The Musicals of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Category: Writers

  • Edgar Allan Woolf

    Edgar Allan Woolf (1881-1943) was a successful screenwriter, dramatist and songwriter whose fame now rests firmly on being co-writer of the screenplay for The Wizard of Oz. He and regular collaborator Florence Ryerson developed a draft produced by Noel Langley, introducing the character of Professor Marvel into the Kansas scenes.

    After graduating from university, Woolf was briefly an actor before turning to writing material for vaudeville performers. He also wrote the book for the 1906 musical comedy Mam’zelle Champagne, which became infamous when a performance was interrupted by the murder of Stanford White, as depicted in The Girl on the Red Velvet Swing (1955).

    After a quarter of a century writing for Broadway, Woolf, who had previously dabbled in screenwriting for silent films in New York,signed a contract to join MGM. Pictures he worked on included Freaks, Grand Hotel and John Ford’s Flesh (all 1932).

    In addition to The Wizard of Oz, Woolf worked on seven other MGM musicals, beginning with Broadway to Hollywood, for which he also wrote a song. Subsequent pictures were Hollywood Party, The Night is Young, Everybody Sing and Ice Follies of 1939. After Oz came Babes in Arms and the posthumously-released Ziegfeld Follies.

  • Charley Rogers

    Charles Rogers (1887-1956) is generally known as Charley and, like his namesake Charlie Chaplin and his close friend Stan Laurel, he started out working in British music halls, before emigrating to the United States in 1912.

    In the same year, Rogers played the Artful Dodger in Oliver Twist, one of the earliest multi-reel features, produced by a New York studio. He continued to work in the East Coast film industry for several years, before finally making his way to Hollywood. 

    In 1927, Rogers appeared uncredited in Love ‘em and Feed ‘em, and stayed at the Hal Roach Studios for many years, quickly moving into writing and directing.

    Rogers has been described as, in creative terms, second only to Stan Laurel on the Roach lot, and he worked on a number of Laurel and Hardy’s best shorts and features. These included, as a gag writer, We Faw Down, Two Tars (both 1928), Hog Wild and Laughing Gravy (both 1930). Rogers contributed the original stories and screenplays for Block-Heads (1938), A Chump at Oxford and Saps at Sea (both 1940). 

    Rogers directed or co-directed, and also contributed to the writing of, three of Laurel and Hardy’s operettas: The Devil’s Brother, Babes in Toyland (in which he also played Simple Simon) and The Bohemian Girl. He also wrote gags for Swiss Miss. 

    Away from Laurel and Hardy, Rogers played Josef Goebbels in the studio’s bizarre wartime semi-feature That Nazty Nuisance (1943). One of his last jobs was an uncredited appearance in Chaplin’s Limelight (1952). 

  • Paul Hervey Fox

    Paul Hervey Fox (1894-1956) was a dramatist, novelist and screenwriter of modest abilities and moderate success.

    One of Fox’s Broadway productions was successful enough to secure him an invitation to work in Hollywood. In 1930, he wrote Prince of Diamonds for Columbia, and the following year he contributed dialogue to MGM’s The Cuban Love Song, perhaps seen as qualified by his marriage to Cuban writer Elsie de Sola. (In a bizarre incident in 1923, they had handed over their new-born daughter to a founding hospital. She grew up to be the celebrated writer Paula Fox.)

    Alcohol impeded Fox’s career. Though he contributed some interesting stories, most notably for the Kay Francis pre-code vehicle Mandalay (1934).

  • C Gardner Sullivan

    Charles Gardner Sullivan (1884-1965) was a prolific screenwriter with around 200 credits, the great majority of which were from the silent era. He was noted for the unusual amount of directorial detail included in his screenplays. Producer Jesse Lasky, speaking of Sullivan’s collaboration with Cecil B DeMille on films like The Buccaneer (1938) and Union Pacific (1939), described him as “the methodical giant who composed sequences of short shots and elaborately prepared camera angles that were calculated to give DeMille pictures a tremendous sense of visual place”.

    It was while working as a journalist that Sullivan began contributing story ideas to film studios. The first accepted would seem to have been Her Polished Family (1912), though this is not included by IMDb.

    When Lee Surrenders (1912) was filmed by Thomas Ince, beginning a long collaboration between Sullivan and the producer/director. In 1914, the writer relocated to Hollywood and joined Ince’s permanent staff. He worked on some of Ince’s most successful pictures, and co-wrote Civilization (1916), the big-budget anti-war film. It was a subject he would return to fourteen years later, when he supervised the screenplay for All Quiet on the Western Front (1930).

    By 1920, Sullivan was the highest-paid writer in Hollywood and, for a time, ran his own production company. 

    Sullivan made one contribution to MGM’s musicals, co-writing, with Bess Meredyth, the screenplay for The Cuban Love Song. 

  • John Lynch

    John G Lynch (1870-1936) was a successful business person operating a chain of theatres on the East coast who, in his mid-forties, contributed a story to a New York picture company and began a new career.

    Within a few years he was working for the Thomas Ince Corporation in Hollywood, churning out stories and occasional screenplays. When he died in 1936, he was working as an editorial supervisor at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. 

    Lynch is credited with Adaptation on The Cuban Love Song, but it is unclear what he adapted, since the picture appears to be an original story.

  • Cyril Hume

    Former journalist and occasional novelist Cyril Joseph Hume (1900-1966) had a fairly workaday career as a Hollywood screenwriter. The high point of the 1930s was adapting Tarzan the Ape Man (1932) and contributing to several of its sequels, and co-writing Flying Down to Rio (1933).

    Then, in 1956, came Hume’s annus mirabilis. He wrote the screenplay for the science-fiction classic Forbidden Planet, and followed it up by co-writing the estimable Nicholas Ray picture Bigger Than Life.

    Early in his career, Hume contributed dialogue to New Moon.

  • Arthur Richman

    Arthur Reichman (1886-1944) was a successful playwright who dabbled in screenwriting during the 1930s.

    Richman wrote a string of successful plays performed on Broadway in the 1920, including The Awful Truth (1922), which was filmed several times, most successfully with Cary Grant and Irene Dunn in 1937. In 1924, he was elected President of the Dramatists Guild of America.

    Richman’s screen work was generally uninspiring, though he did work without credit on Imitation of Life (1934). For MGM, he contributed dialogue to A Lady’s Morals.

  • John Meehan

    John Meehan (1890-1954) was a Canadian actor and dramatist with some limited success on Broadway who made his greatest mark as a screenwriter for MGM. His play Bless You, Sister (1927) was the source for Frank Capra’s The Miracle Woman (1931). 

    Meehan signed a contract with the studio in 1929, along with many other Broadway alumni. Over the next twenty years, he worked on many pictures, including A Free Soul (1931), Dinner at Eight (1933, uncredited) and Boy’s Town (1938). 

    Meehan worked on four Metro musicals: A Lady’s Morals, Stage Mother, Babes in Arms and Three Daring Daughters.

  • Claudine West

    Ivy Claudine Godber (1890-1943) was a British novelist and playwright (to little lasting effect, it would seem), who journeyed to Hollywood in 1929 to write for the talking pictures, where she found considerable success.

    Signed up by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, West contributed to the scripts of some of the studio’s most successful films of the 30s and early 40s. These included Queen Christina (1933, uncredited), The Barretts of Wimpole Street (1934), The Good Earth (1937), Goodbye, Mr Chips (1939), Mrs Miniver and Random Harvest (both 1942). She shared Oscars for the last three pictures.

    West worked on four Metro musicals: A Lady’s Morals and, without credit, Maytime, The Firefly and The Chocolate Soldier.

    Claudine West worked as a codebreaker during the First World War, and it is noticeable that Mrs Miniver and her screenplay for Frank Borzage’s The Mortal Storm (1940) were as fervently anti-Nazi as might be expected from somone with brothers serving in the RAF at the time.

  • Gilbert Emery

    Gilbert Emery Bensley Pottle (1875-1945) was a successful author and playwright (sometimes under the name Emery Pottle) both before and during his career as a screen character actor. At least one of his plays, The Hero (1921), has been revived in the 21st century.

    Following some stage acting, Emery made his first film, for Vitagraph, in 1921, but only appeared in one other silent film. From 1929 onwards, however, he accumulated around 80 credits.

    Emery only appeared in one MGM musical, A Lady’s Morals, but he also contributed to the screenplays of a number of pictures, one of which was The Cuban Love Song. 

Social media & sharing icons powered by UltimatelySocial
RSS
Facebook
X (Twitter)
WhatsApp
Copy link
URL has been copied successfully!