Production
Producer Irving Thalberg purchased the rights to Vicki Baum's novel Menschen im Hotel for $13,000 and then commissioned William A. Drake to adapt it for the stage. It opened on Broadway at the National Theatre on November 13, 1930 and ran for 459 performances. Pleased with its success, Thalberg had Drake and Béla Balázs write the screenplay and budgeted the project at $700,000. There was also some controversy about Greta Garbo, with her strong Swedish accent, playing a Russian.
The film was also seen as an artistic achievement in its art direction and production quality. The lobby scenes were extremely well done, portraying a three hundred and sixty degree desk. This allowed audiences to watch the hotel action from all around the characters. It changed the way sets were made from that point onward.
Read more about this topic: Grand Hotel (film)
Famous quotes containing the word production:
“By bourgeoisie is meant the class of modern capitalists, owners of the means of social production and employers of wage labor. By proletariat, the class of modern wage laborers who, having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labor power in order to live.”
—Friedrich Engels (1820–1895)
“... if the production of any commodity necessitates the sacrifice of human life, society should do without that commodity, but it can not do without that life.”
—Emma Goldman (1869–1940)
“The society based on production is only productive, not creative.”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)