Edwin Justus Mayer (1896-1960) was a journalist and occasional playwright who, quite enterprisingly, wrote an autobiography when he was 25 and had achieved very little. From 1927 to 1945 he worked on a number of Hollywood films; in his own words, “I never gave up the stage, the stage gave me up. The pictures gave me a living and the theatre wouldn’t. I see no shame in using your professional weapons to make a living.” His crowning achievement was his final screenplay, for Lubitsch’s To Be Or Not to Be (1945).
Mayer had earlier been one of the three writers credited with the script for In Gay Madrid.
Edward Salisbury Fields (1878-1936) was, amongst other things, a popular playwright, several of whose comedies were adapted into films.
In the early 1930s Fields undertook writing projects for various Hollywood studios. Amongst these was a contribution to the screenplay for MGM’s In Gay Madrid.
Robert Howard Ober (1881-1950) was an actor with considerable stage experience when he started taking screen roles in the early 1920s. His most notable appearance was as John Gilbert’s brother in King Vidor’s The Big Parade (1925).
Although he never directed a film, Ober does appear to have been assigned some directorial tasks by MGM, one of which was to shoot retakes for In Gay Madrid after Robert Z Leonard had moved on to his next film.
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”, and was responsible, amongst other things, for the butchering of John Huston’s The Red Badge of Courage (1951).
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.
Charles Edgar Schoenbaum (1893-1951) was a hard-working cinematographer whose earliest credit seems to be working for Cecil B DeMille at Paramount in 1917, but who spent much of his career at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. He was sometimes credited as Charles E Schoenbaum, and even C Edgar Schoenbaum.
His work was not greatly celebrated–his sole Academy Award nomination was for Little Women in 1949–but he was valued for his work ethic.
Schoenbaum worked on five MGM musicals over a twenty-year period, from The Rogue Song in 1930 to Duchess of Idaho in 1950. In between came Here Comes the Band and the second version of Good News. He was also drafted in by Rouben Mamouian to replace Charles Rosher on Summer Holiday.
German-born Paul Levy (1889-1932) was an unsuccessful actor who worked as a stage manager on Broadway before relocating to Hollywood. After some writing and directing, he settled at MGM and became assistant to Irving Thalberg, and then a production supervisor.
Bern’s sole involvement in musicals was as the uncredited producer of The Rogue Song.
Bern is best remembered today for all the wrong reasons. A few months after marrying star Jean Harlow in 1932, he was found dead from gunshot wounds under mysterious circumstances.
Franz Lehár (1870-1948), born in what is now Hungary, was one of the most popular composers of operettas in the first half of the twentieth century.
Lehár’s best-known work, The Merry Widow (1905), was filmed three times by MGM, once as a silent film in 1925, and twice in musical form, in 1934 and 1952.
Some of the music from Lehár’s Gypsy Love (1910) is used in The Rogue Song. The musical is sometimes described as an adaptation of the operetta, but their two stories have no similarities.
With a career that lasted more than thirty years, Marion Benson Owens (1888-1973) was undoubtedly one of the most important writers in American cinema, even though her name is not well known today. She worked with Anita Loos on a film for D W Griffith, then became a writer for pioneer filmmaker Lois Weber, developing into one of the most prolific and skilled screenwriters in Hollywood.
Some of the major pictures worked on by Marion include: The Big House (1930), for which she won an Academy Award; Garbo’s first talkie, Anna Christie (1931); The Champ (1931), bringing a second Academy Award; Dinner at Eight (1933); Camille (1936); and The Good Earth (1937), uncredited.
Marion’s extensive work for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer included eight musicals. She co-wrote The Rogue Song, and immediately followed this with an uncredited contribution to In Gay Madrid. She wrote the screenplay for the 1930 version of Good News, and then worked without credit on Going Hollywood, Maytime, Rosalie, Presenting Lily Mars and, her swan song, The Pirate.
John Colton (1887-1946) was a successful playwright who was enticed to Hollywood by MGM in 1927, to write titles for some of their last silent films. This was not taxing work, with Colton’s name in the credits being more valuable than anything he wrote.
The Broadway hit Rain, co-written by Colton with Clemence Randolph, was filmed by MGM in 1928 as Sadie Thompson, but the author was not invited to work on it. Other films based on Colton’s plays were The Shanghai Gesture (1941) and Hitchcock’s Under Capricorn (1949).
Colton contributed to conventional screenplays after the introduction of sound, including for three MGM musicals: The Rogue Song, Call of the Flesh and The Cuban Love Song. All three lent themselves to the interest in exotic settings that Colton demonstrated in his plays.
