http://americanheritage.com/entertainment/articles/web/20071128-louis...

Thought folks might be interested.

On May 16, 2:18 pm, "George Kincaid" <gkincaid... at (no spam) centurytel.net
wrote:

http://americanheritage.com/entertainment/articles/web/20071128-louis...

Thought folks might be interested.

very interesting.  I believe that Mayer did much good.  Many of the
stories spread by his enemies  have no basis in fact.

Posters here with more knowledge of the movies can point to other
flaws in Mayer's character.

gerry wrote:
Posters here with more knowledge of the movies can point to other
flaws in Mayer's character.

He mutilated "Greed" and destroyed the material he cut from it. He
offered to buy the negative of "Citizen Kane" and burn it. These were
two of the greatest movies ever made in Hollywood, or anywhere else.

It would take a lot of saintly behavior to make up for those acts.

Mar de Cortes Baja

www.mardecortesbaja.com<http://www.mardecortesbaja.com/blog

On May 18, 1:33 am, sir m <mccro... at (no spam) adam.com.au> wrote:

On May 16, 2:18 pm, "George Kincaid" <gkincaid... at (no spam) centurytel.net
wrote:

http://americanheritage.com/entertainment/articles/web/20071128-louis...

Thought folks might be interested.

very interesting. I believe that Mayer did much good. Many of the
stories spread by his enemies have no basis in fact.

While Mayer did have some pluses, such as his decision in the early
1940s to preserve MGM's fim library, my opinion is that the bad
outweighed the good after Thalberg died. Mayer ran MGM like a tyrant
from his elevated desk, treating actors like property. There is Buddy
Ebsen's story, how after coming back from recovering from aluminum
dust poisoning in his Tin Man makeup (proving to make-up artist Jack
Dawn that aluminum dust makeup could be toxic, much to Dawn's
surprise), Mayer told Ebsen that MGM would make him a star, he was
MGM's property. The same MGM that had canned his sister when the
studio decided that Ebsen was the only part of the dancing duo that
MGM, Mayer, wanted. Ebsen decided to take the next train east and go
to back to working on Broadway.

Ann Miller, then the world's fastest tap dancer, said that Mayer was
in love with her and thinking of marrying her and dumping his wife.
Miller nixed the idea, and Mayer let her contunue working at the
studio. Luise Rainer's rejection of Mayer, on the other hand, was
reason enough for Mayer to end her stay at MGM and career in
Hollywood.

While Mayer made movie stars, he just as quickly unmade them when
these stars seemed past their prime. Child star Jackie Cooper was
getting older and his salary could be spent elsewhere. In with the
younger and cheaper Mickey Rooney. Lee Tracy, a fairly new hire to
MGM, made the mistake while drunk of apparently urinating out of his
room on a parade of celebrators passing by his Mexico City hotel room,
wher he was starring in Viva Villa. A diplomatic incident, bad
publicity for MGM and Tracy was booted off the MGM lot.

Mayer had exceptions to his zero tolerance policy, such as Wallace
Beery, who appears to have been a miserable person who kept MGM's
Howard Strickling busy covering up Beery's scandalous and sometimes
criminal drunken activities. But Beery movies made MGM money, and
money was the driving force in Mayer's life, not art.

Posters here with more knowledge of the movies can point to other
flaws in Mayer's character. Mayer's big accomplishment as boss at
MGM's west coast Culver City studio was managing to keep the studio
profitable during the first five years of the Depression while all the
other major studios lost money or were even forced into
receivership.

At the time of MGM's silver anniversary in 1949, the MGM Board of
Directors and Nicholas Schenck, who ran Loew's from New York City, had
already tired of Mayer. Mayer's track record had been on the skids.
IMBd's trivia section on the movie Desire Me (1947), a movie with no
listed director, indicates that Schenck thought the movie so bad that
he decided someone should replace Mayer as production chief.

What is amazing about MGM, for which Mayer shares the credit, is that
in the space of months, a movie studio formed from disparate elements
in 1924 could be producing movies at such a fast pace. If not a movie
a week, then close to that goal. That great start for MGM kept Mayer
at the top of the heap in Hollywood for over a quarter century,
earning the top salary in the United States for many of those years,
money enough to pay for his avocation raising thoroughbred race
horses.

The American Heritage article is pretty shallow

On May 19, 12:08 am, gerry <2gerry... at (no spam) gmail.com> wrote:



On May 18, 1:33 am, sir m <mccro... at (no spam) adam.com.au> wrote:

On May 16, 2:18 pm, "George Kincaid" <gkincaid... at (no spam) centurytel.net
wrote:

http://americanheritage.com/entertainment/articles/web/20071128-louis...

Thought folks might be interested.

very interesting. I believe that Mayer did much good. Many of the
stories spread by his enemies have no basis in fact.

While Mayer did have some pluses, such as his decision in the early
1940s to preserve MGM's fim library, my opinion is that the bad
outweighed the good after Thalberg died. Mayer ran MGM like a tyrant
from his elevated desk, treating actors like property. There is Buddy
Ebsen's story, how after coming back from recovering from aluminum
dust poisoning in his Tin Man makeup (proving to make-up artist Jack
Dawn that aluminum dust makeup could be toxic, much to Dawn's
surprise), Mayer told Ebsen that MGM would make him a star, he was
MGM's property. The same MGM that had canned his sister when the
studio decided that Ebsen was the only part of the dancing duo that
MGM, Mayer, wanted. Ebsen decided to take the next train east and go
to back to working on Broadway.

Ann Miller, then the world's fastest tap dancer, said that Mayer was
in love with her and thinking of marrying her and dumping his wife.
Miller nixed the idea, and Mayer let her contunue working at the
studio. Luise Rainer's rejection of Mayer, on the other hand, was
reason enough for Mayer to end her stay at MGM and career in
Hollywood.

While Mayer made movie stars, he just as quickly unmade them when
these stars seemed past their prime. Child star Jackie Cooper was
getting older and his salary could be spent elsewhere. In with the
younger and cheaper Mickey Rooney. Lee Tracy, a fairly new hire to
MGM, made the mistake while drunk of apparently urinating out of his
room on a parade of celebrators passing by his Mexico City hotel room,
wher he was starring in Viva Villa. A diplomatic incident, bad
publicity for MGM and Tracy was booted off the MGM lot.

Mayer had exceptions to his zero tolerance policy, such as Wallace
Beery, who appears to have been a miserable person who kept MGM's
Howard Strickling busy covering up Beery's scandalous and sometimes
criminal drunken activities. But Beery movies made MGM money, and
money was the driving force in Mayer's life, not art.

Posters here with more knowledge of the movies can point to other
flaws in Mayer's character. Mayer's big accomplishment as boss at
MGM's west coast Culver City studio was managing to keep the studio
profitable during the first five years of the Depression while all the
other major studios lost money or were even forced into
receivership.

At the time of MGM's silver anniversary in 1949, the MGM Board of
Directors and Nicholas Schenck, who ran Loew's from New York City, had
already tired of Mayer. Mayer's track record had been on the skids.
IMBd's trivia section on the movie Desire Me (1947), a movie with no
listed director, indicates that Schenck thought the movie so bad that
he decided someone should replace Mayer as production chief.

What is amazing about MGM, for which Mayer shares the credit, is that
in the space of months, a movie studio formed from disparate elements
in 1924 could be producing movies at such a fast pace. If not a movie
a week, then close to that goal. That great start for MGM kept Mayer
at the top of the heap in Hollywood for over a quarter century,
earning the top salary in the United States for many of those years,
money enough to pay for his avocation raising thoroughbred race
horses.

The American Heritage article is pretty shallow

I do not think that Mayer can be blamed for the action on Lee Tracy. 2
Re Jackie Cooper, Fox also discarded Shirley Temple

gerry wrote:
By the way, the comment about Mayer butchering Greed assigns all the
credit to Mayer for the decision to cut the movie from ten hours to
two hours twenty minutes.  Thalberg was involved in that decision.  If
Wikipedia is right, the blame for the disposal of the outtakes of
Greed goes to an unnamed janitor who tossed out the reels of film in
the 1950s, while clearing out a film vault.

I've never heard that before -- it's not reported that way in
Koszarski's biography of Von Stroheim -- and Wikipedia doesn't give a
source.  Von Stroheim believed the cut footage was deliberately
destroyed by the studio to recover the silver content.

Wikipedia is also misleading when it states that the film was a flop.
It actually made money domestically, though poor box office abroad kept
it from turning a profit overall.  So while it wasn't a hit, it was
fairly popular with American audiences -- a fact that doesn't fit
comfortably into the myth of Von Stroheim as self-indulgent artist who
didn't care about the public.  Most of his films either broke even or
made money -- and a few of them made quite a lot of money.  His record
in that department was about on par with Lubitsch's, who is never
accused of self-indulgence as an artist.

Mar de Cortes Baja

www.mardecortesbaja.com<http://www.mardecortesbaja.com/blog

On May 18, 1:33 am, sir m <mccro... at (no spam) adam.com.au> wrote:

On May 16, 2:18 pm, "George Kincaid" <gkincaid... at (no spam) centurytel.net
wrote:

http://americanheritage.com/entertainment/articles/web/20071128-louis...

Thought folks might be interested.

very interesting. I believe that Mayer did much good. Many of the
stories spread by his enemies have no basis in fact.

While Mayer did have some pluses, such as his decision in the early
1940s to preserve MGM's fim library, my opinion is that the bad
outweighed the good after Thalberg died. Mayer ran MGM like a tyrant
from his elevated desk, treating actors like property. There is Buddy
Ebsen's story, how after coming back from recovering from aluminum
dust poisoning in his Tin Man makeup (proving to make-up artist Jack
Dawn that aluminum dust makeup could be toxic, much to Dawn's
surprise), Mayer told Ebsen that MGM would make him a star, he was
MGM's property. The same MGM that had canned his sister when the
studio decided that Ebsen was the only part of the dancing duo that
MGM, Mayer, wanted. Ebsen decided to take the next train east and go
to back to working on Broadway.

Ann Miller, then the world's fastest tap dancer, said that Mayer was
in love with her and thinking of marrying her and dumping his wife.
Miller nixed the idea, and Mayer let her contunue working at the
studio. Luise Rainer's rejection of Mayer, on the other hand, was
reason enough for Mayer to end her stay at MGM and career in
Hollywood.

While Mayer made movie stars, he just as quickly unmade them when
these stars seemed past their prime. Child star Jackie Cooper was
getting older and his salary could be spent elsewhere. In with the
younger and cheaper Mickey Rooney. Lee Tracy, a fairly new hire to
MGM, made the mistake while drunk of apparently urinating out of his
room on a parade of celebrators passing by his Mexico City hotel room,
wher he was starring in Viva Villa. A diplomatic incident, bad
publicity for MGM and Tracy was booted off the MGM lot.

Mayer had exceptions to his zero tolerance policy, such as Wallace
Beery, who appears to have been a miserable person who kept MGM's
Howard Strickling busy covering up Beery's scandalous and sometimes
criminal drunken activities. But Beery movies made MGM money, and
money was the driving force in Mayer's life, not art.

Posters here with more knowledge of the movies can point to other
flaws in Mayer's character. Mayer's big accomplishment as boss at
MGM's west coast Culver City studio was managing to keep the studio
profitable during the first five years of the Depression while all the
other major studios lost money or were even forced into
receivership.

At the time of MGM's silver anniversary in 1949, the MGM Board of
Directors and Nicholas Schenck, who ran Loew's from New York City, had
already tired of Mayer. Mayer's track record had been on the skids.
IMBd's trivia section on the movie Desire Me (1947), a movie with no
listed director, indicates that Schenck thought the movie so bad that
he decided someone should replace Mayer as production chief.

What is amazing about MGM, for which Mayer shares the credit, is that
in the space of months, a movie studio formed from disparate elements
in 1924 could be producing movies at such a fast pace. If not a movie
a week, then close to that goal. That great start for MGM kept Mayer
at the top of the heap in Hollywood for over a quarter century,
earning the top salary in the United States for many of those years,
money enough to pay for his avocation raising thoroughbred race
horses.

The American Heritage article is pretty shallow

By the way, the comment about Mayer butchering Greed assigns all the
credit to Mayer for the decision to cut the movie from ten hours to
two hours twenty minutes. Thalberg was involved in that decision. If
Wikipedia is right, the blame for the disposal of the outtakes of
Greed goes to an unnamed janitor who tossed out the reels of film in
the 1950s, while clearing out a film vault.

On May 19, 1:08 am, gerry <2gerry... at (no spam) gmail.com> wrote:



On May 18, 1:33 am, sir m <mccro... at (no spam) adam.com.au> wrote:

On May 16, 2:18 pm, "George Kincaid" <gkincaid... at (no spam) centurytel.net
wrote:

http://americanheritage.com/entertainment/articles/web/20071128-louis...

Thought folks might be interested.

very interesting. I believe that Mayer did much good. Many of the
stories spread by his enemies have no basis in fact.

While Mayer did have some pluses, such as his decision in the early
1940s to preserve MGM's fim library, my opinion is that the bad
outweighed the good after Thalberg died. Mayer ran MGM like a tyrant
from his elevated desk, treating actors like property. There is Buddy
Ebsen's story, how after coming back from recovering from aluminum
dust poisoning in his Tin Man makeup (proving to make-up artist Jack
Dawn that aluminum dust makeup could be toxic, much to Dawn's
surprise), Mayer told Ebsen that MGM would make him a star, he was
MGM's property. The same MGM that had canned his sister when the
studio decided that Ebsen was the only part of the dancing duo that
MGM, Mayer, wanted. Ebsen decided to take the next train east and go
to back to working on Broadway.

Ann Miller, then the world's fastest tap dancer, said that Mayer was
in love with her and thinking of marrying her and dumping his wife.
Miller nixed the idea, and Mayer let her contunue working at the
studio. Luise Rainer's rejection of Mayer, on the other hand, was
reason enough for Mayer to end her stay at MGM and career in
Hollywood.

While Mayer made movie stars, he just as quickly unmade them when
these stars seemed past their prime. Child star Jackie Cooper was
getting older and his salary could be spent elsewhere. In with the
younger and cheaper Mickey Rooney. Lee Tracy, a fairly new hire to
MGM, made the mistake while drunk of apparently urinating out of his
room on a parade of celebrators passing by his Mexico City hotel room,
wher he was starring in Viva Villa. A diplomatic incident, bad
publicity for MGM and Tracy was booted off the MGM lot.

Mayer had exceptions to his zero tolerance policy, such as Wallace
Beery, who appears to have been a miserable person who kept MGM's
Howard Strickling busy covering up Beery's scandalous and sometimes
criminal drunken activities. But Beery movies made MGM money, and
money was the driving force in Mayer's life, not art.

Posters here with more knowledge of the movies can point to other
flaws in Mayer's character. Mayer's big accomplishment as boss at
MGM's west coast Culver City studio was managing to keep the studio
profitable during the first five years of the Depression while all the
other major studios lost money or were even forced into
receivership.

At the time of MGM's silver anniversary in 1949, the MGM Board of
Directors and Nicholas Schenck, who ran Loew's from New York City, had
already tired of Mayer. Mayer's track record had been on the skids.
IMBd's trivia section on the movie Desire Me (1947), a movie with no
listed director, indicates that Schenck thought the movie so bad that
he decided someone should replace Mayer as production chief.

What is amazing about MGM, for which Mayer shares the credit, is that
in the space of months, a movie studio formed from disparate elements
in 1924 could be producing movies at such a fast pace. If not a movie
a week, then close to that goal. That great start for MGM kept Mayer
at the top of the heap in Hollywood for over a quarter century,
earning the top salary in the United States for many of those years,
money enough to pay for his avocation raising thoroughbred race
horses.

The American Heritage article is pretty shallow

It is an interesting hypothesis to imagine the 'glory' days of
Hollywood without the studio system. Would the classic films have been
produced?

Mayer was a meglomaniac, true - but he was also only one of many
running the studios in Hollywood. The fact that each one of them - all
virtual illiterates - got as far as they did in the world is amazing
and must have been in part due to some business acumen.

I think that the world over, when audiences saw the MGM lion announce
a picture - they knew it was going to be a good picture.

So, who runs the picture business today? Does anybody really know? It
seems to me that it is mostly accountants and the general idea is to
cash in on merchandising rather than worry about the actual picture
itself.

Regards
Silents Please

Donald Binks

I ahve read that in the early thirties, von Stroheim lived in a big
house in Hollywood with almost no furniture. Von Stroheim had to sell
the furniture to pay his bills. Just like Marshal Neilan, another
director who hit hard times in the 30s after great success and
prosperity in the 20s, von Stroheim is in large part responsible for
what happened to him and to Greed. He refused to work within the
studio system. The same director who was so imperious at giving
orders refused to follow orders.

It is an interesting hypothesis to imagine the 'glory' days of
Hollywood without the studio system. Would the classic films have been
produced?

Mayer was a meglomaniac, true - but he was also only one of many
running the studios in Hollywood. The fact that each one of them - all
virtual illiterates - got as far as they did in the world is amazing
and must have been in part due to some business acumen.

I think that the world over, when audiences saw the MGM lion announce
a picture - they knew it was going to be a good picture.

So, who runs the picture business today? Does anybody really know? It
seems to me that it is mostly accountants and the general idea is to
cash in on merchandising rather than worry about the actual picture
itself.

It is an interesting hypothesis to imagine the 'glory' days of
Hollywood without the studio system. Would the classic films have been
produced?

Of course. Just look at all the classic films produced before the
studio system became entrenched -- from Chaplin, Keaton, Griffith,
Sennett, Lloyd, Pickford. These guys invented the art of movies,
created the mass audience for movies, established the industry of movies
before the moguls got control of it all.

The quality of the average production would probably not have been as
high if there had continued to be open access to film distribution but
there would have been more diversity, and more miraculous surprises.

Mayer was a meglomaniac, true - but he was also only one of many
running the studios in Hollywood. The fact that each one of them - all
virtual illiterates - got as far as they did in the world is amazing
and must have been in part due to some business acumen.

These were truly extraordinary men, no doubt about it -- they were
businessmen of genius -- but they weren't filmmakers, and their narrow
visions of "what the public wanted" limited the range of what American
cinema could be.

I think that the world over, when audiences saw the MGM lion announce
a picture - they knew it was going to be a good picture.

Well, they knew it would likely be better than average, at least in
terms of production values and talent. But MGM cranked out a lot of
mediocre stuff. For every "Meet Me In St. Louis" there were ten or
twenty "Neptune's Daughter"s, pleasant but second-rate works.

So, who runs the picture business today? Does anybody really know? It
seems to me that it is mostly accountants and the general idea is to
cash in on merchandising rather than worry about the actual picture
itself.

Hollywood is over -- it's all about cashing in before people notice.

Donald4564 wrote:
I think there had to be someone in the front office who was not
actually a film maker but who new how to get things together and run
the business side of things. Otherwise Hollywood could have been
flooded with Erich von Stroheim types and gone broke.

Nobody would have gone broke backing Von Stroheim. He undoubtedly made
more money for his investors than he lost, overall, and his prestige
added value to the lesser efforts of a studio, increasing the value of
its brand, which is one reason Carl Laemmle backed him in the first place.

He was eccentric but he was not the irresponsible profligate he is
assumed to be. Universal inflated reports about the costs of his
productions, first to get publicity for them and later to justify firing
him (and to hide losses on other films.) It's almost certain that MGM
misreported the costs and returns on the films he made for them in order
to cheat him out of his profit participation in "The Merry Widow". He
always had a good sense of what the public wanted, as shown by the fact
that even a mutilated version of "Greed" made money in America. "The
Merry Widow", his next film, was one of the most profitable movies of
the 20s.

His "irresponsibility" consisted entirely of treating Thalberg and Mayer
as glorified bean counters, which is what they were, failing to
recognize the degree of power they possessed through their control of
distribution. In a free market he would have had no trouble getting
backing for his films, and would very likely have made his investors rich.

Mar de Cortes Baja

www.mardecortesbaja.com<http://www.mardecortesbaja.com/blog