I always thought that the only screen credit that MGM’s Irving Thalberg got was a posthumous one attached to The Good Earth. (1937) So imagine my surprise when I saw this credit pop up on Goodbye Mr. Chips (1939) which opened three years after Thalberg’s passing. Those first 4 signatures are James Hilton (who wrote the novel), Victor Saville (producer), Sam Wood (director), and Sidney Franklin (uncredited director.) It’s nice to see that Thalberg (the hero of my novel, The Heart of the Lion) was so well thought of so long after his death.
Arthur C. says: “Goodbye Mr. Chips, the 1934 novel by James Hilton, was one of the many film projects that Irving Thalberg had planned to produce, along with Maytime (1937), A Day at the Races (1936) and Marie Antoinette (1938). Thalberg’s closest collaborators, Sidney Franklin, Hunt Stromberg and Lawrence Weingarten, Thalberg’s brother in law, were assigned to handle these films after his death. It should also be mentioned that Thalberg a number of unrealized film projects. He wanted eagerly to film The Forty Days of Musa Dagh. A novel by Franz Werfel that was published in 1933, which focused on the events involving The Armenian Genocide in 1915. Thalberg also wanted to borrow Frank Capra from Columbia to film a story about engineer hired to build a pipeline in Russia.”
Orson Welles thought Thalberg Satan!
That’s rather ironic. Considering all the greedy, grasping, grabbing egomaniacs in Hollywood at the time, Thalberg was the least like that!
I’m making the assumption that that Welles thought there was the least creative autonomy available under Thalberg; he had the first and the last word.
Ah yes. By Welles’ definition, Thalberg would be Satan.
Having recently finished The Heart of the Lion, this is an interesting fact to learn. I’m amazed that a movie about the Armenian genocide was even a remote possibility.
Yes, I was very surprised to read about that one.