The Musicals of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Category: Writers

  • Anita Loos

    Corinne Anita Loos (1888-1981) habitually lied about her age, but 1888 is the most likely year. Her name is now inextricably linked with her most famous novel, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1925) and its adaptations, but she was connected with the cinema for most of her career.

    Loos started in public life as a child performer on the stage, and only later tried her hand at writing. In 1911, she submitted a story idea to the Biograph studio. It is often claimed that her first filmed script was D W Griffith’s The Musketeers of Pig Alley (1912), but it was actually Griffith’s The New York Hat (1912), with Mary Pickford. It was only when she visited the studio some time later that Griffith discovered that ‘A Loos’ was female. She would eventually write an estimated 100 scenarios for Biograph and/or Griffith, and for the Lubin studio. Most famously, she provided the intertitles for Intolerance (1916).

    Loos moved to New York in 1918 to write for Famous Players-Lasky. She also published two books on screenwriting, and wrote her first stage play in 1923. Only in 1931 did Loos settle in Hollywood, signing a contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Prominent amongst her screenplays were Red-Headed Woman (1932), the musical San Francisco, for which she was Oscar nominated, and The Women (1939).

    Loos’s final Hollywood film was A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945, dialogue only), after which she returned to New York and worked in other mediums.

    In addition to San Francisco, Loos worked uncredited on The Cat and the Fiddle and Babes in Arms, and wrote the screenplay for I Married an Angel.

  • Sam Spewack

    Samuel Spewack (1899-1971) travelled from what is now Ukraine to the USA as a child and was educated at Columbia University. He became a journalist, wrote a few novels and, after marrying Bella Cohen, worked with her in Moscow for four years.

    In the late 1920s, he and Bella began writing plays together, a number of which were performed on Broadway. Their work was also adapted for the cinema. In 1948, they collaborated with Cole Porter, writing the book for the musical Kiss Me, Kate. Broadly speaking, Sam took responsibility for the plot and structure of their work, while Bella was noted for her crackling dialogue.

    The Spewacks’ first work directly for the screen was providing additional dialogue for Paramount’s Caught (1931). They contributed to fourteen other features, including adapting their own play, Clear All Wires! (1933).

    In 1940, they wrote the screenplay for the Cary Grant-Irene Dunn comedy My Favourite Wife, which earned them an Oscar nomination.

    Bella and Sam Spewack wrote one MGM musical, The Cat and the Fiddle. In addition, Kiss Me, Kate was filmed by the studio in 1953.

  • Bella Spewack

    Bella Cohen (1899-1990) travelled from Romania to the USA as a child and grew up poor in New York. She became a journalist and, with her husband Sam Spewack, worked in Moscow for four years.

    In the late 1920s, she and Sam began writing plays together, a number of which were performed on Broadway. Their work was also adapted for the cinema. In 1948, they collaborated with Cole Porter, writing the book for the musical Kiss Me, Kate. Broadly speaking, Sam took responsibility for the plot and structure of their work, while Bella was noted for her crackling dialogue.

    The Spewacks’ first work directly for the screen was providing additional dialogue for Paramount’s Caught (1931). They contributed to fourteen other features, including adapting their own play, Clear All Wires! (1933).

    In 1940, they wrote the screenplay for the Cary Grant-Irene Dunn comedy My Favourite Wife, which earned them an Oscar nomination.

    Bella and Sam Spewack wrote one MGM musical, The Cat and the Fiddle, and some sources state that Bella worked uncredited on Naughty Marietta. In addition, Kiss Me, Kate was filmed by the studio in 1953.

  • Donald Ogden Stewart

    Donald Ogden Stewart (1894-1980) began writing after graduating from Yale and military service during the First World War. He found success writing satirical comedy, and became a member of the Algonquin Round Table. In the 1920s he wrote plays that were performed on Broadway, and published a novel.

    Stewart’s first work for the cinema was Brown of Harvard (1926), an adaptation of a Rida Johnson Young story. This was followed by contributions to around 40 Hollywood screenplays, including Dinner at Eight (1934), The Barretts of Wimpole Street (1934), The Prisoner of Zenda (1937), Holiday (1938), Love Affair (1939), The Philadelphia Story (1940, winning the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay) and An Affair to Remember (1957).

    His work on An Affair to Remember was uncredited because Stewart had by then been blacklisted owing to his membership of the Communist Party. He and his wife eventually moved to the UK, where Stewart wrote for the cinema and for television. He remained there for the rest of his life.

    Stewart worked on the screenplays of three Metro musicals: Going Hollywood, Reckless (uncredited) and Smilin’ Through.

  • David O Selznick

    David Selznick (1902-65, the ‘O’ was just an initial he adopted), was one of Golden Age Hollywood’s most successful independent producers, though his time at the top was not lengthy. His name will always be linked with Gone with the Wind (1939), the epic Civil War saga, and with Rebecca (1940), Alfred Hitchcock’s first American film. The two productions made him the only producer to win Best Picture Oscars in successive years.

    Selznick was born into a film family (his father was also a producer). Early on, he worked for MGM, Paramount and RKO before striking out on his own. Highlights of this studio period were What Price Hollywood? (1932), King Kong (1933), Dinner at Eight (1933), David Copperfield (1935) and Anna Karenina (1935).

    For Selznick International he produced Nothing Sacred (1937), Intermezzo (1939), Spellbound (1945) and Duel in the Sun (1946). Later on, he produced and then suppressed the Powell-Pressburger masterpiece Gone to Earth (1950), reshooting sections, re-editing it and releasing it under another title. The film was not seen as intended until a restoration in 1985.

    Selznick’s last major production was A Farewell to Arms (1957).

    During his time with MGM, Selznick produced two musicals: Dancing Lady and Reckless (for which he also wrote the original story under the name Oliver Jeffries).

  • P J Wolfson

    Pinkus Jacob Wolfson (1909-73) was a trained pharmacist who took to writing novels. His first, Bodies Are Dust, was published in 1931.

    The book’s success secured Wolfson an offer to write for the screen, and he started at Universal, forming a partnership with Allen Rivkin. They wrote around ten screenplays together in two years. Altogether, Wolfson worked on around thirty-five films in 23 years. He also worked as producer on half a dozen pictures, later moving into television.

    Wolfson co-wrote Mad Love (1935), and two Fred Astaire pictures at RKO (Shall We Dance and Damsel in Distress (both 1937). He also worked on the George Steven comedy Vivacious Lady (1938). In 1939 he directed for RKO a film with the sensational title Boy Slaves, an exposé of child labour.

    Wolfson co-wrote two MGM musicals, Dancing Lady and Reckless.

  • Allen Rivkin

    Allen Irwin Rivkin (1903-90) started out as an advertising copy writer before travelling to Hollywood to work on publicity for RKO.

    Rivkin met P J Wolfson and they established a screenwriting partnership at Universal, their first picture being Night World (1932). Over the next thirty years, working with Wolfson and also with his own wife, Laura Kerr, Rivkin contributed to about fifty screenplays, and also helped to establish the Screenwriters Guild.

    Rivkin’s more notable work included What Price Hollywood? (1932), Dead Reckoning (1946) and The Farmer’s Daughter (1947).

    He co-wrote three MGM musicals, Dancing Lady and, in the 1950s, Grounds for Marriage  and The Strip.

    Rivkin gave up screenwriting in 1962 to work full time for the Writers Guild of America.

  • Robert Benchley

    Humourist Robert Charles Bentley (1889-1945) made his name writing for Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, and carousing with the other intellectuals (and Harpo Marx) at the Algonquin Round Table. He was also well known as a drama critic and reluctant stage performer.

    Benchley appeared in films from 1928 (having earlier written titles, in two distinctly different ways. His first appearances were in very early Movietone sound shorts, in which he recreated revue monologues such as The Treasurer’s Report and  The Sex Life of the Polyp (both 1928). Later on, he wrote and starred in a series of ‘instructional’ comedy shorts for MGM, starting with How to Sleep (1935), which won the Best Short Film Oscar. Other titles, in many of which he took the name Joe Doakes, included How to Be a Detective (1936), How to Figure Income Tax (1938) and Seeing Your Doctor (1939). After leaving MGM, who did not treat him well, Benchley made further shorts at Paramount. Many of these lecture films were based on his own earlier written material.

    Alongside this, Benchley had a peculiar career as a character actor in around 50 feature films. Frequently cast as a drunk (reflecting his personal proclivity), Benchley was often permitted to write his own dialogue. Notable appearances included Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent (1940), The Major and the Minor (very much restricted to speaking Wilder-Brackett lines and I Married a Witch (both 1942).

    Benchley’s two forays into MGM musicals were supporting roles in Dancing Lady and Broadway Melody of 1938.

    Benchley’s early death was the result of cirrhosis of the liver.

  • Bradford Ropes

    Bradford Ropes (1905-66) was one of the people who revived–perhaps saved–the Hollywood musical after its total slump in 1932. It was in that year that he published, at the age of 27, a novel called 42nd Street, inspired by his own experiences as a performer in vaudeville and, more specifically, on Broadway. The subsequent 1933 adaptation by Warner Bros revived the musical genre and became arguably the most successful musical of the first ten years of talking pictures.

    Ropes’s second novel, Stage Mother, came out in 1933 and was rushed into production by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Less successful as a musical–it had no Busby Berkeley–it was a grittier film, closer to the source novel. This is attributable to the fact that Ropes co-wrote the screenplay.

    Ropes went on to sign a contract with, of all studios, Republic, which resulted in some of the 1930s more interesting ‘B’ westerns. He also did further work for MGM, providing the stories for Hullabaloo and Ship Ahoy.

    In the 1950s, Ropes moved into writing for television

  • 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.

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