Hollywood lore has it that Irving Thalberg had a habit of tossing a coin in the air during story conferences. Writer Anita Loos describes him as “boyishly flip[ping] a big silver dollar” (1974: 36) while discussing the making of Red-Headed Woman (dir. Conway, 1932); film critic Bosley Crowther relates that Thalberg would “sit there flipping a gold coin […] while his associates talked” (1957: 182); and in still another account, biographer Bob Thomas details meetings in which Thalberg would “flip […] a twenty-dollar gold piece into the air, often letting it clatter on the top of his glass-covered desk” (1969: 111). As the head of production at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Thalberg brought the studio to critical and commercial prestige in the 1920s and 1930s. He fostered the careers of legendary performers like Lon Chaney, Joan Crawford, Greta Garbo, John Gilbert, Jean Harlow, and his wife Norma Shearer, thus establishing MGM as the studio with (as their slogan went) “More stars than there are in the heavens.” Thalberg also led a coterie of associate producers known as the “Thalberg men” (Marx 1975: 252), advising them as they refined their filmmaking style across a number of genres. Finally, Thalberg guided MGM through the production of era-defining films, from romantic dramas (including Flesh and the Devil, dir. Brown, 1927; Grand Hotel, dir. Goulding, 1932) and period epics (Ben-Hur, dir. Niblo, 1925; Mutiny on the Bounty, dir. Lloyd, 1935), horror films (Freaks, dir. Browning, 1932) and comedies (A Night at the Opera, dir. Wood, 1935). Yet in the chronicles of Thalberg's time at the studio, the grand scale of these accomplishments is juxtaposed with the minutiae of his idiosyncrasies—among these, of course, the continual flipping of the coin.

As New Hollywood producer Robert Evans would write in his 2013 memoir, “Thalberg's talent was mythical […] [N]o one ever filled the immense void he left […]” (210). His untimely death from pneumonia in 1936 at the age of 37 ended one of the most illustrious careers in Hollywood history. From the beginning of the 1920s, Thalberg occupied positions of authority in the film industry: by the age of 20, he was general manager of Universal Pictures—four years before he and Louis B. Mayer founded MGM in 1924.