Reflections on "inventors of cinema"...
... on the 125th anniversary of Irving Thalberg's birth...
“There is nothing in this business that good pictures cannot cure.”
— Nicholas Schenk, president of Loew’s, Inc. and M-G-M
“When one studio sneezed, the others got a cold.”
— A.C. Lyles, Paramount Pictures legend, serving 1928-2013
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Irving Thalberg, legendary film producer, was born 125 years ago today.
A sickly child, Thalberg read voraciously, and was enthralled when Universal Pictures’ head Carl Laemmle screened a silent film at the Brooklyn home of his lace importer father, William, and homemaker mother, Henrietta. Before long, Laemmle dispatched 20-year-old Thalberg to Hollywood to become the studio manager overseeing day-to-day operations. (Irving had suggested the role and Laemmle said, ‘You’re it!’) When Thalberg reined in, then fired director Erich von Stroheim, it sent shock waves through Hollywood.
Soon Louis B. Mayer was courting “The Boy Genius” and, by February 1923, he had come aboard what, in April 1924, became Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer—formed by Marcus Loew of Loew’s Theatres combining Goldwyn Pictures, Louis B. Mayer Pictures and Metro Pictures. “More stars than there are in heaven,” was the studio’s mantra. Thalberg was their top star. He had that deft touch, picking the right scripts, cultivating the right actors, assembling the right production team, and filming in the right location, to make profitable pictures.
Ben-Hur (1925), based on Lew Wallace’s Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ had bogged down in Italy since 1923, given the chaotic political situation and ensuing cost-overruns. So Thalberg brought production back to California, reshot most of the scenes, including the iconic Chariot Race scene he shaped, thereby catapulting M-G-M to Hollywood’s long-time premier studio, ringing up $9.4 million in box office sales, making the $4 million production price tag a worthy gamble. Following on this success were many more money-making audience-favorites including Grand Hotel (1932), A Night at the Opera (1935), Mutiny on the Bounty (1935), Camille (1936), and San Francisco (1936). With that intuitive feel for audience tastes, he would tweak a film until it resonated. To wit, The Champ (1931), initiually ending with Wallace Beery being knocked out and dying, was a dud with test-audiences. Thalberg could easily see the problem and changed it to Beery delivering the knock-out blow, then dying. Thalberg knew the American psyche and character intimately. But, tragically, in an all-too-American tale, he himself died of pneumonia at age 37, a champ, after which F. Scott Fitzgerald began penning The Last Tycoon (1941), imaging Thalberg. As he wrote editor, Max Perkins, “Thalberg has always fascinated me. His peculiar charm. His extraordinary good looks. His bountiful success. The tragic end of his great adventure.”
Meanwhile, as Thalberg sneezed and made classic films, over at Comique Film Corporation, great “art” was being made by “Buster” Keaton in deals cut by Joseph M. Schenck (1876-1961), older brother of Nick (1880-1969), whom Loew kept in New York, given bad blood with Mayer who called him the “skunk.” Truth be told, they were all cunning and Thalberg was later “knifed,” losing his lofty perch—too much literary fare, Mayer thought; though he still had a sweet deal those final years.
Buster’s treatment, however, was far shabbier, and his artistic contributions more significant. As Peter Bogdanovich’s The Great Buster: A Celebration (2018) underscored, “he was the essence of film” and one of the “inventors of cinema.”
William Frank “Buster” Keaton was born on October 4, 1895, some four years before Thalberg, on the feast of St. Francis, accounting for the middle name his Catholic Vaudevillian parents, Joseph and Myra, gave him. As for his famous moniker, it is said, as a baby, he fell down the stairs without getting hurt, prompting Harry Houdini to comment, ‘That was some buster,’ i.e., fall.
Buster would rise to great heights after leaving the family troupe in 1917, partnering with Arbuckle, who, directed his own films and mentored Keaton. When Fatty signed with Paramount in December 1919 to do feature films, he enlisted Buster to do the Comique shorts. He was so good that Schenck turned Comique over to Keaton who set up production at the old Charlie Chaplin Studios, renamed Buster Keaton Studios, to produce shorts for none other than Metro. Meantime Douglas Fairbanks gave him a starring role in his first feature, The Saphead, a sappy film that nonetheless burnished his reputation. By 1920, Buster had a hit with the two-reeler, One Week, and was off to the races, making 19 comedy shorts, also including The Playhouse (1921), Cops (1922), and The Electric House (1922). When Arbuckle’s career was cut short by scandal, Joe Schenck gave Keaton his own production unit, and soon “Buster Keaton Productions” was making feature films that were masterclasses in the business of “how to make people laugh.”
The underside of this great comedy was great tragedy. Old “stone-face,” as he was known, now married to Natalie Talmadge, the sister of Norma, Joe Schenck’s wife, was hard-drinking and easy prey for the voluptuous lovelies lying in wait in his dressing room, in the buff—something that “happened all the time,” he told his friend, actor James Karen. As agent Al Rosen said in The Mystery of Marilyn Monroe: The Unheard Tapes, the currency in Hollywood’s Golden Age was not money but sex. At the same time, as his success mounted with Three Ages (1923), Our Hospitality (1923), The Navigator (1924), Sherlock Jr. (1924), Seven Chances (1925), and The General (1926), the “suits” at the newly-formed M-G-M sought to squeeze more revenue from him. In 1928, at the very moment when he was drinking to excess, his marriage falling apart, and the silent film era ending, he trusted Joe Scheck who prevailed upon him to sign a new contract with his brother Nick that ceded all creative control to M-G-M. Buster was now reduced to a shell of his former self, with no financial responsibility, his artistic genius suffocating in the studio straight jacket.
As Charlie Chaplin, who vigorously urged Buster not to sign, famously said, “Just when we got it right, it was over.”
It was the ultimate fall for Buster, who had helped birth cinema, creating the art that became the basis of so much of what goes into great filmmaking to this day.
Ironically the most iconic scene from Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928), his last independent production, in which he risked losing his life when the house came crashing down on him, was filmed just after he learned that M-G-M had bought his film rights and his marriage was over.
He really did not care what happened.
Though God did.
And, while his career was never the same, he gradually picked himself up and lived a fruitful life. His contributions were numerous. For instance, he mentored Lucille Ball, teaching her all the elements of “slap-stick” comedy and his legacy shines through such classic “I Love Lucy” scenes as “Lucy and Ethel at the Chocolate Factory.”
But, on this day, marking the 125th anniversary of Irving Thalberg’s birth, we are reminded that in Hollywood, where the film industry is the marriage of art and commerce, it’s important to get both right—and to trust the right people; and, with the grace of God, to try and avoid the moral traps. As my great grandmother Lillian Webster Keane always said, “It’s a great life, if you don’t weaken.”
Mary Claire Kendall is author of Oasis: Conversion Stories of Hollywood Legends. The sequel is being published this summer. And, her book about Ernest Hemingway, viewed through the prism of faith, is being published by Rowman & Littlefield Christmas 2024.