Chapter Nine
STARS, STARS, STARS!
Well, I left my company and I was then not quite thirty-five years of age. I was accustomed to a life where every working hour was inspired by the one thought, “How can I make the Lasky Company more significant?” You can imagine, therefore, the terrible blankness of those days following my resignation. Feverishly I cast about me for a new outlet for my organising energy, and in the Autumn of 1916 I, together with my friends Archie and Edgar Selwyn, the theatrical producers, Margaret Mayo, and Arthur Hopkins, the theatrical producer, founded the Goldwyn Motion Picture Company.
The beginning of this second film venture of mine involved conditions very different from those which attended the start of the Lasky Company three years before. Then the story was supreme and the Lasky Company was successful without any really overshadowing personalities. True, the field presented some great celebrities such as Mary Pickford, but the emphasis was not placed upon the player to the degree which afterward swayed the producer. Constantly this emphasis became more irresistible, and by the time that I started the Goldwyn Company it was the player, not the play, which was the thing.
Every theatre-owner in the country wanted personalities. Stars were now made over night. New names came out in electric light almost every evening. Obviously, therefore, the only guarantee for the success of a new motion-picture organisation was the assemblage of a list of big names.
Hence it was upon an array of planets that the Goldwyn Company concentrated its initial energy. The first star we engaged was Mabel Normand; the second, Mae Marsh; the third, Madge Kennedy. Add to these such towering figures from other histrionic firmaments as Mary Garden, Jane Cowl, and Maxine Elliott, and you will see why our competitors were warranted in feeling a deep uneasiness. For the engagement of these people was attended by enormous publicity. Newspapers featured many of our stellar connections and, added to this, huge posters blazoned with the names of our trophies carried promise of greatness to every hamlet in America. The first thing that I did, in fact, was to scatter these posters broadcast.
Perhaps at first I did not quite realise that in building up the Lasky name I had been in reality creating a Frankenstein. Later, however, the full force of this figure was to occur to me, for at every turn I was met by the ruthless competition of the Famous Players-Lasky Company. This was particularly acute in the engagement of stars.
Added to obstructions of bitter rivalry came a personal misfortune. While playing hand-ball at the Athletic Club one day I broke my ankle. This kept me away from our studio for three months and, as my associates were inexperienced in picture-production, my absence meant a loss to the company of thousands of dollars. It was, indeed, a maddening situation for one attempting to launch a new business where the odds were already sufficiently against him.
It would seem as if the Greek dramatists had not overdrawn things. When the gods decide they want to make things hard for you, they are thorough, they overlook no executive detail. The first Goldwyn film was just being released when America announced her participation in the War. Heretofore the conflict had spelled advantage rather than disaster to the American producer, inasmuch as our films had become the rage in all neutral countries. But with America’s precipitation came a new set of conditions. These, oppressive enough to picture industries long established, almost succeeded in crushing our new venture.
First on the list were transportation difficulties. We were now unable to procure space on ships to move our products. This handicap was accompanied by shortage of fuel, conservation of light, and scarcity of labor. The second obstacle of this group became so acute that we were sometimes obliged to use four studios in order to complete a day’s production. Obviously, therefore, our only chance of survival lay in removing our establishment from the Fort Lee studio, where we had been operating, to a California one. This we did in the Summer of 1918.