Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Opening Credits
- 2 Oblique Casting and Early MGM
- 3 One Great Scene: Thalberg’s Silent Spectacles
- 4 Entertainment Value and Sound Cinema
- 5 Love Stories and General Principles: The Development of the Production Code
- 6 The Intelligent Producer and the Restructuring of MGM
- 7 “What can we do to make the picture better?”
- 8 Conclusion: Once a Star, Always a Star
- Works Cited
- Index
6 - The Intelligent Producer and the Restructuring of MGM
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2020
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Opening Credits
- 2 Oblique Casting and Early MGM
- 3 One Great Scene: Thalberg’s Silent Spectacles
- 4 Entertainment Value and Sound Cinema
- 5 Love Stories and General Principles: The Development of the Production Code
- 6 The Intelligent Producer and the Restructuring of MGM
- 7 “What can we do to make the picture better?”
- 8 Conclusion: Once a Star, Always a Star
- Works Cited
- Index
Summary
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:
His brain is the camera which photographs dozens of scripts in a week and decides which of them, if any, shall be turned over to MGM’s twenty-seven departments to be made into a moving picture. It is also the recording apparatus which converts the squealing friction of 2,200 erratic underlings into the more than normally coherent chatter of an MGM talkie. (258)
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
divid[e] his brain into two parts. One part, reading a script, turns it into a moving picture; the other part watches this imaginary picture and […] is so much like the conglomerate brain of 50,000,000 other U.S. cinemaddicts [that it] tells Mr. Thalberg […] whether or not the picture is good. (262)
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.
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- Information
- Produced by Irving ThalbergTheory of Studio-Era Filmmaking, pp. 118 - 144Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2020