Marion Davies

It wasn't the first movie to make fun of Hollywood.

You can go back to movies like Show People with Marion Davies in 1928, and there were others even before that.

But it's certainly one of the best, and it's very pre-code.

The fact that we're able to make a beautiful Blu-ray out of it, it's long overdue.

He builds her a massive opera house in Chicago, shoving her down the public's throat to validate his own ego, completely ignoring the fact that she is hopelessly untalented and is literally begging him to let her stop.

The real-life inspiration for Susan Alexander was Marion Davies.

She was a showgirl in the Ziegfeld Follies 35 years younger than Hearst.

When Hearst fell in love with her, he moved mountains.

He funded her films, built a massive production company specifically for her called Cosmopolitan Pictures, and demanded that his vast network of newspapers praise her constantly.

But there is a crucial heartbreaking difference between the fictional Susan Alexander and the real Marion Davies, and it's a difference that Orson Welles himself later felt terribly guilty about.

Welles admitted that portraying Susan as a talentless, whining amateur was a dirty trick played on Davies.

Wait, why?

And because MGM needed thousands of people to fill the grandstands, many of these visitors were persuaded to put on costumes and become extras.

As a result, the crowd reportedly included an extraordinary collection of established and future stars, including Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, Lionel Barrymore, Lillian Gish, Harold Lloyd, Joan Crawford, Marion Davies, and many, many, many others.

Roughly two hundred thousand feet of film was reportedly shot just for the race before editor Lloyd Nosler reduced it to just a fraction of that length.

Rapidly cutting between wide shots, close views of the drivers, wheels, horses, crashes, and spectators created a pace that feels surprisingly modern.

I think it's The Patsy.

You have Marion Davies who goes through four or five caricatures trying to show off to her screen boyfriend.

And I'm fairly sure Pola Negra is one of them.

I might have got the wrong film.

I, truly, yes.

So without further ado, we've got William Randolph Hearst and Marion Davies.

Yes.

And this was inspired partly because I actually went to the Marion Davies Beach House in Santa Monica, um, earlier this summer, and I was just kind of very fascinated by her story and that she was William Randolph Hearst's mistress.

And she would throw, at this beach house, she- they have all these photos of the crazy parties she would throw.

That's like one of the things she was known for, was like these lavish, like Gatsby-esque parties in the 1920s.

He's his chart.

Okay.

I'm the Floridora Girl? I guess, yeah, the Floridora Girl sounds like what they would have called autism back in like 1900.

Well, the Floridora Girl starred William Randolph Hearst's mistress, Marion Davies, another interesting person.

And then Alexander Pantages also got into the movie business himself, forming a partnership with a Paramount Pictures subsidiary.

to show Paramount Films at his theaters.

Hamilton, it's getting that kind of story, which is amazing.

Hearst also had a long-term affair with the famous actress Marion Davies and had a daughter with her.

But that daughter was like said to be her niece or something until many, many, many years later when that woman was like a senior citizen, she finally revealed, oh yeah, Hearst was actually my dad.

So there's some really crazy history with this guy.

The musical is a much more complicated story and has many more characters and suitors for the two women who each have love triangles.

Howard Hawks owed Fox one more film before his contract ran out, and though he had never directed a musical and had no interest in the musical part, Hawks was one of the most eclectic and genre-bending directors of his time, and he agreed to direct Gentlemen Prefer Blondes along with his writing partner Charles Lederer, the nephew of Marion Davies, who had written His Girl Friday and worked with Howard Hawks on the screenplay The Thing From Another World.

But Howard Hawks had no interest in the musical numbers and left it to the visual director and choreographer, Jack Cole, who felt by the end like he should have gotten a co-directing credit.

Well, Gus will never let you go alone.