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 Film History (Death of Stanley Kramer, Postwar Liberal Producer-Director)

Feb. 19, 2001— Stanley Kramer, a director and producer who stirred audiences’ consciences with provocative sociopolitical content, died at age 87 at the Motion Picture Home in Woodland Hills, Los Angeles, Calif., from complications of pneumonia.

It had been more than two decades since Kramer had retired from the movie business, and more than three since his films had made money or even won critical acclaim. In the quarter century since his death, both conservatives and liberals, in agreement on little else, believe that he was as stodgy in technique as square in outlook.

But Kramer had a two-decade run in which he attracted major stars and made profitable movies with content that risk-averse, politically conservative studio executives regarded as radioactive. 

He might not have been the flashiest, most innovative director, but he was important for making Cold War America look in the mirror he held up to it on injustice at home.

Coming of age in Hell’s Kitchen in New York during the Great Depression, hearing his mother extol her clerical job at Paramount Studios in Gotham, Kramer eventually made his way to Los Angeles, where he got ground-up training in the film industry as a carpenter, screenwriter, editor, and producer before his rise was interrupted by a stint in the Army Signal Corps during World War II.

The fracturing of the studio system in the late 1940s opened the way for someone like Kramer who had, in effect, adopted guerrilla tactics in producing his early independent pictures, on the cheap and on the fly. Because of its sensitive subject, Kramer shot Home of the Brave (1949), generally considered the first movie on racism to be distributed by a Hollywood studio, in seventeen days in total secrecy under a different title.

A five-year contract he signed as an independent producer for Columbia Pictures in 1951 guaranteed a steadier financial base and higher budgets, but at the price of being second-guessed by studio head Harry Cohn, whom Kramer later described as “vulgar, domineering, semi-literate, ruthless, boorish and malevolent.”

High Noon, a taut western with a not-so-subtle message about the dangers of McCarthyism, represented perhaps his greatest triumph in this period while also damaging a friendship and giving him a reputation for having the courage of someone else’s convictions.

After his producing partner, screenwriter Carl Foreman, ran afoul of the House Committee on Un-American Activities for refusing to “name names” of Communists he had known earlier in the industry, Kramer bought his share of the partnership, and would have totally erased his participation in the movie were it not for protests by director Fred Zinnemann and star Gary Cooper.

A move into the director’s chair, Kramer felt, was a natural progression for him, considering how he had become so involved with all aspects of his films to date. 

But it took a couple of years before he hit his stride with The Defiant Ones (1958), with Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier as escaped convicts forced to overcome their differences over race—a dramatic encapsulation of the conflict starting to rage in earnest in America during that time.

Over the next nine years, Kramer would delve into nuclear annihilation (On the Beach, 1959), evolution and church-state relations (Inherit the Wind, 1960), antisemitism (Judgment at Nuremberg, 1961, and Ship of Fools, 1965), greed (his atypical 1963 breakneck farce, It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World), and, most controversially, interracial marriage (Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, 1967, in the image accompanying this post).

What The New Yorker’s Pauline Kael lambasted as Kramer’s “irritatingly self-righteous” themes may have limited the director’s critical acceptance. But with his movies continuing to mint box-office gold, Hollywood congratulated him—and itself, for appreciating him—with the Irving Thalberg Award for overall excellence at the 1961 Oscars.

But after Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, Kramer never had another success. A self-described New Deal Democrat, he fell out of step with youth that gravitated towards more radical “New Left” politics, telling film historian Donald Spoto that he had been “somewhat viciously attacked along the way for being part of a ‘do-good' era.”

I don’t think that audiences simply tired of Kramer’s politics or of his largely stationary camera. Many were driven to distraction by his earnestness, an outlook that naysayers found out of place in an age gone so stark, raving mad that it required movies with the kind of subversive style and substance of The Graduate and Bonnie and Clyde.

I question whether any Kramer-directed movie has served as fodder for film-school sessions on technique, but, by directing 14 different actors in Oscar-nominated performances, he displayed a deft touch with often skittish professionals, and his influence runs stronger than many cynics care to admit:

*Aaron Sorkin’s penchant for courtroom drama (the scripts for A Few Good Men and The Trial of the Chicago Seven) and preachy politics (The West Wing) owes much to him.

*Quentin Tarantino has compared him to Oliver Stone, except that the controversial J.F.K. auteur was not a “clumsy filmmaker” like Kramer.

*And, with Judgment at Nuremberg, Kramer paved the way for Steven Spielberg’s searing Holocaust drama, Schindler’s List.

Today, the Producers Guild of America presents the Stanley Kramer Award to honor films that highlight significant social issues, including, for example, Good Night, and Good Luck, The Normal Heart, and Get Out.

This Day in Film History (Valentino Funeral Sparks Mass Hysteria)

August 30, 1926—A week after his sudden death from peritonis, an invitation-only funeral mass was held in midtown Manhattan for Rudolph Valentino—but thousands more lined up outside St. Malachy’s Church to gawk, whisper or wail over the silent-screen romantic idol, dead at age 31, gone seemingly before he had barely appeared onscreen.

For the last decade, I have walked a couple of blocks from where I work to attend masses on Holy Days of Obligation at St. Malachy’s. I’ve come to have almost a proprietary feeling for the so-called “Actor’s Chapel” located in the heart of the Broadway theater district.

I can’t begin to imagine, though, what it must have been like to be in the church on this late summer day 75 years ago. Today, critics of the Archdiocese of New York and the Roman Catholic Church complain about its unwillingness to bend in any way, but the Church was even more disinclined to do so back then.

In a way, though, the Church’s insistence on maintaining old norms would have appealed to the deceased, an immigrant with Old World values struggling to hold onto his dignity and to make sense of the new medium he had conquered and the celebrity culture it had spawned. This High Solemn mass, to be followed a week later by a second one out in California, where Valentino would be laid to rest, stood in absolutely stark contrast to the hysteria occurring in the two weeks since the news broke that the star was gravely ill.

Some modern viewers have felt that, without dialogue, Valentino looks melodramatic in the films that made him a star: The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, The Sheik and The Son of the Sheik. But his acting style was nothing compared with the over-the-top behavior of his fans at his wake the prior week at the Frank Campbell Funeral Home in Manhattan.

Estimates are that as many as 100,000 people lined up outside the funeral parlor for a chance to pay tribute--no, in so many cases, simply to see--in the flesh the celluloid fantasy projected several times his size onto big screens in movie palaces. It became more than a matter of crowd management--it was more like riot avoidance.

Four thousand red roses were sent to the home at the behest of Pola Negri, who claimed that she had been engaged to the star at the time of his death. Outsized reactions such as this seemed, in turn, to spark outsized rumors, the most persistent of which was that the body on view in the bronze casket on a raised pedestal was not Valentino himself, but a wax likeness meant to save his corpse from the final indignity of being viewed in a hothouse atmosphere by thousands.

The atmosphere surrounding Valentino’s death represented a kind of dividing line in American popular culture. Before, mass outpourings of extreme grief were expressed over the deaths of Presidents or great soldiers. Valentino’s wake marked the first time that the public burst out in such grief over the departure of a celebrity.

Before his death, the actor had been engaged in a media-management campaign--not just promoting The Son of the Sheik, but figuring out how to tamp down the criticism now beginning to come his way. 

The catalyst: a Chicago newspaper that printed a story that the person who installed powder puffs in the men’s room of a ballroom had been inspired by what we would now call the “metrosexual” look of the actor.

Valentino hadn’t reacted well to the “Pink Powderpuff” story at all. The action he would have taken in his native Italy--challenge the anonymous author to a duel--was regarded as preposterous and hilarious when he suggested it, in all seriousness, to reporters.

Over the years, as with many Hollywood stars, it has become difficult to discern the real reason for Valentino's anger. Some, pointing to the actor's two very short marriages, have suggested that he might have been terrified at exposure of his bisexuality.

But whispers about homosexuality or bisexuality have been spread about nearly every major male star over the years. Valentino might simply have been annoyed at the simple aspersion on his masculinity.

It was in this confusing atmosphere that another unusual incident in the last days of Valentino occurred: a dinner with journalist H.L. Mencken. What was curious about this was that the cynical Mencken, then at the zenith of his influence on American intellectuals and the cultural scene, did not count moviegoing among his hobbies.

But in 1926 he was conducting a brief, secret affair with a female Hollywood screenwriter, and it was the latter who helped Valentino--impressed by one of Mencken’s essays--reach out to the journalist for advice on how to handle the media beast.

Mencken’s advice was blunt: ignore whatever they write about you. But at dinner, Valentino began to explain why he couldn’t do that.

Against all odds--not just his lack of identification with the stars of a new medium that downplayed the written word at the expense of the image, but also his lack of sympathy with immigrants--Mencken began to like the young man for his simple dignity. 

And so it was that, on the day of the star’s New York funeral (a second would be held on the West Coast, prior to burial), Mencken’s column on the matinee idol appeared.

The piece became one of the classics of Mencken’s five-decade career, but was among the most atypical of the bunch. It relied less on observation than on a frank participation in an event surrounding his subject (his dinner with Valentino). 

And, rather than dispatch his subject with not just irreverence but savagery, as he had done with William Jennings Bryan the year before, Mencken extended deep understanding and sympathy with someone caught in the American star-making machinery, and utterly unable to extricate himself:

“Here was a young man who was living daily the dream of millions of other young men. “Here was one who was catnip to women. Here was one who had wealth and fame. And here was one who was very unhappy.”

Valentino was one of the first movie stars to try to figure out how to keep the ravenous entertainment industry from destroying his privacy and his image. Since then, others have become shrewd about doing so. 

But, as seen in the recent Newsweek story on jailed private-investigator-to-the-stars Anthony Pellicano, others will resort to far more desperate attempts at keeping their image pristine than Hollywood’s prototypical romantic idol did.