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:
“An art whose limits depend on a moving image, mass audience, and industrial production is bound to differ from an art whose limits depend on language, a limited audience, and individual creation. In short, the filmed novel, in spite of certain resemblances, will inevitably become a different artistic entity from the novel on which it is based.”
—George Bluestone, U.S. educator, critic. “The Limits of the Novel and the Limits of the Film,” Novels Into Film, Johns Hopkins Press (1957)
“Just as modern mass production requires the standardization of commodities, so the social process requires standardization of man, and this standardization is called equality.”
—Erich Fromm (1900–1980)
“The growing of food and the growing of children are both vital to the family’s survival.... Who would dare make the judgment that holding your youngest baby on your lap is less important than weeding a few more yards in the maize field? Yet this is the judgment our society makes constantly. Production of autos, canned soup, advertising copy is important. Housework—cleaning, feeding, and caring—is unimportant.”
—Debbie Taylor (20th century)