The scion of a film-producing family, David O. Selznick was one of the forerunners of the modern independent producer. As a studio executive during the first half of the 1930s, he was responsible for the making of such classics as King Kong (1933) at RKO and A Tale of Two Cities (1935) at MGM. As an independent producer from 1936 until 1957, Selznick made a small but substantial body of dramas, comedies, and thrillers, 18 films in all, many of which are cited among the best films of their era in their respective genres. In most of these films — excepting the thrillers — he had as much (or more) to say about their content than their officially credited directors. In that regard, Selznick also probably had a keener understanding and appreciation of movies as art than any of his rival film moguls of the mid-20th century.
David Oliver Selznick was the younger son of Lewis Selznick, a film producer in his own right until bankruptcy forced him out of business in 1923; the family’s older son, Myron Selznick, was a producer who later became one of Hollywood’s most respected agents. After his father’s bankruptcy, David Selznick found some success producing exploitation films on his own, but it was only after coming to Hollywood in 1926 that he really began his filmmaking career. He started as an assistant story editor to Louis B. Mayer at MGM and rose to associate producer, but quickly moved to Paramount Pictures, where he became a production executive. During 1931, Selznick got his first opportunity to show what he could do as an executive when he became head of production at RKO, which was then in terrible financial trouble. He managed to turn the studio’s fortunes around by bringing in some of the top talent with whom he had previously worked, including Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack from Paramount, and setting up an ambitious production schedule that included King Kong. His next stop was MGM, where he remained for three years as a vice president and producer, and shepherded such big-budget, prestige productions as A Tale of Two Cities (1935), David Copperfield (1935), and Anna Karenina (1935) to completion. In 1936, he formed his own production company, Selznick International, with United Artists serving as his distributor. His films were all high-quality productions, rivalling the best work of MGM and such figures as fellow independent filmmaking mogul Samuel Goldwyn. Little Lord Fauntleroy (1936), The Prisoner of Zenda (1937), A Star Is Born (1937), Nothing Sacred (1937), The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1938), and Intermezzo (1939) were all extremely successful, and the latter film also brought Ingrid Bergman to Hollywood.
His major coup, however, was buying up the film rights to Margaret Mitchell’s novel Gone With the Wind, which he brought to the screen in 1939 in partnership with MGM. The most sought-after literary property of the 1930s, Gone With the Wind was both a lure and a challenge to dozens of would-be producers; its sweeping story — encompassing the whole of the Civil War and the beginnings of Reconstruction, and a lot more — made it seemingly impossible to film, even as its popularity made it impossible to ignore as a potential movie adaptation. Selznick was able to put the production together over a period of three years by marshaling an army of talent both behind and in front of the cameras. He did this, in part, by incorporating his ultimate goal of filming Mitchell’s book into the process of making his other films during that period. In retrospect, he seemed to be working out some aspect of his conception of Gone With the Wind through his early use of Technicolor in the films The Garden of Allah (1936), Nothing Sacred, and A Star Is Born; and in his national talent search for a star for The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1938); and his combining of Technicolor and an authentic-looking mid-19th century setting in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; all of these earlier productions made it possible to move Gone With the Wind forward. Unfortunately, the business arrangement he was forced to conclude with MGM, in order to obtain the services of Clark Gable in the role of Rhett Butler, left the studio with most of the profits of the biggest moneymaker that Hollywood had seen up to that time. It earned Selznick recognition but relatively little financial reward, even as it permanently enshrined its four leads, Gable, Vivien Leigh, Leslie Howard, and Olivia de Havilland, at the pinnacle of Hollywood stardom.
His other major coup, though somewhat less widely recognized at the time, was his signing of English director Alfred Hitchcock to a long-term contract in 1939. Their first film together, Rebecca (1940), was a huge hit and made the screen careers of several of its participants while transforming Joan Fontaine into a top star. Selznick and Hitchcock didn’t enjoy working together, however, and the director was only too happy to be loaned out to Universal and RKO over the next six years, where he was freer to work the way he liked; conversely, Selznick collected huge fees for the loan of Hitchcock’s services to those studios (and got ownership of the best of those outside pictures, Notorious), in essence using the director as a cash cow to help finance his own films during this period. While Hitchcock made five movies during the years 1941-1944 on loan-out, Selznick’s own production during this same period was limited to a single movie, Since You Went Away (1944), an over-long but extremely popular drama of life on the home front during World War II, which co-starred Jennifer Jones, a young actress with whom the producer fell passionately in love; at the time, however, he was still married to the former Irene Mayer, the daughter of MGM’s Louis B. Mayer, while Jones was married to actor Robert Walker, and the producer had to tread lightly in pursuing his romantic interest. Selznick’s relationship with Jones was played out in a veiled yet public manner, on the screen — she starred in all but two of his subsequent productions (those exceptions were Hitchcock films), and it seemed as though the budgets and shooting schedules ballooned to reflect the depth of his feelings for her. Duel in the Sun (1946) was the most notable of these — Selznick’s attempt to replicate the scope of Gone With the Wind in a Western setting, it was two years in the making and employed the services of at least three directors, with Jones at the center of the movie in a fiercely and provocatively sexual role. Possibly the most expensive (and sexually overheated) Western ever made up to that time, it did good business once it was released, but had nearly bankrupted the Selznick company while in production; it also marked the first time that one of Selznick’s movies had enjoyed less than full critical acclaim — Duel in the Sun was a little too daring, even campy at times, and it was treated very harshly by some reviewers. Portrait of Jennie (1948), by contrast, was a delicately textured 86-minute fantasy love story, casting Jones as an idealized woman, her role built on equal parts of innocence and romantic yearning; it took over a year to shoot and was nearly as expensive to make as Gone With the Wind, mostly due to the decision to shoot in New York, and also the large number of retakes and extensive rewrites during shooting ordered by the producer, and the shooting of many scenes that were not used. Even amid this massive expenditure and waste, however, something of Selznick’s taste and artistic vision from the 1930s survived — just as he had chosen Technicolor for The Garden of Allah, A Star Is Born, Nothing Sacred, and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and supervised the entire look of each movie, so he very deliberately had Portrait of Jennie shot in black-and-white, but reserved some dazzling photographic effects for the final reel, and a gorgeous single Technicolor sequence for the final shot in the film, of the painting of the title. Selznick benefited from the movie in the most personal way of all, by marrying Jones once he was free of his first wife. The second half of the 1940s were difficult years for Selznick. He lost the services of Hitchcock following the release of The Paradine Case (1947), a difficult and unprofitable production, the troubled history of which is reflected in the different running times of various extant versions of the film. Duel in the Sun barely broke even once the extended production and distribution costs were calculated, and it had done little to enhance the producer’s reputation — indeed, it was often referred to quietly in the business, mockingly, as “Lust in the Dust.” And Portrait of Jennie was a financial debacle that wouldn’t begin to recover its costs until the middle of the decade. Selznick’s business was kept afloat by sheer force of will and his fortuitous acquisition of U.S. distribution rights to two British films, The Fallen Idol (1948) and The Third Man (1949). Though he issued the latter film in the United States in a somewhat edited form, it proved to be a massive success on this side of the Atlantic and kept the wolf from the door, for a time at least. By the early ‘50s, however, his filmmaking activities had slowed under the weight of mounting business pressures and health problems, including the addictive use of stimulants, and ceased altogether following his disastrous remake of A Farewell to Arms. As a producer, Selznick did far more than initiate projects, although even from that standpoint he was often among the more gifted members of his profession. Beyond such ambitious projects as King Kong or Gone With the Wind, he also exerted a unique influence on Hollywood’s embrace of new types of subject matter — it was Selznick’s fascination with psychiatry, for example, that led to the making of Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1945); and his romance with Jones led to the making of one of the greatest fantasy films of all time, Portrait of Jennie, which would not have been mounted so handsomely or compellingly by any other producer. Additionally, he tended to involve himself in every phase of a movie’s production, and it can be said that he had as much to do with the shaping of the films he made as his directors did, with sometimes impressive results — directors hated his interference, but the results, in all but one or two cases, were highly memorable and successful films. He also understood the art of film as well as the business of movies — Selznick was alone, among producers of any standing in Hollywood, in urging RKO to preserve an uncut print of Orson Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons, when everyone else at his level of the industry merely looked at the movie as a losing investment. His level of involvement and care as a producer is reflected in the fact that so many of Selznick’s movies, beginning with King Kong and Gone With the Wind, have been deemed worthy of major restoration efforts, and continue to be available for theatrical showings a half-century or more after their release. Of course, this same level of involvement also alienated many people with whom he had contact — he was so concerned with protecting the stardom that he’d brought to Vivien Leigh in Gone With the Wind that he refused to permit her to play a role that he deemed too small in her husband Laurence Olivier’s Henry V (1944); yet he never used her in another picture after Gone With the Wind. His conflicts with Hitchcock are perhaps most obvious in the opening credits of the pictures they did together, Rebecca, Spellbound, and The Paradine Case, where it seems as though each is trying to one-up the prominence of their name over the other. Hitchcock probably got in the last word when he made Rear Window in 1954, by deliberately making the murderer in the film (portrayed by Raymond Burr) resemble Selznick. —allmovie.com
