Little seems to be known about David Cox (1906-19??), who designed costumes at MGM before moving to work with Dolly Tree at Fox in 1932. He is, nonetheless, a featured artist at the Victoria & Albert Museum, where a costume designed for Bessie Love to wear in The Broadway Melody is among the exhibits.
Cox also designed for The Hollywood Revue of 1929, It’s a Great Life, Chasing Rainbows, Call of the Flesh, Good News and Love in the Rough.
Douglas Graham Shearer (1899-1971) was working in MGM’s camera department when talking pictures were the latest thing and it has been suggested that he became one of the pioneers of the practical use of sound largely because no one else expressed an interest. He said “Overnight I became the one-man sound department”.
Shearer started out adding music and sound effects to White Shadows in the South Seas (1928) and went on to win five Academy Awards, four of them for musicals. While supervising the still rudimentary sound recording on The Broadway Melody, it was Shearer who suggested playing back the pre-recorded music when Thalberg ordered the big production number be redone. He was also the impetus behind the establishment of MGM’s famed music department.
As a department head, Shearer received a credit on almost a thousand pictures during his forty-year tenure, running Cedric Gibbons a close second. But he does appear to have been very hands-on in his approach, personally developing many innovations and technical improvements in screen sound.
Shearer received Academy Awards for Naughty Marietta, San Francisco, Strike Up the Band and The Great Caruso, and nominations for Maytime, Sweethearts, Balalaika and The Chocolate Soldier. He also won an Oscar nomination for his contribution to the special effects in The Wizard of Oz.
In addition, Shearer won seven awards for scientific and technical innovations.
Arthur Lange (1889-1956) was a prolific composer of songs, scores and incidental music for dozens of films at a variety of studios.
At MGM Lange began by composing and arranging music for the Buster Keaton ‘underwater’ sequence in The Hollywood Revue of 1929, where he also appeared onscreen conducting the orchestra. Lange also made an appearance as himself in Free and Easy. He was subsequently the musical arranger onSo This Is College, and composed and arranged forThe Great Ziegfeld and Let Freedom Ring.
Frances Charlotte Greenwood (1890-1977) had aspirations to be a serious actor, but found that her destiny was to make people laugh. This was, in part, owing to her very long legs and the things she could do with them while dancing; as she said herself, “I’m the only woman alive who can kick a giraffe in the eye”.
Greenwood appeared in many film musicals, though only three at MGM. In 1931 she was Pansy Potts, Bert Lahr’s love interest, in Flying High. There followed a gap of 22 years until Dangerous When Wet, and then, just three years later, The Opposite Sex.
Charlotte Greenwood also notched up one entry as a Metro songwriter when she and her husband Martin Broones contributed ‘Campus Capers’ to So This Is College.
Originally Alfred Breitenbach, German-born Fred Fisher (1875-1942) wrote the popular ‘Peg O’My Heart’ and many other Irish-themed ballads. He also co-wrote ‘Whispering Grass’ with his equally-successful daughter, Doris Fisher.
Songs by Fisher, usually written in collaboration with others, are featured in The Hollywood Revue of 1929, So This Is College, Chasing Rainbows, Children of Pleasure, For Me and My Gal and In the Good Old Summertime. He also contributed a number to The March of Time.
Martin Broones (1892-1971) was a prolific, if little-remembered, composer who worked in theatre, radio, television and moving pictures. He was also the creator and first director of MGM’s music department.
Broones only composed songs for two of Metro’s earliest musicals: The Hollywood Revue of 1929 and So This is College. For the latter, he collaborated on the number ‘Campus Capers’ with his wife, the actor and eccentric dancer Charlotte Greenwood.
Henrietta Frazer (1889-1966, née Henriette Gant) is not one of the big names of costume design. The only reference to her in Dressed A Century of Hollywood Costume Design is for helping Marion Davies spend $52,000 a year on clothes for her pictures.
It is a reasonable assumption that Frazer designed Davies’s military-style costume for The Hollywood Revue of 1929. Her other musical credits are for Hallelujah and So This Is College.
Leonard Smith (1894-1947) photographed his first film in 1915 and spent most of his career at Metro. He was nominated four times for an Academy Award, finally winning for The Yearling shortly before his death. Smith was best known for his Technicolor work, but most of the thirteen musicals he worked on were in black and white.
In the 1929-30 period Smith shot So This Is College, They Learned About Women and Free and Easy.
After a seven-year break he worked uncredited on A Day at the Races and Rosalie, photographed Thoroughbreds Don’t Cry, then shot the Marx Brothers next two pictures, At the Circus and Go West.
There followed Ship Ahoy and uncredited work on I Married an Angel and Seven Sweethearts. Finally, Smith photographed Best Foot Forward and Broadway Rhythm in colour.
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 brief career in talking pictures was less prestigious, 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 singled out by Martin Scorsese as neglected and as a forerunner of his own approach to depicting indigenous Americans in Killers of the Flower Moon (2023).
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.
