Hollywood

Irving Thalberg

Hollywood is like being nowhere and talking to nobody about nothing. - Michelangelo Antonioni

When I think about Hollywood, and what better occasion than the closing of the latest Oscar ceremony, I am often reminded of an important date in its history: April 17, 1924. It was on that date that the biggest movie studio in Hollywood, MGM, was born. How it happened was that a theater chain magnate named Marcus Loew, who owned Metro Pictures, bought out Goldwyn Pictures and Louis B. Mayer Pictures to form Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, with Irving Thalberg appointed as the head of production. 

You might call the date fateful, because at that very moment a film director named Erich von Stroheim was struggling to arrive at a compromise in the laborious editing process of a film that was produced by Samuel Goldwyn that he had finished in 1923. Because of the merger that created MGM, his finished film was now the property of MGM, and its fate was in the hands of its head of production, Irving Thalberg. 

The year before, Stroheim and Thalberg had a confrontation in the offices of Universal Pictures, where Thalberg was then head of production. Stroheim’s work on Merry-Go-Round (1923), set in pre-war Vienna, was interrupted by Thalberg due to its going too far over budget. Thalberg fired Stroheim and replaced him with Rupert Julian. It was the first time that a producer had challenged the authority of a director, and it set an unfortunate precedent in Hollywood. 

Despite this, and despite his reputation as a spendthrift, Stroheim managed to persuade Samuel Goldwyn to let him direct an adaptation of Frank Norris's novel McTeague, the shooting of which took nine months. Stroheim showed a select group of people a cut of the material that is variously said to have been eight or nine hours long. Some of the people who saw Greed, Stroheim's name for the film, called it the greatest film they’d ever seen. But even Stroheim knew that its length was unacceptable. He proposed that it could be reduced to six hours, to be screened in two parts on successive nights. With Rex Ingram, he edited it still further to four hours. 

But then Goldwyn Pictures was absorbed into MGM, and once again Irving Thalberg was there to decide the film’s fate. He took Greed away from Stroheim and ordered it cut to a manageable length. The trimmed footage was gathered up by a janitor and thrown out with the morning garbage. At two hours and fifteen minutes, Greed was released to unanimously hostile reviews, attacking it for being disjointed, badly structured, and ultimately meaningless - none of which was Stroheim's fault. For the rest of his life, he called the mutilated film "the skeleton of my dead child." So the birth of Hollywood’s biggest studio presided over the destruction of what was rumored to be a cinematic masterpiece. 

Hurray for Hollywood.