Financial Times (London,England)
February 13, 1993, Saturday
A life wrapped in celluloid -Stephen Amidon on the career of David O. Selznick
By Stephen Amidon
SHOWMAN: THE LIFE OF DAVID O. SELZNICK by David Thomson Andre Deutsch Pounds 20, 792 pages
PITY THE poor producer. Actors, directors and even writers may get lasting credit for a memorable film, but the person entitled to pick up the Best Picture Oscar is usually a nameless, faceless creature. Only a few producers have been able to reach the level of a Gable or a Wilder in the filmgoer’s imagination. And, as David Thomson makes clear in this comprehensive biography, none was able to stamp his imprimatur on films more deeply than David O. Selznick.
If anyone was ever destined to be in the film business, it was David O. Born in 1902 to the pioneering film magnate Lewis Selznick, he was his father’s right-hand man by the age of 14, writing memos, pampering starlets and even trying his hand at production. When he was 20 ‘Pop’ went bankrupt, forcing David to find his way in the big bad world. He ventured as far as MGM, where he was taken on by his father’s old rival Louis B. Mayer, who suspended his hatred of Selznick pere after recognising the spark of genius in his son. Indeed, David was soon to marry Mayer’s daughter Irene in a dynastic marriage worthy of a Shakespearian history.
But Selznick was restless in the studio system. Though he excelled at MGM right from the start, he moved several times in the next few years, working at just about every major in Hollywood by the time he was 32, lending his hand in the process to such classics as King Kong and David Copperfield. In 1935, Selznick decided to leave the studio system altogether, becoming (along with Goldwyn) the model for independent producers. His first few efforts were worthy, especially A Star is Born, which David more or less wrote. The Selznick style was evolving – lush, sensitive films, bolstered by cogent emotional narrative and a genius for casting.
It was a style that was to reach its apotheosis, of course, with Gone With The Wind. Not surprisingly, Thomson’s biography reaches its high point here as well, depicting the conjugation of visionary grace and rampant ego Selznick employed to complete the picture. Although the story has been told before, it seems to make perfect sense when seen in the context of Selznick’s career. The sentimentality, the escapist grandeur, the utter filmness of the project can all be seen as the culmination of a life that began wrapped in celluloid rather than linen.
To his credit, Thomson does try to squirt some cold water on a few of the GWTW myths, particularly in hinting that the famous meeting of Selznick and Vivian Leigh during the burning of Atlanta sequence might not have been as utterly serendipitous as it was made out to be. Also, the legendary delay over getting the project going had as much to do with Selznick’s natural prevarication as it did marketing genius. Yet the reader still comes way with the sense that, for this one film anyway, Selznick achieved the pinnacle of the producer’s craft.
After that, of course, everything was bound to be anti-climactic. To be sure, there were big films to come, such as Rebecca and Duel in the Sun, but they all paled in comparison with GWTW. Selznick the showman felt this more acutely than anyone – ‘I know my trouble,’ he remarked in 1945. ‘I know when I die, the obituaries will begin ‘David O. Selznick, producer of Gone With The Wind, died today’ and I’m trying like hell to rewrite them.’
Just as inevitably, Selznick’s fame (and his dependency on Benzedrine) created something of a monster. The infectious energy became more malignant. His womanising – he tried to lay everything in his Culver City office except the carpet – finally caused his marriage to break up. Irene had been a devoted wife but she was also a Mayer. She took Selznick to the cleaners, leaving him in debt for the rest of his life. Despite David’s subsequent marriage to Jennifer Jones, Irene would haunt him, Rebecca-like, for the rest of his life. Though there were a few more films left in him, by the mid-1950s David had, like his father-in-law, become so marginalised that a TV documentary about MGM barely mentioned either.
Thomson’s biography is remarkably complete, which is hardly surprising when you consider that he is the first biographer to have complete access to Selznick’s voluminous correspondence. (A compulsive writer who would compose dozens of memos in the course of a working day, Selznick once cabled Irene simply to tell her he had just had a haircut.) Indeed, the book is flawed by its extreme length. Seven hundred pages is simply too much, especially for a character whose star burned bright for a relatively brief period. The wearying accounts of Byzantine financial deals and overly detailed survey of his later years eventually wear the reader down. Selznick may have been able to make GWTW twice as long as its rivals, but Thomson does not have the finesse to pull off a similar feat.
Still, for those willing to stay the course, Thomson well captures the manic, almost demented personality needed to produce a big film, showing how David’s drug-taking and compulsive gambling were almost necessary by-products of his endeavours. The book also provides a comprehensive picture of the bleak realities of the studio system; Selznick had to become something of a pimp to survive, renting out contract players to the majors to pay his bills and ensure distribution rights.
And there is also a restrained smattering of the obligatory wry humor – did you know that Gone With The Wind had as working titles both Tomorrow Is Another Day and, astonishingly, Tote The Weary Load? Most memorable is the time Selznick instructed an author he wanted a rewrite. When the writer asked his producer what specifically needed changing, Selznick replied that he would have to get back to him – he had not yet read the script. Now there’s a born producer for you.
