Byron Morgan (1889-1963) began screenwriting in the silent period but did some of his best work in talkies. He worked with Laurel and Hardy on Way Out West (1930) and Sons of the Desert (1933) and wrote the excellent Five Star Final (1931) for Warner Bros.
Morgan’s sole contribution to MGM musicals was collaborating on the story of It’s a Great Life.
Crane Wilbur (1886-1973) acted in his first film in 1910 and found fame opposite Pearl White in The Perils of Pauline (1913). He also became a scenarist, and directed his first picture in 1916. His final film as writer-director was House of Women in 1962.
In 1929 Wilbur wrote a play, Children of Pleasure, which he helped adapt into a musical the following year. He also wrote Lord Byron of Broadway and made an uncredited appearance in It’s a Great Life.
We may never know how many screenplays Robert E Hopkins (1886-1966) contributed to if Thomas Schatz’s description of him prowling the Culver City lot providing one-liners as required is accurate. We certainly know he contributed to The Hollywood Revue of 1929, Chasing Rainbows, Children of Pleasure (uncredited), Love in the Rough and The Cuban Love Song.
Nineteen-thirty-six was a year of extremes. He got an Academy Award nomination for providing the story for San Francisco, and wrote without credit for Hollywood Party. Such was the life of a contract writer at MGM.
Charles Francis Reisner (1887-1962) was an actor and director who might best be described as ‘competent’. Yet he managed, in both careers, to be associated with some very impressive projects. Reisner acted with Chaplin in A Dog’s Life (1918), The Kid (1921) and The Pilgrim (1923), and also worked for him as a gag writer. And he was the named director on Keaton’s masterpiece, Steamboat Bill Jr (1928). In fact, it was Reisner who came up with the original story idea, and who was literally on his knees praying while Keaton performed the stunt where the house fell down around him.
Reisner’s career at MGM was less prestigious, though he was considered a capable pair of hands. This is why he was brought in to rescue The Hollywood Revue of 1929 when Christy Cabanne’s work was judged to be lacking by Irving Thalberg.
From there Reisner moved straight on to directing Chasing Rainbows, to which he also contributed dialogue. He then directed Love in the Rough and was working on The March of time when it was abandoned. His next completed musical was Flying High.
Reisner did uncredited writing for Hollywood Party and was one of its eight directors. He directed Student Tour, then took a break from musicals after a busy couple of years. He returned in 1941 to direct The Big Store, the last and least of the Marx Brothers’ films for Metro.
In 1943 Reisner made Swing Fever, and ended his career in MGM musicals with Meet the People.
Joseph White Farnham (1884-1931) is the permanent holder of two cinematic records. He was the only person to receive an Academy Award for writing title cards, for The Fair Co-Ed (1927), Laugh, Clown, Laugh and Telling the World (both 1928). And he was the first winner of an Academy Award to die.
Farnham’s more ignominious claim to fame is that it was he who reduced Erich Von Stroheim’s Greed (1924) to the bowdlerized version we have today. Von Stroheim said it “was like seeing a corpse in a graveyard…I found a thin part of the backbone and a little bone of the shoulder”.
Farnham’s brief career in talking pictures was less prestigious and/or deplorable, but did include work on six Metro musicals. He wrote a skit for The Hollywood Revue of 1929 and titles for Marianne (both without credit). He then contributed dialogue to So This Is College, Montana Moon, Good News and Love in the Rough. Farnham also appeared as himself in Free and Easy.
Delmer Lawrence Daves (1904-77) started out as a prop boy, dabbled in acting and screenwriting, and became a director with a distinctive style. He was singled out by Martin Scorsese as a neglected artist, and as a forerunner of his own approach to depicting indigenous Americans in Killers of the Flower Moon (2023). Daves’s best-known films include the westerns Broken Arrow (1950) and 3:10 to Yuma (1957).
In his mid-twenties Daves co-wrote So This Is College, and also appeared onscreen as one of the USC footballers. Sticking with the college background, he then played Beef in Good News.
Albert Isaac Boasberg (1891-1937) played a number of roles in his short career but was essentially a gag writer. In that capacity he worked with many of the major vaudeville and radio stars of the day, including Jack Benny, Bob Hope, and Burns and Allen. In Hollywood, he also wrote for and, on occasion, directed dozens of shorts and features, most notably Battling Butler (1926) and The General (1927) with Buster Keaton.
Boasberg contributed to seven MGM musicals. He co-wrote So This Is College, (and also composed song lyrics, then worked on It’s a Great Life and Chasing Rainbows. Free and Easy reunited him, in less auspicious circumstances, with Keaton, and he provided additional dialogue for The Florodora Girl.
Back in his comfort zone, Boasberg script-doctored for the Marx Brothers in A Night at the Opera, and then wrote most of the scripted jokes for A Day at the Races. Joe Adamson, in his book about the Marx Brothers, wrote of Boasberg that his “monumental ingenuity at packing sentences with insanities was matched only by his monumental indifference to the logical progression of a plotline”.
Dale Van Every (1896-1976) was a highly-paid screenwriter, Oscar-nominated for Captains Courageous (1937). His sole MGM musical credit was for contributing the story of Marianne. Van Every had been stationed in France during the war, which may or may not have qualified him for the task.
Gladys Buchanan Unger (1884/5-1940) was an Anglo-American playwright and occasional scenarist. She contributed dialogue to Marianne and, the following year, helped to flesh out Jeanie MacPherson’s screenplay for Madam Satan.
Laurence Stallings (1894-1968) is best known for co-authoring, with Maxwell Anderson, the First World War play What Price Glory?, which was filmed twice, and for writing the novel that formed the basis of The Big Parade (1925). Informed by his own wartime experiences, these helped qualify Stallings to contribute dialogue to the doughboy story Marianne.
Later in his career Stallings contributed to three of John Ford’s more personal pictures: Three Godfathers (1948), She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949) and The Sun Shines Bright (1953). But, after Marianne, his only involvement in MGM musicals was uncredited work on Let Freedom Ring and At the Circus.
