Word: studioful
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...England ticket sales on the first movie blockbuster, The Birth of a Nation. Now ready to produce his own pictures, he inveigled a popular actress, Anita Stewart, into breaking her contract with Vitagraph, and in 1918-19 starred her in a series of teary films at the modest studio leased from the Selig Zoo in downtown Los Angeles, where my father B.P. Schulberg joined him in the now vanished Mayer-Schulberg Studio...
...company merging Metro and Goldwyn, with Mayer soon adding his big M to the mix. He raised the contract system to a state of the art, using it to rule over a stable of stars who were legally bound to the company for years. In L.B.'s studio, with frail, dedicated lieutenant Irving Thalberg at his side, L.B. worked hard to project himself as a father figure to his extended family of stars, directors and producers...
...wanted $5,000, L.B. blackmailed him by threatening to reveal to Gable's wife Ria his affair with Crawford. Both knew Gable was worth $12,000, but he settled for $2,000. The indentured servitude had its benefits, though, for the kind of power that L.B. wielded on the studio lot extended to local politics. When a drunken Gable hit and killed a pedestrian near Hollywood Boulevard, L.B. sent Gable into hiding and then conspired with the local D.A. to have a minor executive take the rap in return for staying on the payroll for life at a higher salary...
...drop his Gs, a more polished L.B. found a new role model in Herbert Hoover. He worked so effectively for Hoover that he dared hope he might be the new President's choice as ambassador to England. An ambassadorship to Turkey was dangled, but Mayer chose to oversee his studio's triumphant transition from silence to sound: "Garbo Talks!" The Mayers did claim the privilege of being Hoover's first guests at the White House. From then on L.B. felt free to phone the President, and frequently did, to make suggestions for running the government...
Reduced to living in his studio and eating cold beans out of a can, Disney endured the hard times any worthwhile success story demands. It was not until he moved to Los Angeles and partnered with his shrewd and kindly older brother Roy, who took care of business for him, that he began to prosper modestly. Even so, his first commercially viable creation, Oswald the Rabbit, was stolen from him. That, naturally, reinforced his impulse to control. It also opened the way for the mouse that soared. Cocky, and in his earliest incarnations sometimes cruelly mischievous but always an inventive...