Search Results

This chapter examines the historical films produced by David O. Selznick in the U.S. during the period from 1932 to 1937 that focused on Hollywood actors and actress. Selznick worked for MGM, Paramount Pictures, RKO Pictures before founding his own Selznick International Pictures. His first film about Hollywood history was about the life and career of Clara Bow titled What Price Hollywood?. Another such film was A Star Is Born. Though it was a self-conscious composite biography, most 1937 viewers associated the character of Norman Maine, a fading alcoholic leading man, to actor John Gilbert who died of heart attack in January 1936.

The first chapter concentrates on a small group of men employed as studio head-producers. It argues that they were the Henry Fords of the industry, responsible for turning Hollywood into an effective modern entertainment machine. People like Irving Thalberg, David O. Selznick, and Darryl Zanuck arrived on the scene in the early 1920s and successfully reshaped the studio from an informal workplace to a well-thought-out operation with function-specific divisions and tasks. Their newly fashioned Hollywood lots served as intermediary spaces, accommodating the demands of profit seeking corporate executives as well as artists. The chapter shows how, on a day-to-day basis, head producers translated the demands and visions of each group to the other. It demonstrates how these producers served as brokers, embodying the contradictions of the system while closely supervising the production process of every picture and the studio as a whole.

This chapter describes the interactions between Hitchcock and David O. Selznick when the director came to America to work for Selznick International. The two men were a mismatched pair, Selznick flamboyant and Hitchcock withdrawn, but they were united in their love of movies. Hitchcock resented Selznick’s memo-writing interference and welcomed his loan-outs to other studios, but Selznick gave the director his ticket to America and the financial support and star access he needed to make first-rate films. Subsequent chapters examine the impacts of censorship on each of the ten films Hitchcock made while under contract to Selznick.

This chapter focuses on some important developments in George Cukor’s career as a Hollywood director, including the deaths of George Cukor’s mother, Helen Gross Cukor, and MGM producer Irving Thalberg during the filming of Camille and the controversy surrounding the 1939 movie Gone with the Wind. Since Cukor’s MGM contract was directly tied to Thalberg’s health, he was duly informed that he was legally entitled to break it within thirty days of the producer’s passing. Nevertheless, the studio made him a generous renewal offer: a five-year contract at the salary of $4,000 weekly. The MGM offer raised the bidding for Cukor, with David O. Selznick of RKO countering with a revised contract package for the director. Cukor agreed to direct Gone with the Wind for Selznick, but he was fired shortly after filming had begun and was replaced by Victor Fleming.

No Steiner project would be more difficult or emotionally draining than Gone with the Wind. This chapter explores how the composer wrote and/or supervised more than three hours of orchestral music in less than two and a half months (while concurrently writing three other film scores), amid constant and often contradictory direction from Selznick. The producer was more combatant than collaborator: “the whole thing had a nightmare quality,” recalled one participant. Due to a near-impossible deadline, Steiner was forced to have members of his team compose several GWTW music cues. These collaborators always worked under Max’s direction, using Steiner-composed leitmotivs. The chapter uses multiple examples of these cues to draw the distinction between the kind of “ghost writing” by uncredited composers that was common in Hollywood, and GWTW, a case in which Steiner remained the primary creative force behind this, his best-loved score.

The Paradine Case is another example of an instance in which the Code insistence that evildoers must be punished altered the screenplay and weakened the film. The leading character in the source novel was an adulteress and murderess who is acquitted of the charge of murder through perjured testimony and commits suicide after the truth is revealed?all red flags for Code reviewers. It was the final film Hitchcock made with David O. Selznick, whose constant interference and script rewrites caused irritating delays and rarely improved the plot and dialogue. The delays and changes were debilitating, causing Hitchcock to take more time in shooting this film than any of his other movies, and the film lost over $2 million for Selznick International.

This chapter examines the battles fought by David O. Selznick with the censors over their demands during the making of Rebecca and Hitchcock’s mollifying efforts in acceding to those demands. Selznick purchased the rights to Daphne du Maurier’s best seller Rebecca against the advice of the Code officials, who felt that the story of a man who murders his wife and gets off scot-free could not receive Code approval. Hitchcock suggested that the man’s wife die by accident, leaving the rest of the plot elements intact. Hitchcock’s suggestion got the film past the censors while raising the level of implausibility fairly high, but not high enough to keep the film from winning a Best Picture Oscar.

In one of the earliest films to depict the budding field of psychoanalysis, Alfred Hitchcock dealt with oversight from David O. Selznick’s personal psychiatrist as well as the Production Code. Both the psychiatrist and the censors found an abundance of erotic symbolism in the dream sequence created by Salvador Dal’, which was cut significantly in the final film. The Production Code office was also concerned about the suggestion of an illicit affair between psychiatrist Ingrid Bergman and her patient Gregory Peck, the new head of the asylum where much of the story takes place. The film did well at the box office, but its simplistic view of psychoanalysis has caused it to age poorly.

The year 1936 would bring the most significant changes in Steiner’s life since his arrival in Hollywood. He was eager to accept an offer to be musical director at David O. Selznick’s new studio—but RKO refused to let him go. After months of intransigence on both sides, Max got his way. Steiner was thrilled to reteam with a producer who emphasized quality over quantity, with each title under Selznick’s personal supervision. For his part, Selznick knew that while his own movies were being shot, Steiner could be loaned—at considerable mark-up—to other studios. This mutually beneficial arrangement led to the happiest year of Max’s life: an Oscar-nominated score for Selznick’s The Garden of Allah; and, most fatefully from a professional perspective, a loan-out to Warner Bros., for its biggest release of 1936.

Hollywood employed legions of organization women during the studio system, from stenographers to producers; none of them simply took dictation. These white-collar organization women worked as executive secretaries, assistants to the vice president in charge of production, heads of scenario, heads of research, independent publicists, technical advisers, readers, screenwriters, and agents. The range of work, managerial and creative, knew few boundaries for women with the drive to succeed, but these women had an easier time working with producers and studio heads Harry Cohn, Irving Thalberg, Darryl F. Zanuck, and David O. Selznick. But, with the economic decline of the system and the political purges of the blacklist, by the mid-1950s, there was no time for comedy or much girlish laughter at the top. The chapter focuses on the careers of Silvia Schulman, Kay Brown, Dorothy Hechtlinger, Eve Ettinger, Marguerite Roberts, Ida Koverman, and Anita Colby.

By 1932, RKO was on the verge of collapse, due to a lack of quality films and industry-wide contraction caused by the Depression. But a new studio production chief—29-year-old David O. Selznick—would lead a dramatic course correction. Selznick commissioned better movies at RKO and encouraged Steiner to provide full dramatic scoring for as many of them as possible. This was the true beginning of film music in the sound era; and this chapter details Steiner and Selznick’s industry-changing innovations. Symphony of Six Million was the first Steiner score to employ separate leitmotivs (à la Wagner) for characters and extensive scoring under dialogue. Other important titles followed: Bird of Paradise, The Most Dangerous Game, and Katharine Hepburn’s screen debut, A Bill of Divorcement. By year’s end, Steiner’s scores were changing the way Hollywood approached music, paving the way for his first screen masterwork.

Today, the performance of film music is a staple of symphony concert programming. In 1943, it was an anomaly. That year, Steiner was invited to conduct the New York Philharmonic for a potential audience of twenty thousand at Lewisohn Stadium. But for Max, the concert proved a humiliating disaster, due to the orchestra’s open hostility toward a “Hollywood” composer, and the addition to the program of 27-year-old Frank Sinatra. More teen idol than respected singer at the time, Sinatra inspired Beatles-like screaming from his fans throughout the concert, upstaging Steiner. A series of personal calamities followed: the death of Max’s beloved father, a health crisis of his own, and seemingly insurmountable debt. Again, music was Steiner’s salvation. The 1944 film Since You Went Away—his last collaboration with Selznick—earned Max a third Oscar. But shortly after its release, Steiner was devastated by news that Louise wanted a divorce.

On her return to the United States, Hopkins meets Russian-born director Anatole Litvak. They become close, and she stars in his first American film, The Woman I Love. Her costar Paul Muni is bothered by Hopkins’s interference, and fights ensue. Hopkins buys the former estate of John Gilbert. Warner Bros. plans to make Jezebel, a part Hopkins wants, however, she is tricked into selling her rights and the role is given to Bette Davis. Discouraged, Hopkins returns to Goldwyn and makes Woman Chases Man. Polls claim that Hopkins is the number one choice to play Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind, but David O. Selznick has other plans. Hopkins moves into her new Tower Grove home. She elopes with Anatole Litvak and appears in Wine of Choice for the Theatre Guild, but it fails to meet her standards. She is devastated at the death of her ex-husband “Billy” Parker. After the funeral, she collapses and is admitted to the hospital.

This chapter chronicles the stormy history of Carrie, Wyler's film version of Theodore Dreiser's classic novel Sister Carrie. Also discussed is an early script version written by playwright Clifford Odets (for another production that had been abandoned) — it was utilized but mostly discarded by screenwriters Ruth and Augustus Goetz. Also detailed are Wyler's wooing of Laurence Olivier to play Hurstwood and his contentious relationship with David O. Selznick, husband of co-star Jennifer Jones. The film was compromised by HUAC's influence on Hollywood — its release was delayed (because it was perceived as un-American) and the film was re-edited by the studio while Wyler was in Italy filming Roman Holiday.

Today, when the media puts studio-era Hollywood and feminism together, the answer is usually Katharine Hepburn. But during her career at RKO and MGM, she did not discuss women’s issues regarding equal pay, career opportunities, or political equality. However, she did state flatly in 1933, “I intend to speak my mind when I please, despite movie traditions,” setting her independence against the Hollywood establishment. She remained uninterested in working with other Hollywood women on-screen or in recognizing the advantages of promoting women’s careers through publicity networks off the set. Katharine Hepburn endures as a product of American myths about pioneering individualism, the Hollywood star system, and the studio-era film industry’s ambivalent investment in strong women. But if, as historian Nancy Cott has argued, “Pure individualism negates feminism because it removes the basis for women’s collective self-understanding or action,” then Hepburn was no feminist. This chapter unravels her myth.

This preface deals with the contradictory impression that Veit Harlan left on people who knew him personally and people who have merely watched his films. As the director of the Nazi propaganda film Jud Süss (Jew Suss, 1940), he appeared to be a fanatical anti-Semite assisting in the murder of 6 million Jews. Former Jewish friends who had gone into exile couldn’t reconcile this image with the man they had known before 1933. To the scholar, the life and work of Veit Harlan raises a large number of questions, such as the responsibility of the artist, the seduction theory, and the relationship between form and content. Harlan’s preference for melodrama, a term he himself never used, invites comparison with Douglas Sirk and Rainer Werner Fassbinder; stylistic elements in his films that are also found in Alfred Hitchcock can be traced back to Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau; and as a filmmaker obsessed with his wife, he invites comparison to David O. Selznick and Roberto Rossellini. The chapter further deals with Harlan’s treatment of women and strangers; his interest in social issues; his nationalism; and his use of actors, color, and music.

This chapter describes the creators—or authors—of musical film, from directors to producers and choreographers. These include old-pro movie professionals like Michael Curtiz and those totally unsuited such as Cecil B. DeMille and producer David O. Selznick, and even the stage professional Joshua Logan. More successful stage newcomers include Rouben Mamoulian, Vincente Minnelli, Rob Marshall, and the daring choreographer Jack Cole. Producers Arthur Freed and (especially) Joe Pasternak made a specialty of musicals, to greater and lesser effect. The chapter ends by looking at the various audacities of Busby Berkeley and Baz Luhrmann (Moulin Rouge!), and creator/stars Gene Kelly (Invitation to the Dance) and John Cameron Mitchell (Hedwig and the Angry Inch).

This chapter covers Ziegfeld’s disintegrating physical and mental states and his desperate attempts to revive his career. Ziegfeld’s next endeavor is a zany Bert Lahr musical comedy called Hot-Cha! He has to turn to gangsters for financial backing, including the notorious Waxy Gordon, and the show receives only mediocre reviews. Next, Ziegfeld decides to stage a revival of Show Boat but loses money on the project, despite a positive critical reception. Ziegfeld then agrees to host a radio program that will broadcast songs and skits from the Follies. Burke, meanwhile, agrees to star in a film for David O. Selznick, and Ziegfeld joins his family in Hollywood, even though he is gravely ill with pneumonia. Once in California, he is admitted to a hospital and dies shortly thereafter. Burke receives a phone call at the studio but does not arrive at the hospital in time to say a final good-bye. Burke and Patricia stay with Will Rogers and his wife until they find a small bungalow to live in. Burke, devastated and left alone to manage Ziegfeld’s massive debts, suffers terribly. Will Rogers remarks that Ziegfeld was not just a man but a symbol of a glorious bygone era.