Each year, twenty five statuettes are presented at the Oscars ceremony. Occasionally, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences gives a special honour to “creative producers whose bodies of work reflect a consistently high quality of motion picture production.” This trophy, consisting of a bronze head perched on a marble base, is called the Irving G. Thalberg Award. So who was this man?
Irving Grant Thalberg was born in 1899 in New York. Raised by German immigrant parents, he developed into an intelligent young man, obsessed with films. Unfortunately, his health was poor. After contracting rheumatic fever at seventeen, Thalberg was left with a fragile heart. Doctors told him that he would struggle to live past thirty. This poor diagnosis seemed to galvanise the precocious teen. He skipped the chance to go to college and took a job at Universal Studios.
Thalberg initially worked as private secretary to Carl Laemmle, Universal’s founder. His work ethic impressed Laemmle. The New Yorker swiftly moved up the ranks, and became head of production at Universal’s Californian studio, aged just twenty one. As head, Thalberg liked to micro-manage productions. He contributed to scripts, carefully chose the cast and crew and kept a tight rein on finances. His all-encompassing control made the studio more efficient, at the cost of ‘artistic’ directors like Erich Von Stroheim.
Von Stronheim, best known today as Norma Desmond’s butler in Sunset Boulevard (1950), clashed with Thalberg over the film Foolish Wives (1922). At that time, Von Stronheim was a powerful actor/director who paid little attention to production budgets. For the shoot, he demanded an enormous set, expensive costumes and even caviar. With costs, and footage, running completely out of control, Thalberg’s simple solution was to remove the cameras from the set!
Thalberg’s reign at Universal was brief, as he joined Louis B. Mayer’s rival production company in 1923. A year later, Mayer’s company merged with Metro Pictures Corporation and Goldwyn Pictures to form Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM). Thalberg, then aged twenty four, became its vice-president and supervisor of production.
MGM flourished under Thalberg’s leadership with major hits like The Big Parade (1925), The Divorcee (1930), Mutiny on the Bounty (1935) and the Marx Brothers’ classic, A Night at the Opera (1935). Thalberg was a modest man and never took a screen credit for any of his films. He once quipped; “Credit you give yourself is not worth having”.
Thalberg’s influence was distinctive though, as were his innovations. He was the first studio executive to use screen previews in order to gauge public reaction. He was also the first to champion script conferences and scene reshoots. Thalberg also created, and nourished, the careers of a number of screen icons including Clark Gable, Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford and his wife, Norma Shearer.
This extraordinary mogul would have contributed far more to the silver screen but for his health, which ultimately failed him. In 1936, Thalberg contracted pneumonia and died aged thirty seven. The Academy Award that bears his name was inaugurated the following year.
