Irving Thalberg

• Born: May 30, 1899
• Birthplace: Brooklyn, New York
• Died: September 14, 1936
• Place of death: Santa Monica, California

Film studio executive

Insisting on strong scripts, solid acting, and polished productions in both silent and sound films, Thalberg produced quality films for a mass audience. Under his artistic direction, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) became Hollywood’s most prestigious studio.

Area of achievement: Entertainment

Early Life

Irving Thalberg (UR-vihng THAHL-burg) was the son of an ambitious mother, Henrietta Heyman, and an easygoing father, German Jewish immigrant William Thalberg, who owned a lace-making factory. Disappointed in her marriage, Henrietta occupied herself with her son, although a daughter was born a year after his birth. Irving Thalberg was born with a serious heart condition, at a time before heart surgery and antibiotics could help. A fragile child, he was frequently ill. Thalberg attended public schools and played outside when he could, but, often bedridden, he was largely self-educated. He read history, literature, and philosophy, and he was especially interested in the pragmatism of American philosopher William James. Thalberg’s vast reading and James’s influence were factors in his later success.

Physicians advised Thalberg and his family that he would not live past twenty or thirty. His short life expectancy made higher education impractical. After graduating from public high school, he took classes in shorthand and in Spanish, held office jobs, and began his film career in New York with Universal Pictures headCarl Laemmle. Traveling to California, Thalberg reorganized Laemmle’s chaotic studio, proving his managerial abilities before he was twenty. He relocated his family to California. Seeing no future with Laemmle, who was famous for hiring and promoting his relatives, Thalberg joined Louis B. Mayer’s studio in 1923. At twenty-three, Thalberg was made vice president in charge of production for the company that, after a 1924 merger, became Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) in 1926. He worked long hours to meet the formidable production schedule set by Marcus Loew, head of the company that owned MGM. In 1926 alone, Thalberg was responsible for thirty-seven films.

Life’s Work

Thalberg’s initial responsibility was to salvage productions acquired from the merged Samuel Goldwyn and Metro studios, including Ben-Hur (1926). Although a third of the film had been shot, disastrously, in Italy, Thalberg fired the original director and star, rebuilt sets in Hollywood, and restaged crucial scenes, such as the climactic chariot race, and the film became a major success. Thalberg had established the authority of producer over director at Universal when he fired Erich von Stroheim, famous for his extravagantly expensive films. Thalberg hired him back to complete The Merry Widow (1925) but fired him again from Greed (1924); after studying audience reaction to previews, Thalberg cut the film to two hours from the director’s seven. Thus, Thalberg early established that MGM films were made to please audiences; that ineffective scenes should be reedited and refilmed, regardless of cost; and that actors and directors were to serve the film, not vice versa. He also insisted that every major film have at least one spectacular sequence, such as the plague of locusts in The Good Earth (1937).

To accomplish his goals, Thalberg initiated regular story conferences and sneak previews. For his first original studio production, he chose He Who Gets Slapped (1924). Directed by Victor Seastrom, it starred Norma Shearer and Lon Chaney. The studio’s success was assured by King Vidor’s World War I film, The Big Parade (1925), which made John Gilbert a star and grossed six million dollars. Thalberg resisted the change from silent to sound films, but, once committed, he produced MGM’s first musical, The Broadway Melody (1929). Insisting on refilming a dance, Thalberg allowed sound technician Douglas Shearer to use prerecorded film, initiating a process that became standard for filming musicals. Other moneymaking films included The Big House (1930), a prison drama; Anna Christie (1930), Greta Garbo’s first talking film, and her Camille (1937); Mutiny on the Bounty (1935), a sea drama starring Clark Gable; Grand Hotel (1932), MGM’s first all-star feature; and A Night at the Opera (1935), with the Marx brothers.

Success was so great that Thalberg felt free to experiment with controversial films, including Vidor’s The Crowd (1928), about the plight of men reduced to anonymous ciphers in modern cities, and his Hallelujah! (1929), the first serious major-studio film to star an African American cast. In it, Vidor tried to depict the realities of African American life as he had observed it in his native Texas. Thalberg broke controversial ground with his filming of the successful The Sin of Madelon Claudet (1931) about an unwed mother. His most conspicuous failure was Tod Browning’s Freaks (1932), set among the physically challenged who at that time were frequently exhibited at carnivals and sideshows. Audiences were repulsed by the unusually formed actors, the film was banned in Great Britain, and the studio withdrew it from circulation.

By 1926, Thalberg had suffered his first heart attack but continued with his demanding work schedule. In 1927, Thalberg married Canadian-born film actor Shearer, and they lived with his parents until the birth of their second child in 1935. Increasingly, Thalberg expected financial equity with Mayer, who became resentful. After Thalberg’s 1932 heart attack, Mayer, faced with a heavy production schedule, removed Thalberg’s authority, demoting him to a unit of his own. Thalberg hoped to found his own studio, but, his health badly compromised, he died of pneumonia at age thirty-seven.

Significance

With few exceptions, early studio heads were immigrants, thrust into the labor force at a young age and offered little, if any, education. Unlike them, Thalberg came from an established German Jewish family, for whom education and reading were important. He brought his learning to films, choosing to adapt much fiction and, influenced by James, assuming that a film’s merits were measured by audience response, not abstract standards or the desires of writers, directors, or stars. Criticized for his middle-class tastes, Thalberg understood that the middle classes were his largest potential audience, the audience for which the luxurious urban Loews theaters were designed. Since no one knew precisely what interested these audiences, Thalberg tested his films through sneak previews, refilming to correct weaknesses, and even allowing the Marx brothers to test their comedy before live theater audiences before filming A Night at the Opera. Thalberg attended these previews, sought out comments, reedited, and refilmed. In a twelve-year career, he produced at least four hundred films, many still classics.

Bibliography

Eyman, Scott. Lion of Hollywood: The Life and Legend of Louis B. Mayer. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2005. Chapters 3-7 cover the years when the careers of Thalberg and Mayer were inextricably linked in MGM’s success.

Gabler, Neal. An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood. New York: Crown, 1988. Discusses anti-Semitism as it affected major careers and personalities, linking Mayer’s possessiveness, defensiveness, and patriarchy to the original Mayer-Thalberg alliance and its eventual disintegration.

Lambert, Gavin. Norma Shearer: A Life. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990. A study of the actor who married Thalberg and dedicated herself to his health while he molded her successful film career.

Thomas, Bob. Thalberg: Life and Legend. Beverly Hills, Calif.: New Millennium Press, 2000. Accessible, relatively brief biography originally published in 1969. Includes photos and plot summaries from some of Thalberg’s major films.

Vieira, Mark A. Hollywood Dreams Made Real: Irving Thalberg and the Rise of MGM. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2008. Includes biographical information. Primarily designed to illustrate Thalberg’s accomplishments through still photos, some from films that no longer exist.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Irving Thalberg: Boy Wonder to Producer Prince. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009. Detailed, sympathetic biography. Includes list of Thalberg-supervised films with directors and profits or losses. Bibliography.