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Through seduction and mysticism, Rasputin manipulates the czar and his family. It stars the three Barrymore siblings, with Lionel playing Rasputin as a wild, bearded giant of a peasant. You can see Thalberg’s political dispositions appearing on screen as early as MGM’s Rasputin and the Empress (1932), a drama about the fall of the Romanovs. All of this was on his mind in 1933 as he planned Marie Antoinette. Not only did he have to suffer FDR as president (Hoover had personally intervened in Thalberg’s tax fraud case), he feared socialist Upton Sinclair’s plans to run for governor and redistribute property with his popular EPIC plan (End Poverty in California). Sure, Thalberg could crush a Von Stroheim, but not unions of them. Both won the right to collectively bargain under the 1933 National Industrial Recovery Act. By the time Thalberg assigned writers to adapt Zweig’s book that summer, the Screen Writers Guild (precursor to the WGA) and the Screen Actors Guild had both been recently founded, in April and June, respectively. FDR was sworn in, setting in motion his pro-labor New Deal. In 1932, he suffered a heart attack and MGM reduced his authority at the studio.
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In 1933, Thalberg saw his golden decade ending. Mayer and the other producers who formed MGM, where he spent the rest of his career. Griffith, no von Stroheim, no Rex Ingram.”Įven this early in their careers, Renoir and Thalberg could not have seen the world more differently. “That was the beginning of the storm and the end of the reign of the director,” recalls director Rouben Mamoulian, “and when the storm subsided, there was no D.W. His biographer Mark Vieira argues that in an era of auteurs like Chaplin and Griffith, Thalberg single-handedly shifted the balance of creative power to studio producers like himself. At twenty-three, his firing of director Erich von Stroheim during filming of Merry-Go-Round rattled the industry.
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He brilliantly paired talent to movie projects and removed problematic creatives like defective machine parts. In a decade of pro-business Republican rule, Thalberg was a genius of the 1920s-pre-union studio system. Instead, isolation from school, his mother’s constant care, and a home schooling focused on literature made him a cold, driven teenager who in short order spun a secretary job at Universal Pictures into one as the studio owner’s assistant and then top development and production executive. Doctors told his mother he would most likely be dead by twenty. Born May 30, 1899, he grew up sickly, with bouts of disease that damaged his heart. In 1933, Thalberg bought the rights to Zweig’s book on Marie Antoinette and the Revolution, as he feared one coming to the United States. Same Revolution, same world on fire, and yet the two films and their makers could not be in fiercer opposition to one another. They saw things going in a very bad direction and believed the French Revolution to be the ideal historical lesson with which to warn us. Thalberg, Shearer, and Renoir all looked at the mid-1930s and saw a global disaster.
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Capitol, and a presidential election so divisive that FDR openly said of his opponents, “I welcome their hatred.” They adapted Stefan Zweig’s 1932 biography of the Queen of France, Marie Antoinette: The Portrait of an Average Woman.Īs the dust settles on 2020, we can see these two films came out of a time not unlike our own: of record unemployment, fights over the relief for it, of desperation fueling extremist politics, of invidious mass media corporations deceiving the public and fighting their own unionization, of democracies challenged from within and without, of dictators emboldened abroad, of an American president talking about court-packing, violent riots at the U.S. Marie Antoinette came from MGM’s husband-and-wife power couple, producer Irving Thalberg (who did not live to see his film’s release) and movie star Norma Shearer. La Marseillaise is by French auteur Jean Renoir, the follow-up to his global box office and awards season hit, Grand Illusion (1937). In 1938, moviegoers trying to survive in an impoverished world as it lurched toward war found themselves with two new movies on the French Revolution to choose from, La Marseillaise and Marie Antoinette.