Puttin' On the Ritz by Peter Levinson

Author:Peter Levinson [Levinson, Peter J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group
Published: 2015-06-29T00:00:00+00:00

SILK STOCKINGS CAME IN under budget and made a healthy profit. Still, it was the final dance musical Arthur Freed ever produced. It was the final movie Rouben Mamoulian ever directed. Cyd Charisse never made another musical in Hollywood.75 Fred would star in one more musical, eleven years later, but it was inferior to the enduring musicals of the Arthur Freed Unit. The golden age of the Hollywood musical had come to an end.

Roger Mayer, the recipient of the coveted Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Oscar in 2005, knows much about both musicals and MGM. The erudite, retired executive (no relation to Louis B. Mayer) spent twenty-five years at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, ending up as vice president of administration at the studio. He left MGM for the Turner Entertainment Company to manage the library of films he had been working on at MGM. Eventually, he became the CEO of Turner Entertainment.

Mayer also had the distinction of having had Fred Astaire vote in the garage of his Beverly Hills home, which was used as a polling place, for twenty-five years. Mayer said, “I remember that sort of a sad aspect was that every year I would ask my wife, ‘Well, did Fred show up?’ And she’d say, ‘Yeah, and he’s walking more slowly.’ And so we watched him age in that regard.”

Knowing the studio as well as he did, Mayer noted, “I think that MGM for many years had executives who had the ability to pick both literary material and talent that when put together made first-rate motion pictures and commercial motion pictures. The management kept falling behind the times and was unable to see changes. For example, it was the last studio to get into television and the last to market its features to television. They thought if they could ignore television, it would go away.

“But I think the major problem was that later managements after Mayer and Thalberg—and really starting in the midsixties and after that—didn’t have the ability to pick material, and they didn’t have the respect for talent that the previous managers had. … They were unwilling to make the sort of deals that everyone else was making, such as granting percentage compensations. Therefore, they lost talent and material. The studio system worked beautifully. … MGM allowed it to fall apart. I arrived the day Marlon Brando’s Mutiny on the Bounty went over budget, and it has been downhill ever since.”

Mayer delved into the validity of the decision made at MGM, which the entire industry embraced, to cease producing musicals. “It became more and more expensive to produce them, and the market didn’t grow. A musical that ten years earlier would have made money now lost money. And whereas the market for other kinds of pictures outside the United States continued to grow, the American musical did not.”

I quoted Betty Comden, who had said that there weren’t any replacements for Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly. Mayer said, “There might have been. They weren’t developed. There were still big musical stars on Broadway.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.