If Hollywood truly suffers from a leadership malaise, as some charge, would the return of Monroe Stahr resuscitate the system? Filmmakers respect his judgment, stars his panache and investors his discipline, so Stahr’s return may ignite a new Irving Thalberg-like era.
Whoops — he’s not available.
The manic and manipulative hero of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon ruled MGM in its ‘30s heyday, but Stahr’s fictional reign was short-lived. So was Fitzgerald’s brilliant but never completed 1939 novel, which modeled Stahr after Thalberg.
Having achieved literary stardom with The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald’s decision to write a Hollywood novel, while simultaneously working as a script doctor, plunged the novelist into alcoholic paralysis. He never managed to finish his book and even his screenplays were unrealized.
The Last Tycoon briefly flickered back to life as a movie thanks to the great Elia Kazan, who cast Robert De Niro, Jack Nicholson, Tony Curtis and Jeanne Moreau in key roles, only to see that version, too, self destruct.
This week, the original novel was republished by Scribner, so I decided to revisit it in the hope of discovering its mystique. Fitzgerald had uniquely been able to hang with Thalberg, scrutinizing studio intrigues of that robust period.
To be sure, MGM’s resources at that time were pathetic compared to today’s Amazon-and-Apple era. But could contemporary Hollywood still learn some lessons from the success of the system?
Maybe not.
“There are no second acts in American life,” Fitzgerald wrote in his insightful pre-amble to The Last Tycoon, and that concept seemed to apply to his own career. Though novels like Gatsby, Tender is the Night and This Side of Paradise earned him plaudits and rich advances, Fitzgerald still had to take refuge in Hollywood to pay his mounting bills.
Re-reading his novel I found myself inhabiting Thalberg’s movie meetings through Fitzgerald’s eyes — “the studio system” in its prime.
Gripped by feverish ambition, Thalberg’s youthful mission was to foster a program of quality, star-laden, movies for the mass audience. He hurtled from script battles to budget fights to laborious analyses of daily “rushes,” his mood veering from exuberance to adolescent petulance.
“You are photographing trash,” he shouted to one director. “I want to see Claudette Colbert’s great liquid eyes so why do we stay on top of her head,” he demanded of a cinematographer. ”I want that character to be mean and you’ve got her simply boring,” he told a writer.
In his weary exasperation, Thalberg warned one producer that “no one will pay to see that movie.” An hour later, he told a different producer: “I want to make a movie that we know will lose money. A good money-loser may bring in new customers for other movies.” He got his wish.
Writers received the toughest reprimands. They were often hired in teams, with as many as three teams working on a given movie. Fitzgerald, himself a script doctor, was pained to learn that competing writers were at work on the same scene, desperate to satisfy not only “the talent” but also bureaucrats from the motion picture code.
One scene in which a priest was slugged during a confession required the direct approval of Joseph Breen, chairman of the code.
MGM’s output ranged from musicals (Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy) to Mutiny on the Bounty to the Marx Brothers comedies. Star vehicles were prioritized, with Thalberg’s wife, Norma Shearer, turning up in romantic hits like The Divorcee.
Irving Thalberg and Norma Shearer in 1935
Everett
Thalberg liked to indulge in historic fare like Marie Antoinette but had to please his superior, Louis B. Mayer, with Grand Hotel and Greed. Their quarrels were epic.
Could Fitzgerald’s Monroe Stahr have coped with the demands of today’s corporate Hollywood? As depicted, Stahr was consistently angered by the limited vision of “the money men.” Further, since MGM’s mandate was to employ “all the stars in heaven,” the pressures of keeping talent under contract was intense, as well as persuading them to play their assigned roles.
But through it all, Thalberg and Shearer projected a Hollywood of youth and optimism also of evanescence: Thalberg died at 37. Fitzgerald at 44. Of course, their Hollywood barely survived the Great Depression and World War II.
Whether they would have survived the Streaming Wars of the moment remains a matter of speculation.