British-born William Henry Penn (1868-1929) would have to be described as an obscure composer and arranger of popular music from the early twentieth century.
Penn is one of those composers who hangs on to a small place in musical history by virtue of a single song. In his case, this was ‘The Honeysuckle and the Bee’, which he wrote in 1906, with lyrics by Albert H Fitz. Penn’s music was featured in Broadway to Hollywood, though the dance number appears to have been filmed for The March of Time.
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.
Julius Weiss (1900-85) liked to think of himself as the Fourth Stooge, having been producer and/or director on well over half of their output. He claimed to have heavily influenced and shaped their comedy.
White acted in a couple of films as a teenager, including The Birth of a Nation (1915). He was then a general dogsbody around various studios, ending up as an editor at Educational Pictures, where his brother Jack was producing comedies. White co-directed his first short film in 1924.
Jules White moved to MGM in 1930, where he wrote and directed short comedies, including the Dogville Comedies, satires starring trained dogs. He also co-directed Sidewalks of New York, starring Buster Keaton.
In 1933, White moved on again, this time to Columbia, where he was put in charge of the studio’s short subjects. Over the next couple of decades he produced over 360 pictures, and also acted as director on around 240, as well as contributing to their screenplays. It is claimed that by the 1950s he could put out a new short comedy with a single day’s shooting, largely by cannibalizing from earlier films.
Columbia stopped making shorts in 1957, but White went on to direct a couple of Three Stooges’ feature films.
Shortly before moving to Columbia in 1933, White shot retakes for Broadway to Hollywood, which featured two of the Stooges, More and Curly Howard.
The Crew
| Willard Mack | Director |
| Jules White | Director (uncredited) |
| Willard Mack | Screenplay |
| Edgar Allan Woolf | Screenplay |
| Robert E Hopkins | Dialogue (uncredited) |
| Gus Edwards | Songwriter (uncredited) |
| Al Goodhart | Composer (uncredited) |
| Edgar Allan Woolf | Lyricist (uncredited) |
| William H Penn | Composer (uncredited) |
| Dimitri Tiomkin | Composer (uncredited) |
| John Stromberg | Songwriter (uncredited) |
| Edgar Smith | Songwriter (uncredited) |
| Fred E Ahlert | Songwriter (uncredited) |
| Anton Rubinstein | Composer (uncredited) |
| Ernest Ball | Songwriter (uncredited) |
| Caro Roma | Songwriter (uncredited) |
| William Axt | Composer (uncredited) |
| Harry Rapf | Associate Producer |
| Norbert Brodine | Cinematographer |
| William Daniels | Cinematographer |
| William S Gray | Editor |
| Ben Lewis | Editor (uncredited) |
| Stan Rogers | Art Director |
| Edwin B Willis | Set Decorator |
| John Waters | Assistant Director (uncredited) |
| Douglas Shearer | Sound Recording Director |
| Sammy Lee | Choreographer |
| Albertina Rasch | Choreographer |
Edward Eleck Foster (1906-89) had a fairly anonymous thirty-six-year career, but worked with some of Hollywood’s finest filmmakers.
Sullivan started at the top in 1926, performing in Buster Keaton’s The General. Later, he appeared in Howard Hawks’s The Road to Glory (1936), Only Angels Have Wings (1939) and Ball of Fire (1941, and Frank Borzage’s Strange Cargo (1940).
He was in Hitchcock’s Saboteur (1942), George Stevens’s The More the Merrier (1943) and Raoul Walsh’s White Heat (1949). He played a slave in DeMille’s The Ten Commandments (1956), and one of his last films was Capra’s Pocketful of Miracles (1961).
Along the way, Sullivan appeared without credit (as was normally the case) in Metro’s Broadway to Hollywood.
William Arthur Sullivan (1891-1946) was a hard-working character who made around ninety films, none of which have attracted a great deal of attention from film historians. His best-known film may well be MGM’s musical Broadway to Hollywood, even though it is unclear what role he actually played.
Sullivan would have been 23 when he made his debut in the serial Million Dollar Mystery (1914). He bowed out with the Raoul Walsh picture Big Brown Eyes (1936), in the auspicious company of Cary Grant and Joan Bennett.
Edwin Forrest Taylor (1883-1965) had already acted on the stage and made over two dozen films when America’s belated involvement in the First World War interrupted his career.
He returned to the stage after military service, for a time leading his own company. Screen work began again in 1926, and by the time he retired, shortly before his death, he had appeared in well over 400 films and television episodes.
Taylor was a character actor, mainly in uncredited parts, including in a couple of hundred ‘B’ westerns. He occasionally showed up in more prestigious pictures, including Reap the Wild Wind (1942), Hangmen Also Die! (1943), Wilson (1944), The Sea of Grass (1947) and Rancho Notorious (1952).
Despite all those appearances, Taylor was only ine one Metro musical, as a film director in Broadway to Hollywood.
Robert David Somers (1932-1982) made his screen debut aged seven months, playing Eddie Quillan as a baby in the MGM musical Broadway to Hollywood.
Some sources suggest that Somers also appeared with the Little Rascals, though it is unclear whether or not this is accurate. His adult career in the cinema began in 1953 when he worked as both actor and stunt performer on The War of the Worlds. Stunt work in film and television constituted the major part of his work over the next twenty years. Most of his work would appear to be uncredited and, in many cases, unrecorded.
Thomas Joseph Nawn (1863-1949) was a Scottish-born vaudevillian who specialized for many years in playing comic Irishmen. He and his wife Hettie toured the world with the Tom Nawn Polite Vaudeville Company, an iteration of which makes an appearance in MGM’s Broadway to Hollywood.
Nawn was in a few silent comedy pictures, most notably Buster Keaton’s masterpiece The General (1926).
Charles Rice (dates unknown) and Fred Cady (dates unknown) were vaudeville and burlesque performers who established a long-running partnership in 1900. They also worked in musical theatre, including touring productions of the Weber-Fields comedy Fiddle Dee Dee.
They appeared separately in a handful of films, and were seen together in MGM’s Broadway to Hollywood.
