Word: selznicks
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This latest idea of young David Selznick's was ambitious enough to be like his father's, the best of which it resembled. And because shrewd young David Selznick is the son of Lewis J. Selznick, the new company was something more than a likely combination of creative and executive talent. It was a climax in a cycle, a Milestone in a legend...
...Selznick saga is a fantasy told in light signs over Broadway, a loud scandal whispered in file copies of Variety, a legend forgotten in the smoke that curled out of spittoons in the Claridge Hotel from cigarets that had gold tips and monograms. An epic and a joke, it has made Selznick the name of a dynasty in the weird peerage of the cinema industry. It helped give the industry its reputation. It concerns a Japanese valet who learned how to pickle herring, a girl who was born in a Pennsylvania coal town and killed herself in Paris, a gold...
...week later he was telephoned by a man he had known in Pittsburgh and who had been trying to find him. By sheerest chance this man met Selznick's sister-in-law on a train to Pittsburgh. The man wanted Selznick to sell some stock in Universal pictures. Selznick sold the stock to Carl Laemmle, using a handful of diamonds left over from his store as an entering wedge. The stock gave Laemmle control of Universal and he gave Selznick a desk in the office. Selznick had a sign made which said "General Manager...
...Gods Would Destroy for $4,250, sold shares in it for $42.50 to 99 Wall Street men. He used their backing when he was head of World Film Corp. which had an elephant for a trademark. When the stockholders in World Film, conservative bankers who never understood the Selznick to make pictures starring Clara Kimball Young...
...great period of the Selznick legend began then. He formed other companies for other stars and when Adolph Zukor did the same for Mary Pickford, he wrote Mary Pickford a letter telling her to congratulate Zukor for copying his idea. He held the first lavish previews at the Astor Hotel, signed Nazimova and Norma Talmadge, made $300,000 out of War Brides, had his valet Ishi pickle herring and serve tea from a samovar. The day after the Tsar abdicated, he sent a cable: NICHOLAS ROMANOFF: WHEN I WAS A POOR BOY IN KIEV SOME OF YOUR POLICEMEN WERE...