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This chapter focuses on the Hollywood career of Dorothy Fields and Jimmy McHugh. McHugh and Fields went to Hollywood as a songwriting team, like Rodgers and Hart, or George and Ira Gershwin. They signed their first contract with MGM studios on October 3, 1929, just a few weeks before the stock market crash. The first film that Dorothy and Jimmy provided songs for, Love in the Rough (1930), was the sort of cheery fare that would become typical of musicals produced during the Depression.

Numerous factors accounted for the precipitous decline in musicals starting in mid-1930. The stock market crash and the Pathé studio fire in 1929 were dire omens, and the overabundance of backstage films and unsuitability of filmed revues and operettas played a prominent role. Songs were cut from a number of (former) musicals such as The Life of the Party, while some major projects were aborted shortly before shooting. Most calamitous was MGM's The March of Time, a lavish and shapeless revue that was tinkered with incessantly and finally abandoned, a symbol of the hubris and miscalculation of the era.

The Broadway Melody, produced by MGM, is the first true musical film. Unlike other films preceding (and following it), it was constructed with meticulous care directed toward both the technology and the audience. The film's huge success can be seen as the watershed that established sound film as viable entertainment, instead of a Jolson-style showcase or stunt. The film's use of early two-color Technicolor was extremely influential, as was its use of a newly-written musical score by Nacio Herb Brown and Arthur Freed. Its central performance, by Bessie Love, was vital in forging new paths for vocal acting on the screen. While its backstage story spawned scores of imitators, it would retain a powerful hold on its audiences' affections.

Another distinctive trend was the all-star revue film, as produced by most of the major studios. Each would serve as a guidepost to its company's reigning aesthetic as it addressed the new world of sound films. With The Hollywood Revue, MGM triumphed through a wise use of stars and production knowhow. With Show of Shows, Warner Bros. failed through a misspent budget and indifferent material. While Fox's Happy Days was tepid, Paramount on Parade was witty and resourceful. Universal's King of Jazz, by far the most spectacular of the revues, found artistic success at the expense of diminished audience favor. Seldom, after 1930, would such work ever be tried again.

Buzz and Eta moved to Palm Desert, 140 miles east of Hollywood. They settled for a quieter life, less demanding, in a climate that suited them both. Weather notwithstanding, the fact was that the Palm Desert abode made Buzz happy. Despite years of inactivity, Buzz retained his membership in the Directors Guild of America. Jumbo had a choppy history. For this film, Buzz's first in almost eight years, his credit was to be “second unit director”. But, Buzz had nothing to do with Jumbo's ultimately disappointing finale, “Sawdust and Spangles and Dreams”. Buzz was correct in his assessment. The film opened in December 1962 to middling reviews and seriously underperforming ticket sales. Buzz returned to the desert and kept himself busy dictating new story ideas to a professional secretary. There were three titles that never found a publisher, if publication was ever pursued.

This chapter deals with Hawks’ work for MGM, focusing on the film Viva Villa!. He talks about Irving Thalberg, the difficulties of filming in a violent part of Mexico, his experiences with guns, and his uncredited work on the MGM film The Prizefighter and the Lady.

This chapter sheds new light on the strategies that Paramount, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and Fox developed in the early 1930s to target the Italian-speaking market. It documents how the Italian government, local film traders, and the press responded to the majors’ Italian-language production during a critical turning point for the national film industry. The chapter draws on a range of historical records (diplomatic, censorship and administrative state documents, film prints, press reviews, and other publicity materials) from Italian and North-American archives. The findings show that the majors’ experiments with Italian dubbing and versioning were not always successful and elicited ambivalent responses in Italy; the findings also demonstrate the gradual emergence of dubbing as the most commercially viable solution for both the US majors and the Italian establishment. Incongruities in the archival records, and the scarcity of surviving film prints, pose interpretative problems and call for further empirical research in the field.

Tom has the best filming experience, Delirious, and some of the worst, Taking the Heat and a film with Burt Reynolds which never gets off the ground. Mankiewicz is getting tired of dealing with agents and producers - the suits. He'd rather be on a film set with gafers, makeup artists, actors, script supervisors. His father, Joe, passes away in 1993. Mankiewicz reflects on what he learned from papa Joe.

Betty Comden and Adolph Green realized that after On the Town their newfound success as writers required that they attempt devising a second musical. In short order they penned Billion Dollar Baby, with a score by Morton Gould, which opened on Broadway almost one year to the day after their first tuner debuted. The show, though well received, didn’t have the lasting impact of Town, but it did help them secure a gig at MGM, where they were hired to write a screenplay for a new movie version of the Broadway musical Good News. It was the beginning of a bi-coastal existence for them that would last 15 years.

Betty Comden and Adolph Green, after finishing work on the screenplay for Good News, began work on their third Broadway musical. It became Bonanza Bound, and the tuner, a comedy set in the 1890s in Alaska, closed during its tryout engagement in Philadelphia. Though critics were chilly toward this show, there were warm notices for the film. It prompted MGM to offer them work on two more movies, and Comden and Green returned to Hollywood to work on the Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers picture The Barkleys of Broadway and Take Me Out to the Ball Game, which starred Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra.

In 1949 Betty Comden and Adolph Green discovered that MGM finally wanted to move forward with a screen version of On the Town. Before it could go in front of cameras, though, there were obstacles to overcome, particularly the fact that the studio only wanted to use a few of the original songs that they had written with their friend Leonard Bernstein. Eventually all parties were able to negotiate terms, and Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen, making their debuts as co-directors and co-choreographers, were able to start work on the project, which starred, in addition to Kelly, Frank Sinatra, Ann Miller, Vera-Ellen, and Betty Garrett. After they completed work on this screenplay, they attempted to pen a book for the Cole Porter musical Out of This World.

Betty Comden and Adolph Green received a summons in May 1949 to California from MGM producer Arthur Freed about a movie he needed them to start writing immediately. The project, which would become Singin’ in the Rain, would contain a host of the songs he had written with Nacio Herb Brown. They balked at the assignment, believing their contract did not require them to pen movies that used songs by other writers (except for a handful, such as Richard Rodgers or Cole Porter). Their agreement with the studio contained no such clause, and so they developed the now iconic scenario about the transition from silent movies to talkies and early movie musicals. After they finished this assignment they returned to New York to write sketches and lyrics for the revue Two on the Aisle, which starred Bert Lahr and Dolores Gray.

Betty Comden and Adolph Green found themselves in 1952 developing for MGM’s Arthur Freed a screenplay using pre-existing songs by Howard Dietz and Arthur Schwartz. The result was the movie The Band Wagon, which starred Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse and was directed by Vincente Minnelli. Not long after they finished writing this they got an urgent call from Broadway director George Abbott. He was working on a new musical, and the show’s star, Rosalind Russell, did not like the songs that had been penned for it. He wondered if they might be willing to write a new score for the show with Leonard Bernstein. They agreed and in four weeks turned out all of the necessary material for the hit musical Wonderful Town.

After a false start on one project for MGM (which did ultimately resurface for them a few years later), Comden and Green discovered that Gene Kelly loved an idea they had had for a follow-up to the stage musical On the Town, and that scenario (about three guys reuniting ten years after their service together in World War II) became the basis for their newest film. With music by André Previn, the movie, It’s Always Fair Weather, starred Kelly, along with Dan Dailey and Michael Kidd. Before they completed work on the screenplay a call from Jerome Robbins had them at work on their next stage project; they contributed additional songs to the new version of Peter Pan he was staging. It was the classic that starred Mary Martin.

John Howard Lawson was torn apart with conflict and inner doubt, even though his life was driving inescapably to a resolution. Harold Clurman “watched with shock and anger” as Lawson was upbraided by Communists and leftists at a meeting of the radical John Reed Club. Though Clurman had become not only a staunch supporter but one of his severest critics, it was scathing criticism from another corner that pushed Lawson definitely and defiantly toward a more unbendable commitment. Organizing writers and sojourning in the South deepened his “conviction that commitment is essential to the artist's creative growth; what we call the sensibility of the artist is deadened if he does not respond generously to the human reality that surrounds him; to observe and report, to laugh or weep, are not enough.” Lawson was “fired” from MGM because of his union organizing. Still, he was “popular” as a union leader.

Betty Comden and Adolph Green finally got around to writing the screenplay for a movie that would use a host of Cole Porter’s songs. Called Wonderland and focusing on two hapless screenwriters who are attempting to write a movie that brings together a bevy of unrelated songs, the project became the first that the writers had penned for the studio that went unproduced. It didn’t matter, because they had a new stage musical to work on. They wrote it for their old friend Judy Holliday, and Bells Are Ringing, with music by Jule Styne, became one of their biggest hits. Just after this they and Styne contributed songs for the comedy Say, Darling.

Betty Comden and Adolph Green struggled with getting the screenplay for the movie version of Bells Are Ringing produced, but eventually the project went before the cameras with Judy Holliday reprising her stage performance under the direction of Vincente Minnelli. After this the writers found that their work as performers was taking them to television and specifically two high-profile network specials. They also began work on another musical with Jule Styne, an adaptation of Garson Kanin’s novelette Do Re Mi. The story, about some ex-cons trying to go legit in the jukebox business, starred Phil Silvers and proved to be such a hit that President-elect John F. Kennedy felt it necessary to take it in just days before his inauguration.

In January of 1929, Paramount released its first all-talking picture, and in March Fox announced its decision to produce films. MGM was one of the last to produce sound films, not even making part-talkies until 1929. And in 1928, the head of the production of MGM, Thalberg, initially saw sound as merely an adjunct to silent film. Thalberg, together with his brother-in-law, added a synchronized score as well as sound effects to the other silent film, and in the same year he ordered the reshooting of two reels of the completed silent movie ;Alias Jimmy Valentine. Thalberg realized how profoundly sound could transform movies. Once Thalberg did realize the appeal of sound in film, however, it was not song but dialogue that intrigued him, and so he started reading “Whoopee” by Edmund Goulding. As his enthusiasm for “Whoopee” grew, he decided to make it an all-talkie film to which he added original songs.

MGM had created and presented songs imaginatively and lavishly. Arthur Freed, a lyricist and producer, had brought a songwriter's understanding to how song should be presented in film. Freed imparted to MGM his experience, earned in traveling all over the world, to acquire a taste and knowledge for music and art. Freed found a position as an assistant director at Paramount, where he also played mood music on the sets. He and Brown wrote “Singin' in the Rain” for the 1927 edition of the annual Hollywood Music Box Revue, and after two years, Irving Thalberg hired the two songwriters to write the score for MGM's Broadway Melody. In 1934, while he was still a staff lyricist at MGM, Freed hired a young piano player and vocal arranger named Roger Edens. Freed and Edens shared the conviction that song must be integral, expressive, and dramatic.