Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,838

This is the grave of David O. Selznick.

Born in Pittsburgh in 1902, Selznick was perhaps the first major film person who actually grew up in a film family. His father Lewis, a Russian Jewish immigrant, started working in the film industry in 1913 after the family moved to Brooklyn and became an important producer and distributor in the silent era. David’s brother Myron would become an important agent too. David would later add the “O” to his name, just to separate himself from his uncle David and because he thought it sounded cool, for whatever reason. I mean, hell, Elon Musk has reshaped the world because he thinks the letter “X” is rad like a stoned 90s surfer, so the world is full of idiots. Selznick went to Columbia and immediately started working for his father. But then Lewis went bankrupt. Still, Lewis had all the connections. Selznick went to Hollywood in 1926, Dad helped him meet who needed to meet, and MGM hired him as an assistant story editor. He moved to Paramount in 1928 and married Irene Mayer, daughter of MGM founder Louis Mayer.

It did not take long for Selznick to move up in the film world hierarchy. In 1931, David Sarnoff of RKO hired him as Head of Production. RKO was always a low-budget shop and Selznick was very good and disciplining those who did not adhere to its strict cost controls. But he also decentralized the creative side of the studio, creating a unit production system that gave individual producers a lot more freedom. He believed that would lower costs and create better films. He was highly invested in bringing in young talent across the board. That included new directors such as George Cukor and young actors such as Katharine Hepburn. He had Cukor direct Hepburn’s film debut A Bill of Divorcement (that’s such a great title) and a little film called King Kong, which merely was a gigantic step forward in the history of special effects. He did not get along with a lot of RKO leadership though and left after a big blowup, only 15 months into his tenure. His last major action at RKO was approving Fred Astaire’s screen test. That one worked out.

So Selznick took his talents back to MGM. Irving Thalberg was the big creative honcho there, but he was already in bad health and would die shortly after. For the moment, Selznick created a sort of second team at MGM. It was just banger after banger for the next few years. Among the films he produced and oversaw between 1933 and 1935 were Dinner at Eight, David Copperfield, Anna Karenina, and A Tale of Two Cities. I’m trying to imagine today’s Hollywood adapting Dickens and Tolstoy for the screen. Greta Garbo had a clause in her contract that said only Thalberg or Selznick could produce her films. That ended quickly though because Thalberg died and Selznick wanted to go independent and start his own shop. In fact, Garbo begged him not to go and offered him exclusive control over her pictures if he agreed, but even that wasn’t enough.

So in 1935, Selznick left MGM again. He gained independent control through a United Artists leasing deal. He also leased a RKO back lot. Selznick International Pictures produced a ton of the best and most popular movies of the late 30s and early 40s. They include The Garden of Allah, A Star is Born, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Intermezzo, and Gone with the Wind. And for whatever you want to say about the horrors of Gone with the Wind politically, no one can question that it was a huge blockbuster that changed film history. It’s extremely unfortunate that the most important film of the 1910s and the most important film of the 1930s were both pro-Confederate propaganda films. Then in 1940, he worked with a young British guy making his first film in Hollywood. That was Alfred Hitchcock and the film was Rebecca. Amazingly, this was the only Hitchcock film to win Best Picture at the Oscars.

But Selznick began to tire of the rigamarole of being a big time Hollywood player. He wanted to have fun. He closed his production company after Rebecca and decided to work less. He had his artists under contract, so he made money by loaning Hitchcock and actors such as Ingrid Bergman and Vivian Leigh to other studios. He also developed pictures that he would then sell. That included Hitchcock’s Notorious, the first film of his I ever saw and which made me fall in love with Hitch, Cary Grant, and Bergman. He formed another studio, called The Selznick Studio, in 1944 and worked with Hitchcock on Spellbound and The Paradine Case. He coproduced the astounding Carol Reed film The Third Man. And let me tell you one thing–when I went to Vienna my top priority was riding the Ferris wheel from the film and I did that and it was fucking fantastic. My wife was somewhat less enthused, having not seen the film. Whatever, that’s her fault. She has also refused to watch the film in the years after that, mostly to drive me nuts for making her go to that Ferris wheel. Ah, marriage. Selznick also made Duel in the Sun, which was a hugely influential film on Martin Scorsese but which was a problematic production, in part because Selznick was cheating on his wife with Jennifer Jones, who he had cast in the star role.

Anyway, in 1948, Selznick just stopped. He was rich and he was done. He was tired. He wrote,

“I had been producing, at the time, for twenty years….Additionally it was crystal clear that the motion-picture business was in for a terrible beating from television and other new forms of entertainment, and I thought it a good time to take stock and to study objectively the obviously changing public tastes….Certainly I had no intention of staying away from production for nine years..”

Fair enough. He occasionally worked to promote Jones, who he had married. That included the producing the 1957 film A Farewell to Arms, with Jones and Rock Hudson. Definitely not the best of Hemingway adaptations.

It probably didn’t help Selznick’s career that he was an amphetamine addict for years so wasn’t sleeping much. Evidently, he got Carol Reed hooked on the pills too and so they worked 22 hours to make the film under budget! He also was the King of the Casting Couch, an absolute predator of the most disgusting manner. He tried to rape Shirley Temple when she was 17 by locking her in his office, among so many other crimes. Total scumbag.

By the late 50s, Selznick’s heart was starting to give out. I’m sure years of a racing heartbeat due to the drugs, plus the cigarettes and booze, really helped a lot….He had a series of heart attacks and died in 1963. He was 63 years old.

David O. Selznick is buried in Forest Lawn Memorial Park, Glendale, California. Myron Selznick is here too, but I chose to focus on David.

If you would like this series to visit some of the people who worked with Selznick, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Greta Garbo ended up being buried back in Stockholm and if you want to send me to Sweden, I guess I could sacrifice enough to justify a Scandinavian vacation. Don’t make me do this! In the US, Fred Astaire is in Chatsworth, California and Louis Mayer is in East Los Angeles. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.