Hollywood by Garson Kanin

some benches, and then he started coming every week, and we began developing it into a nice little business. And by nineteen hundred and six, I formed a company, and we made up a name for it. It was—”
    “The Nickelodeons,” I said.
    “You know that?” said Laemmle delightedly. He turned to his son. “Say, this fellow’s all right.” He turned back to me. “The Nickelodeons. Yes. And that was a real success. Well, then we started buying more and more pictures. Renting them, I mean. Pretty soon, I began to have trouble with the suppliers. So the next thing, I looked into it and I decided why have trouble with the suppliers? We’ll make our own. And we started making our own. So you probably know already, after a while that led to the Universal Film Manufacturing Company. Then, when everybody started moving out here to the sunshine, we did, too. It’s been—the whole thing—a very interesting business. A very interesting life. And I sometimes think that it must have been God who pushed me into that long store.”
    “Mr. Laemmle,” I once asked, “what do you think is the most important element in the success or failure of a picture?”
    The answer came back at once. “The right actors in the right parts or the wrong actors in the wrong parts.”
    It is sometimes said that a star makes a part, but by and large, the opposite is true. Further, audiences have demonstrated that they are interested in their favorite stars only if the stars play parts they want to see them in.
    When Clark Gable was known as The King and was as powerful a box-office attraction as the American film business had ever known, his pictures were sold in advance simply as Gables.
    “We’ve got three Gables this year,” the salesman would say to the exhibitors, and book almost the whole Metro program on the strength of this pitch.
    Gable was a superstar. At the peak of his career, it was decided at Metro to make a film of the play titled Parnell . It had been a great success on the London stage, but had failed in New York. Still, the story of the Irish patriot attracted someone, and that someone proved to be persuasive. Parnell was under way. It was planned as an expensive prestige picture.
    “Prestige pictures,” so-called, were an element of Metro production left over from Irving Thalberg’s regime. Thalberg believed it was incumbent upon the industry to make a certain number of pictures each year without thought of profit. They were to be class pictures that would appeal to the theatergoing public and the book-reading public, the academic world, the professionals, the upper middle class. Thalberg believed such films broadened the base of the audiences and dignified the industry.
    Parnell was made, then launched with an outstanding campaign.
    Years later, an executive in Metro’s sales department told me, “I want to tell you, the picture went out, and when the gross reports started to come in, I swear to God we thought something’d gone wrong with the telegraph keys. You couldn’t believe the grosses that were coming in on Parnell . We kept telegraphing back, asking for confirmation, because we figured these had to be typographical errors. I mean, you couldn’t have grosses like that, not with a Gable. It would be like, say, you did a play on Broadway today, and the cast was Lunt and Fontanne and Al Jolson, and you’re going to open them in a show by Kaufman and Hart with music by Irving Berlin. And you open the box office Monday morning and nobody comes over to buy a ticket. What would you say? You would say, ‘Well, they didn’t get it, they didn’t see the ads.’ So you take the ads again, and five people come up the next day to buy tickets. I’m trying to give you an idea of what it was like with Parnell . We took a terrible beating with that whole picture. Nobody at the studio could understand what happened. Me, I still don’t understand. The only thing I could figure out is they didn’t want to see Gable in that