Eighteen months after the start, when MGM had poured more than $20,000,000 into this bounty on the Mutiny, Marlon was still acting up. The final scenes, months behind schedule, were being shot in Hollywood, costing still another two million. With the financial future of Metro itself at stake, with millions tied up in a picture which still had no ending, Marlon played Fletcher Christian in such a manner that, although the cameras turned, the film was unusable. He overplayed; he underplayed; he mumbled; he minced. It was a unique moment in our town’s history. Nobody before him had dared take hold of a mammoth studio, swing it by the tail, and make the bosses like it. The actors’ revenge was complete.
It takes avaricious agents with calculating machines for hearts to encourage stars like Brando to behave as they do. Now that no studio any longer has its own roster of stars tied by contracts, the agents and actors run Hollywood, as they always threatened to. The studio has to go cap in hand to the agent to sign up the big star for a single picture. No more than a half dozen actors and actresses alive today can attract an audience big enough to give a picture a hope of success at the box office.
The first giant among ten per centers hated producers and made no secret of it. Myron Selznick held it a point of honor to wring every dollar he could get out of the studios to settle the score for the wrong that had been done his father, Lewis J. The louder the bosses yelled “Murder!” the harder Myron squeezed.
Lewis J. was nicknamed “C.O.D.” for “cash on delivery” by starlets he lured to that notorious item of studio furniture, the casting couch. He lured plenty when he owned a $60,000,000 film corporation in the silent twenties. But as a financier he overreached himself. His sons, Myron and David, blamed rival movie makers for plotting the ruin that overtook old “C.O.D.”
Myron’s first client was Lewis Milestone, who must have smiled philosophically to himself when he saw what Brando was doing to MGM. Acting for Milestone, Myron left his mark on the Howard Hughes studio when, in 1927, he squeezed out of them exactly twice the salary the then young director had anticipated receiving. Alva Johnston recalled the time when Myron went home rejoicing: “Remember what those bastards did to my father? They paid more than a million dollars for it today.”
Bill Wellman was Selznick’s second client. After him, everybody who was anybody—Carole Lombard, William Powell, Pat O’Brien, to name just a sample—rushed to get Myron to do battle for them.
But neither he nor the mob of imitators who followed him in business managed to hold the entire industry up to ransom as it is being done today. One reason was that under the star system of that era, contracts came up only once a year for negotiation, not before every picture. Another reason: producers and directors, to a great extent, could make or break a star.
As a tribe, actors and actresses seldom know what’s good for them. They usually judge any script solely by the number of lines of dialogue they get. Greer Garson announced to one and all that she wouldn’t be playing in Goodbye, Mr. Chips, one of the finest pictures that came her way, because “I’m only in a few scenes.”
The day before she left town for England to make the picture, she poured out her woe to me. “I’ve sat here for months doing nothing,” she said, “and now I’m going back to my native land in a picture that gives me a very small part. When I left England, I was a star there; my friends will think I’m coming home a failure.”
I wrote the story, but before she stepped on the train the next day, she begged me to kill it: “What if the picture’s a hit? I’d look like a fool.” So I kept a friend by sitting on the interview. Mr. Chips made her an international name.