David O. Selznick

David O. Selznick (May 10, 1902–June 22, 1965), was one of the iconic Hollywood producers of the Golden Age. He is best known for producing the epic blockbuster Gone with the Wind (1939) which earned him an Oscar for Best Picture. Not only did Gone with the Wind gross the highest amount of money at the box office of any film ever (adjusted for inflation), but it also won seven additional Oscars and two special awards. Selznick also won the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award that same year. He would make film history by winning the Best Picture Oscar a second year in a row for Rebecca (1940).

Biography

Selznick was born to a Jewish family in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the son of silent movie distributor Lewis J. Selznick and Florence A. (Sachs) Selznick. He studied at Columbia University and worked as an apprentice in his father's company until his father went bankrupt in 1923. In 1926, Selznick moved to Hollywood and with his father's connections, got a job as an assistant story editor at MGM. He left MGM for Paramount Pictures in 1928, working there until 1931 when he joined RKO as Head of Production. His years at RKO were fruitful and he guided many notable films there, including A Bill of Divorcement (1932), What Price Hollywood (1932) and King Kong (1933). While at RKO, he also gave George Cukor his big directing break. In 1933 he returned to MGM to establish a second prestige production unit to parallel that of Irving Thalberg who was in poor health. His blockbuster classics included Dinner at Eight (1933), David Copperfield (1935), Anna Karenina (1935) and A Tale of Two Cities (1935).

But Selznick was restless and longed to be an independent producer and establish his own studio. In 1935 he realized that goal by forming Selznick International Pictures and distributing his films through United Artists. His successes continued with classics such as The Garden of Allah (1936), The Prisoner of Zenda (1937), A Star Is Born (1937), Nothing Sacred (1937), Made For Each Other (1939), Intermezzo (1939) and of course, his magnum opus, Gone with the Wind (1939). In 1940, he produced his second Best Picture Oscar winner in a row, Rebecca, the first Hollywood production for British director Alfred Hitchcock. Selznick had brought Hitchcock over from England, launching the director's American career. Rebecca was Hitchcock's only film to win Best Picture.

After Rebecca, Selznick closed Selznick International Pictures and took some time off. His business activities included loaning out to other studios for large profits the high-powered talent he had under contract including Hitchcock, Ingrid Bergman, Vivien Leigh and Joan Fontaine. He also developed film projects and sold the packages to other producers. In 1944 he returned to producing pictures with the huge success Since You Went Away, which he wrote. He followed that with the classic Spellbound (1945) as well as Portrait of Jennie (1948). In 1949, he co-produced the memorable Carol Reed picture The Third Man.

After Gone with the Wind, Selznick spent the rest of his career trying to top that landmark achievement. The closest he came was with Duel in the Sun (1946). With a huge budget, the film is renowned for its stellar cast, its sweeping cinematography and for causing all sorts of moral upheaval because of the then risqué script written by Selznick. And though it was a troublesome shoot with a number of directors, the film would turn out to be a major success. The film was the second highest grossing film of 1947 and turned out to be the first movie that Martin Scorsese would see, inspiring the director's career.

"I stopped making films in 1948 because I was tired," Selznick later wrote. "I had been producing, at the time, for twenty years . . . . Additionally it was crystal clear that the motion-picture business was in for a terrible beating from television and other new forms of entertainment, and I thought it a good time to take stock and to study objectively the obviously changing public tastes . . . . Certainly I had no intention of staying away from production for nine years."^[1] Selznick spent most of the 1950s obsessing about nurturing the career of his second wife Jennifer Jones. His last film, the big budget production, A Farewell to Arms (1957) starring Jones and Rock Hudson, was ill received. But in 1954, he ventured successfully into television, producing a two hour extravaganza called Light's Diamond Jubilee, which, in true Selznick fashion, made TV history by being telecast simultaneously on all networks.

Selznick died in 1965 following several heart attacks, and was interred in the Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery in Glendale, California.

In addition to his stellar filmography, Selznick had a keen instinct for new talent and will be remembered for introducing American movie audiences to Fred Astaire, Katharine Hepburn, Ingrid Bergman, Vivien Leigh and Louis Jourdan as well as director Alfred Hitchcock. Selznick continued to be a larger than life Hollywood presence right up to the end of his life. A fascinating study in contrasts, this passionate, creative, obsessed product of the motion picture business remains an integral part of film making history.

Despite the debt many of his discoveries owe him and his undoubtable dedication to film-making, Selznick is considered to be the stereotypical version of the film producer to whom his modern equivalents are often compared to - one who constantly interfered with the creative process of film-making and earned as many enemies as friends. Alfred Hitchcock, whose film Spellbound was edited on Selznick's insistence, grew resentful of his nature and decided to produce his own films from Notorious onwards. Selznick also battled with Carol Reed during the production of The Third Man and edited the film for its American release. Perhaps the most famous example of his interference was during the production of Powell and Pressburger's Gone to Earth starring his wife Jennifer Jones. After production, Selznick disliked the film and removed almost an entire third of it for its American release, under the title The Wild Heart. Selznick lost a court case with Powell & Pressburger to control all versions of the film but he retained control of the American release so he proceeded to cut and change various sections back in Hollywood.

However, it is generally conceded that had Selznick not been such a meddlesome perfectionist, his best films would not have been the masterpieces that they were. One memorable example, revealed in the book Memo From David O. Selznick, concerned the 1940 film Rebecca. When he was submitted the screenplay for approval, Selznick was shocked to discover that Alfred Hitchcock, the film's director, had allowed Daphne du Maurier's original novel to be changed so that it was virtually unrecognizable, even to the point of introducing unnecessarily comic scenes not in the book. The furious Selznick wrote Hitchcock a blistering memo, and forced Hitchcock to remain faithful to the novel.

Other Facts

• David O. Selznick's real name was simply David Selznick. It is sometimes claimed that the "O" stands for Oliver, but, in fact, the initial was an invention of his. The book Memo from David O. Selznick^[2] starts with this autobiographical memoir:

I have no middle name. I briefly used my mother's maiden name, Sachs. I had an uncle, whom I greatly disliked, who was also named David Selznick, so in order to avoid the growing confusion between the two of us, I decided to take a middle initial and went through the alphabet to find one that seemed to me to give the best punctuation, and decided on "O."

• Alfred Hitchcock made subtle reference to this in North by Northwest where Cary Grant's character Roger Thornhill uses the monogram ROT and says the O stands for "nothing". He also dressed the antagonist of Rear Window to look like Selznick.

• Selznick married Irene Gladys Mayer, daughter of MGM mogul Louis B. Mayer, in 1930. They divorced in 1948. They had two sons, Daniel Selznick and Jeffrey Selznick.
• Selznick married actress Jennifer Jones in 1949. They had one daughter, Mary Jennifer Selznick, who committed suicide in 1975.
• Selznick's brother Myron Selznick became one of the most powerful agents in Hollywood, defining the profession for those that followed. He died in 1944.
• For his indelible contribution to the motion picture industry, David O. Selznick has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 7000 Hollywood Blvd., in front of the historic Hollywood Roosevelt hotel.
• The casting of the lead role in Gone with the Wind became a complex, two-year endeavor. Many famous or soon-to-be-famous actresses were either screen-tested, auditioned, or considered for the role of Scarlett. Four actresses were still under consideration by December 1938. But only two finalists were tested in Technicolor,^[3] and after a series of screen tests, Vivien Leigh's casting was announced on January 13, 1939. Just before the shooting of the film, Selznick informed Ed Sullivan: "Scarlett O'Hara's parents were French and Irish. Identically, Miss Leigh's parents are French and Irish."^[4]

Film Library

After Selznick's death, his estate sold the rights to a majority of his post-1935 films to ABC (now part of Disney/Buena Vista), although MGM retained the rights to Gone with the Wind (today part of the Turner Entertainment library), and 20th Century Fox still holds rights to the remake of A Farewell to Arms.

Academy Awards and Nominations

• 1946 Nominated Best Picture Spellbound
• 1945 Nominated Best Picture Since You Went Away
• 1941 Won Best Picture Rebecca
• 1940 Won Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award
• 1940 Won Best Picture Gone with the Wind
• 1938 Nominated Best Picture A Star Is Born
• 1937 Nominated Best Picture A Tale of Two Cities

References

1. ^ Memo from David O. Selznick, p. 423.
2. ^ Selznick, David O. (2000). Memo from David O. Selznick. New York: Modern Library, 3. ISBN 0-375-75531-4. 
3. ^ Haver, Ronald (1980). Davd O. Selznick's Hollywood. New York: Knopf. ISBN 0-394-42595-2. 
4. ^ Letter from David O. Selznick to Ed Sullivan, Jan. 7, 1939. Research by Leigh's biographer Michelangelo Capua has called into question both ancestral claims.

• Thomson, David. Showman: The Life of David O. Selznick. New York: Knopf, 1992. ISBN 0-394-56833-8

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