"Over that rainbow was a land of dreams." "I never went there except when the rainbow was the turnstile of my local movie theater and there, in the darkness the lion's roar would freeze time, suspend reality and introduce a world of adventure and beauty and romance." "That lion's domain was the grandest motion-picture studio the world has ever known:" "Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer." "There's magic in the very name." "MGM meant escape, extravagance, glamour." "Garbo, Gable, Crawford, Tracy, Garland." "But there was more." "There was much, much more." "Power struggles, corporate intrigues shifting alliances, driving ambition." "L.B. Mayer, the founding father." "Irving Thalberg, the boy wonder." "The spectacular rise of an empire and its lamentable fall." "Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer was a turbulent kingdom with its own rules its own mythology but they're all gone now." "all that remain are the memories dreams, the movies where the dreams that they dared to dream really did come true." "all we've got is cotton and slaves and arrogance." "Maggie the Cat is alive." "Why don't you ride him, Mi?" "Now!" "These are my boys." "Jazz hot." "Come on, you..." "I'm as mad as hell." "I can't think." "I can't do it." "Welcome to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios." "The date is April 26, 1924 and this morning, a former scrap metal dealer, Louis B. Mayer and his 24-year-old protégé, Irving Thalberg ceremoniously opened this shadowland of make-believe." "In doing so they ushered in a new era in motion-picture history for today, the movies entered the industrial age." "Moving pictures are the most popular form of entertainment on earth." "The public's appetite for these shimmering silver images is insatiable." "And the cry for bigger and better movies gets louder." "L.B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg have heard this call." "And together they've set out to create a motion-picture studio capable of producing and releasing one full-length feature film each and every week." "Now, that would be an unprecedented feat." "To do it, they would have to revolutionize the entire filmmaking process." "They needed a factory, a dream factory." "They find their factory just outside the town of Hollywood in Culver City, California." "Some 45 buildings are scattered across 43 acres of land and connected by 3 miles of paved roads." "The facility has its own police force and fire department its own hospital, a school house, parks, and even a zoo but most importantly, Culver City has room to grow." "Mr. Mayer, who is vice president of studio operations and Mr. Thalberg, who is vice president of production then set out to populate their dream factory." "The two men hired directors, writers, cameramen, editors set designers, wardrobe people, prop men, painters and carpenters." "And it isn't long before Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg have an army of filmmakers under their command." "It was the great film studio of the world." "Not just of America or of Hollywood, but of the world." "The creation of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer is the brainchild of New York theater magnate Marcus Loew." "A man of wealth and foresight Mr. Loew orchestrated the merger of Metro Pictures Corporation The Goldwyn Picture Corporation and Louis B. Mayer Productions into a single conglomerate." "This new production and distribution operation would provide Mr. Loew's rapidly expanding chain of first-run movie palaces with a constant flow of high-quality feature films." "One of MGM's first pieces of business is the creation of a corporate identity." "Marcus Loew and L.B. Mayer want a symbol that evokes both dignity and strength." "Howard Dietz, Loew's New York publicity chief suggests a roaring lion framed by the former Goldwyn slogan ars gratia artis." "Art for art's sake." "Leo the Lion will grace the first film conceived and produced in its entirety at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer He Who Gets Slapped." "Irving Thalberg assigns Victor Seastrom to direct this story of a scientist who has been reduced to the role of a circus clown." "The film contains all the elements of a poetic tragedy:" "Irony, unrequited passion, and slow death." "The public loves it and so do the critics." "He Who Gets Slapped is Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's first hit." "They were good years then, you see." "And it was" "There was a certain beauty involved." "And you hoped you were making something beautiful, meaningful and that the world might be a little better for it." "Not just entertained, but a little bit better for it." "One of this era's most indomitable characters is Viennese actor, writer and director, Erich von Stroheim." "Irving Thalberg had first worked with Erich at Universal Pictures and their relationship had been a tumultuous one." "Mr. von Stroheim was once heard to comment:" ""Since when does a boy supervise a genius?"" "I first heard of Erich when I got my first job at Universal in New York." "He was being described as a tyrant and generally unmanageable and Thalberg always found that the pictures went way over every budget sometimes ready to break the company." "By the time Thalberg went to MGM Mr. von Stroheim was making a picture called Greed which had been begun under the reign of Samuel Goldwyn." "And he was involved in that when Mayer and Thalberg were brought into MGM." "And Mr. Thalberg was very upset." "Actually, Thalberg said, "I don't want any part of this." "I don't wanna get involved again with Erich von Stroheim."" "Don't forget Irving had a weak heart and he wasn't gonna do that through his own detriment." "Greed is based on Frank Norris' best selling book, McTeague and Mr. von Stroheim was determined to film each and every page of the novel from cover to cover." "One of the oddities about it is that von Stroheim was shooting the book." "He began on Page 1 and went right through the book." "As a consequence they had about 25 reels, maybe more, of film and they were still shooting." "And that was a terrific problem for a studio." "So Greed, which" "When it was finally finished ran about some 70 reels or something like that." "I've never known the exact amount." "I've run into people who said they saw it in its entirety took two or three days, and they thought it was fabulous but Mayer and Thalberg elected to cut it down to about 12 reels." "That means that an enormous amount of film was shelved and thrown away." "I think it was generally mauled by the critics." "The picture simply never caught on the way that von Stroheim thought it was gonna be the epic of all epics." "In the end, if you look at Erich von Stroheim's history he finally wound up very discouraged because they would no longer hire him as a director." "If he were around in our day he might well be one of the greatest directors we ever knew because his mind was directed toward doing things that were forbidden." "When Mr. Mayer and Mr. Thalberg assumed control of MGM they inherited two films already in production." "One was Erich von Stroheim's Greed the other will become the most expensive motion picture ever undertaken to date." "Launched in Rome in 1923 the picture reportedly features over 150,000 extras." "Its name, Ben-Hur." "Three years in the making." "Many of this spectacle's elaborate sequences had been shot in an experimental process known as two-color Technicolor." "The film was started under a different management." "June Mathis wrote the script and George Walsh was the leading man." "And Mayer and Thalberg came in after the picture was started." "They were unhappy with the direction of it." "They had the script rewritten by Carey Wilson and they replaced George Walsh." "Despite the changes in cast and crew filming continues at an agonizingly slow pace and Mr. Mayer decides to go to Italy to see for himself what is causing the delays." "When Mr. Mayer arrives in Rome he finds a production that is desperately floundering." "Fred Niblo, the picture's replacement director along with his new star, Ramon Novarro, are re-shooting the epic sea battle." "The script calls for one of the 14 full-sized galleys to catch fire and burn." "As the vessel's oil drums are lit, all hell breaks loose." "An unexpected draft fans the fires and the ship is engulfed in flames." "The terrified extras, many of whom can't swim, dive into the sea." "Fortunately, no lives are lost." "But Mr. Mayer has seen enough." "With more than $2 million already spent, and the picture nowhere near completion he demands this debacle must be brought home to the safety and control of Culver City, and so it is." "There, under the close supervision of Irving Thalberg the battle sequence is completed and preparations begin for the filming of the climactic chariot race." "I was the production manager of the studio then." "Thalberg thought we were short of people and I disagreed with that." "We were short of lunches and when you're waiting, a minute seemed like five." "Fred Niblo, the director, said:" ""We're gonna have a riot if the people aren't fed."" "I said, "Then they'll look as if they're cheering the races." "Bring the horses out."" "October 5th, 1925, Saturday morning, 11:00." "Hollywood goes to the races." "In the stands of Circus Maximus sit 3500 extras who have each been paid $3.50, plus lunch to cheer Ben-Hur to victory." "Scattered throughout the massive set a legion of 42 cameramen crank for all they're worth." "On the track, Francis X. Bushman and Ramon Novarro race their chariots in fierce competition with 10 of Hollywood's best stuntmen." "By the time the studio finished shooting this chariot race 35 hours of film had been exposed." "And MGM's head of production, Irving Thalberg, exhausted collapsed with a heart attack." "Despite the seriousness of his condition no one could keep the 26-year-old producer in bed." "He ignored doctor's warnings and was back at work in time for last night's triumphant premiere of Ben-Hur." "Five weeks earlier, the studio had released another film that brought particular satisfaction to Mr. Thalberg." "It cost one-tenth the amount of Ben-Hur." "It would become the most acclaimed and profitable silent film in MGM's history." "Its director, a Hollywood pioneer, King Vidor." "The motion picture, The Big Parade." "King Vidor once observed:" ""Irving Thalberg knows instinctively when someone submits a good idea."" "When Mr. Vidor suggests making a motion picture depicting the horrors of World War I and their effect on an ordinary American soldier Mr. Thalberg doesn't try to change his mind." "Irving hires playwright and war veteran, Laurence Stallings to create a realistic screenplay." "And then casts matinee idol John Gilbert as the ordinary American doughboy." "Two weeks into the shoot word spreads throughout the studio that something special is taking place." "You see my idea on The Big Parade was have this soldier walk through, observe everything that happened." "He didn't cause anything." "Up until then, all pictures said generals had caused the war and colonels but he didn't cause anything." "He just observed the whole picture." "And I got to experimenting with music." "The association of the right theme and the right tempo with a film is so important." "That particular walk through the woods in The Big Parade was done so that every move would be on the beat." "Now, actually, I got that idea from watching the tempo of a funeral march in some Signal Corps film." "If we used this tempo as they approached the front lines it would give the feeling of death." "And I got it to the point of using a metronome." "We didn't have portable loudspeakers, so we used a bass drum to let the metronome beat be heard all over the woods and it meant that you picked up the gun on the beat and pulled the trigger on the beat." "And put your hand to your wound on the beat and fell on the beat and everything right in tempo." "And therefore, it would look like death before they got to the actual front line trenches." "The Big Parade makes King Vidor MGM's most prestigious director." "And John Gilbert, the studio's biggest star." "Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer is now a household name." "And in 1926 it is the most profitable company in Hollywood." "In the dusty fields of Culver City, California, an empire is rising." "One could almost mistake these two for father and son." "Such a curious alliance." "Irving was a sickly youth with a weak heart." "An avid reader he was raised by a protective mother in a middle-class Brooklyn neighborhood." "If he had followed his doctor's orders, he would have spent his entire life in bed." "Louis, on the other hand, was built like an ox." "The son of an immigrant, uneducated junkman he'd muscle his way into his father's scrap metal business by the age of 12." "On the day that Irving was born Louis was probably wearing a brass diving helmet surveying a sunken wreck on the bottom of Boston Harbor." "Following the failure of his father's junk business L.B. took a job selling tickets in a local movie theater." "Years later, he would say:" ""I realized then that movies are the only thing you can sell and still own."" "After borrowing enough money to buy his own theater he soon discovered the only way to acquire quality motion pictures was to produce them himself." "He was a hell of a man." "He dealt in the large pictures." "He was a man, I think, who had a vision." "He didn't think small." "And one day he said to me:" ""Joe, never be" "Worry about hiring a man smarter than you are." "You'll only learn from him."" "Back in 1923 L.B. Mayer made one of his most fortuitous decisions." "He hired young production executive Irving Thalberg." "Thalberg was a young man and not terribly prepossessing when you looked at him." "Physically, he was extremely thin." "He got into the movie business first because of Carl Laemmle, Sr who was the head of Universal Pictures." "Mr. Laemmle, nearly everyone in the industry owes at least part of their stock to you." "I owe all of mine." " We all thank you." " Thank you very much." "Marcus Loew saw him constantly in the shadow of Louis B. Mayer as they negotiated for Mayer to run the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Corporation." "And one day, Marcus Loew said:" ""Who's that little boy that follows you around?"" "And Louis B. Mayer said, "That's Irving Thalberg." "He's gonna run the company and you're gonna pay him a thousand dollars a week."" "BOOTH:" "When he first walked on the lot, I thought, "What a lovely young boy."" "He was very nice, a very shy young man." "I used to have dinner with him at nights." "If we were gonna run a picture or something." "I'd have dinner with him, just he and I alone and we hardly talked." "He was very shy." "He was beautiful to look at." "He was the boy wonder, as he was called because he was so young and seemed so fragile." "Irving was responsible for all productions and Irving loved having all that responsibility." "It was too much, but he wanted it and he was given it and it worked." "It worked for a long, long time." "The only way that Mr. Mayer and Mr. Thalberg can complete their quota of 52 pictures a year is by nurturing a stable of stars." "Competing with John Gilbert and Ramon Novarro for the public's attention is MGM's bouquet of fair maidens." "The brightest flower in the bunch is an ambitious young actress named Norma Shearer." "Irving first noticed Norma during his tenure at Universal." "When he moved to Metro, he signed her to a five-year contract." "When Norma first met him she thought she was talking to an office boy." "She asked if he could show her the way to Irving Thalberg's office." "So he said, "Yes, I'll take you there."" "And he walked along with her, and when he got there he opened the door to the private office, sat behind the desk and he said, "I am Irving Thalberg."" "Now, Irving was a bachelor, of course, and Norma was unmarried." "And I think Norma got the first idea that she wanted to marry him." "Although Irving keeps a close watch on Norma's career in his mind, the relationship is strictly professional." "Norma has a different opinion." "She makes no secret of her intentions and tells her friends:" ""I'm out to get him."" "On September 29, 1927, she does." "At 4:30 in the afternoon in a simple ceremony attended by family and a few close friends Irving Thalberg and Norma Shearer are married." "MGM's wunderkind is 27, his bride, 23." "He really loved her as a movie actress, as a star that he could mold." "He was like a sculptor or a painter." "He was an artist, that's what he was." "She laid out his clothes in the evening if they were going out to some black-tie event." "She really worshipped him and she coddled him but he was the head of the whole ménage." "Of all the movie stars that pass through the gates of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer there is no one more enigmatic than Greta Garbo." "We're not allowed in there." "No one ever is, except maybe John Gilbert." "There are many conflicting stories as to how Greta Gustafsson found her way to these hallowed halls." "What we know for sure is that Mr. Mayer encountered her in Berlin when she showed up at a meeting he was having with her mentor Swedish director, Mauritz Stiller." "Stiller wanted to work in Hollywood and Miss Gustafsson wanted to go with him." "Mr. Mayer signed them both to studio contracts at bargain basement prices." "Legend has it, before sailing for home, L.B. told the struggling young actress:" ""Americans don't like their women fat." "And get your teeth fixed."" "To say that Greta Garbo's arrival at MGM was a welcome event would be an overstatement." "The New York office didn't understand what Mr. Mayer had seen in this awkward-looking peasant girl who can barely speak English." "The publicity department was also bewildered." "They attempted to fabricate an athletic persona by photographing her with University of Southern California's track and field team." "Mr. Thalberg was equally perplexed and after a considerable search, finally found a film to put her in." "The Torrent is a standard melodrama starring a second-string matinee idol named Ricardo Cortez." "When the picture was completed it became obvious which one was the real star." "It's something she had that nobody else ever had." "She did everything that was wanted of her and then she had something else behind all that that she gave to us that we didn't know what it was." "There was something behind the eye that told the whole story." "She could be looking in this direction, in a close-up at somebody whom she despised and you could see it in her eyes and she could turn across the camera without a change of expression but it was there." "Nobody ever had that, in my knowledge, on the screen but Garbo." "Clarence is the first person who saw on the set the huge emotional outburst of love between Greta Garbo and John Gilbert." "So much so that when they were doing an emotional romantic scene and he called cut, they didn't cut." "He went to Louis B. Mayer about that and said:" ""I think we've got the greatest romantic couple that have ever appeared in films."" "And he said:" ""I think you ought to know that this is more than just a celluloid romance." "This is the real thing." "They are crazy about each other."" "Flesh and the Devil radiates a smoldering sensuality and audiences the world over are mesmerized by the torrid love scenes between Greta Garbo and John Gilbert." "When John hears that his good friend King Vidor and young actress Eleanor Boardman are getting married he decides to turn the occasion into a double ceremony and marry Greta Garbo." "Unfortunately, Miss Garbo doesn't show up and this puts an end to one of Hollywood's all-time great romances." "Jack Gilbert and Greta Garbo were having a very torrid liaison and they would be married at the same time, a double ceremony." "I remember Louis B. Mayer was there and Irving Thalberg." "I was upstairs with a little champagne." "People were downstairs, the music was playing Garbo hadn't shown up and Gilbert was getting very nervous." "He was getting rather violent." "It seems that Mayer was in the men's room with Gilbert and Gilbert was crying about this thing." "He was very nervous, and Mayer said, "Sleep with her, don't marry her."" "Gilbert socked him and knocked him down." "He hit his head on the tile." "That was really the beginning of the end of Gilbert's career." "From then on, they were violent enemies and Mayer did everything he could to ruin Jack." "This morning, September the 5th, 1927 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's founding father, Marcus Loew, died in his sleep." "The first of the great movie magnates to pass away." "He's respected throughout the industry for his honesty and simplicity." "Mayer and Thalberg are stunned by the loss of their champion and mentor." "Shortly after the funeral, Marcus Loew's trusted adviser, Nicholas Schenck assumes control of the MGM parent company, Loew's Incorporated." "The new president is a devious master of the corporate boardroom." "When rival studio kingpin William Fox attempts to take over Loew's and with it MGM, it is with the complicity of Nick Schenck." "Through connections in Washington L.B. Mayer thwarts the takeover and saves the studio." "The wounds inflicted by this conflict will never fully heal." "And years later, they will fatally rupture." "Mr. Mayer is now often heard referring to his New York boss as Mr. Skunk." "The death of Marcus Loew foreshadowed the passing of an era." "It is 1927." "Sound is coming." "Many of these silent stars will soon fade from the screen." "Renée Adorée, William Haines, Mae Murray, Lew Cody." "all names that sadly will soon be forgotten." "Fortunately, a few strike indelible impressions." "Lon Chaney is one of these." "A master of disguise and a genius in the art of make-up." "He is "The Man of a Thousand Faces."" "Listen, children." "Children." "Lon Chaney had been a great star in the silent days." "He played those roles primarily with a director named Tod Browning." "Tod Browning was a master at making pictures that were off the ordinary beat." "Chaney was a rather inarticulate man." "I think he came from parents who were deaf and dumb." "He was not a cripple but he could pretend to be one of the greatest cripples you ever saw." "Lillian Gish has been one of the great stars of the silent screen since the early 1900s." "In 1925, L.B. Mayer proudly announces that she is joining MGM's family." "During her brief stay at Culver City, Miss Gish will place before the cameras such classics as The Scarlet Letter, The Wind and her studio debut, La Bohème." "To entice her to sign a multi-picture contract Irving Thalberg grants her unprecedented artistic control." "For La Bohème, she selects her co-star, John Gilbert, and her director, King Vidor then insists they film the tragic love story without ever showing the lovers kiss." "I thought it was a story of passion way beyond love scenes life and death, really." "And I suggested we do it suggesting everything beyond a kiss and a hug." "When they saw it, they said it's a love story without any lovemaking." "So we had to go back and spend a day kissing and hugging John Gilbert." "VIDOR:" "She wanted to know about two or three days ahead when we were gonna shoot the death scene of Mimi in La Bohème." "And she wanted to prepare to look dead or dying." "And she wanted to not eat and got her mouth dry so her lips would leave her gums and teeth." "I don't know everything she did to prepare but when it came the time to shoot it I began to become convinced that she was dying, during the scene." "And she died so realistically and her breath didn't move that I began to see headlines:" ""That actress does a scene so well that she actually dies."" "Marion Davies' arrival at Culver City is an event comparable to the entrance of a queen and her royal household." "A former Ziegfeld girl has come to the studio publishing czar William Randolph Hearst." "Mr. Mayer is overjoyed not only because of Miss Davies' delightful talents but because Mr. Hearst has decreed that not a single day shall pass without some mention of the actress and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in his nationwide chain of newspapers." "She was adorable in every way." "She was not only generous with her money, with presents but she was generous in her heart and her mind." "Her métier was comedy and Mr. Hearst was her really worst enemy when it came to picking films for her." "He wanted to see her in costumes period things or boy's clothes, strangely enough." "But she was a great comedienne." "And she did a few pictures that brought it out." "One was The Patsy and one was Show People." "Marion Davies will remain at Culver City for nine years until a rift between Mr. Thalberg and Mr. Hearst causes the actress to pack up her bungalow and move on." "Another ace in the studio's hand in the mid- 1920s is Buster Keaton." "A noted film critic remarks about him:" ""How dead a human being can get and still be alive proper in granite, but uncanny in flesh and blood."" "Old Stone Face is the producer, director and star of a great many of the silent era's comic masterpieces." "His MGM debut is The Cameraman." "Buster Keaton is a renegade filmmaker with a reputation for being fiercely independent." "He's been lured to MGM by Nick Schenck with the promise of artistic freedom." "He is quickly disillusioned for the only way the studio can complete its yearly production quota is by rigid supervision." "While many filmmakers flourish at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Buster Keaton finds it unbearable." "He's unable to express himself creatively under the studio's strict controls and he will never again see the success he once had as an independent filmmaker." "It says here Irving Thalberg thinks that sound won't last." ""The talking motion picture has its place as has color photography but I do not believe it will ever replace the silent drama any more than I believe color photography will replace black and white."" "Well, the young tycoon isn't often wrong, but he certainly is this time." "Mr. Mayer's philosophy is wait and see." "Consequently, MGM is the last studio to undertake the conversion to sound." "It is Nick Schenck who finally gives the order to retool the factory." "Faced with the inevitable Mayer and Thalberg mobilize Culver City's vast body of resources." "Metro's parks and country lanes are ripped out to make way for fortress-like sound stages." "Technical experts are shipped in from the East Coast under the supervision of Irving's brother-in-law, Douglas Shearer." "Their mission, to train MGM's creative staff in the use and application of this frightening new medium." "If I were to tell you that we have a camera capable of photographing a voice." "Many think, "How can they photograph something that happens in thin air, even in Hollywood?"" "But with a few transformations of the sound waves that's really what is done." "The sound film was as wide as my little finger and it was always breaking and you were always out of sync." "Everybody went through hell." "Everybody was afraid of it." "You'd run with Doug Shearer because he was supposed to know." "He didn't know anything more than anybody else." "And he used to say, "That is out of sync one sprocket hole."" "Well, you know, one sprocket hole you could hardly tell whether somebody's mouth was moving or not." "But he used to say that, and it drove us crazy." "The Broadway Melody is MGM's first all-talking, all-singing, all-dancing film." "The musical numbers are shot with a live orchestra without the benefit of pre-recorded playback." "In 1929, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences an organization L.B. Mayer has co-founded by the way awards The Broadway Melody its Best Picture Oscar." "It is the first talking film to be so honored." "The coming of sound was not received with open arms by many directors." "Because at first, sound anchored the camera still and it was just like photographing a stage play because the cameras were in big, heavy soundproof boxes and the only thing you could photograph was out through a glass window." "We were going back to the beginning of movies." "Camera movement was finished." "The general rhythm, the general music of the film was tied down." "We felt just about this time that we had developed a technique and a form of pantomime that expressed everything we wanted to express." "It was a sort of a Universal language." "And we didn't feel we needed the dialogue." "The words, we felt music and sound effects great but we didn't need the words." "Several very, very good prominent players when they jumped in and made a sound film their voices did not sound the way the audience expected them to sound." "They may have been good voices but they didn't fit what the audiences saw as the personality of that man on the screen and they wouldn't accept them." "Oh, gentle Romeo if thou dost love, pronounce it faithfully." "will thou thinkst I am too quickly won?" "I'll frown and be perverse and say thee nay." "Lady, by yonder blessed moon I swear which tips with silver all these fruit tree tops." "Swear not by the moon the inconstant moon that monthly changes in her..." "Of all the stars that will fall from grace none will fall quite so far or quite so hard as John Gilbert." "I love you." "I've told you that a hundred times this week." " I love you." " And I told you not to tell me that again." "I don't wish to hear it." "What is a man to do, darling, when he loves so helplessly as I?" "You must remember what I" "I just remember him as a hysterical person." "If he had good reviews, he hit the ceiling, he was the happiest man in the world." "But if he had a bad review he'd go in the dumps and you couldn't get him out of it." "Strange fellow." "And actually, it wasn't his bad voice." "His voice was no different than anybody else's but the studio didn't know how to handle sound." "In 1930, John Gilbert is a bitter man." "He's the highest paid movie star in the country yet his love scenes are drawing giggles." "After His Glorious Night is laughed off the screen rumors begin to circulate that L.B. Mayer is trying to destroy him." "I can only tell you that when I came to the studio Gilbert's career was on the rocks." "Gilbert was a highly literate man, by the way." "And I think he caught on to a story that he wanted to do a boy whose mother was a prostitute." "And in the course of Gilbert making an impassioned pitch for it Louis B. Mayer, who was a highly righteous man when he was thinking of movies especially, stopped him and said:" ""Are you telling me that the boy's mother is a whore?"" "And John Gilbert said, "Well, what's wrong with that?" "My mother was a whore."" "And Mayer hit him and knocked him down." "John Gilbert's star is slowly flickering out." "In 1934, he will place an advertisement in The Hollywood Reporter that reads:" ""Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer will neither offer me work nor release me from my contract."" "Two years later, he will die of a heart attack, a broken man." "Here's to the funeral knell of the living dead." "The last star at MGM to face the microphone is the studio's greatest asset." "The question on everyone's lips, "Can Garbo talk?"" "Mr. Mayer is understandably nervous, given her thick Swedish accent and Irving has spent more than two years searching for the proper vehicle." "He finds it in Eugene O'Neill's seedy waterfront drama, Anna Christie." "Give me a whiskey." "Ginger ale on the side." "I'm awfully stingy, baby." "Well, shall I serve it in a pail?" "Well, that suits me down to the ground." "BROWN:" "I never directed Garbo in anything above a whisper." "She was very backward and I think she had probably a bit of an inferiority complex." "I did an awful lot of rehearsing and she didn't like it very much." "But she finally put up with it because we had some old pros in there along with her, you know." "We had George Marion who played the original sea captain and we had that gal named Marie Dressler in there, alongside of her." "So she was in some pretty high-class talent." "I'm gonna have another drink." "What do you say?" " Will you have something on me?" " Sure thing, thanks." "Larry?" "Larry?" "A little service here, please." "Anna Christie may have been Garbo's picture but Marie Dressler stole the show." "The former vaudeville queen had been reduced to cleaning houses when her career was resurrected by MGM's top screenwriter, Frances Marion." "Frances convinced Irving to give the aging comedienne a break." "Audiences fell in love with her weather-beaten face and comedic charms." "In the early '30s, Marie Dressler reigns as America's most popular actress." "You ain't mad at me, Min, are you?" "No, I ain't mad at you." "We just had a couple of snifters and I got to feeling kind of wild." "Can't you take a joke?" "The uncanny pairing of Marie Dressler and Wallace Beery is irresistible." "Min and Bill is MGM's biggest hit of the year and for her performance, Miss Dressler receives an Oscar." "I want to thank The Academy for allowing me to present this award to the most distinguished actress of this past year." "Our tribute goes to someone who is not only a great artist but to someone whom we all dearly love." "A grand old trouper who has carved her niche of fame in two generations." "Miss Marie Dressler." "I never so happy in my life." "I never had anything like this." "Marie Dressler once said of her Oscar:" ""It is the crown for all the years of suffering that have gone before."" "Oh, I don't think I've missed anything." "You see, when, well, when people like we grow old well, we've had all the bad things in life and then when the good things come, they seem so much better." "It is 1932 and L.B. Mayer is known as "the most dignified personage in Hollywood."" "The former scrap metal dealer is the film industry's ambassador to the world." "When royal figures, politicians and other luminaries visit the West Coast L.B. Mayer is their host." "He's even President Hoover's first weekend guest at the White House." "He would later muse:" ""There I was, an immigrant boy, born in Russia, the guest of the president." "I didn't sleep a wink."" "He was literally a legend." "I think he was entitled to everything that people sometimes think of him as a great motion-picture authority." "He made MGM the important studio that it became." "Mayer was a very determined man once he knew what he was doing." "He was also a charming man when it came to thinking about other people." "BOOTH:" "He used to take me to church on Sunday with his Ford." "He had a Ford touring car and I used to ride in the front seat with my prayer book." "Like everybody, he wanted people to love him and like him and admire him and respect him, but he'd want it his way." "It was done his way." "Maybe he wasn't that wrong for the kind of a showman he was." "I mean, he came from theaters and standing out in the lobby." "He was a showman." "So since he did that, and he knew more about your audience than any of you shut up, do what he says, that's the way he wanted it." "Mayer's great faculty was the wooing of stars the developing of stars and the preservation of the star system and of the" "I mean, he used every method in the world." "He was a genius to hold them there." "Lucille LeSueur is MGM's first Cinderella." "An unknown chorus girl she is transformed by L.B. Mayer's dream factory into the movie star, Joan Crawford." "Here's one of my favorites and I know you all like her too." "Because she's the personification of youth and beauty and joy and happiness, Joan Crawford." "In her earliest career she'd been a chorus girl, I think." "But I will say that when I got there, she was a superior star." "She had been fired, by the way." "They were letting her go, and she got on a train to New York." "And Harry Rapf, one of the producers under Thalberg, was on the same train and they got to talk, and he decided she had great possibilities and suggested she get off the train and go back and when he came back he would work on her." "She became a great star." "Now let's see." "Lovely eyes." "That's goodie." "Intelligent forehead, mm, not so good." "Straight nose with plenty of spirit." "Show it." "Warm mouth with plenty of pride, oh, hide it." "Now with all this equipment, what do you intend doing in New York?" "You see, we were trained with a stable of stars when I was growing up and in my teens." "I used to sneak over from my set when I was playing an extra or a small bit part." "And sneak over and watch the Lewis Stones Wally Beery, Greta Garbo, three Barrymores." "You see, pictures have given me all the education I ever had since I never went beyond the fifth grade." "No formal education whatsoever and I used to have to read scripts and then look up words in the dictionary." "How to pronounce them and what they meant before I could learn the lines." "Regrets?" "I left school when I was only 12." "Never learned how to spell regret." "Over the years, Joan Crawford will go on to become the heroine of shop girls everywhere." "A working-class woman who was able to rise through the ranks of society." "Of her frequent co-star, Clark Gable, Joan once said:" ""He is pure animal magnetism."" "When Irving Thalberg sees Clark Gable on the screen for the first time, he declares:" ""We've got ourselves a star."" "Clark Gable is a new hero for a new age." "Not dashing and debonair like John Gilbert, but rough and tough." "A man's man, lusting after life and women." "MGM wastes no time in exploiting its new discovery." "Culver City's screenwriters are instructed to make Gable's characters rogues." "Hot-tempered, hard-boiled, sexy." "In reality, Mr. Gable is a private man who loves the solitude of hunting and fishing." "At the few Hollywood functions he attends he can often be found discussing automobiles with the parking attendants." "At work, he prefers the company of studio technicians to studio big shots." "Clark was, as I was growing up, always, "Hi, guy," one of these fellas, you know." "He was just terrific." "And I loved him and he knew I loved him and he" "He was terrific." "Talking about fishing and talking about adventures and films and Mr. Mayer, he was just a delight." "I heard he would be kind of tough with some of the ladies, the leading ladies and this and that." "I don't know." "He was terrific with me and any of the guys that I knew." "He was a guy's guy." "I couldn't wait to get back, to marry you." "Marry, that's funny." "I should have paid you off." "Thrown a few dollars on the bureau." "That's language you understand." "You don't know what you're saying." "I even bought the ring engraved with your initials and mine and the word "always."" "You said you wanted a wedding ring more than anything." "Well, there it is." "I'm not a one-woman man." "I never have been and I never will be." "And if you wanna take your turn" "all right, if it makes you feel any better." "We had, it seemed to me great strength and depth in the studio." "And Mayer encouraged it." "It was more important to him that we made a personality than we made money on a picture." "He always figured that we'd make money with the personality later." "And Mayer was very, very certain of that." "Contrary to what some people think, he had a respect for talent." "Louis B. Mayer's prime speech to everybody at the Christmas parties and he meant every word of it, and he thought it was true:" ""Ladies and gentlemen, we have a marvelous studio." "Do your job, do the best you can and you've got a job for life."" "Back in 1926 Mr. Mayer added one of the most prestigious names in show business to the MGM marquee:" "Lionel Barrymore." "Despite being afflicted in later years with crippling arthritis Mr. Barrymore will remain under contract to Metro until his death in 1954." "He once said of L.B. Mayer:" ""His loyalty to me never wanes, and that is why I remain loyal to him."" "In 1931, Lionel will receive his one and only Academy Award for his portrayal of a drunken father in A Free Soul." "When this man threatened the rest of her life this father wasn't there to protect his daughter." "all this Dwight Winthrop knew." "all this was caught in the whirlpool of his love." "The poor boy went insane." "And he's not guilty of cold, deliberate murder." "There's only one breast that you can surely pin the responsibility of this crime on." "Only one." "Stephen Ashe is guilty and nobody else." "Stephen Ashe." "Your Honor." "I" "At one of the first Academy Awards I was nominated and my competition was Fredric March and Lionel Barrymore." "Lionel Barrymore was up for A Free Soul, and he won it." "And the story is, I fell asleep on Marie Dressler's lap." "And so when Mr. Barrymore won the award-- He's limping a little bit then." "he came by our table after all the applause and I'm in her lap." "And she wakes me up, and she says, "It's Mr. Barrymore, it's Mr. Barrymore."" "And he says, "This really belongs to you but they gave it to me, because they think I'm gonna die."" "And of course he worked for about another 25 years after that." "I'm quite too overcome and proud to say anything but thank you very much." "1932." "The young Irving Thalberg is hailed by Fortune Magazine as a genius." "A flimsy bag of bones held together by the furious ambition to make the best movies in the world he is what Hollywood means by MGM." "I think he was rather frightening." "He was slender, and dark and kind of mysterious." "He didn't talk very much." "And when he spoke, it had meaning." "I found him intimidating." "He was a little bit awe-inspiring." "I was scared of him, you know." "But he was a kind of a remote figure." "And when he came on the set, there was really silence." "Despite the responsibility of overseeing the production of 52 pictures a year Irving still finds the time to guide his wife's career." "He personally supervises her pictures and insists that she never film two movies in a row with similar themes." "His devoted attention to her pays off when The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences honors Norma with an Oscar for The Divorcée." "I'm glad I discovered there's more than one man in the world while I'm young." "Believe me, I'm not missing anything." "I don't doubt it." "Once a woman throws down her" "Pin it on a motto, hang it where janitors can see it." " Stop that." " Loose women, great." " But not in the home, eh, Ted?" " Cut it, do you hear?" "The looser they are, the more they get." "The best in the world, no responsibility." "Well, my dear, I'm going to find out how they do it." "So look for me in the future where the primroses grow and catch your man's pride with the rest." "And from now on you're the only man in the world that my door is closed to." "I think he was a genius." "His ideas were extravagant, but great." "He worked constantly and desperately hard." "But it was everything that he wanted and loved in life, was that work." "COHN:" "He reversed the whole idea of how to make pictures." "He wasn't afraid to remake them or remake portions of them." "As a matter of fact, we were ridiculed in the industry because we were called Retake Alley." "Irving Thalberg believes that pictures are not made, they are remade." "An integral part of this remake policy is the preview process." "At least once a week, Irving, Margaret Booth, Sam Marx a handful of executives, and occasionally, L.B. Mayer himself would board the MGM special." "The studio's plush private trolley car." "They would head for one of the smaller communities on the outskirts of Los Angeles." "There, they would hold sneak previews of upcoming pictures." "The theater audience would be asked to fill out response cards and according to their suggestions, scenes from the picture would be re-edited." "Or even re-shot." "They gave me the worst script they had had in years." "The script was called Lullaby, and it was shown at a preview and was a disaster, and they shelved it." "So when Irving got back and they were showing him all the pictures that had been finished and polished up while he was away, he said:" ""Where's Helen's picture?"" "And they said, "Oh, well, that's out." "That's shelved."" "So he said, "Let me see it." "I might find something there, who knows?"" "He saw it and said:" ""It has the last maybe seven minutes of it are the disaster point." "And we just write a new finish."" " You've had quite a life." " What?" "Well, I haven't been around women's wards for nothing." "Still..." "You don't look like that kind of a woman." "They're usually pretty tough." "Do it for the boy?" "Mm-hm." "Where is this son of yours?" "I..." "I don't know." "Tomorrow, we'll go out and look for him." "I've done it a couple of times before and it gives a lot of satisfaction." "Oh, no, no." "I don't know how or why, but you're alive." " I guess mothers are hard to kill." " Yes." "Robert Young and I did that scene." "And it came out a success." "Oh, and I got an Oscar for it too." "The Sin of Madelon Claudet was the name that Irving gave it because he thought Lullaby was too naive a name, you see." "And they got that "sin" in there, and that was a good sales lift." "We didn't make bad pictures." "We made good pictures." "We went to previews and we corrected the picture in every way, shape and form that we could." "I couldn't wait to get to a preview to see what we were gonna do to correct it." "And then when Irving saw it, he came out." "He told exactly what to do with it." "And sometimes we previewed two and three times, because they were" "It wasn't good and it had to be improved." "He did it with all of the pictures, and he was wonderful, just wonderful." "I think Irving was an experimenter." "I think he was an innovator." "He was not averse to trying things that Louis B. Mayer didn't even wanna try." "And they had quarrels about it." "He allowed King Vidor to make the first all-black film." "He allowed Tod Browning to make Freaks, which was an offbeat film." "Oh, monsieur, there must be a law in France to smother such things at birth." "Tod Browning was a delightful man but his feeling about movies was to make horror pictures." "Suddenly, we, who were sitting in the commissary having lunch would find Zip the what-is-it sitting at the next table or the Siamese twins who were linked together." "And half the studio would empty when they would walk in because the appetites went out." "And so Harry Rapf, who was a great moral figure got a bunch of us together, and we went in and complained to Irving about Freaks." "And he laughed at that." "He said, "You know, we're making all kinds of movies." "Forget it, I'm gonna make this picture." "Tod Browning's a fine director." "He knows what he's doing."" "And the picture was made." "But it was a story of poor people who were caught in terrible physical agonies." "When I get a chance I like to take them into the sunshine and let them play like children." "That is what most of them are." "Children." "Well, Mayer left the production the artistic part of it, up to Thalberg." "And he says, "Well, I think MGM is making enough pictures, enough money." "They can afford an experimental film every once in a while." "It'll do something for the studio and would do something for the whole industry."" "So that was a pretty good attitude for a top production executive." "We knew immediately that he was brilliant." "And I've known the way he worked, that he had the long table." "Long table, with scripts laid out." "And he would walk down through and turn the script." "He'd make some comment about it, and then he'd move to the next one make the changes, and he would deal with 20 scripts." "He was about as intimate with writers as any film producer could ever hope to be." "He liked good writing." "I had the freedom from Thalberg to bring in anybody I wanted which was marvelous." "And I went after very eminent authors." "So that sooner or later, Ben Hecht came in, Charlie MacArthur came in." "Herman Mankiewicz, Joe Mankiewicz." "There was Donald Ogden Stewart." "Anita Loos was almost just as good." "There were some playwrights, like John Meehan." "There was the comedy writer Bob Hopkins known as Hoppy, who was a great gag man." "Some of them were star writers." "Frances Marion was superior to everybody, in my opinion." "I can't eat that stuff." "MAN:" "Who did that?" "Me." "What do you think of that?" "I want some food." "I don't want any more of this swill." "You give me some food, I'm not going to eat that stuff." "Shut up!" "Come on and give me some food." "Come on now." "Frances Marion's Oscar-winning screenplay, The Big House is the granddaddy of all prison movies." "It's the first of its kind in Hollywood and, many say, the best." "L.B. Mayer has no great love for gangster films, but the public does and The Big House makes Wallace Beery a box-office sensation." "I ain't afraid of your guns." "I ain't afraid of nobody." "Come on, you yellow bellies, let's storm." "MAN:" "That folly went against the wall." "The next time, shoot to kill." " Butch, sit down." " Yellow bellies." "Sit down, Butch." "It's your last chance." "Just the other day, I think it was a bellman in a hotel." ""What was Wallace Beery like?"" "And they wanna hear, "Oh, what a wonderful guy."" "That's what they wanted, what they saw, that's what I usually say." "One, as a kid, he hated kids." "And the crew used to rib him, "Cooper's stealing the picture."" "I can whip him." "The odds are too big, Andy." "You gotta buck them." "I can whip him." "Daddy, Daddy." "I'm scared of what he's doing to you, that's all." " I don't want you to go in." " No, I'm all right, Dink." " I'm gonna throw in the towel." " No, don't." "No." "He was always playing my father or my better, dearest best old friend, you know." "And the minute a scene was over, he'd push me off like this, you know." "Just, he couldn't stand any affection or anything." "Every time I was gonna work in one of these pictures I just dreaded it, because this" " I could" "I had to be with this guy so much, and he was no fun." "He didn't like any of my little jokes or anything." "And he didn't like me, so I didn't like him." "And then I was gonna have to be reprimanded or worked on to try and pretend that I love him." "What's happened?" "Nothing, Dink." "All of a sudden, I turned sissy and faint dead away." "The ground came up and socked me right square in the face." "I won the fight, didn't I, Dink?" "I'll say you did." "Ain't you proud of your old man now?" "Well, gee, Champ, I always was." "But you was going to throw that towel in and stop the fight." "Ain't you ashamed of yourself?" "Uh-huh." "Champ." "Champ." "Nix it." "Keep your chin up." "Don't cry." "Come on, give the old man a smile." "Throughout the early 1930s Hollywood is in the throes of the Great Depression." "The motion-picture industry is in desperate straits." "Several studios are on the brink of bankruptcy." "Everyone is drowning in red ink." "Everyone but Louis B. Mayer and MGM." "Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer literally goes to the ends of the earth to provide an escape from the Depression." "In Tahiti, the studio shoots White Shadows in the South Seas a romantic depiction of the civilized world's corruption of Polynesia." "They were not easy times in this country or all over the world." "We had a major depression on during most of that heyday of MGM." "It was an age of wonderment." "And people wanted to escape into that." "People could get away from the unpleasantness of reality and wallow around in beauty and fun and adventure and excitement." "White Shadows in the South Seas was started by veteran filmmaker Robert Flaherty." "But his anthropological approach to the material clashes with the studio's idea of entertainment." "Mr. Thalberg believes the public wants a love story and replaces the distinguished documentarian with Woody Van Dyke a young staff director, who will become one of Metro's most prolific creators." "Meanwhile, on the other side of the world veteran filmmaker Clarence Brown is up to his ears in snow." "Leading an army of extras through an epic saga called The Trail of '98." "Over 2000 of them." "Put them on a train at 2:00 in the morning." "Had to clothe them because they were off the streets be tramps and things that we'd picked up, anybody we could get." "I never went through a seizure like that." "I lost 20 pounds on the picture." "Cold." "I was at work at 11 , 12,000 feet altitude at 20 to 40 below zero." "Blizzards and everything." "That was all real." "One man dies filming this avalanche and three more will perish shooting a treacherous white water sequence." "We wanted white water." "We found the white water on the Copper River in Alaska." "From what I understand some of the stuntmen didn't wanna wear the jackets." "That's when we lost three men." "They should have insisted that all of them wore the life jackets." "I don't know if it would have made any difference." "I think it would have." "There's no economy in a cheap stuntman." "You may never get the stunt." "Five years after the tragedies that marred The Trail of '98 MGM sends another film company to the Arctic Circle." "The expedition is headed by the studio's resident globetrotter Woody Van Dyke." "The film, Eskimo, is distinguished by its semi-documentary style, native cast and use of the local language." "Oh, hello, Mala." "What do you want?" "Oh, well, put it down." "I had a marvelous friend named Peter Freuchen who had written the book Eskimo." "And he went along as a technical adviser." "He reported to me that Woody Van Dyke, who liked to drink and always wanted ice in his drinks, took a Frigidaire up into Alaska where there was ice right outside the boat." "You could go out and chop all you wanted." "But Van Dyke took the Frigidaire so he'd have ice for his liquor." "No matter what the film was or what part of the world they were gonna make it in or what the budget was Woody was gonna bring it in on or under budget." "He knew that's how you stay alive at MGM and that's how you get very popular with Mr. Mayer." "It better be pretty good too, but more important, it better be on budget." "It isn't long before Woody Van Dyke is known in Culver City as One-Take Woody." "His next stop, Africa and Trader Horn." "When I came to MGM, Trader Horn was already back at the studio." "They had sent it to Africa, the company, which Van Dyke directed and he shot crazy." "I mean, he just turned the film on everything he saw, I think without much regard to the continuity." "And they finally elected to bring everybody back." "You see, the original intent was to shoot the whole film in Africa." "And they cast in it two very regal tribe heads." "Kings, really." "And suddenly, when the film was ordered back to Hollywood it was necessary to take them along." "They were in the footage that had already been shot and recognizable." "Unfortunately for MGM, they quickly found out they did not wanna live among other Americans." "So they made them happy by erecting two tents on the backlot of the MGM studio, where they've got their food and liquor." "And ultimately, they even wanted women, and the studio had to deliver them too." "The American public is fascinated by tales of the dark continent with its scenes of charging rhinos and savage pygmies and the great white hunter." "In the footsteps of Trader Horn MGM embarks on the most popular African adventure movie of all time." "And yet Woody Van Dyke's cast and crew never leave Southern California." "The picture is so popular it spawns a seemingly endless series of films." "The hero is a gentleman named Tarzan." "Woody Van Dyke had made Trader Horn in Africa." "And he'd come back with a lot of film that they hadn't used." "Lions and tigers and action stuff, and really good stuff." "They didn't know what to do with it." "Now, I don't know who came up with the idea of making a Tarzan." "It might have been Edgar Rice Burroughs' office or it might have been MGM, but that was the nucleus of the idea." "I used to read the Tarzan books and they had a kind of a shrill yell for Tarzan." "And I never thought I'd ever make Tarzan." "But when I finally got it, we were trying to do yells like that and I remembered when I was a kid, I used to yodel in the picnics on Sunday." "So I said, "I know a yell."" "It was a man who'd never seen a woman before." "So it was a fairy tale." "And yet it was two real people." "Don't." "Let me go, let me go, let me go." "Let me go, let me go." "Let me go." "Oh, no, let me go, let me go." "You let me go." "He didn't know what to do with a woman." "I guess he found out pretty quickly." "But he didn't know whether-- What it was when he found her." "Was it a monkey?" "And she was able to teach him many things that he was unaware." "It was a lovely innocent concept and yet very sexy." "And they tried different things to make Jane look pretty sexy." "And first of all, they had the idea of wearing no bra no brassiere at all." "And that she would be always covered with a branch." "And they tried that, and that didn't work." "So then they made a costume, and it wasn't that bad at all." "There was a little leather bra and a thing with thongs on the side." "Well, it started such a furor that the letters just came in." "So it added up, like, to thousands of women who were objecting to my costume." "I think that was one of the things that started the Legion of Decency." "Cheetah certainly deserts us when we get near water, doesn't she?" "Wait, Tarzan." "Now, in those days they took those things very seriously, the public did." "Do you know I was offered land in San Francisco to hide?" "I was offered all kinds of places where I could go in my shame to hide from the cruel public who were ready to throw stones at me." "It's funny, you know." "We were unreal people and yet we were real." "When a man in the outside world meets a young lady he isn't allowed to behave at all the way you did, not at all." "What man do?" "If he decides he wants her for his wife, he goes to see her father." "Why?" "That's the way it's done." "Politely, with etiquette." "Too much talk." "Tarzan way better." "Yes." "It is better." "One of the brightest stars in L.B. Mayer's galaxy is Jean Harlow." "Known throughout the world as the Platinum Venus she is MGM's resident sex symbol and a major source of studio income." "So gentlemen prefer blonds, do they?" "Yes, they do." "Can you see through this?" "I'm afraid you can, miss, but" " I'll wear it." "With Jean, I think what you saw was what you got." "There didn't seem to be any subterfuge or subtlety about Jean." "She never wore a nightgown or anything." "She slept in the raw, and then she'd say:" ""Oh, the maid may be embarrassed."" "She'd take her nightgown, rumple it up." "She'd say, "I put it here." "Then she'd think I slept in my nightgown." She was kind of sweet, you know?" "She didn't wear any underwear." "She'd step into her white slacks and a white sweater, and off she'd go to work." "What the...?" "Hey, hey." "How many times have I told you to let down those curtains?" "Why?" "They've all gone off to work." "You heard me." "Let them down." "What's the matter?" "Afraid I'll shock the duchess?" "Don't you suppose she's ever seen a French postcard?" "You let those curtains down or this is the last bath you'll ever..." "Get out of there." " Say, what's the idea?" " What?" "Getting in that barrel." "Oh, I don't know." "Maybe I'm going over Niagara Falls." "Whoo!" "She was a darling girl." "She was really a kind of a homebody girl." "She used to sit on her stepfather's lap on the set." "She was naive in a way." "Very sweet girl." "It's morning, September the 5th, 1932." "MGM producer Paul Bern husband of film siren Jean Harlow, was found shot through the head in the bathroom of his Benedict Canyon mansion." "The first call the gardener made after discovering the body was not to the police." "But to the studio front office." "And when L.B. Mayer arrived on the scene, his first thought was that one of his biggest stars had murdered her husband." "Paul Bern had come up from the New York theater." "And..." "He came to Hollywood after a woman that he had known and lived with had been adjudged to be virtually insane." "I didn't know it at the time, I heard later that Jean Harlow and Paul Bern began to become very romantically attached began to think of marriage." "Now, Jean was very much younger than Paul and that seems to have been what affected the studio most many of whom were against it purely because they thought Paul was too old for her." "Two months after the marriage, Paul Bern was found dead in his home in Beverly Hills." "And I went up there, and Thalberg was there." "The police didn't come till much later that day." "Louis B. Mayer and Howard Strickling, the head of publicity had been there and gone." "Mayer found a paper in a diary and it had no date on it." "It was a note written to a woman as an apology for something and it was used as a suicide note." "And of course, I now feel differently." "I think the woman who had been in his life earlier had come down, had demanded things, and finally had shot and killed him." "Then she killed herself." "Three days after Paul Bern's death, his first wife, Dorothy Millette is found floating face down in a Northern California river dead of an apparent suicide." "It still is a mystery, really." "I mean, there were just a thousand rumors." "Howard Strickling calmed everything down as he could calm everything." "And I don't think that any of us really felt it our business to think even too much about it." "No gossip." "That would be outside the studio domain." "As I say, we were a family." "We didn't destroy each other." "It was a world unto itself." "And I would think that if MGM had a fault, they overprotected us." "If there was bad publicity or something, you took it up with Howard Strickling." "Life was taken care of and they spoiled us." "Messy incidents like the Paul Bern scandal, along with Jean Harlow's antics both on and off-screen have civic groups outraged." "The demand for censorship grows." "And a more rigid code of standards is adopted by the studios and enforced by the will Hays office." "The code sets up high standards of performance for motion-picture producers." "You want entertainment wholesome, interesting and vital." "Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's production of Grand Hotel has plenty of sex in it but it all takes place behind closed doors." "The film is one of the cinematic highlights of the Depression era and is based on an obscure play written by a German author named Vicki Baum." "After securing the film rights Irving Thalberg defies conventional wisdom and casts several of Culver City's biggest names in the same picture." "What MGM's publicity department has been promising more stars than there are in heaven, this movie delivers." "The day-to-day production of this gloomy cosmopolitan melodrama was supervised by Mr. Thalberg's close friend and associate, Paul Bern shortly before his mysterious death." "Grand Hotel is Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's first all-star blockbuster and the film receives the Best Picture Oscar of 1932." "Who are you?" "Someone who could love you, that's all." "Someone who's forgotten everything else but you." "You could love me?" "I've never seen anything in my life as beautiful as you are." "You must go now." "I'm not going." "You know I'm not going." "Oh, please, let me stay." "But I want to be alone." "That isn't true, you don't wanna be alone." "You were in despair just now." "I can't leave you now." "You mustn't cry anymore." "You must forget." "Let me stay just for a little while." "Oh, please, let me stay." "For just a minute, then." "Irving was the great mind of the old MGM." "He would not slap anything at the audience." "It had to be as perfect as he could make it." "He believed that he understood and he did, what they wanted." "And what would fulfill their dreams." "And he did it." "Grand Hotel." "Always the same." "People come, people go." "Nothing ever happens." "Grand Hotel." "Three months after the triumphant opening of Grand Hotel Irving Thalberg collapses." "The man Vicki Baum refers to as the overheated dynamo is returning home from the studio's Christmas party when he is stricken with a heart attack." "With Irving convalescing Mr. Mayer has no choice but to assume control of all production." "He suddenly finds himself wielding absolute power over a vast organization operated almost entirely by men loyal to his stricken associate." "In desperation, he turns to outside producers." "When Irving finds out, he's furious." "Well, I think what happened is that Irving had had sole credit to operate that studio." "And everybody worked under him." "Consequently, when he had the heart attack L.B. had to take over." "That's when he brought in David Selznick Walter Wanger, Howard Hawks." "He brought in some very stalwart motion-picture makers." "But they were not under Thalberg." "Mr. Schenck made a whole new deal with Thalberg and Irving was supposedly no longer in charge of other producers." "Of course, we all leaned on him, anyway." "We all depended on him." "As long as Irving lives, we're all great men." "And that was the attitude." "He knew that they were scheming to get him out." "And as old Mayer said to me when he called me in:" ""I'm doing it for the little fellow's good." "That's why we did it." "We did it for his good." "He was killing himself."" "And the crisis came when Irving and Charlie, my husband and Norma Shearer and I were going off to Europe for a holiday." "He had to leave the studio." "I think the doctors wanted to get him away from there." "Because he was being harassed and tormented." "He was having a struggle with them because the Depression had begun and they were of two minds." "Metro wanted to make the same number of pictures 52 a year, one every week, and cut prices." "Irving said, "We will make fewer pictures but we will make them so good and so much above the average that people will have to spend their money to go to see them."" "They didn't get together on that." "They thought that he was being extravagant." "But Irving didn't know that and we get to Europe, and that's when they changed their policy." "And one day Norma came knocking on our door and yelling:" ""Charlie, Charlie, come help." "Irving has had an attack."" "Well, we all raced back to their room and here was that little, beautiful face ivory white and eyes closed." "And all he said was:" ""They knifed me, Charlie." "They knifed me."" "In 1933, it can safely be said that Greta Garbo is the most famous movie star in the world." "To be like Garbo has become an international craze." "Fans hound her at every turn." "A young girl screams, "I love you," and throws herself in front of her car." "A Midwestern farmer dies and leaves her his entire fortune." "Desperate to find peace, she leaves for Sweden, vowing:" ""Never again will I come back to America."" "Still, she finds no refuge." "Her every move is scrutinized by the world's press." "A Swedish reporter criticizes her selfish desire to be left alone." "Miss Garbo finally returns to Hollywood and the relative safety of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer." "There, under the direction of Rouben Mamoulian she films Queen Christina." "This final scene provokes endless discussions among critics and film scholars as to its emotional significance." "The picture's director explains it quite simply:" ""I told Garbo to think of nothing." "You must make your mind and your heart a complete blank." "I want the writing to be done by the audience." "You are nothing but a beautiful mask."" "You can't pigeonhole Garbo." "She's hard to classify, because she was like Chaplin man, woman and child." "She was fascinating." "Extremely selfish, beautiful, strange." "She'd walk around Jack Gilbert's garden perfectly nude with a dressing gown over her back like this and the Japanese gardener would look at her." "You know, I've worked with people who made you feel this or that." "Nothing." "So I was so interested that I went to see the rushes." "And everything was on the screen." "Thoughts that I had never known she felt or thought." "So I realized then that her great love affair was the camera or the camera's love affair with her." "It was quite extraordinary." "It is Greta Garbo who bullies the studio into filming Anna Karenina." "The picture features Freddie Bartholomew and Fredric March and is a remake of Garbo's silent classic Love in which she costarred with John Gilbert." "However, Fredric March is no John Gilbert." "At least in Greta Garbo's eyes." "Reportedly, before shooting their love scenes Miss Garbo chews on a piece of garlic." "You're going away with me." "Yes, yes, Alexei." "Don't leave me ever again." "Oh, Anna." "Oh, hello, ladies and gentlemen." "First of all, I want to thank you for all the lovely letters you have sent me." "It's been great pleasure and honor to work with Miss Garbo and Mr. March in our new picture, Anna Karenina." "You didn't come in to kiss me good night." "You know I can't go to sleep until you've kissed me good night." "I'm sorry, darling." "I'm sleepy." "Sergei, will you always love me?" "I played her son in Anna Karenina." "I remember my Aunt Cissy and perhaps others saying:" ""Greta Garbo loves you, and she doesn't give autographs and she doesn't really talk to people, but she will you." "And you get her to sign this picture."" "I knocked on her dressing room door and she came, and I said:" ""Would you please sign this for me?"" "And she said no and closed the door." "Anna Karenina is a critical tour de force for the picture's cast and the film's producer David O. Selznick." "David was a very charming, decent guy but he was very obsessed with his ambition." "And he insisted that every picture be a David Selznick production." "The first pictures he made were the first films ever made at MGM that carried the producer credit." "David was subjected to an enormous amount of criticism because he was the son-in-law of Louis B. Mayer and of course the nepotism was obvious." "They brought David in with a great deal of show." "They built a whole bungalow for him." "Thalberg had a bungalow." "Now, David had to have one right alongside." "The famous remark around Hollywood was, "The son-in-law also rises."" "His first film, which was Dinner at Eight was a great Broadway play by Edna Ferber and George S. Kaufman." "And just as Irving had made a smash hit out of Grand Hotel by putting big stars in every part now, David proceeded to cast Dinner at Eight the same way." "You've been acting very strangely lately, my fine lady and I'm not going to stand for it." " Yeah, and so what?" " So what?" "I'm the works around here and I'll give you orders what to do." "Who do you think you're talking to, that first wife of yours?" "Leave her out" "That poor mealy-faced thing with a flat chest that didn't talk up to you?" "Shut up." "Washing out your overalls and cooking and slaving in some lousy mining shack?" " No wonder she died." " I ought to sock you." "Well, you can't get me that way." "You're not gonna step on my face to get where you wanna go, you big windbag." "Listen, you little piece of scum, you." "I've got a notion to drop you back where I picked you up in the checkroom of the Hot 'n' Tot Club or wherever the joint was." "Oh, no, you won't." "And then you can go back to that sweet-smelling family of yours." "Back of the railroad tracks in Passaic, and get this if that sniveling, money-grubbing, whining old mother of yours I'm going to give orders to have her thrown down those 60 flights of stairs." "Irving Thalberg was very inconspicuous." "You didn't see much of him." "He very seldom came on the set." "You weren't really aware of his presence." "But David was into everything." "Scripts and rushes." "And you were very much aware of David as opposed to Thalberg." "I was reading a book the other day." " Reading a book?" " Yes, it's all about civilization or something." "A nutty kind of a book." "The guy said that machinery is going to take the place of every profession." "Oh, my dear." "That's something you need never worry about." "David Selznick the man was a person of in his behavior towards me, incredible patience." "I tried his patience greatly." "For whatever reason" "I'm sure he wasn't doing it for any effect, the man was busy." "but I was kept waiting a little while in his anteroom of his office at MGM." "And so I utilized the time to great advantage by carving my initials on his leather furniture." "David, come here." "If I have an obstinate horse or a dog to deal with, what do you think I do?" "I don't know." "I beat him." "I make him wince and smart." "I say to myself, "I'll conquer that fellow."" "And if it were to cost I'd do it." "Mr. Murdstone, sir, don't." "Pray, don't..." "Basil Rathbone, who played my wicked stepfather in David Copperfield had major concerns apparently because of press reaction and fan reaction certainly about being doomed to be the bad guy who whacked and beat and was ferociously ill-willed towards this sweet little boy." "He thought that was gonna ruin his career." "They would say, "Basil Rathbone's no good and I hate him."" "And so he went out of his way to be nice to me to counter that." "I used to go to his house a lot we were having a lot of friendly pictures taken to prove he wasn't a bad guy." "Young friend, I counsel you." "Annual income, 20 pounds." "Annual expenditure, 19 pounds." "Result: happiness." "Annual income, 20 pounds." "Annual expenditure, 21 pounds." "Result: misery." "Farewell, Copperfield." "I shall be happy to improve your prospects in case anything turns up." "Which I may say I am hourly expecting." "David was very definitely inclined toward fine literary writing." "And many of the movies that he made at MGM were based on his feeling." "He did the Dickens pictures." "He did Viva Villa which was a very fine book that I had bought just before he arrived." "David was a very competent executive, competent producer, of course." "But he also had a great ego about himself." "And in the end, it tripped him up because Irving had the loyalty of all the workers at the studio." "And David felt that very keenly." "In fact, that was the reason why he left." "He wrote a lengthy memorandum to Louis B. Mayer explaining that MGM was Thalberg's studio." "That he had been an interloper, and he moved out formed his own company, ultimately making Gone with the Wind." "When Irving Thalberg returns to Culver City from his European sabbatical he finds a studio that is very different from the one he had left." "He is no longer in charge of MGM's entire output." "And the men he once supervised are now running their own production units." "The balance of power has shifted." "L.B. Mayer is now firmly in control and direct communication between the two partners is now rare." "Even Irving's comeback picture, Riptide which stars Norma Shearer, is a disappointment." "Around the lot, there are whispers." "Has the boy wonder lost his touch?" "Mr. Thalberg has better luck with his second endeavor a remake of Erich von Stroheim's 1925 hit, The Merry Widow." "Irving delights in finally creating a sound version of the beloved Franz Lehár operetta." "In the parts originally played by silent stars Mae Murray and John Gilbert director Ernst Lubitsch casts Jeanette MacDonald and Maurice Chevalier." "Mr. Mayer and Mr. Thalberg had been trying to sign Maurice Chevalier to a studio contract for years." "He agrees to come to Metro for one picture and one picture only." "His charming personality is a refreshing presence on the lot and one of his biggest fans is Irving's wife." "Norma, I think, was a born flirt." "She flirted with life she flirted with every man that came on the set." "She and I became great friends." "And every afternoon, we would have eggnogs in her dressing room." "And she'd say, "Maureen," she'd say, "Let's go and visit Maurice."" "So we would go and visit Maurice." "She would flounce around and Maurice would come." ""Oh, Norma, you look so lovely."" "And she'd say, "Maureen has perfume on too." "Which perfume do you like best, Maurice?"" "And he would say, "Why, yours, Norma." "Yours is the best perfume."" "You're the freshest Fifi I ever met." "Very nice Fifi." "How nice?" "Mm." "Not too nice." "Your right eye says yes and your left eye says no." "Fifi, you're cockeyed." "When the Marx Brothers are turned loose on the MGM lot Hollywood is convinced they are washed up." "It is Irving Thalberg, over the strenuous objections of L.B. Mayer, who rescues their sagging careers." "Chico used to play bridge every night with Thalberg." "He was the most feared man of any producer in any major studio." "And he wasn't feared because he wasn't a nice guy but he was so powerful because he was so talented and he was so great at his own business." "Paging Mr. Driftwood." "Mr. Driftwood." "Mr. Driftwood." "Mr. Driftwood?" "Boy, do me a favor and stop yelling my name all over this restaurant." " Do I go around yelling your name?" " Mr. Driftwood." "Is your voice changing or is somebody else paging me?" "Mr. Driftwood." "Why, Mrs. Claypool, hello." "Mr. Driftwood, you invited me to dine with you at 7:00." " It is now 8:00 and no dinner." " What do you mean no dinner?" "I just had the biggest meals I ever ate, and no thanks to you either." "I've been sitting right here since 7:00." "Yes, with your back to me." "I invite a woman, I expect her to look at my face." " That's the price she has to pay." " Your check, sir." "Nine dollars and 40 cents?" "This is an outrage." "I wouldn't pay it." "After Duck Soup, we signed up with Thalberg." "Now he says, "Come to the office tomorrow morning at 11:00 and we'll have an initial talk about what we're gonna do."" "We started to talk about I think, it was Night at the Opera, the first picture." "And then at 11:30 or 12:00, he'd say:" ""Look, I have to go over and talk to Bob Sherwood for a few minutes." "I'll be back."" "He did this two or three times." "And he didn't come back till around 2:00." "So around the fourth time he did this we lit a fire in the fireplace, a huge fireplace and we sent to the commissary, and we got eight baked potatoes." "And we lit the fire, we had a roaring fire going we took off all our clothes." "And when he came back we were sitting in front of the fireplace, roasting these baked potatoes." "And after that, he loved us, because nobody ever cracked a joke around him." "Everybody was so afraid of him." "Even Mayer was afraid of him." "Peanuts, peanuts." "Get your fresh-roasted peanuts, folks." "They're nice and hot." "Get your peanuts." "Here you are." "Peanuts, peanuts?" "Peanuts." "Screenwriter Charles MacArthur once remarked:" ""Entertainment is Irving's god." "He doesn't know how to rest, play or even breathe without a script in his hand."" "This relentless pursuit of excellence leads him to Mutiny on the Bounty." "When Irving proposes filming the epic, Mr. Mayer is vehemently against it decreeing, "A mutineer is no proper hero."" "Charles Laughton lets it be known that he's subject to seasickness." "Clark Gable flat out refuses to appear in the picture, stating:" ""I'll be damned if I'll shave off my moustache just because the British Navy didn't allow them."" "Murdering butcher." "I've had enough of this blood ship." "He's not master of life and death on a quarterdeck above the angels." "McCoy, Quintal." "I'm sick of blood." "Bloody backs, bloody faces." "Bligh, you've given your last command on this ship." "We'll be men again if we hang for it." " Are you ready for anything?" " Aye." " Release those men." " Taking the ship?" " Mutiny?" " We're with you." "Yes, mutiny." "Pass the word and seize the arms chest." "Well, I enjoyed Mutiny on the Bounty." "It was a very big picture and it..." "In a way, it was..." "It was shot so well by the director that I used to just go to a cupboard, and I'd take out a piece and put it in." "Casting me adrift 3500 miles from a port of call you're sending me to my doom, eh?" "Well, you're wrong, Christian." "I'll take this boat as she floats to England if I must." "I'll live to see you, all of you hanging from the highest yardarm in the British fleet." "Mr. Thalberg had been in the East and he hadn't seen the picture cut or anything." "And there he was in a preview." "And he was very..." "He was happy about it and very..." "And it went over so well that night." "It was just a real boost for him." "Mutiny on the Bounty." "The picture's director, Frank Lloyd, its editor, Margaret Booth the film's composer, its three writers, along with Clark Gable Charles Laughton and Franchot Tone will all be nominated for Academy Awards." "To the voyage of The Bounty." "As president of The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences it's a pleasure to present this to you for producing the best picture of 1935 Mutiny on the Bounty." "Mr. Capra, it is obvious, but nevertheless true for me to say that I'm happy that Mutiny on the Bounty won this award." "And the several thousand men and women who played in this picture I am sure, will share this happiness with me." "Irving Thalberg is back on top." "He turns his attention to Romeo and Juliet." "Mayer, again unhappy with the idea, calls Shakespeare box-office poison." "Mr. Thalberg retorts:" ""I've never had any picture closer to my heart."" "'Tis almost morning." "I would have you gone and yet no further than a wanton's bird who lets it hop from her hand and with a silk thread plucks it back again so loving and jealous of his liberty." "I would I were thy bird." "Sweet, so would I." "Yet I should kill thee with much cherishing." "Good night." "Good night." "Parting is such sweet sorrow that I shall say good night till it be morrow." "Romeo and Juliet is hailed as a masterpiece by the critics." "Time Magazine says:" ""Producer Irving Thalberg does everything but call William Shakespeare from his grave." "This proves that the cinema has at last grown up."" "But only three weeks after the picture's triumphant premiere Irving Thalberg is gone." "It was terrible." "It's appalling and..." "It was so sudden, you know." "It was not right." "It wasn't fair for a young man." "He was so young." "Terrible." "Your life to be taken when he was so famous." "It was just a shocking thing." "Because he was a genius and there isn't anybody today to equal him or ever will be, and I've worked with all of them." "I think Hollywood went into a state of shock." "We all knew he was ill, but nobody thought he was that ill and it affected the studio tremendously because I was told by Eddie Mannix who was the studio manager that when Mayer drove away from the synagogue he nudged him in the ribs and said, "Isn't God good to me?"" "It's a pretty murderous line in a way, and yet I understand it because I think in their last couple of years together Irving and L.B. were not getting along that closely." "And suddenly, God had removed his rival." "So it's a kind of tough comment." "But it was a tough time." "It must have been a terrible thing to live with for Mr. Mayer." "There wasn't a soul in that community who didn't hold him a little responsible." "Possibly, he wasn't." "The handling of Irving may have been impossible." "Irving was a workhorse, would not give up work." "This thing had such a grip on his own spirit, mind, heart." "It killed him." "He died of genius." ""As long as Irving lives, we are all great men."" "This quote echoes throughout the canyons of Los Angeles as Hollywood holds its breath and asks:" ""Can Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer survive without its greatest creative force?"" "Irving Thalberg's last words were to his wife." ""Don't let the children forget me," he said." "He was laid to rest this morning, September the 16th, 1936." "He was 37 years of age." "Today, the show stopped." "For the first time in its history, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer is closed." "Warner Bros., Columbia, Paramount Universal, R.K.O., Fox, the entire industry shuts down and pays silent tribute to the man they called the boy wonder."