Karl E Zindt (1909-78) was a sound engineer who started out in Douglas Shearer’s new sound department at MGM. While there, he worked on the highly successful Grand Hotel (1932) and, with slightly less prestige, Free and Easy. Thereafter, Zint spent most of his career on Poverty Row aand in television.
Tag: MGM musical
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Karl Zint
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George Todd
George Todd (1???-1???) is a mysterious figure. Both IMDb and the American Film Institute are certain that he was a cutter on Free and Easy and Children of Pleasure…and that’s it.
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William LeVanway
William LeVanway (1896-1957) was an editor who spent his entire career at Metro-Goldwyn Mayer, latterly as head of the editing department. Unlike Douglas Shearer and Cedric Gibbons, he was not credited on every film.
While still undertaking editing assignments, LeVanway worked on the silent version of The Broadway Melody (1929), and was the cutter on Free and Easy, Good News and A Night at the Opera. He was the supervising editor for An American in Paris and Singin’ in the Rain.
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Paul Dickey
Paul Bert Dickey (1883-1933) was a former vaudeville performer who partnered with Charles W Goddard to write a number of successful plays. The best-known of these is The Ghost Breaker (1909), which was filmed at least four times, most famously with Bob Hope and Paulette Goddard in 1940.
Dickey also directed in the theatre, notably the first production of the musical Rose-Marie in 1924. He acted as well, but only appeared in one film, playing Guy of Gisbourne opposite Douglas Fairbanks in Robin Hood (1922). His acting career was hampered by health problems.
Dickey undertook occasional screenwriting assignments, and provided the adaptation for Free and Easy.
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Edward Sedgwick
Edward Sedgwick Jr (1889-1953) was a colleague and friend of Buster Keaton and, like him, started working in a family vaudeville act at a young age. He acted in his first comedy short in 1914, and started directing in 1920. Sedgwick’s first directorial assignment was making episodes of a serial based on the French Fantômas character.
Although is today associated with Keaton and comedy, Sedgwick worked in a variety of genres during the 1920s, including many westerns. He also did uncredited work on Lon Chaney’s The Phantom of the Opera (1925).
Sedgwick joined MGM in 1926, and went on to direct most of Keaton’s films at the studio, including his first talking picture, Free and Easy.
Some years later Sedgwick did uncredited work on Easy to Wed and Excuse My Dust.
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Doris McMahon
Doris McMahon (1910-61) was a performer whose short, mostly precode, career could largely be described as scantily clad.
She was in three MGM musicals, Free and Easy, Children of Pleasure and Madam Satan.
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Theodore Lorch
Theodore Andrew Lorch (1873-1947) was a busy supporting player who notched up over 170 screen appearances, most of those in the sound era being uncredited. His adaptability is indicated by a sample of his work in 1934: an abortionist (The Road to Ruin), a ringmaster (A Modern Hero), an executioner (The Affairs of Cellini), a jury member (Two Heads on a Pillow) and a native fakir (Kid Millions).
Lorch found time to be in three Metro musicals: Free and Easy, A Lady’s Morals and Reckless.
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Lottice Howell
Lottice Howell (1897-1982) was a versatile soprano who was happy in both opera and the vaudeville stage.
Howell signed a contract with MGM in 1929, but only appeared in a handful of films before returning to the stage. Two of these were the musicals Free and Easy and In Gay Madrid.
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Cecil B DeMille
Cecil Blount DeMille (1881-1959) was one of the founders of Hollywood cinema. After a fairly successful career as a stage actor, and less success as a playwright, he helped to found the Jesse L Lasky Feature Play Company (later Paramount) in 1913. DeMille and a team of actors and technicians relocated from New York to Los Angeles and established the first studio in the Hollywood area. His first production was The Squawman (1914), a story he remade twice, in 1918 and 1931.
DeMille produced and directed films in Hollywood for the next forty-three years, ending with The Ten Commandments in 1956. Veering wildly between the prurient and the pious, his work was usually commercially successful, and The Greatest Show on Earth (1952) won one of the all-time most baffling Best Picture Oscars, beating The Quiet Man and High Noon; Singin’ in the Rain was not even nominated.
DeMille directed one of MGM’s strangest musicals, Madam Satan, in which he provided the voice coming from a radio. He also appeared, as himself, in Free and Easy.
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Jackie Coogan
John Leslie Coogan (1914-84) claimed his place in cinema history at a very young age when he played the eponymous character in Chaplin’s The Kid (1921). It is a performance for the ages, though the downside is that Coogan’s parents exploited his earnings, with subsequent legal action culminating in the California Child Actors Bill (the Coogan Act).
Unlike many other child actors who have immediate success, Coogan had other substantial parts while young, such as Oliver Twist (1922) and Tom Sawyer (1930), and also continued his career into adulthood. He found renewed fame in the sixties playing Uncle Fester in The Addams Family (1964-66). His final credit, as far removed as possible from The Kid, was in the 1983 slasher movie The Prey.
Jackie Coogan made two appearances in Metro musicals, and with the longest gap between of any performer. In 1930 he appeared as himself in the Hollywood-set Free and Easy. Thirty-five years later he played a cop in Girl Happy (1965), an Elvis Presley vehicle. Chaplin to Presley is a long journey.
