Word: goldwyn
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Most of these beauties, alas, were the creations of his pressagents or the chronically disaffected habitues of the commissary writers' table. What truly distinguished Goldwyn was his fussy insistence on applying the same standards of "good taste" to his movies that he applied to his dress. Even more important was his ability to maintain those standards while defending his independence for nearly 50 years - despite the nearly irresistible drive for industry consolidation. The nerve, shrewdness, and energy with which Sam Goldwyn maintained his freedom in the Hollywood jungle now seem at once exemplary and unduplicable...
...truth about Goldwyn was more interesting than any one-liner. He was, for example, the only producer in history who was named after one of his own corporations. Born in a Polish ghetto, he received his first American name - Goldfish - from an immigration official when he arrived in New York City in 1896 as a 13-year-old. Under it, he prospered as a glove salesman and entered the movies as a partner of Jesse L. Lasky and Cecil B. DeMille. In 1913 they made The Squaw Man, one of the first feature-length films produced in Hollywood. The trio...
...often from the second drawer of other arts. They formed the basis for his bankable reputation at a time when the middlebrow public tended to administer a literacy test before taking a movie seriously. By persuading audiences and critics to regard at least some films as an art form, Goldwyn did his industry an enormous service...
Ironically, Goldwyn's own pictures exercise surprisingly small claim upon memory; today they seem impossibly culture-bound. It is, however, a tribute to his blithe showmanship that he put them over (along with such later high-minded successes as The Best Years of Our Lives and Porgy and Bess) at the same time that he was fabricating his own broad comic reputation. Sam Gold wyn was his own greatest production, and one can only be saddened that, at 91, death last week finally included...
Died. Samuel Goldwyn, 91, a founding father of Hollywood's film industry and a leading independent producer for nearly 50 years (see SHOW BUSINESS...