David O. Selznick - Biography, Date of Birth, Place of Birth, Filmography (Read)
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David O. Selznick - Biography, Date of Birth, Place of Birth, Filmography
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David O. Selznick - biography, date of birth, place of birth, filmography, clips, Producer, Writer, Director, Editor.
May 10, 1902 - June 22, 1965 - American screenwriter and film producer.
The son of a film producer of Jewish origin, Lazar Zheleznik, a native of Kiev, who declared bankruptcy in 1923. In Hollywood since 1926, first as an assistant to LB Mayer. In 1930 he married his daughter Irene Gladys. A year later, he moved from Paramount to RKO Pictures, which at the time was close to financial ruin, and thanks to the success of King Kong (1933), he was able to make it a prosperous.
Selznick spent the next three years (1933-1936) at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer as vice president. As a producer, he specialized in meticulously verified adaptations of the classics of the previous century. From this period belong such films as "A Tale of Two Cities", "David Copperfield" and "Anna Karenina" starring Greta Garbo.
In 1936, Selznick set up his own film production company, Selznick International, through a distribution agreement with United Artists. He managed to buy the film rights to the bestselling Gone With the Wind for $ 50,000. For the next three years, Selznick worked on an epic adaptation of the novel, which marked the zenith of classic Hollywood. The film turned out to be a triumph and earned Selznick his first Oscar (although the lion's share of the box office proceeds ended up in the pockets of his father-in-law, Louis Bart Mayer) .
In 1939, Selznick achieved new success by signing a long-term contract with the British director A. Hitchcock. Despite the Oscar for Best Picture, their collaboration on Rebecca (1940) was marked by a series of quarrels between the producer and the director. For example, because of the letter R in the ending of "Rebecca": Selznick wanted the letter to be read in a cloud of smoke rising from the ashes, and Hitchcock insisted on a pillow. The project of the film about the disaster of "Titanic", which Hitchcock resisted, did not take place. As a result, Selznick began to rent out Hitchcock to other studios and used this money to make his own films, the main roles in which, as a rule, went to his young wife, actress Jennifer Jones.
In 1946, Selznick tried to replicate the success of Gone With the Wind with the massively conceived Western, Duel in the Sun. Two years later, worsening alcohol problems forced him to leave the film industry. Having bought the rights to the film adaptation of the novel A Farewell to Arms, Selznick in 1957 tried to return to big cinema, but the film version of the book failed at the box office.
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