"Selznick was a giant
panda of a man, standing about six feet two and permanently struggling with a
weight problem. He wore thick glasses and had thick curly hair. He
chain-smoked incessantly, had a broken nose, a wild sense of humour, a great
deal of kindness, a weakness for dry martinis and terry-cloth bathrobes and a
completely non-existent sense of punctuality. Not even his friends, and he had
hundreds of them, could have called him handsome but such was his charm that
it never crossed one's mind that he was anything else..." - David
Niven.
David O. Selznick was the son
of Lewis J. Selznick, pioneer film producer who, during the silent era, was a
film mogul and the industry's biggest advertiser. David grew up in the motion
picture industry and worked for his father's company since the age of
seventeen. But his one life-long ambition was to be an independent producer.
Here's is the story of his career in his own words:
========
"I have no middle name...I
had an uncle, whom I greatly disliked, who was also named David Selznick, so
in order to avoid the growing confusion between the two of us, I decided to
take a middle initial...".
~~~
"...Anything I ever
learned in school, I learned in the public schools of New York City".
~~~
"I was trained by my
father in motion-picture distribution, finance and advertising, his idea being
that my older brother, Myron, would take care of the producing end and I would
take care of the other things".
(Myron was later to become one of Hollywood's leading agents.)
~~~
"What had been my
continuing dreams of going to Yale, which I had clung to for many years, were
smashed when my father went broke in 1923".
~~~
"Myron had gone to
California and urged me to go out...I went to California in the summer of 1926
with the hope of promoting some independent pictures for Associate Exhibitors,
which was a distributing company in need of product".
~~~
"When I tried to get a job
at MGM, Harry Rapf was one of the heads of the studio...When I arrived, Harry
told me that he was sorry, but Louis B. Mayer had said that he would not have
any Selznick in the studio". (as a result of an argument Mayer and L.J.
Selznick had a little way back. Nonetheless, David worked for MGM in the years
1926-1928.)
~~~
"After leaving MGM, I was
sent for in early 1928 by Paramount's Ben Shulberg, who hated MGM and was
jealous of its success. He was anxious to tell me and the rest of Hollywood
that Paramount had more respect for independent opinion that did MGM". (He
worked for Paramount since 1928 till 1931; meanwhile in 1930 he became
L.B.Mayer's son-in-law by marrying his daughter, Irene).
~~~
"After my resignation from
Paramount in June of 1931, I decided to follow up on what I had long believed:
that the whole system of assembly-line-production picture studios was absurd,
and that the business had to be broken into small producing units". (with
a man called L. Milestone, he formed the Selznick-Milestone unit and went East
to promote it, but got nowhere.)
~~~
In October 1931 he was put in
charge of production of RKO. He stayed at RKO until 1933, when his contract
expired. During his stay there, he personally produced "A Bill of
Divorcement", "The Animal Kingdom", " Bird of Paradise"
and "Topaze" and he was the executive producer of "King
Kong".
~~~
"After refusing the new
conditions at RKO, I accepted an offer in early 1933 to become a
vice-president of MGM, in charge of my own unit-the first departure from the
traditional setup at MGM". (He worked on the productions of "David
Copperfield", "A Tale of Two Cities" and "Anna Karenina".)
~~~
In 1935 with financial help
from I. Thalberg (MGM's vice president) and his New York friend, John Hay
Whitney, Selznick announced the formation of his own company, Selznick
International (he also took over the operation of J. Whitney's company Pioneer
Pictures).
Left: David and Irene Selznick around 1930
Right: M. Cooper, John Hay Whitney and Selznick announcing the formation of Selznick International.
In 1935 Selznick International signed to distribute through United Artists. Among most notable picture made by Selznick International are
"The Garden of Allah", "A Star is Born", "The Prisoner of Zenda",
"Gone with the Wind", "Intermezzo" and "Rebecca".
|
Selznick International Studios lot (note the main office in the building up front at the bottom of the picture). In the 50s the buildings were owned by Desilu (Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball - the producers of the TV show,
"I love Lucy").
|
"Every time I try to cut
down on my memos by giving verbal instructions, something happens which
discourages me..."
David Selznick was notorious for
his memo-writing habit. It had its beginning when he worked for his father who was a very impatient man; besides when at the age of seventeen David was supervising a large advertising and publicity department he was self-conscious about his age and hid it behind impressive memos.
"To begin with, I find that I can think a thing through to its conclusion more clearly if I can express my views completely without interruptions and without argument. Two, I like to have my views a matter of record and reference. Three, I find that when a man receives written instructions he is much more likely to follow them, and certainly much more likely to follow them exactly, than if he receives them verbally...[...]
I can tell you pretty well the punctuating habits of the writers that I read as a child. As a result of this study of punctuation, I still find myself actually reading the punctuation marks to this day, and as a further result, I continually insult my secretaries by dictating punctuation. Similarly, Dickens, who was above all writers my childhood god, so impressed me with his torturous sentences and his long-windedness that the sentences in my memos are probably two or three times as long as they should be for these modern times...".
