Giving Thalberg plenty of credit

Irving Thalberg was no shrinking violet.

Despite his frail physique and bad health, the “Boy Wonder” head of production at MGM from 1924 until his death in 1936 had considerable inner strength. He threatened to close the studio gates when the writers began to unionize. And when the Hays Office censors wanted him to cut a scene from the 1934 film “The Barretts of Wimpole Street” because it suggested an incestuous relationship, Thalberg refused.

The influential career and legacy of Thalberg, who never took credit on the 90-plus films he produced, is the subject of a new Turner Classic Movies documentary, “Irving Thalberg: Prince of Hollywood,” premiering tonight. TCM also will air several films Thalberg was responsible for, including 1928’s “The Crowd” and 1932’s “Grand Hotel,” in which he introduced the concept of an all-star cast, and several films starring his wife, Norma Shearer.

“When I started doing this, I really had this impression of him being ‘St. Irving,’ ” says producer/director/writer Robert Trachtenberg. “I really thought he was this sickly little figure, this frail genius. The thing that was most surprising for me was that he was not going to be walked over by people.”

Trachtenberg admits he was surprised by Thalberg’s outrage at the concept of a writers guild. “He said he would shut down the studio before he would let them organize. He really felt he had nurtured those people and brought them up. He didn’t understand it.”

Thalberg, who started his film career at Universal at age 20, ran MGM like a well-oiled dream factory. Stars and stories were of the outmost importance. Directors were just a means to an end.

But not everyone fit into the MGM mold. Erich von Stroheim saw him take his 1924 melodrama “Greed” out of his hands. Thalberg cut Von Stroheim’s four-hour film to 2 1/2 hours. Film historians still mourn Thalberg’s actions.

Buster Keaton was a superstar when he came to the studio in 1928. But without the creative freedom he enjoyed at his own studio, Keaton wilted.

Though he scoured the literary world for the best writers, not every scribe found success under Thalberg, including F. Scott Fitzgerald, who later fictionalized Thalberg in his short story “Crazy Sunday” and in his unfinished novel, “The Last Tycoon.”

However, Thalberg resurrected the film career of the Marx Brothers, whose last film for Paramount, 1933’s “Duck Soup,” had laid an egg.

“They were mass producing films,” says producer Samuel Goldwyn Jr., who knew Thalberg and Shearer as a little boy. “More or a less one man had to say, ‘go,’ ‘we don’t go,’ ‘we go.’ It wasn’t a group of nervous hysterical executives sitting around trying to figure out if the chemistry was right. They had to make the pictures and they had to get personalities to make them. You had a whole system you couldn’t fool around with.”

Thalberg, adds Goldwyn, had been sick as a child and spent his convalescence reading literature. “He really understood stories and the importance of writing. I remember my father once saying, ‘Irving didn’t make pictures; he remade them.’ What he would do is he would have a picture shot in a very short period of time and then they would remake it. W.S. Van Dyke shot ‘Marie Antoinette’ in 14 days and then kept working on it, so a movie was always a work in progress. It is still the best way to make movies.”

Thalberg suffered a massive heart attack at the age of 33 and was felled by pneumonia four years later. After his death, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences created the Irving Thalberg Award for producers. Recipients include Darryl F. Zanuck, Walt Disney, George Stevens, Ingmar Bergman, Steven Spielberg and Clint Eastwood.