1/21/23
Newsletter #226
The Crack of Dawn
If you hear folks who grew up in the 1940s, ‘50s, and ‘60s in Brooklyn, NY – like Barbra Streisand, for instance – they refer to Loew’s Theaters as “Low-ees,” pronouncing the silent E. Loew’s Theaters was started by Marcus Loew, a first-generation, Jewish-American, born in NYC in 1870. His family was desperately poor and Marcus worked every menial job he could find until, at the age of 30, he had saved enough money to invest in a penny arcade with Adolph Zukor (who would later co-found Paramount Pictures), and their company was the wonderfully named, Automatic Vaudeville Co. Once Loew and Zukor had their foot in the door, they began buying up penny arcades all over New York and the east coast.
Marcus Loew is remembered as a really friendly, sweet, nice guy. Adolph Zukor is remembered as one of the biggest assholes in Hollywood history. Their partnership was not bound to last. The Automatic Vaudeville Co. only existed from 1900-1904, but that was exactly the time that Thomas Edison introduced the Kinetoscope, the wooden box into which you peered and fed nickels to see a one-minute movie. As I’ve mentioned previously, the Kinetoscope went crazy, and Edison couldn’t manufacture enough of them to fulfill the worldwide craze. And the penny arcades became nickelodeons. Loew and Zukor split up, and Marcus Loew just kept buying theaters, until he was the largest theater-owner in the country.
In the next phase of the development of the film business, all of the theater-owners could not get anywhere near enough product to satisfy there ever-growing audience. Adolph Zukor, along with several other nickelodeon owners, went into production; Marcus Loew simply bought a production company, Metro Pictures, owned by Lewis Selznick (father of David O.). Not desiring to actually be in the film business, Loew bought Louis B. Mayer Pictures, a low-budget operation with no infrastructure, run by Louis Mayer and his hotshot young production head, Irving Thalberg, strictly to get Mayer and Thalberg to run Metro. Loew, unable to pass up a good deal, then bought the debt-ridden Goldwyn Co., which not only had a number of big stars under contract, several expensive movies in production, but it owned the big Goldwyn Studio in Culver City, which in the merger of 1923 became Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.
The biggest headache Mayer and Thalberg inherited was the completely out-of-control, runaway production of Ben Hur. The film had been shooting in Italy for over a year, had already cost the unheard of sum of a million dollars, and everybody hated all of the footage. In the boldest move in the history of film production, Mayer and Thalberg shut down the entire production, scraped everything, moved the production to Hollywood and started again. They recast the picture and got a new director. For the big finale chariot race they had the gigantic Colosseum set rebuilt, then hired thousands of extras. To wrangle all of these extras, they hired every young director in town to work as assistant directors, one of whom was William Wyler, who had just started directing low-budget westerns. This was 1924.
Ben Hur came out in 1925 and was a big hit, but at a final cost of over three million dollars, even if it became the highest-grossing movie in history (which it didn’t), it still wasn’t going to break even. Everybody understood that the only way this production was ever to become profitable was to wait at least 20 years and remake the movie.
The kindly, lovable Marcus Loew died in 1927 at the age of 57.
Then sound came in, and Louis Mayer began scheming how to get this million dollar Ben Hur debt off his books. He had the film scored and rereleased it in 1930, and it did all right for a silent movie with a musical score, but it didn’t fix the problem. When color was introduced in the mid- to late-1930s, Mayer began to actively discuss the idea of remaking Ben Hur. And it became the poison project at MGM for the next 20 years. It stank of disaster and nobody would touch it.
Slow dissolve to 1958 when William Wyler is honestly considered the greatest director in Hollywood by the folks in Hollywood – his films have more Oscar nominations and wins than the next five biggest directors put together – and he’s never made any money. He’s always made a good living, but that’s it. He had never come close to a million dollars.
So, William Wyler made the incredibly bold decision to remake Ben Hur, the film nobody wanted to touch. Knowing exactly the position that MGM was in regarding that film – Louis Mayer had died, but MGM was still owned by Loew’s – Wyler waltzed in there and made the deal of his life: a million dollar fee and 10% of the gross. Now all he had to do was make a hit movie, and not go over budget. He shot the film in Italy to not only get more widescreen spectacle, but more bang for his buck due to the exchange rates.
On the first day of shooting Wyler told the cast and crew the story of him being an assistant director on the 1925 version.
The film won 11 Oscars, was a huge hit, and William Wyler finally got rich.
And thus we head off into another glorious day.