Selznick & Milestone

Hollywood last week remarked with interest the formation of a new cinema producing company--Selznick-Milestone Pictures, Ltd. Director general of the new company was Lewis Milestone (The Racket, All Quiet on the Western Front, The Front Page). President was David 0. Selznick. At 28, David Selznick has sometimes been described as one of the bright young men in an industry full of dull ones. Reared in a household which was kept awake at night by new and erratic ideas about cinema, he has been full of ideas ever since. His idea when he resigned from Paramount where he had been getting $104,000 a year as assistant to Production Manager Ben P. Schulberg was this: mass production in the cinema is wrong. It produces inferior pictures and costs more than production in small units. Also, Depression has recently made exhibitors partial to independent products. Selznick-Milestone will make perhaps six pictures a year. If the company is a success, there will be other Selznick companies like it.

This latest idea of young David Selznick's was ambitious enough to be like his father's, the best of which it resembled. And because shrewd young David Selznick is the son of Lewis J. Selznick, the new company was something more than a likely combination of creative and executive talent. It was a climax in a cycle, a Milestone in a legend.

The Selznick saga is a fantasy told in light signs over Broadway, a loud scandal whispered in file copies of Variety, a legend forgotten in the smoke that curled out of spittoons in the Claridge Hotel from cigarets that had gold tips and monograms. An epic and a joke, it has made Selznick the name of a dynasty in the weird peerage of the cinema industry. It helped give the industry its reputation. It concerns a Japanese valet who learned how to pickle herring, a girl who was born in a Pennsylvania coal town and killed herself in Paris, a gold watch, a $50,000 messenger boy, the Tsar of Russia and the Wandering Jew. It began the day Lewis J. Selznick auctioned off the stock in his cheap Manhattan jewelry store and began wondering what to do next.

A week later he was telephoned by a man he had known in Pittsburgh and who had been trying to find him. By sheerest chance this man met Selznick's sister-in-law on a train to Pittsburgh. The man wanted Selznick to sell some stock in Universal pictures. Selznick sold the stock to Carl Laemmle, using a handful of diamonds left over from his store as an entering wedge. The stock gave Laemmle control of Universal and he gave Selznick a desk in the office. Selznick had a sign made which said "General Manager" and put it on the desk. When, some months later, he got a memorandum from Laemmle which said "accepting your resignation" he had acquired a knowledge of the tricks of the trade which enabled him to remark that the motion picture business "takes less brains than anything else in the world."

He got the U. S. rights to a picture called Whom the Gods Would Destroy for $4,250, sold shares in it for $42.50 to 99 Wall Street men. He used their backing when he was head of World Film Corp. which had an elephant for a trademark. When the stockholders in World Film, conservative bankers who never understood the Selznick to make pictures starring Clara Kimball Young.

The great period of the Selznick legend began then. He formed other companies for other stars and when Adolph Zukor did the same for Mary Pickford, he wrote Mary Pickford a letter telling her to congratulate Zukor for copying his idea. He held the first lavish previews at the Astor Hotel, signed Nazimova and Norma Talmadge, made $300,000 out of War Brides, had his valet Ishi pickle herring and serve tea from a samovar. The day after the Tsar abdicated, he sent a cable: NICHOLAS ROMANOFF: WHEN I WAS A POOR BOY IN KIEV SOME OF YOUR POLICEMEN WERE NOT NICE TO ME. . . . CAN GIVE YOU FINE POSITION ACTING IN PICTURES STOP SALARY NO OBJECT. . . . SELZNICK. Zukor sent a friend, who was said to have been paid $50,000, from Chicago to see Selznick. Selznick and Zukor, two of the biggest producers in the industry, started Select Pictures Corp. together.

Selznick put the first electric sign on a Broadway cinema theatre. Zukor took Selznick's name out of Select cinemas, but Selznick had his son Myron, 17, sign up Olive Thomas. She starred in Selznick Pictures devised by him and executed by his son. Zukor and Selznick broke up their partnership over that. Selznick started a new company of his own, got a slogan ("Selznick pictures make happy hours") whose author he reimbursed with a gold watch. Overexpansion ruined the new company. In 1924, Selznick was dabbling in radios. A year later, he was dabbling in Florida real estate.

The Selznick legend has flickered a few times since. In 1928, Myron, no longer a prodigy but still impetuous, hit John Barrymore on the jaw. Of late, David, youngest and least bombastic Selznick, has been heard of most. A year ago, he married Irene Mayer, daughter of Louis B. Mayer of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Near the David 0. Selznicks in Hollywood lives Father Lewis J. Selznick. His grand mannerisms are gone. But his sons and his legend are as lively as ever.

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