The Ten Commandments of Ambitious Film-Watching
Advice from the grave of a genius
Irving Thalberg is the patron saint of middle managers. Sandwiched between studio chief Louis B. Mayer and the legions of writers, directors, actors and artisans in MGM’s employ, he spent much of the late 1920s and early 1930s shaping the Dream Factory’s golden era.
This was the age of the Hollywood central producer. Under this system, studios concentrated creative and financial responsibility for their output in one man (it was always a man). And it was Thalberg, “the boy wonder,” who pioneered this approach, overseeing the production of more than 400 films during his twelve years at MGM while cultivating stables of writers (F Scott Fitzgerald, Frances Marion, Anita Loos) and stars (Clark Gable, Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford) that were the envy of the industry.
Everything went through Thalberg. His days were a whirlwind of script meetings, editing sessions, production meetings and rough-cut screenings. He plunged into every stage of the production cycle, working with writers, directors, editors, composers and department heads to midwife the studio’s pictures from conception to release.
To identify raw story material for his factory, Thalberg commissioned a battalion of readers to plough through thousands upon thousands of potential properties. In “any given year during the early 1930s,” writes historian Thomas Schatz, “MGM’s readers filed reports on over 1,000 novels and original scripts, over 400 short stories, and on 1,500 plays and 1,300 works on foreign language.”
Thalberg, who was only 26 when he joined MGM in 1925, was openly described as a genius by his peers. He had a near-supernatural knack for identifying a good story, and for shaping it in a way that was both creatively ambitious and commercially attractive.
For the readers under his tutelage, he developed a guide designed to help them spot the latent potential in the stories they reviewed. He called this guide his Ten Commandments.
For years now I’ve been stubbornly trying to become a better movie-watcher. By this, I mean developing the context, language and historical understanding I need to properly appreciate what’s in front of me. Such is the task of the ambitious cinephile.
So when I stumbled upon Thalberg’s Commandments, in Schatz’s excellent The Genius of the System, the effect was like a lighthouse in a storm. Nearly 100 years later, they remain (with a healthy dose of linguistic jiu-jitsu) excellent advice for how to better appreciate what’s on the screen.
For paid pilgrims, I’ve shared the Commandments below, along with some notes on how I interpret them. Which ones do you agree with?
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(1) Your most important duty is to find great ideas. You’ll find them buried under tons of mediocre suggestions
In Ted Gioia’s 9 Rules of Criticism, he describes the life of a critic as follows:
You seek out greatness as your daily routine.
What a wonderful phrase. Is this not the higher calling, not just of a critic, but of any of us who vociferously consume culture?
Consumption can become an end in itself, a Sisyphean exercise of racking up the numbers. But each time we think of a piece of art as just another notch on the bedpost we’re contributing to a flattening effect; a homogenisation of our cultural experience.
I’m being aspirational. I love Letterboxd as much as anyone. But it’s helpful, I find, to remember the “why.” We are seeking greatness.
This means reorienting our consumption from passive to active; mindless to mindful. It means treating each film on its own terms. It also means becoming both familiar with, and sensitive to, the mediocre. If you find that everything meets your standards, then they’re probably too low…