In December 1932, Fortune magazine published what would become one of the most famous articles about Thalberg-era MGM. Appraising the studio’s financial and artistic success in the midst of the Depression, the anonymous piece identifies Thalberg as “what Hollywood means by MGM” (“Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer” 1976: 257). Mayer receives fairly lengthy commentary in his role as “a commercial diplomat” in charge of “contacts and contracts” (267); the importance of a more corporate figure like Schenck is considered as relatively circumstantial. Thalberg, however, dominates the article and the studio itself:

It is not only Thalberg and the studio that are connected so symbiotically; as Fortune tells its readers, the producer relates just as wholly to his audience. Thalberg can

As Jerome Christensen would observe of this article decades later, it suggests that Thalberg “made the movie in half of his brain (the studio one) and distributed it to the other half (the exhibitor one)” (2012: 26; emphasis added). At once sharing the subjectivities of the studio, cinematic apparatus, and spectator, Thalberg is, as Fortune states in another context, “changeable as the chameleon industry in which he labors” (259).

As Vieira has noted, Fortune was not the only publication to so laud Thalberg in 1932 (2010: 199). Only a few months earlier, Screenland's Alma Whittaker had identified Thalberg as Hollywood's “Hit-Maker”: “His is the guiding mind, the driving force which pervades the production activity of that great organization […] [H]is influence appears in every production” (1932: 19). Instead of an interview with Thalberg, this one-page piece offers a “vivid impression” of his presence and accomplishments—and how, through his filmmaking, these coalesce into an identity almost beyond his control.