Word: thalberg
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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ATLANTA. Burned once by William Tecumseh Sherman and again by Irving Thalberg, city of Tom Watson and Gregg Allman and Bert Lance and Jimmy Carter, --populists all, huzzah! From Peachtree Plaza to the White House, springing up from the ashes, born again --the place you have to go to get to almost every other place. The air crossroads of the western world, or at least those southernmost provinces of These United States --oh, Atlanta...
...Night at the Opera. In 1934 Chico Marx, an inveterate bridge player, sat down at the table with one of the sharpest cards ever to hit Hollywood: Irving Thalberg, the boy wonder producer, whose career inspired F. Scott Fitzgerald's unfinished last novel "The Last Tycoon." Thalberg's gambling ability marked him as the man to revive the ailing career of the three Marx brothers (Zeppo, having gotten fed up with his role as straight man, had left the team to become an agent; when Thalberg asked if the Marxist troika expected the same salary they had received...
Anthropologists say that primitive people often eat the gods they worship. The cannibals in question are the new generation of studio heads, many of whom are ex-agents. They are light-years away from the megalomaniac visionaries of yesteryear like Samuel Goldwyn and Irving Thalberg. The current studio bosses' philosophy seems to be: if it sold 30 years ago, it must sell now. Even the greatest of Hollywood's camp creations is not to be spared. For the past two months, ads have been splashed throughout the press proclaiming that King Kong will love and die again...
WRETCHED EXCESS (2): Katharine Hepburn's love of herself for finally attending the party after regretting 41 previous annual invitations. Everyone's pleasure in her modest triumph over justifiable nausea quite overwhelmed her reason for being there: to present the Irving Thalberg Award to Producer Lawrence Weingarten...
Despite such occasional disappointments, expensive films of this kind are good for television movies in the same way that the David Selznick-Samuel Goldwyn-Irving Thalberg "prestige" productions were good for the movie industry in the '30s. They cause people who would not otherwise pay attention to the form to do so. But as with the old films, so with TV movies: the quick, deft westerns, mysteries and action melodramas that depend on well-established conventions may in the end exert a larger claim on our attention than their more pretentiously publicized rivals...