The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (380 page)

In 1935 he left to form Selznick International Pictures with John Hay Whitney as his chief partner. There he produced
Little Lord Fauntleroy
(Cromwell);
The Garden of Allah
(36, Richard Boleslavsky);
A Star Is Born
(37, Wellman);
Nothing Sacred
(37, Wellman);
The Prisoner of Zenda
(37, Cromwell);
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
(38, Norman Taurog);
Made for Each Other
(39, Cromwell); and
Intermezzo
(39, Gregory Ratoff), before
Gone With the Wind
, a triumph with which he never came to terms.

Margaret Mitchell’s novel was published in 1936, the year in which Selznick went independent. It took him three years to prepare and shoot, and he spared nothing—to buy the novel or shoot the movie. Any number of writers worked on the script, but Selznick always outwrote them with variant scenarios or prolix midnight memos. Three directors had a hand in the shooting, Cukor, Sam Wood, and Victor Fleming. Just as Cukor probably did most for Vivien Leigh, so Fleming was in Gable’s corner.
Gone With the Wind
is, not surprisingly, void of creative personality. But it has vast entrepreneurial aplomb, for Selznick loved the glamour of movies and of the independent empire. He cared for every facet of making a film and had a greater sense of how to photograph individuals, how to use sets and music, and how to construct a picture than many directors. His memos, laughed at by many, radiate an intuitive, loving preoccupation with detail in what has to be a painstaking form. He inaugurated epic, even if with a twopence colored novelette. Wonderful to relate, the glory swamped the rewards, for Selznick had mortgaged much of the profits away to MGM.

Ever afterwards, he was in search of a greater project, increasingly interfering. Only Hitchcock on
Rebecca
(40) absorbed his energy, his memos, and his mixture of insight, shrewdness, and wild dreaming. In the 1940s Selznick appeared to have lost interest in production and he largely functioned through loaning out the stars he had made (Ingrid Bergman, Gregory Peck, Joseph Cotten, and Joan Fontaine), by selling already packaged projects, like
Notorious
(46), to other companies, and by taking a 25 percent interest in United Artists.

He made
I’ll Be Seeing You
(44, William Dieterle); his own experience of psychoanalysis resulted in
Spellbound
(45, Hitchcock); while his adoration of Jennifer Jones shaped the rest of his life. He starred her in his own productions of
Since You Went Away
(44, Cromwell) and
Duel in the Sun
(46, Vidor), the latter his most serious attempt to match
Gone With the Wind
. He contributed enormously to the film, not least in the way he brought fire to Jennifer Jones, but his reluctance to settle on a limit to the film finally forced King Vidor to quit. Fortunately for the cinema, but confusingly for analysis, Vidor was the sort of director Selznick aspired to be. At any event,
Duel in the Sun
was another great success.

He formed Selznick Releasing Organization to distribute it and then kept the offshoot supplied with expensive failures
—The Paradine Case
(47, Hitchcock) and
Portrait of Jennie
(49, Dieterle). The latter is a good example of Selznick’s way of breathing his own conviction into romance, and of cinema’s way of making the novelette an eerie and touching genre.

By 1948 he was divorced, he was $12 million in debt, and his companies closed down. In 1949 he married Jennifer Jones and, while living in Europe, was involved with her in
Gone to Earth
(50, Michael Powell) and
Indiscretion of an American Wife
(53, Vittorio de Sica). His chief interest now was his wife’s career, and he exchanged his rights in
A Star Is Born
for the chance to put her in
A Farewell to Arms
(57, Charles Vidor). When that was a severe failure, he made no more films and died in 1965 of heart attacks.

Selznick never forgot his father’s fall or his advice to be lavish in everything. A chronic gambler, he had seething energy and care for detail as well as a youthful faith in literary values that hindered as much as it helped. Nearly all his films are adaptations of successful books and plays. But he had remarkable skill with people—launching Cukor and Hepburn, harnessing Cooper and Schoedsack, choosing Fields for
David Copperfield
, recognizing Ingrid Bergman and Alfred Hitchcock. Finally, he was proved right in his insistence on Jennifer Jones.
Gone With the Wind
is film history and
Duel in the Sun
is a masterpiece of the primitive.
David Copperfield
and
Rebecca
are masterpieces without qualification. At least a dozen more of his films survive as brilliant entertainments. For all Scott Fitzgerald’s comparison of Thalberg with Monroe Stahr, is Selznick really not the more heroic and talented figure?

Myron Selznick
(1898–1944), b. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
So much of old Hollywood history depends on the traps and coils of family. There were three Selznick boys—Howard (1897–1980), Myron, and David (1902–65). Howard was born with some kind of brain damage or retardation: the family variously ignored or finessed the problem so that it is impossible to be sure about it medically. David was the apple of his father’s eye, and his own favorite genius. He was inept in many ways, indecisive, neurotic, yet he had charm, need, energy, and a daft kind of radiance. The good and the bad all came together in
Gone With the Wind
and that crusade called Jennifer Jones. Myron was the smart one: brilliant, shrewd, decisive, and an enormous influence on the picture business—he invented agenting.

Myron Selznick also died at the age of forty-five (looking sixty-five), divorced from his wife, a hopeless alcoholic, his great agency in ruins. Myron had some fearful demons that kept him from being the potentate of his Hollywood. If he had had one ounce of need or belief to go with his efficiency, he might have taken the town. He might have been Mike Ovitz, early. But he was twisted: he had to look after Howard the stooge; he had to protect David the romantic chump. And he was not his father’s favorite. He never believed in anything except the booze.

He was a kid only when he ran the father, Lewis J. Selznick’s, production enterprise in Hollywood. He produced a few pictures before Pop went bust. Myron reckoned that great potentates in Hollywood had plotted this downfall—a more candid interpretation was that Lewis J. was the cause of his own ruin. But Myron thought of vengeance. And so it was, toward the end of the 1920s, that he became an agent. There had been agents before, but the job was not esteemed. No one had identified its power. Myron Selznick saw the truth, and even in the age of seven-year contracts he established an agency for actors, directors, and writers, and saw the need to challenge the studios. He made careers. He made himself fabulously rich. He made enemies. And all these things he pulled off before the age of profit participation, of packaged productions built around great stars. But the triumphs to come for men like Lew Wasserman and Ovitz were pioneered by Myron Selznick.

He had a magnificent office on Wilshire Boulevard; he had a team of agents; he worked the telephone; he was abrasive, arrogant, and surreal in his demands. He was also an extraordinary, collusive aid to his brother, as David Selznick set up independently. Myron Selznick also invented the conflict of interests. He was usually drunk; he was belligerent; he was famous for his ski lodge in the mountains, Hillhaven, for his Japanese butler, Ishii, and for Myron Selznick stories. And it all rolled off his back like Johnnie Walker going down his throat.

What did he do? He made and represented, for much of the thirties, people such as William Powell, Myrna Loy, Carole Lombard, Constance Bennett, Fredric March, Lewis Milestone, William Wellman, Loretta Young, Paulette Goddard, Charles Laughton, W. C. Fields, George Cukor, Miriam Hopkins, Rouben Mamoulian, Kay Francis, Laurence Olivier, Vivien Leigh, and Alfred Hitchcock. It was Myron who had the idea, in the late thirties, of getting star names to produce their own films: he nearly began with Lubitsch on a thing called
Shop Around the Corner
, but the studios ganged up against him. It was Myron who owned, and kept, a piece of
Gone With the Wind
, and left it to his daughter—the last Selznick to have profit participation in the great movie.

And Myron pioneered something else in agentry, maybe the most comical thing: self-hatred. He couldn’t finish himself off quickly enough.

Ousmane Sembene
(1923–2007) b. Ziguenchor, Senegal
1963:
Barom Sarrett
(d). 1965:
La Noire de … / Black Girl
. 1968:
Mandabi/The Money Order
. 1971:
Taaw
(d);
Emitai
. 1974:
Xala
. 1977:
Ceddo
. 1988:
Camp de Thiaroye/The Camp at Thiaroye
(codirected with Thierno Faty Sow). 1992:
Guelwaar
. 2000:
Faat Kiné
. 2004:
Moolaade
.

Sembene was a manual laborer in his late teens who then joined the Free French army in 1942. He worked on the railways in Senegal after the war, and then for ten years he lived in France, working at a Citroën factory and as a docker in Marseilles. While there, he began to write novels—in French—notably,
Le Docker Noir
, published in 1957. He turned to moviemaking as a way of reaching the large African audience. To that end, he went to study in Russia in the early sixties and was a student of Mark Donskoi.

He began in shorts and documentaries, but made an impact at film festivals with
La Noire de …
, about an African woman who works for a family in France.
Mandabi
was a comedy about the bureaucratic difficulties in cashing a foreign money order.
Emitai
recounts the confrontations between a Senegalese tribe and French soldiers.
Xala
was a sophisticated comedy about a successful Dakar businessman who takes a new wife and finds himself impotent.
Ceddo
was Sembene’s most ambitious film, set in no fixed place, but an exploration of all the influences that have worked on tribal Africa.

It is often said that Sembene is the father figure of African cinema. Yet that kind of comment shows how far Africa is like another planet. Sembene is a fine director, with his own European ties. But Africa has so many other sources, languages, and visions, most of which we never see.

Mack Sennett
(Mikall Sinnott) (1880–1960), b. Danville, Canada
The name Sennett is nearly an adjective. If he had named the studio after himself, instead of Keystone, then “Sennett comedy” would stand for all that frantic, innocent knockabout that signifies a moment in history. For, supposedly, Sennett invented screen comedy. In 1937, his special Oscar cited “his lasting contribution to the comedy technique of the screen the basic principles of which are as important today as when they were first put into practice.”

What were those principles? Charlie Chaplin got this instruction from the boss: “We have no scenario—we get an idea then follow the natural sequence of events until it leads up to a chase, which is the essence of our comedy.” Charlie wanted more: it was for Sennett that he discovered the look and the attitude of the Tramp; and it was Sennett, a year later, who couldn’t bring himself to pay the clever limey $1,000 a week.

Sennett was not really a performer. He had acted for Griffith, but then Griffith assigned Sennett to supervise the production of comedies. Sennett was a good laugher; he was energetic and enthusiastic. Chaplin and others used him as a sample audience: Mack knew what was funny. And then he got that joke done and he punched it out at the audience. The most important thing Sennett pioneered was being a producer.

When only in his teens, the family friend Marie Dressler introduced Sennett to the theatrical impresario, David Belasco. So Sennett went into vaudeville as a minor performer, and in 1908 he went to Biograph looking for work. Griffith hired him and used him a lot in the years from 1908 to 1911. He wrote some scripts, and he did some directing, and at Griffith’s suggestion he began to study the mechanics of comedy—not Griffith’s forte.

In 1912, Sennett left Biograph and with a couple of bookmakers for backing he formed Keystone. He brought along Ford Sterling and Mabel Normand from Biograph and he laid down the pattern of slapstick humor—with gorgeous girls, owlish idiots, noble simpletons, antlike armies of cops, and the riot of pursuit. He loved tricks, but he also had an unconscious feeling for light and space, and his great movies give fascinating glimpses of early Los Angeles.

No one ever accused Sennett of planning this, but he filmed disorder, or order reappraised—collisions, accidents, chaos, the mechanization of the chase, the pixillation of life. Run his movies, forward
and
backward, and you may see how little difference there is. He was pouring action from one vessel to another. He had discovered a kind of surrealism in which people played pinball rather than lived life. It is vital to the nature of movies, and it is as terrifying as it may be liberating. For it is not quite human.

Theodore Dreiser, for one, saw this as it happened. He interviewed Sennett and said of him: “The trains or streetcars or automobiles … collided with one another and by sheer impact transfer whole groups of passengers to new routes and new directions! Are not these nonsensicalities illustrations of the age-old formula that underlies humor? Isn’t this an inordinate inflation of fantasy to heights where reason can only laughingly accept the mingling of the normal with the abnormal?”

Sennett ran a factory, and he became a supervising editor as well as a very good picker of talents. He admired Mabel Normand, and she would likely have married him but for his fling with Mae Busch. He backed Fatty Arbuckle, Mack Swain, Chaplin, Slim Summerville, and later, Gloria Swanson and Harry Langdon.