A DIRECTOR RECALLS DAYS OF MGM MAGIC

Director George Sidney speaks of the heydays of MGM as if the old Culver City studio were Camelot and mogul Louis B. Mayer, whose name has been more frequently linked with a couple of the seven deadly sins, was its benevolent patriarch King Arthur.

With job security, free cars, health and dental care and a $5,000-a-week salary, it is hard to imagine a more congenial spot for happy-ever-aftering.

“It was a wonderful, magical time,” says the 69-year-old Sidney, whose lavish musicals (“Anchors Aweigh,” “Show Boat” and “Kiss Me, Kate”) made him the Steven Spielberg of the ‘40s and early ‘50s.

“The studio was your home. Everything you wanted was there, and for film makers, everything we needed we were given.”

Sidney, who started his career as a 14-year-old day laborer at MGM and worked his way into directing assignments by his early 20s, was among the first wave of beneficiaries of the Directors Guild of America, which had been formed in 1936 and recognized in 1939.

The guild hadn’t won $5,000-a-week salaries for all its members. That was simply the amount that Louis B. Mayer, whom Sidney still refers to as “Mr. Mayer,” decided to pay each of the “A” directors on long-term contracts at MGM.

But the guild had forced a grudging admission from the studios that film was a director’s medium and by the mid-’40s, the top directors--even when limited to drawing talent and craftsmen from the studio staff--were enjoying broad creative freedom.

“We had an awful lot to say about everything,” Sidney says. “It all depended on your particular talents and the things you cared about. Some directors simply didn’t care about the editing of the film, or what the cameraman was doing, or how the music was being done. If you wanted to oversee those things and you knew what you were doing, they never interfered.”

Sidney says Mayer never looked at movies until they were finished, and he could see them with recruited preview audiences.

“MGM operated on a $50-million revolving fund,” he says. “There was no interest on the money, so they were in no hurry to get a movie released. If it didn’t work in previews, we just took it back and worked on it some more.

“The studios can’t do that today. The longer they hold it, the more it costs.”

Before federal antitrust laws, television and other things combined to end the old studio system, directors and everyone else went to work every day. Sidney says that when he wasn’t working on his own movies, he was often asked to work on someone else’s.

“There was a camaraderie that couldn’t exist today,” he says. “We would shoot sequences for each other and never ask for credit.”

Sidney directed sequences for many of the MGM musicals that don’t bear his name. He also directed hundreds of screen tests, which was then a major function of the studio’s aggressive ongoing star search.

“No one went undiscovered in Hollywood,” Sidney says. “Everyone who worked for the studio acted as a talent agent. If they saw a pretty girl in a coffee shop, or in the chorus line at the Trocadero (a Hollywood nightclub), they invited her to a screen test.

“MGM’s theory was that it was better to spend money on tests than to sign someone for a couple of years and have them take up space. We really made tests to determine who not to sign.”

Sidney says he liked directing screen tests because they gave him the opportunity to experiment. The studio spent as much as $10,000 on a single test.

Among the stars who emerged from Sidney’s tests were Ava Gardner, Ann Sheridan, Barry Fitzgerald, Van Heflin and Donna Reed.

One of his biggest discoveries ended up on contract at rival Paramount Pictures.

“It was common to send tests to other studios. I did this one with a girl we all thought looked good and I put her in with this short guy.

“They (the studio brass) didn’t like the guy. They said, ‘Don’t do tests with midgets.’ That test ended up over at Paramount and they said, ‘We don’t care about the girl; we want that guy.’ And they got him: Alan Ladd.”

As for making movies on the MGM “campus,” Sidney says it was a film maker’s dream.

“MGM was the big daddy of the father complex of the studios,” he says. “They tried to get the best of everything. If Mr. Mayer heard of somebody who built a better buttonhole, he would say, ‘I have to have him.’ They had the best writers, the best costumers; they had the best of everything. What they didn’t have, they manufactured.”

Sidney has a low regard for the current state of the movie art and pegs “the turn in the road” at Lew Wasserman’s success in getting a profit participation deal for James Stewart in the 1949 “Winchester 73.”

It was a windfall for Stewart, and, soon, agents were demanding and getting profit deals for other clients--directors and producers as well as actors--and the Age of the Agent was at hand.

“It is the heyday of the agent now,” Sidney says. “The agent wakes up and says, ‘Well, Charlie is going to get $5 million today instead of $4 million. That’s his new price.’ And the studios pay it because they want the deal.

“From there on (after “Winchester 73”), the happy little kingdom changed.”

Eventually, the little kingdom was taken over by lawyers and financial people, and there were black clouds hanging over Camelot.

“In the old days, we negotiated with principals, the heads of studios,” he says. “They knew what film making was about . . . . All of a sudden, the studios were being sold and the people who came in knew nothing about movies. Then they would send lawyers who knew even less to deal with us.”

Another black cloud appeared when congressional witch hunters decided that Hollywood was a hotbed of communism and through red-baiting and harassment managed to divide the guild membership.

“We went from one end of the political spectrum to the other,” says Sidney, who started the first of two long terms as guild president in 1951. “Everyone had worked together before, then all of a sudden people began pulling here and there.

“Everybody was being called something. I was called a Communist by some people and a reactionary by others. Someone called my father and said, ‘What happened to your son? Did you know he was a Communist?’

“My father said, ‘My son is a Communist? Three Rolls-Royces and he’s a Communist?’ ”

Sidney’s greatest successes were at MGM, where his musicals grossed as much as $30 million in the era of 35-cent tickets. He also had shown a deft hand at directing light adventure films (“The Three Musketeers,” “Scaramouche”).

But the musical was his forte and with the coming of television, the genre faded to near extinction in theaters.

Sidney’s post-MGM years were spotted with hits (“Bye-Bye Birdie”) and misses (“Pepe”), and he retired in 1968 after directing the English musical “Half a Sixpence.”

For the last 20 years, he has spent much of his time visiting archeological digs around the world, accumulating a wealth of research and photos that he says will eventually be donated to USC. He keeps in shape for that activity with weight training and daily five-mile runs.

He is certainly in better shape than Hollywood.

“Say whatever you want about Mr. Mayer, Harry Cohn, Jack Warner and the others who ran the old studios, but they wanted to make movies and that made the business exciting.

“The conversations in this town used to start out with, ‘Hey, I’ve got a great story.’ Today, they start with, ‘Hey, I’ve got a great deal.’ ”