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Mgm iconic roaring movie lion replaced1/31/2024 ![]() While presiding over RKO in 1946-47, Schary, who started his career as a screenwriter at MGM in the 1930s (he was hired sight unseen and thought to be a woman because of his first name), had perfected a formula for garnering both critical esteem and box office success. In 1948, sensing the need for fresh blood in a postwar world of television and arthouses, Nicholas Schenck brought in Dore Schary as vice-president in charge of production. It was the kind of neighborhood that the rock-ribbed Republican, who kept portraits on Herbert Hoover and Cardinal Spellman on his office wall, would have liked to have grown up in, assuming his family could have gotten around the restrictive covenants. Hardy’s neighborhood, Americans practiced an unspecified brand of Protestantism whose central tenets were well-manicured lawns, man-to-man talks, and let’s-put-on-a-show spunk. Louis (1944), Father of the Bride (1950), and most of all, the 15 Andy Hardy films (1937-1946) that Mayer doted on. No less than the Latin and the lion, the idealized, nuclear units were an MGM trademark - in Meet Me in St. In An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood, published in 1988, cultural historian Neil Gabler casts Mayer as the super-patriotic patriarch of home, studio and nation who may never have written a line of dialogue, but whose vision infused the MGM product line. ![]() Selznick, who could be, but he was not uninvolved or unwilling to intervene and make final cut (as when he tacked on a happy ending to the relentlessly grim Thomas Hardy adaption Tess of the D’Urbervilles ). ![]() Mayer was not as obsessively hands on as say his son-in-law David O. Yet after Thalberg’s death in 1936, the MGM machine never skipped a beat. (In 1947, Mayer sold that off for $1.5 million.) Mayer was so notorious for absenting himself from the studio to cheer on his horses at the Santa Anita Race Track that a fed-up Nick Schenck eventually gave him an ultimatum: pick a stable. “Louis never personally made a picture in his life,” scoffed gossip columnist Hedda Hopper, a former MGM contract player who served as unpaid publicity shill for Mayer and who bad-mouthed “the tubby bespectacled little tyrant” only after he was safely dead. Ever since the publication in 1957 of Bosley Crowther’s The Lion’s Share: The Story of an Entertainment Empire, head of production Irving Thalberg has been touted as the true genius of the MGM system, the man whose mark, though never screen credit, is imprinted in the films he supervised. In 1933, he delivered perhaps his most bravura performance, turning on the waterworks to convince his stable of contract players to accept a 50 percent salary cut, a star turn recently reenacted in David Fincher’s Mank.įilm historians have long argued about how much Mayer had to do with the high-quality craftsmanship rolling off his factory floor. (sometimes Louiebee) anecdotes was his breast-beating bouts of maudlin - and manipulative -sentimentality. Mayer had a short fuse and, in fits of anger, was known to strike underlings and overlings alike (he once decked Charlie Chaplin). “Colorful” was the euphemism used to describe a personality that, even by mogul standards, was obnoxiously outsized. Originally conceived as what skeptics called “a one-sided racket of which the producers would have control,” it soon morphed into a guild dedicated to promoting “the honor, dignity, and good repute of the profession.” Oh, and “the bestowal of awards of merit for distinctive achievements.” In 1928, he pitched the concept for what became the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. He also steamrolled through the rest of the town as a self-appointed industry spokesman and city father. Schenck, head of Loew’s, Inc., the parent company back in New York, but Mayer basked in the press clips and high profile as the on-site overseer of the huge acreage at Culver City. The real power behind MGM, the guy who called the shots, was Nicholas M.
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