Word: goldwyn
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...five writing greats. In 1937 F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose wife was in a sanitorium, whose agent was unable to sell a single manuscript, and whose earnings for all his books in print during the past year had totalled $81.18, thought that his days were numbered. So when Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer offered him a $1250 a week contract to write film scripts he had no choice but to accept. That his frustrating last years in Hollywood, when he tried, desperately, to make enough money in the movies and then leave, did not hurt Fitzgerald's talents, is Dardis's thesis. California...
...such an unliveable situation, writes Tom Dardis in Some Time in the Sun, his account of the Hollywood screenwriting years of five American writers, the job that Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer offered Fitzgerald was a godsend. Unfortunately, Dardis, who is anxious to refute Fitzgerald critic Arthur Mizner and others who have portrayed the writer demoralized and deteriorating under the California sun, attempts to equate Fitzgerald's happiness with the $1,250 paychecks he received in 1938 from MGM. Dardis gives a blow-by-blow account of how Fitzgerald secured his contracts, but almost completely omits Fitzgerald's much talked about affair...
...script for a ballet by the Marinski Theater in Leningrad, although his failure as a choreographer and scenarist never enters into the pamphlet. A similar flopped attempt at film writing in Hollywood set his anti-semitism ludicrously into gear: "The Hollywood Jews ... know what a pretty girl is. Ah Goldwyn Mayer! I would have given ten years of my life to sit for one moment in their armchairs. All those goddesses at my mercy." The underlying equations here aren't hard to discern: Hollywood is sex and money, and sex and money are possessed by Jews who exclude Aryans...
...learn that thieves have put sleep gas in the 747's ventilation system. When the big snooze hits, the big plane alights on a watery sand bar. "There's nothin' new about 'em," says Stewart of such disaster dramas. "Been the same since Sam Goldwyn made Hurricane...
...fledgling moving picture business-first with a string of penny arcades featuring flickering, hand-cranked "peep-shows," later with storefront nickelodeons. Convinced that the movies' future lay in full-length dramas, Zukor in 1912 split with Loew, who later became one of the founders of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and invested $35,000 in Queen Elizabeth, a cranky, French-made potboiler that starred an aging Sarah Bernhardt -and was a smash success. Zukor maneuvered his Famous Players Film Co. through a series of deals to form Paramount, the first film company with its own theater chain, and began turning...