was a model for how to squander a writer’s capacity.

Or, as Knowles concluded in his poignant reminiscence: “The autopsy found the failure of various organs, but I knew that he had died because he had used up all of the things he had ever lived for.”

Quote of the Day (Lynda Obst, on How China's Influenced Hollywood's Film Product)

“China is the No. 2 market now. In 2020, it will be No. 1. That's why movies must all be sequel-ized or sequel-izable. So that they become more and more familiar to the international audience, where 80 percent of the profits are now coming from. We can't afford to spend the same kind of money marketing movies internationally that we spend here, so we need pre-awareness: titles and characters that are already known. International audiences love action, wild and exciting special effects that can only be created by our technology. No nuance. Not so good for so-called writing. And China won't look at anything that isn't 3-D, which means everything is made that way – even with domestic audiences rejecting it.”—American film producer and author Lynda Obst quoted by David Edelstein, “The Tentpole of Doom,” New York Magazine, July 8-15, 2013

What Ms. Obst predicted a decade ago did indeed come to pass: China became the world’s #1 film market in 2020.

It’s become more complicated since then. Ironclad COVID-19 lockdowns shut Hollywood out of China for a time, and in 2023 all top 10 movies for the country were homegrown products, according to a January report on the prior year’s international box office from Deadline.

So will Hollywood continue to cite China as the primary cause for The Sequel Syndrome?

Whether the American industry remains in the default position that pre-awareness sells will be determined by this summer’s grosses. This January article from MovieWeb indicated that 35% of wide releases for this year will be sequels, spin-offs, and reboots.

But, in a sign that audiences might be tiring of same-old, same-old, the latest installment in the “Mad Max” franchise, Furiosa, has underperformed at the box office.

Hollywood executives have been complaining that since the pandemic, older viewers have largely preferred to stay at home. But these audiences have been given little reason to come out to see more adult fare, and Hollywood still hasn’t figured out a way to market low-budget films for niche audiences. Until it does, filmgoers will have to brace for more of the same.

Flashback, April 1924: Merger Sends MGM Roaring

A century ago this month, what became the most structured—and successful—studio in Hollywood’s Golden Age was formed with the merger of Metro Pictures Corp., Goldwyn Pictures and Louis B. Mayer Productions.

Though theater chain magnate Marcus Loew orchestrated the deal, the prime mover for the next 27 years in Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer—MGM for short—turned out to be a Ukrainian emigrant who not only celebrated American values onscreen, but even pushed his actual birthdate up to July 4 to coincide with that of his adopted country.

In his office in Culver City, studio head Louis B. Mayer may not have been the most hated movie mogul (that dishonor probably goes to Jack L. Warner), but he was the most paternalistic—an executive you wanted on your side and dreaded to cross.

Those in “L.B.”’s lair might find themselves subject to shouting (MGM president Nicholas Schenck, who, upon Loew’s death, dealt with the theater side of the business from New York), groping (young musical star Judy Garland, who, according to notes for an unpublished memoir, claimed she finally summoned the nerve to tell him to stop), and crying (matinee idol Robert Taylor, who, after having his boss cry on his shoulders, gave up his demand for more money).

Directors might fume at rushed production schedules, favorite scenes left on the cutting-room floor, or being replaced mid-production.

But all of these C-suite theatrics produced as many as 50 films a year, including Gone With the Wind, all-star vehicles like the Oscar-winning Grand Hotel, beloved musicals such as The Wizard of Oz —and, in 1937, in the midst of the Great Depression, a princely yearly salary of $1.3 million for Mayer.

The roaring lion appearing at the start of its films may have been MGM’s most instantly recognizable branding element, but its most important asset was its stable of actors.

“More Stars Than There Are in Heaven,” the studio’s advertising slogan went—a boast that held true from the silent era (e.g., Greta Garbo, Jack Gilbert, Buster Keaton, Lon Chaney) well into the coming of sound (Clark Gable, Myrna Loy, Jean Harlow, Gene Kelly).

The Culver City complex was a true movie factory—“scattered over six separate lots, cramped and shedded and separated from one another by public thoroughfares,” with Lot 1 given over to stages  dressing rooms, and offices, according to James Curtis’ 2011 biography of the studio’s most respected actor, Spencer Tracy.

Here, stars were manufactured virtually from whole cloth (Lana Turner, Ava Gardner), shrewdly redesigned when found to be imperfect elsewhere (Tracy, Wallace Beery, and Marie Dressler); or imported from Europe (Garbo and Hedy Lamarr).

It all stemmed from Mayer’s frequently expressed belief that the movies were the only business where the assets walked out the gate every night, and Thalberg’s understanding that “without stars, a company is in the position of starting over every year.”

And, long before Hollywood went endlessly to the well with the “Star Wars” and Marvel series, MGM milked the commercial value of multi-film franchises, including:

*The 12 Tarzan movies made by Johnny Weissmuller from 1932 to 1948;

*The six “Thin Man” movies starring William Powell and Myrna Loy;

*The nine Doctor Kildare movies made by Lew Ayres;

* Mickey Rooney’s 15 “Andy Hardy” films from 1937 to 1946;

*The 10 “Maisie” comedies with Ann Sothern as a lovable Brooklyn showgirl; and

* The “aqua-musicals” of “America’s Mermaid,” Esther Williams.

Several Mayer lieutenants were crucial in churning out all this product:

* Irving Thalberg: Nicknamed the “Boy Wonder” by the press and “The Last Tycoon” by F. Scott Fitzgerald (who fictionalized him as the title character of his posthumously published Hollywood novel), he served as production head of the new studio and a kind of surrogate son to Mayer, before dying of pneumonia, after a dozen years of overwork as the epitome of a Hollywood creative producer, at age 37.

* Eddie Mannix: Installed as a studio snitch by Nicholas Schenck, he soon went over to Mayer’s side, where, as general manager, he became LB’s indispensable “fixer”—soothing insecure stars, along with squelching innumerable scandals involving pregnancies, fatal auto accidents, abortions, a precursor of Harvey Weinstein's sexual harassment crimes—and, some have argued, the murder of “Three Stooges” director Ted Healy.

* Howard Strickling: Head of publicity, the studio exec in charge of communication was, ironically, afflicted with a communication handicap of his own—stuttering. But, 24/7, he controlled access to the industry’s greatest assembly of talent, rewarding reporters who played ball and punishing those who didn’t.

* Howard Dietz: Head of advertising and publicity at the studio for 30 years, he not only came up with its famous lion (an idea he borrowed from the mascot of his alma mater, Columbia University), but also pursued a simultaneous sideline as the lyricist partner of Arthur Schwartz.

The landmark 1948 Supreme Court case United States v. Paramount effectively ended the quarter century of studio dominance by outlawing the block-booking system of selling multiple films to a theater as a unit and by recommending the breakup of studio-theater monopolies.

Three years later, Nicholas Schenck finally resolved his multi-decade clash with Mayer by persuading the studio’s board of directors to replace the mogul with writer-producer Dore Schary, who would suffer the same fate as his predecessor five years later.  

By the 1960s, MGM’s onetime ability to achieve profit margins even with handsomely mounted productions had devolved into boom-or-bust blockbusters that left it vulnerable to takeovers. It’s now a subsidiary of Amazon. 

Fairbanks and Pickford, Hollywood’s First ‘Power Couple,’ Recalled in Fort Lee Exhibit

Try to imagine, if you can, what the motion picture industry was like a century ago. Color film was decades away, and even talkies hadn’t arrived yet.

But the studio system had come into being, and, most important of all, the star system. Two stars in particular, married to each other, burned especially brightly, not only headlining their own movies but producing their own projects. And film fans couldn’t get enough of their love story.

The pair I’m talking about, Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, are the subject of an exhibit running through December at the Barrymore Film Center in Fort Lee, NJ.

Readers of this blog know that I’ve made it a point to catch several vintage movies in the theater at this relatively recent addition to the Bergen County cultural scene. But the museum space is also a must for movie aficionados.

Although the museum’s first exhibit, on John, Lionel, and Ethel Barrymore, featured a family with Bergen County connections, this current exhibit, “Power Couple: Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford in Hollywood," is remarkable in its own way.

Unlike the Barrymores, Fairbanks and Pickford never lived in Fort Lee. But they worked in the borough during the early days of the silent film industry.

A forerunner of Errol Flynn, Harrison Ford, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Tom Cruise, Fairbanks was Hollywood’s first great swashbuckling action hero, an actor who endowed costume dramas like The Thief of Baghdad, Robin Hood, and The Mark of Zorro with his enormous charisma and athletic ability, even performing his own stunts, in independent films he produced.

Pickford was, like Fairbanks, a producer in her own right—in fact, as the first woman to own her own movie company, as well as theaters themselves and a studio lot, the most powerful female in Hollywood.

That clout derived from her box-office success as “America’s Sweetheart,” with audiences flocking to see this actress in her twenties playing innocent, virginal, but spunky girls (an illusion enhanced by her 5-foot-tall frame, bashful glance, and blond curls).

The two stars met not long after Fairbanks came out to Hollywood in 1915. At first, because they had other spouses at the time, they tried to conceal their attraction from each other and, more important, the public.

But, while spearheading the drive for Liberty Bonds during WWI, the two not only found a way to cement Hollywood’s relationship to Washington decision-makers for the next century, but their own liaison. Married at last in 1920, they lived and threw parties in one of the most lavish estates in Beverly Hills, “Pickfair.”

Together with friends Charlie Chaplin and D.W. Griffith, Fairbanks and Pickford formed their own film studio in 1919, United Artists—a venture meant to ensure that the creative talent—directors and stars—rather than moguls or banks, would control the distribution network of films.

Although their popularity as the king and queen of Hollywood lasted for more than a decade, they became two of the casualties of the transition from silents to sound pictures. Both Fairbanks and Pickford chafed at the restrictions placed by limited microphone mobility on camera movements in the new era.

Additionally, they had trouble adjusting their old personas for audiences. Years of chain smoking left Fairbanks unable to exhibit the daredevil stunt work that had been his stock in trade. The aging Pickford found the ingenue roles that had made her the highest-paid actress in Hollywood to be golden handcuffs as she tried to transition to more adult roles. (Her decision to cut her trademark hair was not only front-page news but inspired an outpouring of protests from fans.)

The two would make only one film together—a 1929 adaptation of The Taming of the Shrew, the first time that the talkies had put Shakespeare onscreen—but it did little to recalibrate audience expectations of their onetime idols. With each facing disappointment, they became less active onscreen, with Pickford even retiring from screen acting (though not producing) in the early 1930s.

Inevitably the marriage crumbled, with the two divorcing and remarrying to different partners in the mid-1930s. Fairbanks died of a heart attack in 1939.

Pickford, though living four decades longer than her ex-husband, was not necessarily luckier in her passage into history. In 1976, millions of Oscar watchers (including me) were aghast when the producers of the shot presented the ailing, 83-year-old Pickford with a lifetime achievement award at Pickford.

The sight of the venerable star, outfitted with wig of blonde curls, false eyelashes, and gaudy lipstick, was shocking enough that columnist Mike Royko wrote, “"Mary Pickford, the one-time screen darling of America, has managed to offend people. She did it by growing old.”

I could not close this post without considering the two stars in their heyday—what they meant to each other and to the overall Hollywood dream factory. More than 200 items in the Fort Lee museum exhibit help in this regard.

They trace the evolution of the Fairbanks-Pickford relationship, including stills, posters, window cards, set and costume designs, boots and practice swords used by Fairbanks in career highlights like Robin Hood, and Pickford’s hairbrush set.

Most poignantly, there is a small sample of the many love letters that Fairbanks sent Pickford throughout their relationship—which, despite their eventual divorce, she kept in a box in Pickfair until the day she died.

Movie Quote of the Day (‘The Player,’ In Which a Studio Exec Anticipates Today’s Strikes)

Griffin Mill [played by Tim Robbins]: “I was just thinking what an interesting concept it is to eliminate the writer from the artistic process. If we could just get rid of these actors and directors, maybe we've got something here.”—The Player (1992), screenplay by Michael Tolkin, directed by Robert Altman

I won’t engage in any spoilers here, but Griffin Mill carries his idea on how to “eliminate the writer from the artistic process” quite far.

I’m not saying that today’s studio executives have the same solution in mind. But the screenwriters and actors currently on strike feel like they’re being cut out of the revenue streams that developed during the pandemic.

With the advent of CGI, pictures often feature actors (admittedly in truncated roles) who are dead, such as Carrie Fisher as Princess Leia in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. (See this very interesting Screen Rant list of other notables—like Laurence Olivier, Marlon Brando and Christopher Reeve.)

Now, with artificial intelligence, the lowliest of Hollywood actors—scrambling just to appear as extras—believe that with facial recognition software, they won’t be compensated even for these fleeting appearances onscreen.

Why resort to murder when you can terminate difficult creative partners—not to mention employees insisting on their rights—with the click of a mouse?

Quote of the Day (Budd Schulberg, on Gwyneth Paltrow’s Oscar Speech Omission)

“I watch the Awards shows year after year and I have noticed a trend. When Gwyneth Paltrow won for Shakespeare in Love, she thanked the producer and her agents. She thanked her hairdresser and every member of her family. She must have thanked 50 people. But she never mentioned the writer. She didn’t even mention Shakespeare. They don’t want to thank the people who created their characters and who put the words in their mouth. There can’t be anything without the writer.”— Oscar-winning screenwriter and novelist Budd Schulberg (1914-2009), quoted in “The Real Contender: A Conversation with ‘On the Waterfront’ Screenwriter Budd Schulberg,” Hudson Reporter, July 29, 2000

Budd Schulberg, with more than 80 years of experience in the film community as the son of a studio executive, screenwriter, and observer of the industry, was venting about the lack of respect so long accorded to scribes in Hollywood.

Their indignities have been legion—they have watched in frustration as:

*their terrific script goes into “turnaround,” or development hell; or as

*their script is given to one or more other writers for polishing (Turner and Hooch, the early Tom Hanks film that teamed him with an ugly dog, went through eight different writers!); or as

*their script gets turned by some combination of other writers, directors and producers into something radically different (or, in the words of William Holden’s hack in Sunset Boulevard about his last project, it “was about Okies in the Dust Bowl. You'd never know because when it reached the screen, the whole thing played on a torpedo boat”); or as

*they are banished from the set so they can’t object to the director's damage to their work; or as

*the angrier ones try to use whatever meager leverage they’ve accumulated to protect their scripts by becoming directors themselves, as with Preston Sturges and Billy Wilder; or finally, as Schulberg noted,

*actors forget to say thanks for writing the lines that helped them win the biggest professional honor of their careers.

But, if Schulberg had lived almost a decade longer, his outrage might have been, if anything, even more intense than what he conveyed in this interview.

After all, that producer that Gwyneth Paltrow thanked in her weepy speech on Oscar night almost a quarter century ago? It was Harvey Weinstein, a figure she later described as a “bully”—and now, of course, not just the poster boy of the #MeToo movement but also a felon convicted of rape and assault.

By the way, “the writer” Paltrow neglected to mention? It was actually two: Marc Norman and Sir Tom Stoppard—and that year they shared the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for Shakespeare in Love.

So let’s see tomorrow night who thanks the writers—and who, like Paltrow, for whatever reason, never gets around to it.

TV Quote of the Day (‘Gilmore Girls,’ on Jennifer Lopez, Once and Future Wedding Maven)

“Mom, it’s a pretend wedding. J-Lo has them all the time.”—Lorelai Gilmore [played by Lauren Graham], reassuring Emily (nervous about renewing her marriage vows), in Gilmore Girls, Season 5, Episode 13, “Wedding Bell Blues,” original air date Feb 8, 2005, written and directed by Amy Sherman-Palladino

It’s amazing how some sitcoms just feel really dated, while the jokes in others have a habit of coming around again. Jennifer Lopez is the gift that keeps on giving.

When the episode from which this joke was taken first aired, Facebook had only gone public within the past year and was still unknown to many members of the public. Alexa, Netflix “streaming,” “Grubhub,” TikTok, Instagram were not around at all.

But audiences then and now would nod approvingly and chuckle at “J-Lo.” The year before Lorelai Gilmore tried to cheer up her mom by invoking her name, the actress-singer had broken off her engagement up with Ben Affleck.

Recently, you may have heard, “Bennifer” reunited and married. It’s hard not to escape the suspicion that she wed the Oscar-winning actor-writer-director-producer on the rebound from her broken engagement to former baseball slugger Alex Rodriguez.

In case you’re not keeping count, this is J-Lo’s fourth marriage. She’s also been engaged six times. Don't ever try to keep track of the men she's been with in between.

No wonder she confessed eight years ago to being a "love addict."

Many economists tell us that a recession is around the corner. But, as long as Ms. Lopez is around, it’ll always be full employment for entertainment reporters working the celebrity matrimonial beat.