“Credit you give yourself is not worth having.”—MGM production head Irving Thalberg, explaining why he refused to allow his name to appear on the credits of films with which he was associated, quoted in Julie Lugo Cerra,
Culver City: The Heart of Screenland (2004)
Irving Thalberg (pictured left, with movie-star wife Norma Shearer) inspired the creation of Monroe Stahr in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s last, unfinished novel
The Last Tycoon. He only let his name be put on one of his films:
The Good Earth.
Nevertheless, Hollywood remembers this driven, sickly creative force at Oscar time with the
Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award, given to “creative producers whose bodies of work reflect a consistently high quality of motion picture production.”
