The New Yorker:

How Irving Thalberg helped turn M-G-M into the world’s most famous movie studio—and gave the film business a new sense of artistry and scale.

By Adam Gopnik

The afterlife of the great American movie moguls is uncertain. Way back when, you might one day be on the cover of Time, the next day lost to time. Some who were once famous and feared, like Harry Cohn, of Columbia Pictures, have vanished into the sands. Sam Goldwyn persists only after having been made into a Yogi Berra, good for sideways wisdom—“Include me out,” and so on. But Irving Thalberg, the head of production at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer during the nineteen-twenties and thirties, left a lasting echo, in part because he died young enough to be remembered romantically, but mostly because he was the model for the title character of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s unfinished novel “The Last Tycoon” (1941). Indeed, Kenneth Turan’s “Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg:

The Whole Equation,” from Yale University Press’s Jewish Lives series, takes its subtitle from Fitzgerald’s posthumously published roman à clef. “Not a half dozen men have been able to keep the whole equation of pictures in their heads,” Fitzgerald’s narrator, Cecilia Brady, the daughter of a character based on the studio’s boss, Mayer (his ethnicity switched from Jewish to Irish), explains of the Thalberg character, who can.

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