4/28/24
Newsletter #591
The Crack of Dawn
I recently mentioned that the Indian guru, Sadhguru, had a brain tumor and surgery, and I wished him the best. A week after surgery he was up and released from the hospital in Delhi. I saw a video of him from a couple of days ago and he was in Bali, apparently addressing a room full of devotees. He explained what had occurred, that he had experienced increasingly worse headaches, leading to the tumor and surgery. Sadhguru seemed quite proud of himself for his quick recovery and return to the speaking circuit. I was proud for him too. He then told a strange, I must say inscrutable, ancient Hindu story of a student who so looked up to his guru that one day he handed him a platter with his eyeballs on it. Meanwhile, as Sadhguru told this odd tale, he began to get emotionally choked up. He finally became so overcome by emotion that he started to cry. Sadhguru, like baseball players, doesn’t cry. Sadhguru is an enlightened being, he’s beyond crying. But there he was, sobbing. Luckily, they had a young man at a microphone standing by and he began singing, allowing them to cut away from the overwrought Sadhguru, whom I still wish the best.
Episode #4 of Selznick, the who-knows-how-many-part, Netflix limited series, starring Bradley Cooper as David O. Selznick. I figured it out, the makeup department can attach the round glasses directly to the Bernstein nose, thus saving time in application. By the way, the O. in David O. Selznick didn’t stand for anything. He gave himself the initial to differentiate himself from his uncle, also named David Selznick, also a film producer.
The Selznick name was not new to Hollywood. This could be a black and white flashback. David and Myron’s father, Lewis J. Selznick (real name, Lewis Zeleznick, a Russian Jew) was a very successful jeweler, and an early, big-shot, wheeler-dealer of the early film industry, meaning the teens. Before Hollywood became the center of American filmmaking, in the teens, most American movies were made in Fort Lee, New Jersey or Chicago. Lewis Selznick went into the film business in 1912, bought up a number of the early, early film companies located in Fort Lee, merged them together and became huge for a few years as Selznick Pictures. He was then ousted from his own company, which made the move to Hollywood and went bankrupt. But when he did have a big studio for a few years there, churning out movies, he let his two sons, Myron and David run it.
Meanwhile, back in the present day of 1939, the biggest MGM crew spent 140 days shooting – that’s a very long schedule – and they managed to spend $4 million in 1939 dollars, which would be like $400 million now. Eventually, it is reported that Victor Fleming had to be replaced near the end of shooting due to some sort of a nervous breakdown. His replacement was the old time, highly dependable director, Sam Wood, who among many other films, directed A Night at the Opera (1935) with the Marx brothers. The film was hastily cut, and they had a gigantic, super gala premiere in Atlanta on December 15, 1939, with the author, Margaret Mitchell meeting Clark Gable. But MGM also got one print showing in Los Angeles and one print in New York for that final week of 1939, thus achieving Academy Award consideration.
The film was pulled from the two theaters, then given some serious reediting. It took a couple of months, then MGM gave GWTW a “platform” release, meaning one print per major city. The point being is that by March and the Oscars, almost nobody had seen GWTW. Even still, the movie received 13 nominations and won 10 Oscars.
Gone With the Wind soon became the biggest moneymaking movie in history, taking the position from Birth of a Nation (1915). It is reported to have earned $400 million.
And there you have it.