1.
W. S. Van Dyke
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Known as a reliable craftsman who made his films on schedule and under budget, he earned the name One Take Woody for his quick and efficient style of filming. Woodbridge Strong Van Dyke II was born on March 21,1889 in San Diego and his father was a Superior Court judge who died the day his son was born. His mother, Laura Winston, returned to her acting career. As a child actor, Van Dyke appeared with his mother on the circuit with traveling stock companies. They traveled up and down the coast and into the Middle West, when he was five years old, they appeared at the old San Francisco Grand Opera House in Blind Girl. He would later remember his unusual education, I think Ive been to school in state in the Union. Whenever the company stopped off long enough in any city I went back behind a school desk, the rest of the time my mother taught me. When Van Dyke was fourteen years old, he moved to Seattle to live with his grandmother, while attending business school, he worked a number of part-time jobs, including janitor, waiter, salesman, and railroad attendant. Van Dykes early adult years were unsettled, and he moved from job to job, in 1909, he married actress Zelda Ashford, and the two joined various touring theater companies, finally arriving in Hollywood in 1915. In 1915, Van Dyke found work as an assistant director to D. W. Griffith on the film The Birth of a Nation, the following year, he was Griffiths assistant director on Intolerance. That same year he worked as an assistant director to James Young on Unprotected, The Lash, in 1917, Van Dyke directed his first film, The Land of Long Shadows for Essanay Studios. That same year he directed five films, The Range Boss, Open Places, Men of the Desert, Gift O Gab. In 1927, he traveled to Tacoma to direct two silent films for the new H. C, weaver Productions, Eyes of the Totem and The Heart of the Yukon. During the silent era he learned his craft and by the advent of the talkies was one of MGMs most reliable directors, many of his films were huge hits and top box office in any given year. He received Academy Award for Best Director nominations for The Thin Man and San Francisco and he also directed the Oscar-winning classic Eskimo, in which he also has a featured acting role. The earthquake sequence in San Francisco is considered one of the best special-effects sequences ever filmed, to help direct, Van Dyke called upon his early mentor, D. W. Griffith, who had fallen on hard times. Van Dyke was also known to hire old-time, out-of-work actors as extras, because of his loyalty, he was much beloved and admired in the industry. Van Dyke was known for allowing ad-libbing and for coaxing natural performances from his actors and he made stars of Nelson Eddy, James Stewart, Myrna Loy, Johnny Weissmuller, Maureen OSullivan, Eleanor Powell, Ilona Massey, and Margaret OBrien
2.
Hunt Stromberg
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Hunt Stromberg was a film producer during Hollywoods Golden Age. Hunt Stromberg was born in Louisville, Kentucky in 1894 and he promptly resigned from Inces staff to form Hunt Stromberg Productions. From his first independent film, The Foolish Age, Stromberg quickly made his mark by turning out independent, low-budget films in increasing quantity and quality. When Sid Grauman saw a cut of the resulting A Ladies Man. Stromberg continued his string of successes with Breaking into Society, which he wrote, Stromberg joined newly formed Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1925 and became one of its key executives, listed as one of the studios Big Four with Louis B. Mayer, Irving Thalberg, and Harry Rapf—later with Thalberg, David O. Selznick and he was the first production supervisor to get a produced by credit on-screen, well deserved considering his achievements. At the height of his career, MGM was producing 52 films a year, or an average of one film a week, Stromberg was one of the top ranked money makers of Hollywood, with a salary to match, US $8,000 a week, guaranteed. In 1937, he was included in managements inner circle and received an additional 1. 5% of Loews Theaters profits, the Treasury Department listed Stromberg as one of the ten highest paid executives in the United States. But there were changes in those years. Thalberg died in 1936, while Selznick and Wanger left MGM in 1937, leaving Mayer in sole, Selznick, Walter Wanger, and Orson Welles.85 million. His subsequent films were not as successful and he retired in 1951, in the same year his wife, Katherine Kerwin. An avid horseman and a businessman, Stromberg was independently wealthy by this time as well as a founding investor in Santa Anita Park. Stromberg died on August 23,1968 and he was survived by his son Hunt Stromberg Jr. a Broadway and television producer in his own right. Roaring Rails, screenwriter Soft Shoes, screenwriter The White Sister, director Hunt Stromberg at the Internet Movie Database Hunt Stromberg at Find a Grave Clip of Stromberg logo c.1943 on YouTube
3.
Harry B. Smith
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Harry Bache Smith was a writer, lyricist and composer. The most prolific of all American stage writers, he is said to have written over 300 librettos, some of his best-known works were librettos for the composers Victor Herbert and Reginald De Koven. He also wrote the book or lyrics for several versions of the Ziegfeld Follies, Smith was born in Buffalo, New York to Josiah Bailey Smith and Elizabeth Bach. According to his autobiography First Nights and First Editions, Smiths actual name at birth was Henry Bach Smith and his first wife was Lena Reed, whom he married on October 12,1887 in Chicago, Illinois. They had a son named Sydney Reed Smith, Smiths second wife was the actress Irene Bentley. She is buried in Woodlawn Cemetery in Bronx, NY, while on a brief holiday in Atlantic City, New Jersey, on New Years Day in 1936, Smith died of a heart attack in his room at the Marlborough-Blenheim Hotel. Smith worked on many of the musical theatre productions of his time. His younger brother Robert Bache Smith was also a successful lyricist, unless otherwise specified below, Smith wrote the libretto for the work, and the date given is the date of the original production. In addition to the below, in 1980, some of Smiths songs were featured in the Broadway revue Tintypes, Works by Harry B. Smith at Project Gutenberg Works by or about Harry B. Smith at Internet Archive Harry B. Smith at the Internet Broadway Database
4.
Dorothy Parker
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Dorothy Parker was an American poet, short story writer, critic, and satirist, best known for her wit, wisecracks and eye for 20th-century urban foibles. From a conflicted and unhappy childhood, Parker rose to acclaim, following the breakup of the circle, Parker traveled to Hollywood to pursue screenwriting. Her successes there, including two Academy Award nominations, were curtailed when her involvement in left-wing politics led to a place on the Hollywood blacklist, dismissive of her own talents, she deplored her reputation as a wisecracker. Nevertheless, her output and reputation for sharp wit have endured. Also known as Dot or Dottie, Parker was born Dorothy Rothschild to Jacob Henry and Eliza Annie Rothschild at 732 Ocean Avenue in Long Branch, New Jersey, dorothys mother was of Scottish descent, and her father was of German Jewish descent. Parker wrote in her essay My Hometown that her parents got her back to their Manhattan apartment shortly after Labor Day so she could be called a true New Yorker and her mother died in West End in July 1898, when Parker was a month shy of turning five. Her father remarried in 1900 to a woman named Eleanor Francis Lewis, Parker once joked that she was asked to leave following her characterization of the Immaculate Conception as spontaneous combustion. Her stepmother died in 1903, when Parker was nine, Parker later went to Miss Danas School, a finishing school in Morristown, New Jersey. She graduated from Miss Danas School in 1911, at the age of 18, following her fathers death in 1913, she played piano at a dancing school to earn a living while she worked on her verse. She sold her first poem to Vanity Fair magazine in 1914 and some months later was hired as an assistant for another Condé Nast magazine. She moved to Vanity Fair as a writer after two years at Vogue. In 1917, she met and married a Wall Street stockbroker, Edwin Pond Parker II and she had ambivalent feelings about her Jewish heritage given the strong antisemitism of that era and joked that she married to escape her name. Her career took off while she was writing criticism for Vanity Fair. At the magazine, she met Robert Benchley, who became a close friend, the trio began lunching at the Algonquin Hotel on a near-daily basis and became founding members of the Algonquin Round Table. The Round Table numbered among its members the newspaper columnists Franklin Pierce Adams, through their re-printing of her lunchtime remarks and short verses, particularly in Adams column The Conning Tower, Dorothy began developing a national reputation as a wit. One of her most famous comments was made when the group was informed that famously taciturn former president Calvin Coolidge had died, Parker remarked, How could they tell. Parkers caustic wit as a critic initially proved popular, but she was terminated by Vanity Fair in 1920 after her criticisms began to offend powerful producers too often. In solidarity, both Benchley and Sherwood resigned in protest, when Harold Ross founded The New Yorker in 1925, Parker and Benchley were part of a board of editors established by Ross to allay concerns of his investors
5.
Sweethearts (musical)
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Sweethearts is an operetta or musical play in two acts with music by Victor Herbert, lyrics by Robert B. Smith and book by Harry B. Smith and Fred De Gressac. The original Broadway production opened at the New Amsterdam Theatre on September 8,1913, there was a brief revival at Jolsons 59th Street Theatre, opening on September 21,1929 and closing on October 5,1929. MGM made the musical into a film in 1938 with a considerably altered screenplay, directed by W. S. Van Dyke and starring Jeanette MacDonald and this was the first All-TECHNICOLOR film of MGM Studio. A Broadway revival opened at the Shubert Theater on January 21,1947 and it featured a revised book by John Cecil Holm and musical direction by Robert Russell Bennett. The cast included Bobby Clark as Mikel, Marjorie Gateson as Dame Lucy, Gloria Story as Princess Sylvia, the piece was presented in the 1980s by the Light Opera of Manhattan. In 2002 the Ohio Light Opera commissioned a new edition of the opera from Quade Winter. A complete recording was issued by Albany Records, Mikel Mikeloviz, disguised as a monk, transports Princess Jeanne, the infant daughter of King René of the little kingdom of Zilinia, to Bruges to wait in safety during the war. Dame Paula runs the Laundry of the White Geese and is known as Mother Goose, Mikel gives the princess to Paula in secret to raise as her own daughter under the name of Sylvia. Paula later has six daughters of her own who help her run the laundry and their father has been at war for ten years. 22 years later, the people are demanding the restoration of a monarchy, Mikel is conspiring to restore Princess Jeanne to the throne, which is about to be offered to Prince Franz, the heir presumptive. Franz, while travelling in disguise, has fallen in love with Sylvia, but Sylvia, who does not know that she is really a princess, is bethrothed to Lieutenant Karl, a military lothario. Mikels plans are hindered by the schemes of three villains, Mikel also mistakes Liane, a milliner who has sought temporary employment in the Laundry of the White Geese, for the lost princess. After all the complications are combed out, Franz and Sylvia marry, RCA Victor issued an album using studio singers and Al Goodmans orchestra on 78-RPM records in 1947. These highlights were issued on Lp by RCA Victor in 1951, a 2008 CD release combines these recordings with selections from Naughty Marietta and The Red Mill
6.
Jeanette MacDonald
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Jeanette Anna MacDonald was an American singer and actress best remembered for her musical films of the 1930s with Maurice Chevalier and Nelson Eddy. During the 1930s and 1940s she starred in 29 feature films, four nominated for Best Picture Oscars and she later appeared in opera, concerts, radio, and television. MacDonald was one of the most influential sopranos of the 20th century, introducing opera to movie-going audiences, MacDonald was born June 18,1903, at her familys Philadelphia home at 5123 Arch Street. She was the youngest of the three daughters of Anna Mae and Daniel MacDonald and she had Scottish, English, and Dutch ancestry. Starting at an age, she took dancing lessons with Al White, imitated her mothers opera records. She performed at church and school functions and began touring in kiddie shows and she was the younger sister of character actress Blossom Rock who is most famous as Grandmama on the TV show Addams Family. In 1920 she appeared in two musicals, Jerome Kerns Night Boat as a replacement, and Irene on the road as the second female lead. Shipman once remarked that MacDonald did not have the legs for a chorus girl. In 1921 MacDonald played in Tangerine, as one of the Six Wives, in 1922 MacDonald was a featured singer in a Greenwich Village revue, Fantastic Fricassee. Good press notices brought her a role in The Magic Ring, MacDonald played the second female lead in this long-running musical which starred Mitzi Hajos. In 1925 MacDonald again had the female lead opposite Queenie Smith in Tip Toes. The following year found her still in a female lead in Bubblin Over. MacDonald finally landed the role in Yes, Yes, Yvette. Planned as a sequel to producer H. H. Frazees No, No, Nanette, MacDonald also played the lead in her next two plays, Sunny Days, her first show for producers Lee and J. J. Shubert, for which she received rave reviews, and Angela and her last play was Boom Boom, with her name above the title. While MacDonald was appearing in Angela, film star Richard Dix spotted her and had her screen-tested for his film Nothing, the Shuberts wouldn’t let her out of her contract to appear in the film, which starred Dix and Helen Kane, the Boop-boop-a-doop girl. In 1929, famed film director Ernst Lubitsch was looking through old screen tests of Broadway performers and he cast her as the leading lady in his first sound film, The Love Parade, which starred the Continental sensation Maurice Chevalier. In the first rush of sound films, 1929–30, MacDonald starred in six films and her first, The Love Parade, directed by Lubitsch and co-starring Chevalier, was a landmark of early sound films and received a Best Picture nomination
