Latest news with #Thalberg
Telegraph
10-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Was this the most significant Hollywood duo in history?
They don't make 'em like this anymore. It's 1921, and William Daniels turns up for the umpteenth retake of a scene in Erich von Stroheim's Foolish Wives – only to find his cameras missing. 'I got a car and went after them,' he recalled. Alas, not only could Daniels not recover the kit, by the time he was back on location his lights had gone too. It turned out that the studio's new manager, Irving Thalberg, had confiscated the equipment and was calling time on the shoot. 'If you were not my superior,' von Stroheim snapped, 'I would smash you in the face'. 'Don't let that stop you,' came Thalberg's cool reply. What really goaded von Stroheim was Thalberg's age. At the time of this dressing-down Thalberg was just 22. 'Since when,' von Stroheim sneered, 'does a child supervise a genius?' Sorry, Erich, you're in the wrong game. No film-lover doubts your genius, but if you wanted to use it unsupervised you would have been better off writing poetry. In the movie business – and before they're anything else, the movies are a business – the talent takes orders from the suits. Thalberg wasn't merely a money man. Though he never wanted to write, he had spent his sickly childhood reading the great novelists and philosophers. A devotee of William James, he had an instinctive feel for the pragmatics of storytelling, how to tighten and tune a tale until it sang. In The Last Tycoon, F Scott Fitzgerald, who worked for Thalberg at MGM, reimagined him as Monroe Stahr – a visionary Icarus who 'saw a new way of measuring our jerky hopes and graceful rogueries and awkward sorrows, and… came here from choice to be with us at the end'. Sadly for Thalberg, that end wasn't far off. He was dead at 37 – a couple of years older than Mozart at his passing, a year younger than Caravaggio. Like Fitzgerald before him, Kenneth Turan is in no doubt that this was a tragedy. In his joint biography of Thalberg and Thalberg's father-figure champion, Louis B Mayer, the former movie critic of the Los Angeles Times goes in for some startlingly old-fashioned film aesthetics. Forget the auteur theory that dominates popular talk on the cinema. Though Mayer and Thalberg always insisted their names not appear on the finished product, they were, Turan argues, always the guys who called the shots. Not that they were martinets. Thalberg's run-ins with von Stroheim are justly famous, but anyone with a cool head can see that while the director was a genius he was also a goofball. Hitchcock once said that the length of any movie should be determined by the endurance of the human bladder. Von Stroheim's rough cut of Greed clocked in at nine hours-plus. Ordered to trim some fat, he got it down to a mere five-and-a-half – at which point Thalberg reached for his shears. Von Stroheim aside, everyone else got on well with Thalberg. Men liked him because if they followed orders he left them to their own devices. Women liked him because he left them alone. Happily married to one of MGM's biggest stars, Norma Shearer, he invited girls to his office not to put the moves on them but to ask what movies they liked. 'When you've got a picture women want to see,' he explained, 'the men have to go along. A woman can always keep a man away from a picture that attracts only him.' No, it isn't exactly feminism, but nor is it sexism, and it resulted in some of the best 'women's pictures' there are: Camille, Queen Christina, Anna Karenina. (Incidentally, Mayer was only slightly less morally exemplary. Save the odd bottom-pinch, the closest he got to the casting-couch was placing his hand on the young Judy Garland's chest as he encouraged her to sing from the heart.) Eventually, of course, Thalberg and Mayer fell out. Though Mayer was the boss with the bigger pay cheque, he was far less cultured than Thalberg, and he came to resent the man Hollywood went on calling 'the boy wonder'. As Thalberg's demands for pay-hikes and profit-shares got louder, Mayer gradually edged him out. In 1933, Thalberg suffered a massive heart attack (his second) and demanded a year off to recuperate. Mayer hired his son-in-law, David O Selznick, as stand-in. A few weeks later, Thalberg was advised that his job had been abolished. In 1936, he died. Turan, who calls Mayer and Thalberg's partnership 'arguably the most consequential in Hollywood history', tries his best to make a weepie of all this. Fair enough, although he never faces the basic fact: though MGM always made more money than its rivals, next to Warner Brothers or RKO it was an also-ran in the quality department. For every 80-minute masterpiece like Red Dust, there was a four-hour clunker like Gone with the Wind; for every moody melodrama like Anna Christie, there was a soporific sudser like Grand Hotel. As for the Marx Brothers, only a blockhead could find their work for MGM (A Night at the Opera, A Day at the Races) more fun than their work for Paramount (Horse Feathers, Duck Soup). Maybe it's for the best that they don't make like 'em that any more.
Los Angeles Times
29-01-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
MGM was once Hollywood's most successful studio. These Jewish men made it happen
Kenneth Turan's splendid book about Hollywood titans Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg is the first in 50 years to tell their story in a single volume. Part of Yale University Press' 'Jewish Lives' series, 'Louis B. Mayer & Irving Thalberg: The Whole Equation' centers on the years in the 1920s and '30s when the two men made MGM the most successful movie studio in Hollywood. On one side of that equation was Mayer, the platonic ideal of a movie mogul, once described as 'a shark that killed when it wasn't hungry' and a man who was the highest-paid executive in the U.S. in one seven-year period. On the other was Thalberg, a sickly but energetic man whose youthfulness meant he was often mistaken for an office boy even as he oversaw and shaped behind the scenes more than 400 movies in his time at MGM. Their commitment to giving the public what they believed it wanted and to proving that motion pictures were a serious art form transformed movies. Mayer, 'a tough junkman's son,' was born in 1884, possibly in Ukraine, and emigrated to the U.S. as a child. At 12 he was bidding at scrap-metal auctions for his father. On his journey of self-invention, he added a middle initial and claimed, with immigrant patriotism, that his birthday was July 4. Meanwhile, Thalberg, 'a cosseted mama's boy,' was born to German Jewish New Yorkers in 1899. An excellent student, he entered adulthood with a wit and emotional intelligence that would become useful for offsetting Mayer's brasher, more impulsive behavior. Mayer went into movies early, acquiring his first theater in 1907 and making a bundle off exhibiting the racist blockbuster 'The Birth of a Nation.' He moved to L.A. when Hollywood's industrial practices were still being developed. It was only when Adolph Zukor pioneered vertical integration at Paramount in the late 1910s that the production-distribution-exhibition business model became the standard for studios. When theater chain owner Marcus Loew brokered the merger of Mayer's fledgling production company with two others, Mayer found himself heading up operations at a new studio called MGM. Thalberg began his lightning career as personal secretary to Universal co-founder Carl Laemmle. His brilliance was obvious, and he rose quickly to a role with production oversight. When he clashed with Erich von Stroheim over a movie's runtime, the director allegedly griped, 'Since when does a child supervise a genius?' Thalberg was 23 when he joined Louis B. Mayer Studios as vice president, shortly before the merger that minted MGM. Turan writes that Mayer and Thalberg's collaboration at MGM 'was arguably the most consequential in Hollywood history.' Though he tenders too many examples to cite, the 'alchemy' of their working relationship was particularly evident, Turan suggests, in 1932's 'Grand Hotel.' Transcripts of story conferences demonstrate Thalberg's detailed interventions as well as his confidence that, done right, it would prove a hit. (It won the best picture Oscar.) It's perhaps telling that, even as Turan calls it 'a high-water mark in the Thalberg-Mayer relationship,' he focuses overwhelmingly on Thalberg. Mayer holds our interest less: For all his histrionics and fainting spells — one star called him 'the best actor on the lot' — he was kind of a blunt instrument, the business rather than the creative brain. Though he outlived Thalberg by 20 years, those last decades merit only a small portion of the book. While many MGM movies haven't stood the test of time, the studio had at least one best picture nominee annually through 1947. Mayer and Thalberg were perceptive talent scouts, notably signing Greta Garbo, whose entire Hollywood career was at MGM, alongside Jean Harlow, Joan Crawford and Clark Gable. Whether or not they made MGM the 'dullest' of the studios, as film critic David Thomson claims, their commercial success was irrefutable. In MGM's first year, only Fox Film Corp. was more profitable. By 1926, MGM was top, meriting comparison to 'Athens in Greece under Pericles.' Parent company Loew's 'was the only film company to pay dividends all through the bleak years' of the Depression. Turan does a fine job exploring how Mayer and Thalberg's Jewishness affected their business and artistic lives. At a time of widespread antisemitism, both were cruelly caricatured and attacked for their movies' perceived immorality — never mind Mayer's conservative taste for buttoned-up, 19th century-style moralizing. Both men contributed to the building of legendary Hollywood rabbi Edgar Magnin's Wilshire Boulevard Temple. Both had a strong sense of Jewish identity — Mayer tearfully recited kaddish, a Jewish prayer of mourning, on the anniversary of his mother's death. Nevertheless, what made business sense for MGM took precedence: It was one of three studios to remain operational in Germany even after the Nazis forbade the employment of Jews. Repeated arguments over profit percentages, Thalberg's declining health and Mayer's treacherous maneuvers eventually withered the men's partnership. When Thalberg died in 1936, his relationship with Mayer was bad enough that Mayer is reported to have remarked, 'Isn't God good to me?' Turan is well paired with his subject. He grew up with Jewish immigrant parents going to thriving Brooklyn movie palaces. He's written about how the 'tradition of Talmudic exegesis' prepared him for life as a critic. Decades of it — including more than 30 years writing for The Times — has equipped him with a breadth of reading that enables him to pepper his historical canvas with a dazzling range of perspectives. In his hands, Golden Age Hollywood bristles with backchat, and not just from obvious characters. Ever heard of Bayard Veiller? He directed MGM's first dramatic talkie, and Turan has, naturally, read his 'charming autobiography.' He's dug through the boxes at the Academy's Margaret Herrick Library. He's read the unpublished memoir of Thalberg's wife, Norma Shearer. The result is a panoramic view of an era that's fading fast in popular awareness. The dual-biography format perhaps precludes Turan going deeper on some of the seamier sides of the story, including Mayer's alleged molestation of Judy Garland, mentioned only briefly, as well as the unforgivable intrusions of the studio system into its stars' private lives. But as a record of a paradigm-shifting partnership, this is an entertaining, literate and beautifully crafted contribution to Hollywood history. Charles Arrowsmith is based in New York and writes about books, films and music.
