Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Opening Credits
- 2 Oblique Casting and Early MGM
- 3 One Great Scene: Thalberg’s Silent Spectacles
- 4 Entertainment Value and Sound Cinema
- 5 Love Stories and General Principles: The Development of the Production Code
- 6 The Intelligent Producer and the Restructuring of MGM
- 7 “What can we do to make the picture better?”
- 8 Conclusion: Once a Star, Always a Star
- Works Cited
- Index
7 - “What can we do to make the picture better?”
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2020
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Opening Credits
- 2 Oblique Casting and Early MGM
- 3 One Great Scene: Thalberg’s Silent Spectacles
- 4 Entertainment Value and Sound Cinema
- 5 Love Stories and General Principles: The Development of the Production Code
- 6 The Intelligent Producer and the Restructuring of MGM
- 7 “What can we do to make the picture better?”
- 8 Conclusion: Once a Star, Always a Star
- Works Cited
- Index
Summary
In “Why Motion Pictures Cost So Much,” Thalberg discusses the initial reception of melodrama The Sin of Madelon Claudet (dir. Selwyn, 1931). Noting that it had “brought tears to the eyes of every man and woman in the studio” (1933: 10) during production, Thalberg wryly recounts the audience’s contrasting response at a preview:
[W]hen we took a sample print out to a little theater just outside Los Angeles […] there wasn't a wet eye in the house.
All the company had cried, but the audience didn’t. The pathos of the mother who sacrificed all […] for some reason did not get over on the screen.
In other words, what we had thought was pathos was only bathos. (10)
Thalberg goes on to explain that in order to redeem the film, as well as the nascent screen career of theatrical star Helen Hayes, “we simply had to spend whatever might be needed to make that picture right” (11). Though Thalberg does not explicitly say that retakes were the solution to Madelon Claudet's problems, his signature strategy of reshooting key scenes, introducing new material, or revising the screenplay following unsuccessful previews—no matter the cost—suggests that they were the greatest protective measure he could grant the film. Framed within the article's broader context (or as argued in the previous chapter, pretext) of discussing industry costs for studios and spectators, this anecdote functions as a case study of how investing time and money in films could reap aesthetic and commercial benefits. The film made $145,000 at the box office, and Hayes won the Academy Award for Best Actress (Marx 1975: 172, 259).
However emblematic, the experience above was only one of a number of times that Thalberg used previews and subsequent retakes in order to “make [a] picture right” (1933: 11). Samuel Marx would note that Thalberg's focus on previewing films emerged from an understanding that “a paying audience provided clues to strong points and weaknesses” where the “studio showings”—as noted in Thalberg's account above—could generate a misleading and complacent response (1975: 136).
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- Information
- Produced by Irving ThalbergTheory of Studio-Era Filmmaking, pp. 145 - 176Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2020