William Axt (1888-1959) was a composer and conductor who joined the MGM music department in 1929 and went on to write hundreds of scores. He composed for a number of musicals, mostly early in his career: Marianne, It’s a Great Life, Devil-May-Care, Chasing Rainbows,The Rogue Song, Free and Easy, Call of the Flesh, Madam Satan, Hollywood Party, The Great Ziegfeld, Thoroughbreds Don’t Cry, Everybody Sing and Listen, Darling.
Axi’s work was also taken off the shelf for use as stock music in New Moon, Student Tour, Balalaika and Little Nellie Kelly .
The costumes he designed for The Wizard of Oz, which included the iconic ruby slippers, were unquestionably the high point of the career of Adrian Adolph Greenburg (1903-59), known simply as Adrian. But his designs were included in hundreds of MGM features, mostly between 1928 and 1941, including 34 other musicals. These included eleven Jeanette MacDonald pictures: The Cat and the Fiddle, The Merry Widow, Naughty Marietta, Rose-Marie, San Francisco, Maytime, The Firefly, The Girl of the Golden West, Sweethearts, New Moon and Bitter Sweet.
Adrian was very active during 1929-31, designing for Marianne, Devil-May-Care,The Rogue Song, Montana Moon, In Gay Madrid, Madam Satan, New Moon andThe Cuban Love Song.
Dancing Lady reunited Adrian with Joan Crawford a year after the white mousseline de soie dress he created for her in Letty Linton (1932) was copied commercially and sold over 500,000 units.
Going Hollywood, Hollywood Party, Reckless, Broadway Melody of 1936, The Great Ziegfeld, Born to Dance, Broadway Melody of 1938, The Great Waltz and Honolulu led up to the triumph ofThe Wizard of Oz. Adrian then worked on Balalaika, Broadway Melody of 1940, Ziegfeld Girl andThe Chocolate Soldier before leaving MGM in 1941 to open his own fashion business.
He continued to freelance for a variety of studios and returned to Metro for a final musical, the aptly-named Lovely to Look At.
Lawrence Weingarten (1897-1975) was working as assistant to Irving Thalberg, his brother-in-law, when he was assigned to work on the supervision of what became Metro’s first musical, The Broadway Melody. Weingarten’s description of working on the picture is included in Samuel Marx’s Mayer and Thalberg: The Make-Believe Saints (1975).
Weingarten had a lengthy career as a producer at MGM, but little subsequent involvement with its musicals. He was an uncredited supervisor on A Day at the Races, but his only producer credit on a musical was Balalaika.
