Movie moguls

Benny Green

The movie moguls of the golden age really were a low lot. To this day the cinema industry continues to protest about the bad press its tycoons always get, but when you study the evidence with any sort of detachment, you have to admit that the movie moguls of the golden age really were a bunch of jerks. Their prototype always turns out to have been a cross between an inbred Renaissance prince and a hungry buzzard, sitting in the cultural desert waiting to sup on the artistic misfortunes of others:

Will require dialogue writer. ... Understand Garrett's play terrible flop, so should be able to buy him cheaply.

whose artistic conceit grows to such comically insufferable proportions that he ends up the only man able to take himself seriously:

In adapting well-known and wellloved books, it is better to chop out whole sequences ... In 'David Copperfield' we got away with it very successfully indeed . . . We had no criticism of any kind and were universally congratulated upon giving them the book they knew so well and loved so well.

whose relentlessly mercantile brain never fails to perceive the commercial possibilities in the misfortunes of others:

I feel that the greatest publicity story and Horatio Alger story in the history of the picture business would be our finding Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn in an orphan asylum, and that this would receive such tremendous attention anti arouse such a warm public feeling that it would add enormously to the gross of the picture (The Adventures of Tom Sawyer).

These and a hundred other selfexposures just as enlightening come from a new publication called Memo from David O. Selznich, in which the production notes, cablegrams and letters of thirty years of professional trivia are gathered together in a megalomaniac package calculated to leave the less robust reader languishing with a hernia. The book is vast, its indiscretions numberless, its points of departure inexhaustible, but perhaps the most convenient way of focusing its quaint blend of naivete and ruthlessness, shrewdness and soppiness, is to follow the extraordinary sequence of events leading to the bonanza of Gone With the Wind.

When I was a small boy, the publicity pertaining to the casting of GWTW was as persistent as the weather reports or Mr Chamberlain's oratory. At the time we all assumed that the whole thing was a routine publicity stunt calculated to get people slavering with eagerness for a movie which hadn't yet been made. We now discover, with a thrill of delighted horror, that the Scarlett-andRhett industry was genuine, that

Selznick, the great masteriniocr not only believed in all the go bage being circulated about picture, but actually corsPes much of it himself. Let us folloil the tangled skein of his dell,'

berations, keeping in mind all time that Margaret Mitche',

Scarlett was a teenager wit h„1. eighteen-inch waist and a phY al beauty so ravishing that ne;i: in her career did she ever faii

captivate a man with it. On May 26, 1936, Selznick (IP;

the opening shots in the four-Yei, campaign. He wants either Cooper or Clark Gable for gtle;t: with Joan Crawford as Scarlo Being a man of some consistell. two days later he has decideid should be Ronald Colman, P18,1,' opposite either Miriam HoPk'n'tre‘ Tallulah Bankhead. Slowly '0 quest grinds on, until by Jarni:.

1937, "one of our strongest Pcrui bilities for the lead is Flynn." CI On March 23, 1937, Selini,

hotly denies that Norma Sher will be playing the part of Scfo lett, and two days later, in a ri°„'e, syntactical indiscretion, he WI." e "Chances of getting Gable Ili practically nil, if not in factrall

tually." In March 1938 GarY per suddenly dashes into the in the Rhett Butler Stakes, onlY16

be overtaken on the line bY 682.0 who signs in August. This

that Selznick can now settle" to the task of testing the entire.le!

male population of the Unito States for the role of Scarleo That September he says hew, sorry Bette Davis won't be P''

ing the role. ss

By now everyone except 1-tgo and Eleanor Roosevelt has measured for the job, and Se;,"er, ick in a frenzy in case he has looked anyone, writes, "I we can forget about Susan ward," and .then adds, " about Ann Sheridan? I feel definitely a clear possibili$

There then follows a test bY Turner which understanno

leads Selznick to decide, Turner is completely inadequP'the From here on, Selznick leacis.h): stampede to bathos. "I agree d`oi, Humphrey Bogart can be f014101 ten "; "Mae West might be ga3f, to do it." On December 10, 1;,it. Selznick begins shooting the „r4 ture at last with the burninphl!

Atlanta. He still hasn't foun° ' Scarlett O'Hara.

Two days later he writes th' Vivien Leigh is" the Scarlett horse; it's narrowed down to r; lette, Jean Arthur, Joan Beilf1:11. and Vivien." At which point book reduces itself to parodY.4 omitting the one piece of inf'9.Pi' ation it has been fussing abon,.flo the moment Selznick finallY °pro for Vivien Leigh, the tidal wav'a information is cut off, becati;cr says the book's editor, the °II; cuments are missing. Two M011,tili later George Cukor leaves J.5; ' GWTW ' team; years later Mlie Leigh was to remember, "He Vitti my last hope of ever enjoying; picture." Never mind; to dtior has pulled in rentals of 116111":11:4 dollars. The publishers descii;e. Memo from Selznich asa1;01‘ document," a just enough c1 at perhaps not quite in '

way they have in mind.