(Memo From David O. Selznick)
Memo From David O. Selznick
https://www.amazon.com/Memo-David-Selznick/dp/0670467669?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=0670467669
He was born on May 10, 1902 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States, the son of Lewis Joseph Selznick, a prosperous jeweler, and of Florence Anna Sachs. In 1910 the family moved to New York City, where Lewis Selznick's business promptly failed. Undaunted, he organized a small motion picture company, and by 1916 films had remade his fortune. The Selznicks moved into a twenty-two-room Park Avenue apartment.
Young Selznick attended the Hamilton Institute for Boys (1917 - 1919) and took extension courses at Columbia University. His prospects for attending Yale University vanished in 1923 with his father's bankruptcy.
Selznick, who added "O. " to his name for looks and euphony, produced his first films - "Will He Conquer Dempsey?" of boxer Luis Firpo working out, and another of Rudolph Valentino judging a beauty show - in 1923 for 100 percent profit. Two years later he moved to Hollywood, now clearly the world film capital, where he worked until 1928 for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) as story editor and assistant producer, then for Paramount until 1931 as associate producer.
Offered a bonus at Paramount for usable movie titles, he came up with a list of thirty-six, including such marquee attractions as "Love Among the Coeds, " "Good Little Chorus Girls, " and "Love Among the Rich. "
During the 1930's Selznick's constant aim was to produce pictures independently of the studio system, where he felt confined. His first venture was as production chief (1931 - 1933) of Radio-Keith-Orpheum (RKO) Pictures, a company created at his urging by David Sarnoff, president of Radio Corporation of America. In early 1933, after only fourteen months at RKO, Selznick, partly to satisfy a deathbed wish of his father's, returned to MGM, Hollywood's largest and most prestigious studio and the fiefdom of his father-in-law, where he remained until 1935.
He introduced two great stars: Katharine Hepburn (in Little Women, 1933) and Fred Astaire (in Dancing Lady, 1933).
In 1936 he finally attained his goal with the formation of Selznick International Studios, the independent company with which, under different names and studio distribution arrangements, he produced the remainder of his pictures. The films that mark the pinnacle of Selznick's career and include some of the finest in Hollywood history began to appear: Little Lord Fauntleroy (1936), A Star Is Born (1937), The Prisoner of Zenda (1937). The high point was Gone with the Wind.
Producing Rebecca he marked for the Hollywood debut of the noted English director Alfred Hitchcock. Selznick enjoyed further successes after 1940, including I'll Be Seeing You (1945), a compassionate treatment of shellshock; Spellbound (1945), directed by Hitchock; and The Third Man (1950), coproduced with Alexander Korda. His secong wife Jones (born Phyllis Isley) first appeared for Selznick in Since You Went Away (1944) and later in the grandiose western Duel in the Sun (1947); a romance, Portrait of Jennie (1949); Beat the Devil (1954), opposite Humphrey Bogart; and Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms (1958), Selznick's last film. Although the later productions were tasteful and inventive, they seldom equaled the earlier films, either critically or financially.
He died in Beverly Hills of a heart attack.
David O. Selznick is best known for producing Gone with the Wind, at the time the longest (almost four hours) and costliest ($4 million) movie ever made. The film won ten Academy Awards and grossed many times its cost within a few years. Selznick garnered eight Academy Award nominations for A Star Is Born and another eleven for producing Rebecca. Selznick also won the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award in 1939. The David O. Selznick Golden Laurel Trophy is awarded annually to an outstanding film producer. For his contribution to the motion picture industry, David O. Selznick has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
(Memo From David O. Selznick)
Selznick was apolitical and did not make socially conscious films. He was aware of the fascist menace in the 1930's, and even while romanticizing the Old South of Gone with the Wind he refused to portray the Ku Klux Klan favorably, as D. W. Griffith had done in Birth of a Nation.
He instantly appreciated the genius of Sergei Eisenstein's film Potemkin and urged aspiring producers and directors to study it for technique as artists might view a Rubens or a Raphael.
A muscular, energetic six-footer with bushy brows, Selznick was a formidable presence in Hollywood throughout his career.
On April 29, 1930, Selznick married Irene Gladys Mayer, daughter of Louis B. Mayer, the head of MGM. They had two children.
On July 13, 1949 he married actress Jennifer Jones, after having divorced his first wife; they had one child.
