When's the last time a silent movie left you stunned?
Screened to a hand-picked audience in 1924 Eric von Stroheim's 10-hour long epic Greed was heralded as the greatest, most powerful film ever made. But almost immediately after the screening MGM prodction chief Irving Thalberg seized both the print and the negatives, ordered Greed cut to two hours, and destroyed both the original version and Von Stroheim's negatives.
25 year old Thalberg, the MGM boy wonder who later predicted "talking movies will never last," was largely responsible for creating movie production as we know it ... the "unit production management scheme", which splits productions into "units" thus spreading out the creative control of a film among producers, directors, etc.
Which goes a long way to explain why studio films are often so bad.
The destruction of the original version is regarded as the greatest single loss in movie history ... uncovering an original unedited 8-10 hour version of Greed would be the equivalent of finding the "holy grail" of filmmkaing.
In 1999 Greed was re-released in both 4 and 6-hour reconstructed versions. Do yourself a favor and commit to watching either one ... you'll never feel the same way about Road Trip again.
Quotes Worth Quoting:
"Credit you give yourself is not worth having". -Irving Thalberg (Thalberg refused to have his name included in film credits)
"In a business in which few men had the courage of their convictions, I decided that if I made them do things my way they would never know if their way would have been better."
-Irving Thalberg
"When I saw how the censor mutilated my picture Greed which I did really with my
whole heart, I abandoned all my ideals to create real art pictures and made pictures
to order from now on." - Eric Von Stroheim
"Since when does a boy tell a genius how to work?" -Eric Von Stroheim
[on seeing the two-hour version of Greed (1924), rather than the whole film] "It was like viewing a corpse in a graveyard".
[Dying in bed, telling his biographer] "This is not the worst, the worst is that they stole twenty-five years from my life..."
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