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theater side of the business from New York), groping (young musical star Judy Garland, who, according to notes for an unpublished memoir, claimed she finally summoned the nerve to tell him to stop), and crying (matinee idol Robert Taylor, who, after having his boss cry on his shoulders,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. 

Quote of the Day (Irving Thalberg, on Credit)

“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.”

This Day in Film History (Von Stroheim’s Mutilated “Greed” Opens)

December 4, 1924—Running 2½ hours, the silent film Greed was nothing like the project originally conceived by director Erich von Stroheim. 

Less than a quarter remained of the footage after Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer production head Irving Thalberg ordered it drastically cut. Nobody ended up satisfied with the results. 

While MGM wept at the gross (only $277,000 domestically compared with a cost of $585,000, a fortune in those days), von Stroheim fumed over a project not only snatched from his hands but impossible to reconstruct, because all unused footage had been burned to extract just a few cents worth of silver in the nitrate.

The epic adaptation of Frank Norris’ naturalistic novel McTeague would be on most cineastes’ short lists for lost masterpieces. Not surprisingly, even the closest thing to it—a 239-minute version from Turner Classic Movies several years ago—added only another 99 minutes, with rephotographed stills, a “continuity screenplay,” and a new score. Jonathan Rosenbaum offers a fine assessment of this reclamation project.

I’ve always been amused by a story that Billy Wilder told about meeting Erich von Stroheim at wardrobe tests for the latter’s role as General Erwin Rommel in Five Graves to Cairo. “I clicked my heels,” Wilder recalled, “and said, ‘Isn’t it ridiculous, little me directing you? You were always ten years ahead of your time.’”

Von Stroheim’s reply: “Twenty, Mr. Wilder. Twenty.”

“Oh, that arrogant, crazy guy,” I used to think. More recently, though, I’ve reconsidered. What if von Stroheim was being, believe it or not, modest?

That’s not a characteristic you associate with the actor once billed in Hollywood as “The Man You Love To Hate,” someone whose very name was an artifice (the “von” was meant to suggest an aristocratic Austrian ancestry that did not exist) and whose top billing as military commanders in Five Graves to Cairo and Jean Renoir’s antiwar classic Grand Illusion was pretty ironic, considering that he had deserted from the Austrian army.

But let’s consider how Greed foreshadowed later developments in entertainment. It’s entirely conceivable, viewed in this prism, that von Stroheim was not merely twenty years ahead of his time, but forty, even fifty.

Which time frame you prefer tells much about whether you subscribe to the auteur theory—i.e., the notion that a film is preeminently the product of one person’s, the director’s, vision—or if you believe that film is more of a collaboration among director, producer, screenwriter, and other creative forces.

If you’re an auteur aficionado, then you see von Stroheim as a visionary bursting not just beyond his time but beyond even his medium. Many believe that von Stroheim was aiming at something close to a page-for-page transcription of McTeague. Rosenbaum, pointing out that nearly a fifth of the plot in the script occurs before the novel’s opening sentence, suggests an even more expansive view.

Seen in this light, the 42 reels and 47,000 feet of film that the director came up with surge way, way beyond the limits of film to that time. 

The mode of presentation that he suggested to the studio—playing it over two consecutive days—was tried out two decades ago in Little Dorrit, the adaptation of Charles Dickens’ behemoth Victorian novel directed by Christine Edzard and starring Derek Jacobi and Alec Guinness.

Even Little Dorrit, though, clocked in at 360 minutes—six hours. The original Greed still surpassed that in length (though the version that von Stroheim was aiming for with his two-day plea to MGM, approximately four hours, wasn't quite as long).

It's like a scientist--say, a Leonardo--who comes up with a concept not just decades, but even centuries ahead of its time, but, because he doesn't have the equipment, doesn't know how to implement it.

No, I’m afraid that there was only one medium that could have encompassed von Stroheim’s vision, one not even invented at that point, one that, after it came to maturity, enjoyed a two-decade heyday before falling victim to Hollywood’s stern laws of economics (one that von Stroheim, of course, cheerfully flouted): the TV mini-series.

Forty years ago this fall, public television in the U.S. spun out over 26 weeks the British import The Forsyte Saga. The following that the adaptation of Nobel Prize laureate John Galsworthy's magnum opus generated helped to create an audience for the later arrival, Masterpiece Theatre.

When it was time to remake it 3 1/2 decades later, what viewers gained in technique—color instead of black-and-white, film instead of videotape—they lost in time—seven episodes instead of 26. That reflected the wall that TV producers had hit: too long a series meant too much of a gamble. The old-style epic miniseries had its real last hurrah when War and Remembrance premiered on ABC in 1990.

The miniseries that von Stroheim might have really appreciated was Berlin Alexanderplatz, Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 15 ½-hour adaptation of Alfred Doblin’s novel of Germany in the dying years of the Weimar Republic. The two directors shared the same perspective on the ills of capitalism, lust, and the deterioration of individuals under the pressure of modern mores.

There is, as I’ve said, another school of thought that holds that film is nothing like the ego trip licensed by the auteur theorists, that it involves give and take among the studio, director, screenwriter, and star(s). In this view, megalomaniacal directors need to be reined in before they wreck studios, let alone single productions.

I’m not talking here about Cleopatra, the Elizabeth Taylor star vehicle so preposterous, someone once said, that it was “the end of the era of two of everything, and twice as big.” That became a milestone in cost overruns because of Twentieth-Century Fox’s decision to shelve one set and director and go in a different direction—in effect, creating a second film with additional costs.

No, I’m talking about Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate, the 1980 film that became synonymous with what could happen when a director, with an ego recently swollen from an Oscar win (The Deer Hunter), believing all the stories that he's a genius, gets not only final cut but carte blanche to run amok. You might think of Cimino’s true cinematic forebear as von Stroheim.

Von Stroheim should have known better than to try Irving Thalberg's patience. The boy wonder of Hollywood had dismissed him from Universal Pictures after six weeks of shooting Merry Go Round because of bloated budgets. At MGM, Von Stroheim probably thought he had a clear field to make his dream project, the adaptation of McTeague.

The problem was that Thalberg had migrated from Universal to the newly formed MGM. He well knew what von Stroheim could do, and he had his eyes peeled out on him. Von Stroheim should have trod carefully. It just goes to show: don't burn your bridges.

In later years, Thalberg would be regarded as a genius of the studio system, a rare businessman whose instinct for translating a story into visual terms would be celebrated by F. Scott Fitzgerald, who transformed him into tragic hero Monroe Stahr in the unfinished The Last Tycoon. But Thalberg has come in for his share of abuse over his role in destroying Greed.

Destroying that footage is extreme. But in the early 1920s, film was not yet regarded as an art, the way it is today. It would be like tampering with a video game.

Funny—in literature, critics hail economy, especially the likes of its evangelists, Flaubert, James, Fitzgerald and Hemingway. The word “saga” is enough to make critics break out into hives.

So why isn’t economy celebrated in the same way in film? Why do we clamor for every missing segment, no matter how misguided? 

You can argue persuasively that the 1954 version of A Star is Born was badly amputated after its premiere, but do we really need the “director’s cut” of an already overblown Oliver Stone film?

The miracle was that von Stroheim not only had been allowed to push the boundaries of cinema (and censor boards) before, but that he’d continue to do so even beyond Greed. His stock in trade, before and after Greed, was lust, decadence, and upper-class amorality. Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut would have been just the type of assignment he’d tackle if he were alive today.

Only von Stroheim’s rookie feature, Blind Husbands, survives in anywhere near the form he intended. Here’s the rundown on his other efforts, besides Greed, through the rest of the decade:

* The Devil’s Pass Key (1920)—utterly lost.

* Foolish Wives (1921)—no more than a third of its 6 1/2-hour rough cut survives.

* Merry Go Round (1923)—see above.

* The Merry Widow (1925)—Thalberg, working with von Stroheim again at MGM, attempting to mediate between the director and boss Louis B. Mayer, had a heart attack during production; maybe that had something to do with the fact that, though the studio reportedly cut scenes relating to a bordello, wedding night exotica, and a baron’s foot fetish, the main structure of the film remained largely intact.

* Wedding March (1928)—the second half was lost in a fire.

* Queen Kelly (1929)—Joe Kennedy agreed to finance a film for mistress Gloria Swanson, despite the fact that von Stroheim was between jobs after a record of cost overruns and countless clashes with studios and actors. Against all reason, Kennedy hired the monocle-wearing, riding-crop-brandishing martinet. One scene after another was filmed—in a brothel, and a seduction in a convent—until, supposedly, von Stroheim’s instructions to an actor playing a seducer to dribble tobacco juice while kissing Swanson’s hand persuaded her that he’d taken leave of his senses. Kennedy sent von Stroheim packing pronto.

Von Stroheim loved to spend studio dollars while keeping executives at a distance. Being true to the setting of McTeague—in San Francisco and Death Valley—would also allow him to shoot away from interference. Or so he thought. Of course, he guessed wrong.

(By the way, New Jersey film buffs might be interested to know that the Garden State had played a role in an earlier version of Greed—a 1915 silent known as Life’s a Whirlpool. World Film Productions, based out of Fort Lee, N.J., decided, like von Stroheim, to shoot in Death Valley for its climactic scenes. The crew reached their destination only after a horrific sandstorm, according to a Moving Picture World account reprinted in Richard Koszarski’s Fort Lee: The Film Town.)

After the 1920s, Stroheim was through as a director. He's best known to fans of classic films as Max, the butler to Swanson's mad Norma Desmond in Wilder's Sunset Boulevard. Just as Stroheim had directed Swanson, Max, before his fall from grace, had directed Desmond.

I would have loved to have seen what passed between the two of them, two decades after their initial debacle...