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.”

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. 

This Day in Literary History (‘Intruder’ Film Premieres in Faulkner’s Hometown)

October 10, 1949—William Faulkner had spent a sizable portion of his most creative years in Hollywood, but it was a different experience for him to be attending the hometown premiere of a movie adapted from one of his novels. Yet, though the screenplay was written by others and he had only showed up at the opening at the insistence of one of his aunts, Intruder in the Dust overwhelmingly reflected his influence—including choices for location shooting, suggestions on the content and acting of key scenes, even a behind-the-scenes defusing of locals’ resentment over his treatment of an issue gaining in urgency with each passing day: racism.

Most Oxford, Miss., residents ended up enjoying the film when it opened that day at the local Lyric Theater. (After all, so many knew family members or friends who had acted in it—or had even done so themselves). The problem was that not enough Americans as a whole did so. MGM mogul Louis B. Mayer had predicted this outcome nearly a year before, and now it seemed that events would be proving him right: the film underperformed at the box office.

Mayer thought that Americans would not turn out for a socially conscious film implicitly critical about the American political system, but the truth was a bit more complicated. Veteran MGM director Clarence Brown, who came from Tennessee, had been haunted by race riots he had witnessed in 1906 in Atlanta, and he had wanted to purchase the rights to Faulkner’s novel of a racially-charged murder trial even before publication.

But Mayer’s point-blank refusal to secure the rights meant that, by the time another studio champion of the project, Dore Schary, had been installed as head of production, three other films on racial issues were well on their way to release: Mark Robson’s Home of the Brave, Elia Kazan’s Pinky, and Alfred Werker’s Lost Boundaries. The U.S. public, perceiving a glut of movies devoted to this one issue, may have simply decided to stay home.  

Contemporary reviewers, as well as historians of film since then, hailed the movie for its feel for the region and its fine acting, particularly by Juano Hernandez in the pivotal role of defendant Lucas Beauchamp. 

Even so, most who saw Intruder in the Dust could not have been aware that the adaptation could only begin to suggest the experience of reading Faulkner’s complex novel—a work with extraordinarily vivid description that nevertheless challenged at every turn with its long sentences; characters that, like so much of his other fiction, harked back to other novels and short stories in his loose ongoing saga about “Yoknapatawpha County”; and a treatment of race as complicated as its current state in the Deep South (e.g., the film never indicated that Beauchamp, with black and white ancestors, tended to identify with the white ones, because Brown, who could accept the idea of political equality for African-Americans, found miscegenation to be beyond the pale).

Faulkner’s own personality and struggles make him the equal of anything that sprang from his fecund imagination. The Coen brothers’ movie Barton Fink exploits this persona through a character, W.P. Mayhew, strongly suggested by Faulkner in the early Forties: a Southern novelist moonlighting in Hollywood, carrying on an affair with a script assistant when he is not falling-down-drunk. It is an exaggeration of his actual situation (there are no indications in the novelist's real life, unlike in the film, that a script assistant with whom he was carrying on an affair wrote any of his works).

While in Hollywood, Faulkner, while called upon to adapt the works of others (notably, Ernest Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not, which had virtually nothing to do with the original), had only been called upon to translate one of his own for the big screen: his first screen credit, Today We Live, from his World War I short story “Turn About,” done during his short stint in the early Thirties at MGM. The original had been short enough to allow him space to expand, including an invented part for one of the studio’s principal female stars at the time, Joan Crawford. It is hard to say whether he could have done a better job of streamlining the vastly larger canvass of his novel than the screenwriter who got the job, Ben Maddow.

Unlike F. Scott Fitzgerald, Faulkner had little invested emotionally in film as a medium; he simply regarded his screenwriting assignments, even the ones he did in partnership with the understanding Warner Brothers director Howard Hawks, as jobs to pay the bills. (That last phrase was literally true in his case: in January 1941, he couldn’t afford to pay a $15 electricity bill.) While pleasantly surprised that Brown did such a good job with Intruder in the Dust, he was also thrilled to receive extra remuneration from one of his works.

As it turned out, this film adaptation came at a time when his financial situation, though not his health, was about to undergo a dramatic improvement. A couple of years before, a volume that critic Malcolm Cowley edited, The Portable Faulkner, had led American reviewers to raise him higher in the pantheon of native writers, to the point where it approximated his long-lofty position abroad. A month after the premiere of Intruder in the Dust, 15 of 18 members of the Swedish Academy had voted to award him the Nobel Prize in Literature, and though he did not receive the award immediately (rules required a unanimous vote), that showing had put him in a strong position to win the following year. Within the next five years, he would not only win the Nobel but also the National Book Award (for his Collected Stories) and the Pulitzer (for a novel, ironically, regarded as among his weakest, A Fable).

All this came at a time when alcoholism, long a powerful influence in his life, would now affect his work. Like Hemingway, poor health, with drinking a significant contributing factor, had begun to cloud his creative power. Faulkner didn’t experience Hemingway’s extreme inability to finish work, but in a way, it might have been better if he had: the novels he wrote in the last dozen years of his life did not measure up to his extraordinary output from 1929 (The Sound and the Fury) to 1942 (Go Down, Moses).

This Day in Film History (Botched Sound Ruins Silent Star Gilbert)

September 28, 1929—The transition from silents to talkies claimed its most prominent victim when preview audiences for His Glorious Night howled at the unexpectedly off-putting voice of John Gilbert, successor to Rudolph Valentino as the great male lover of the big screen.

What none of the fans understood that night was that Gilbert’s image had been sabotaged because of a quarrel with MGM studio head Louis B. Mayer.

And what did that quarrel involve? Well, the same thing that 99% of guy quarrels revolve around: a woman, of course.

Only this wasn’t just any woman. This was Greta Garbo, the epitome of wistful foreign allure, now as much as then—Mayer’s employee and Gilbert’s lover.

Eleven years ago, at the John Harms Center for the Arts in my hometown, Englewood, N.J., I attended a screening of the most famous Gilbert-Garbo collaboration, The Flesh and the Devil. I had seen the film 25 years before on public television, but this screening was special. Gilbert’s daughter, Laeticia Gilbert Fountain, introduced the movie and spoke about her dad.

Moreover, instead of a clunky piano accompanying out-of-kilter movements, I was watching something closer to the experience of 1920s audiences, with the 95-member New Jersey Youth Symphony Orchestra providing full-bodied accompaniment.

Most of all, that big screen projected images of Garbo and Gilbert that radiated a palpable erotic charge. Silent-film audiences sensed the two weren’t faking their love scenes, and the film became a roaring success.

With Love (an adaptation of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, only with a happy ending) and A Woman of Affairs, the two became possibly the greatest romantic team of the entire silent era.

Gilbert wanted them to marry—he liked matrimony so much that he went through with the ceremony four times in his 36 years on this planet—but his skittish Scandinavian lover stood him up at the altar. As Gilbert groaned, sulked, and sank deep in his cups, Mayer made a raunchy suggestion about what the actor could do with his runaway bride. Gilbert took extreme offense and had it out with his boss.

That’s how the legend has the prelude to Gilbert’s fall, anyway. Is it true? I’m not sure there’s a smoking gun, but the circumstantial evidence is so suggestive that I don’t see any reason to doubt it.

Let’s pick up on our story, then:

Mayer waited awhile—after all, revenge is a dish best served cold, as they say. His opportunity came with the arrival of sound.

Anyone who’s seen Singing in the Rain or the first wildly funny play written by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, Once in a Lifetime, is likely to chuckle over these depictions of the coming of sound, then dismiss it all as somewhat exaggerated satiric fun. Well…not quite.

The fact is that, when everyone in Hollywood had the rules figured out, The Jazz Singer changed the game. English-challenged European actors, for instance, used to emoting through their gestures, wondered—with reason—if they’d be employable in the new Hollywood.

But even American and Anglo actors grew concerned. Actors began frantically training with voice coaches, lest their careers go the way of Vilma Banky, Clara Bow, and the Talmadge sisters. Even the normally sensible William Powell—perfectly cast as suave, self-possessed private eye Nick Charles of the “Thin Man” series—ran from the room when he heard his voice for the first time.

Was Gilbert scared by all this? From what I’ve read, he didn’t have to be. In the first MGM film featuring sound, Hollywood Revue of 1929, there were no problems with his voice. In all but one film he made afterward, there was likewise no issue with it.

The exception was His Glorious Night, a misnomer if there ever was one. I hope Drew Barrymore achieves more success with her directing debut, Whip It, than granduncle Lionel did in this case.

Lionel Barrymore may have been more even creatively versatile than his marvelous siblings Ethel and John. An accomplished painter, he had enough of a visual eye that he’d already directed some silent films. His Glorious Night would also mark his debut as both a producer and composer, for heaven’s sake.

Maybe all that activity made it harder to keep track of everything. Maybe the family penchant for substance abuse began to rear its ugly head. Maybe he was just flummoxed by that darn microphone, which was bedeviling everyone in those days as they tried to focus on what was happening through the camera lens without having some stupid noise spoil everything. Or maybe he simply threw up his hands at the ridiculous dialogue he had to turn into gold.

Was Lionel paying attention? Because something big was happening beneath his nose: the destruction of a major star. Here’s the story, as related by E.J. Fleming in The Fixers: Eddie Mannix, Howard Strickling, and the MGM Publicity Machine: Mayer had ordered that all bass be removed in recording Gilbert’s lines.

The results at the preview were everything he could have wished for. He must have especially loved it when a viewer yelled out, “Gilbert, your slip is showing.”

By 1952, when Singing in the Rain appeared, Mayer, ousted the year before at MGM by Dore Schary, was a grumpy old man. But he must have perked up an awful lot when he saw the scene in the great musical from his old studio when Gene Kelly’s character, Don Lockwood, improvises by endlessly repeating to voice-challenged Jean Hagen, “I love you, I love you, I love you.” This was the part that made the audience for His Glorious Night howl.

But was it as bad as all that? A post on the blog "Trouble in Paradise" made me wonder. It has a clip from His Glorious Night that shows what all the fuss was about. I don’t share that blogger’s belief that there was nothing wrong with Gilbert’s delivery—audiences were right to detect something odd and artificial in that voice—but he’s right that it’s not as bad as has been made out. Maybe Singing in the Rain has colored modern perceptions of the scene.

Whatever the case may be, you can trace Gilbert’s decline pretty clearly from this point on. The roles came less steadily now (though Garbo managed to push aside a young Laurence Olivier and replace him with her old lover in Queen Christina), and he drank more heavily. He died in 1936.

I don’t think silent-film audiences saw anything fake in his allure, though. Consider this: In his short lifetime, he not only married four times but had two of the world’s most bewitching women: Garbo and, even at the time of his drink-besotted death, Marlene Dietrich.

Whatever Gilbert had, I’m sure a lot of men wished it could have been bottled and sold.