Word: mgm
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...landed a $30-a-week job as a mail clerk at MGM, and kept his ambition in fighting trim by calling all the executives by their first names. "Hiya, Joe," he grinned at Producer Joe Pasternak, who stopped for a moment, then threw out the classic line: "Hey, kid -how'd ya like to be in pictures?" Pasternak gave Nicholson a script, and told him where to show up for the screen test. Nicholson looked the script over but did not realize that he was supposed to memorize his lines. The test was a disaster, and Nicholson was back...
Thereafter, crime dramas, shipboard romances, even westerns were adopted by the new art form. The results were often ludicrous but invariably profitable. To survive, almost every studio learned to experiment with musicals, but no company ever duplicated the burnish and exuberance of the MGM product. The proof can be found in That's Entertainment!, a two-hour retrospective backed by the current owners of MGM. These are operators who have converted studio real estate and properties into the MGM Grand Hotel, a Las Vegas monument to brashness and vulgarity. Still, if they are contemptuous of the future, they...
...clip after clip, they are outdone by unintentional comedy. The Nelson Eddy-Jeanette MacDonald epic Rose Marie (1936) offers the couple known to Hollywood as the Singing Capon and the Iron Butterfly in a Canadian Mountie scene that must be heard to be disbelieved. Even in the '40s, MGM knew that there were different strokes for different folks. Esther Williams could do them all, in a series of swimming-pool epics that for elaborate waste of money, have been unmatched since the days of the Regency. To watch Williams posing in gold lame, rising from red smoke and diving...
...with Bill Buckley vowel attenuation-drama is his element. The wonder is that his own acting career failed. In fitting Old Hollywood style, he was "discovered" by Norma Shearer by the pool of the Beverly Hills Hotel. Shearer decided that Evans was the man to play her late husband, MGM Producer Irving Thalberg, in the film Man of a Thousand Faces. Evans has since been compared to Thai-berg many tunes, but as an actor he was to get nowhere...
...Wizard of Oz (1939): Now, isn't it about time that some good, clean, family entertainment appeared on television? Actually, this is the Wizard's 16th incarnation. Some trivia: When editing the film in 1939, MGM executives decided to drop the "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" number. Too sentimental, they said; slows down the film. Lyricist E.Y. Harburg talked them out of it. Aren't you glad? Ch. 4, 6:30 p.m. Color (except for the scenes in Kansas), 2 hours...