Kurt Fritz Schneider (1902-85) was a member of the Doll Family, four siblings all affected by dwarfism. For more than forty years, starting in the 1910s, they toured the United States, appearing in circuses and sideshows.
Earles made a number of films, most memorably a starring role in Todd Browning’s Freaks (1932). His sister Daisy was also in Freaks, and they both appeared as Munchkins in The Wizard of Oz.
Earles had earlier made a brief appearance in Good News.
In 1977, Margaret Booth (1898-2002) received an honorary Oscar in tribute to her 62-year Hollywood career, during most of which she was arguably the industry’s greatest editor. Remarkably, she carried on working for another eight years.
Like many major Hollywood figures, Booth started out with D W Griffith, working as a negative cutter. She subsequently worked for Louis B Mayer, transferring with him to the new Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio. She was appointed as Supervising Editor in 1939, and stayed there until her shameful dismissal in 1986. During that time, as Booth described it, she worked only in the projection room, never the cutting room (though it is believed she did uncredited cutting on Ben Hur (1959). She has been described as “the final arbiter on every picture the studio made”.
The first MGM musical edited by Margaret Booth was The Rogue Song. This was followed by New Moon, The Cuban Love Song, Dancing Lady, Reckless. After that, she technically supervised the editing of every musical, but made a particularly significant contribution to The Wizard of Oz and Gigi.
As late as 1982, aged 84, Booth worked as supervising editor on the Columbia-released musical Annie.
Blanche Irene Sewell (1898-1949) died far too young, but had become one of the most talented of all Hollywood editors and a seminal influence on the MGM musical style . After training under pioneer Viola Lawrence, Sewell became a full-fledged editor at MGM in 1925 and spent the rest of her career there.
She was the sister-in-law of Walt Disney, and it is generally accepted that she tutored him on the principles of editing and was very influential, in particular, on the form of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937).
Sewell cut some of Metro’s most memorable pictures of the 1930s, including Grand Hotel, Red Dust and Queen Christina. In the 1940s, she edited twenty films, fourteen of which were musicals.
Sewell’s involvement with musicals began in 1930 with Children of Pleasure, after which she cut Naughty Marietta, Broadway Melody of 1936, Rose-Marie, Born to Dance, Broadway Melody of 1938, Rosalie and Listen Darling.
In 1939, Sewell was chosen to edit The Wizard of Oz, and it was claimed that this was in the hope she could bring to it some of the magic that Disney had produced in Snow White.
After this cameBroadway Melody of 1940, Go West, Ziegfeld Girl, Ship Ahoy, Panama Hattie, Seven Sweethearts, Du Barry Was a Lady, Best Foot Forward, Bathing Beauty, Easy to Wed, It Happened in Brooklyn, Fiesta andThe Pirate. Sewell’s last work, shortly before her death, was on Take Me Out to the Ball Game.
Robert Shirley (1904-81), like most of the engineers in Douglas Shearer’s sound department, never received onscreen credit for his work, despite working on some of Metro’s prestige projects. These included Strange Interlude (1932), Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (1944) and The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946).
Shirley’s musicals were They Learned About Women, Reckless, The Wizard of Oz (though everyone seems to have worked on that), Broadway Rhythm, Meet Me in St Louis, Music for Millions, Thrill of a Romance, Anchors Aweigh, Yolanda and the Thief, The Harvey Girls, Two Sisters from Boston,Easy to Wed, Holiday in Mexico and, to round things off nicely, Singin’ in the Rain.
Thomas Held (1889-1962) was an Austrian-born editor. After starting out as an assistant director, his first, uncredited editing assignment was on They Learned About Women, where he worked alongside Jack McKay.
Held’s other musicals were San Francisco and The Great Waltz (for which he was Oscar-nominated). He also worked uncredited on The Wizard of Oz.
Herbert Pope Stothart (1885-1949) is a composer whose name is less familiar today than, say, Dimitri Tiomkin or Max Steiner, but in Hollywood’s golden age he was ranked alongside them for his work at MGM.
Stothart had a successful career writing stage musicals, most notably Rose-Marie, but was invited to join Metro in 1929. He signed a contract and stayed there for the rest of his life.
Scores by Stothart were prominent in some of the studio’s most important pictures of the 1930s and 40s. These included Queen Christina (1933), Mutiny on the Bounty (1935), Camille (1936), The Good Earth (1937), Pride and Prejudice (1940), Mrs Miniver (1942), They Were Expendable (1945) and The Yearling (1946). In all, Stothart wrote over 100 scores.
Stothart worked on many of MGM’s musicals. He and Clifford Grey wrote the songs for Devil-May-Care and contributed numbers to Montana Moon, The Rogue Song, In Gay Madrid, The Florodora Girl, Call of the Flesh, New Moon and Madam Satan.
He worked with other lyricists on A Lady’s Morals, The Cuban Love Song, Here Comes the Band, Maytime, The Firefly (composing ‘The Donkey Serenade’), Broadway Serenade, Balalaika, The Chocolate Soldier and I Married an Angel.
Stothart was the musical director on some of these films and also on The Cat and the Fiddle, Lubitsch’s The Merry Widow, The Night is Young, Naughty Marietta, Reckless, San Francisco, Rosalie, The Girl of the Golden West, Sweethearts, The Wizard of Oz (picking up an Oscar), New Moon, Bitter Sweet, Rio Rita, Thousands Cheer, Ziegfeld Girl, Cairo, Thousands Cheer, Kismet, The Unfinished Dance. Musical direction usually involved writing incidental music.
And, of course, Metro produced two versions of Stothart’s greatest stage success, Rose-Marie, and he worked on the first version.
Edward Sedan (1896-1982) had a fifty-eight-year career as a Hollywood bit player, notching up over 300 appearances, including many Ernst Lubitsch pictures. He also worked regularly in the theatre and on radio.
Sedan’s MGM musicals were It’s a Great Life, They Learned About Women, Call of the Flesh, The Cat and the Fiddle, The Merry Widow, A Night at the Opera, Rose Marie, The Firefly, The Wizard of Oz and Silk Stockings.
John M Nickolaus (1881-1963) was one of the cinematographers on The Hollywood Revue of 1929 but, like his colleagues Irving G Ries and Max Fabian, spent most of his time at MGM working on special optical effects. It was here that he made his contribution to The Wizard of Oz.
Maksymilian Fabian (1891-1969) worked as one of the cinematographers on The Hollywood Revue of 1929, but spent most of his MGM career in the visual effects department, where he specialized in miniatures. It was here that he contributed to the special effects work in The Wizard of Oz.
