John Waters (1893-1965) was one of the few people (men) to receive an Academy Award for Best Assistant Director; it was only presented for five years.
Waters joined the film industry as a young man, and many of his credits from the 1910s are thought to be missing. The earliest suggested by IMDb is The Shadow of a Doubt, produced by the Equitable Motion Pictures Corporation, which was based in New York.
In 1926, Famous Players-Lasky signed Waters as a director, and he made about a dozen pictures for them over the next couple of years, functioning as producer on at least one, Two Flaming Youths (1927).
Waters joined Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1928, and stayed for nearly thirty years. Pictures he worked on included Viva Villa! (1934), Ninotchka (1939, as second unit director) and The Desperate Hours (1955, as second unit director).
Waters was AD on Broadway to Hollywood and second unit director on Let Freedom Ring, The Big Store and Annie Get Your Gun.
Edwin Booth Willis (1893-1963) worked on the design of over 800 MGM pictures, in a career lasting a little over thirty years. He was nominated for Academy Awards 32 times, and won on eight occasions. In broad terms, Willis was an art director, but his specialism was set decoration and the bulk of his credits were in this capacity.
After working as an art director for Tiffany Pictures in the 1920s, Willis worked exclusively for Metro, obtaining three types of credit: Associate Art Director (AAD), Interior Decorations (ID) and Set Decorator (SD). He did early work as SD on Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (1925).
Willis worked on some of the studio’s major critical and commercial successes, including Queen Christina (1933, for ID), The Thin Man (1934, as AAD), Anna Karenina (1935, as AAD, Fritz Lang’s Fury (1936, as AAD), Camille (1936, as AAD), The Good Earth (1937, as AAD), Captains Courageous (1937, as AAD), Boys’ Town (1938, as AAD), The Women (1939), Ninotchka (1939, as SD), The Shop Around the Corner (1940), Waterloo Bridge (1940), Pride and Prejudice (1940), The Philadelphia Story (1940), Blossoms in the Dust (1941, winning an Oscar), Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1941), Woman of the Year (1942), Mrs Miniver (1942), Lassie Come Home (1943), Madame Curie (1943), Gaslight (1944, winning an Oscar), John Ford’s They Were Expendable (1944), The Yearling (1946, winning an Oscar), The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946), State of the Union (1948), Act of Violence (1948), Intruder in the Dust (1949), Little Women (1949, winning an Oscar), The Asphalt Jungle (1950), The Red Badge of Courage (1951), The Bad and the Beautiful 1952, winning an Oscar), Julius Caesar (1953, winning an Oscar), Bad Day at Black Rock (1955), Somebody Up There Likes Me (1956, winning an Oscar), Forbidden Planet (1956) and Lust for Life (1956).
Willis had a particularly extensive collaboration with Vincente Minnelli, decorating most of his musical and non-musical pictures
Edwin B Willis contributed to 153 musicals, around 70 per cent of MGM’s total output. It could be argued that this makes him the single most influential figure on the look of the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer musical. The pictures were:
Stanwood Rogers (1898-1963) was an art director who did most of his work at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. As a consequence, he rarely received full credit for the films he designed. He was cited as associate art director under Cedric Gibbons, even where he was himself responsible for the look of the film.
There is little information available about Rogers prior to his first MGM picture, Midnight Mary (1933). He was rarely assigned to the studio’s big pictures, making it all the more likely that he was the creator of most of the art design for those he did work on.
Rogers worked on four of the Marx Brothers’ MGM musicals, A Day at the Races, Go West, At the Circus and The Big Store, in addition to five others: Broadway to Hollywood, Stage Mother (on both of which he did receive full credit), Thoroughbreds Don’t Cry, Love Finds Andy Hardy and Free and Easy.
Benjamin Lewis (1894-1970) was a film editor who spent the whole of his career, forty-three years, working for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.
He started out working as an assistant editor on Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (1925), and obtained his first full credit a year later on The Devil’s Circus (1926), directed by Benjamin Christiansen during his sojourn in Hollywood.
Lewis edited some of MGM’s most prestigious pictures, as well as being a frequent editor on the money-making Andy Hardy series. He worked on Trader Horn (1931), Tarzan the Ape Man (1932), Dinner at Eight (1933) and The Good Earth (1937, uncredited).
In 1951, Lewis was given the unpleasant task of editing John Huston’s cut of The Red Badge of Courage down to 69 minutes.
Lewis worked on seven MGM musicals, across a thirty-four-year period: Broadway to Hollywood, Love Finds Andy Hardy, Strike Up the Band, Rio Rita, For Me and My Gal, Three Little Words and The Fastest Guitar Alive.
Ben Lewis’s brother was the venerated ‘B’ picture director, Joseph H Lewis.
Albert S Goodhart (1905-55) was a composer whose best-known song gained its fame from being featured in one of the world’s favourite musicals. In 1932, he collaborated with Arthur Freed on ‘Fit as a Fiddle’, which Freed later used to great effect in Singin’ in the Rain.
Goodhart worked in the UK for a few years in the mid-30s, where he received a commission for another iconic song. He co-wrote, with Sammy Lerner and Al Hoffman, ‘No One Can Like the Drummer Man’ for the film Young and Innocent (1937). Director Alfred Hitchcock used the number for the big reveal of the villain in the picture’s denouement.
Music for Broadway to Hollywood was Goodhart’s other contribution to Metro’s musical output.
Norbert F Brodine (1896-1970) had a forty-four year career as a cinematographer, working predominantly with Loretta Young in television for the last few years, for which he won an Emmy. He was credited on more than 130 pictures.
Having worked as an army photographer during the First World War, Brodine started out in Hollywood as a stills photographer, before shooting his first film for Goldwyn Pictures in 1919.
Brodine worked prolifically throughout the 1920s and 30s, including repeatedly for Hal Roach. He shot Libeled Lady (1936) for MGM, as well as Topper (1937), Topper Takes a Trip (1938) and Topper Returns (1941).
But Brodine did his best work after joining Twentieth Century-Fox in 1943: The House on 92nd Street (1945), 13 Rue Madeleine, Kiss of Death (both 1947) and The Desert Fox (1949) for Henry Hathaway; I Was a Male War Bride (1949) for Howard Hawks; and Thieves’ Highway (1949) for Jules Dassin.
Brodine shot three MGM musicals: Broadway to Hollywood, Nobody’s Baby and Swiss Miss. In addition, he was the cinematographer on the French-language version of A Lady’s Morals, titled Jenny Lind and filmed on the same sets as the original in 1931.
Female songwriters were relatively rare in Tin Pan Alley, but Carrie Northey (1866-1937) had a reputation as one of the most talented.
Roma made her stage debut aged three, and was later sent by her family to train at the New England Conservatory of Music. While still in her teens, she apparently conducted an orchestra in Canada, and was a gifted singer and pianist.
Caro Roma wrote a variety of types of song, including setting her own poetry to music. She wrote ‘coon’ songs in an exaggerated African-American idiom (popular at the time, less so now), songs with a religious theme, and sea songs.
Roma collaborated with composer Ernest Ball, and their ‘In the Garden of My Heart’ is featured in Broadway to Hollywood.
At the time of his death, the New Yorker described Ernest Roland Ball (1878-1927) as the most able ballad writer of his time, though scarcely known outside the profession.
Ball specialized in Irish ballads (though born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio), the two most famous being ‘When Irish Eyes are Smiling’ and ‘Mother Machree’. Both songs were collaborations with lyricist Chauncey Olcott, with George Graff Jr contributing to the former and Rida Johnson Young to the latter.
Numbers composed by Ball appear in four MGM musicals. In Broadway to Hollywood, Nelson Eddy sings ‘In the Garden of My Heart’, written with Caro Roma. An uncredited boy sings ‘When Irish Eyes are Smiling’ in Stage Mother and Jeanette MacDonald performs ‘Love Me and the World is Mine’ in San Francisco. Finally, it is back to Nelson Eddy for a rendition of ‘Irish Eyes’ in Let Freedom Ring.
Russian Anton Grigorjewitsch Rubinstein (1829-94) was a concert pianist, composer, teacher and founder of the St Petersburg Conservatory of Music.
Rubinstein was a key figure in the Romantic Era, writing operas, symphonies and many piano pieces. His most famous composition is probably ‘Melody in F’, written in 1852. This music was the basis for a ballet sequence in the abandoned MGM revue The March of Time, performed by the Albertina Rasch troupe. Some of the footage was later incorporated into Broadway to Hollywood.
Edgar McPhail Smith (1857-1938) was a librettist, occasional actor, and songwriter who contributed to an estimated 150 Broadway productions over a period of forty years. Much of his work was for the comedians and impresarios Joe Weber and Lew Fields, and his songs were performed by some of the biggest musical and comedy stars of the day, including Al Jolson and Marie Dressler.
Smith contributed the lyrics to only one standard. ‘Ma Blushin’ Rosie’ was written with John Goldberg, and is featured in MGM’s Broadway to Hollywood, which also shows one of Smith’s shows, Whoop-Dee-Do playing at one of Weber and Field’s theatres.
‘Heaven Will Protect the Working Girl’, written for Dressler, is performed by Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney in Strike Up the Band.
