The Musicals of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Category: Writers

  • Delmer Daves

    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. 

  • Al Boasberg

    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

    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 Unger

    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

    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. 

  • Ransom Rideout

    In 1928 Ransom Rideout (1889-1975) had some success in New York with Goin’ Home, a melodrama about miscegenation in which, regrettably, the central character was played by an actor in blackface.This may or may not have qualified him to contribute dialogue to Hallelujah, which stands as his sole contribution to the cinema.  

  • Richard Schayer

    Richard Schayer (1880-1956) helped to write over 100 films during a forty-year career, and perhaps staked his claim to a place on the lower levels of immortality by co-writing the treatment that became Universal’s The Mummy (1932). 

    While at MGM, Schayer worked on four of the studio’s early musicals. He wrote the treatment for Hallelujah, developing King Vidor’s basic idea. In the same year he adapted a French play from 1851 into the Roman Novarro swashbuckler Devil-May-Care. He then displayed his versatility by scripting Free and Easy for Buster Keaton and turning a recent Crane Wilbur play into Children of Pleasure. 

    By 1932, Schayer was a member of the Laemmles’ team at Universal.

  • Wanda Tuchock

    Writing the scenario forHallelujah was the only MGM musical credit for Wanda Tuchock (1898-1985), though she did script Youth Will Be Served (1940) for 20th Century-Fox. Tuchock worked in most of the other major genres during her career, and was also one of only three women credited as a Hollywood director during the 1930s (the others being Dorothy Arzner and the less well-known Dorothy Davenport).

  • Norman Houston

    Norman Houston (1887-1958) was a sometime actor and director who spent most of his career as a screenwriter, making his mark as one of the principal writers on the extended Hopalong Cassidy series. His limited involvement in MGM’s musicals involved contributing dialogue to The Broadway Melody and directing, without credit, some of the skits in The Hollywood Revue of 1929.

  • Sarah Y Mason

    Sarah Y Mason (1896-1980) is one of the forgotten women of early Hollywood, having made a significant contribution, and leaving little information behind. I am grateful to the Women Film Pioneers Project for summarizing what information there is. 

    Dr Roseanne Welch has credited Mason with being the person to name and develop the role of ‘continuity girl’ (now script supervisor): the person on set with responsibility for ensuring continuity from shot to shot and scene to scene. This was in 1918, when she began working for Douglas Fairbanks. 

    Mason later moved into script-writing, often in partnership with her husband, Victor Heerman. It was she who fleshed out Edmund Goulding’s story for The Broadway Melody into a continuity script, with dialogue added later by James Gleason and Norman Houston.

    Mason went on to script They Learned About Women and to adapt Love in the Rough from its stage original. She also worked uncredited on Meet Me in St Louis. She and Heerman won the Best Adaptation Oscar for Little Women (1933). 

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