From the late 1920s through about 1960, a handful of studios turned out stars, spectacles and legends on tight seven-year contracts. Some of the best stories happened off camera: a segregated Oscar ceremony, a dog who never won, a Supreme Court case that ended the studio system, and a censor's rule that nearly cut Hollywood's most famous line. These tiles are checked against museums, archives and film histories, not studio publicity.
Every tile in a Golden Age of Hollywood game carries one of these. Open one to read it now, or leave them for the board to hand you.
Stars
nine stories
1The first Black Oscar winner sat apart from her cast
On the tile: McDaniel1940
When Hattie McDaniel won best supporting actress for Gone with the Wind in February 1940, she became the first Black performer to win an Academy Award. The ceremony was held at the Ambassador Hotel's Cocoanut Grove nightclub, which had a strict no-Blacks policy; producer David O. Selznick had to call in a special favor just to get her into the building. McDaniel was seated at a small table against a far wall, apart from her white costars, before she walked up to accept her award: the embossed plaque then given to supporting winners.
2The dog who almost won best actor, according to legend
On the tile: Rin Tin Tin1929Myth busted
Popular legend says the German shepherd star Rin Tin Tin received the most votes for best actor at the first Academy Awards, only for the Academy to hand the prize to a human instead. The signed 1928 nomination ballots survive in the Academy's Margaret Herrick Library, and just one of them names a dog: Jack Warner's, on which the studio chief recycled a joke first made by his own executive, Darryl Zanuck. The real winner was Emil Jannings, honored for two silent dramas, The Last Command and The Way of All Flesh.
3The screen siren who patented a wartime radio trick
On the tile: Hedy Lamarr1942
Hedy Lamarr was an MGM leading lady, but when she wasn't playing femme fatales she was often at a drafting table, inventing. In 1942 she and composer George Antheil patented a "Secret Communication System" in which a transmitter and receiver hopped together across many radio frequencies, making the signal hard to jam, an idea meant to guide torpedoes to their targets. The Navy decided against using it during the war, but frequency hopping became a foundation for today's Wi-Fi, GPS and Bluetooth, and in 2014 Lamarr was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.
4The star passed over for a role written as Chinese
On the tile: Anna May Wong1935
In 1935 MGM was casting The Good Earth, adapted from Pearl Buck's novel of Chinese farm life, and Anna May Wong hoped to play its heroine, O-Lan. The studio gave the part to Luise Rainer, one of several white actors made up to play the Chinese leads, and asked Wong to test instead for Lotus, a conniving concubine. She turned it down: "You're asking me—with Chinese blood—to do the only unsympathetic role in the picture, featuring an all-American cast portraying Chinese characters." Rainer went on to win the Academy Award for best actress.
5The redhead Hollywood once crowned queen of the B movies
On the tile: Lucille Ball1942
Long before I Love Lucy, Lucille Ball played a fashion model in RKO's Roberta in 1935, and the bit part led to a studio contract. Her leading roles in RKO's minor pictures, through the late 1930s and into the '40s, earned her the nickname "Queen of the B's." Her own favorite film role, in The Big Street opposite Henry Fonda, brought her to MGM's attention, and she signed with that studio on her birthday in 1942. It was television, though, that made her one of the most popular stars in America.
6The myth that Dracula asked to be buried in his cape
On the tile: Bela Lugosi1956Myth busted
Legend holds that Bela Lugosi asked to be buried as Dracula, the role that made him famous. In fact the choice was made after his 1956 death: his son, Bela G. Lugosi, said many times that he and his mother, Lillian, decided it, believing his father would have wanted it. They even passed over the original 1931 film cape, which Lugosi had wanted his son to have, for a lighter cape he wore for personal appearances. The screen cape stayed in the family until 2019, when it went to the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures.
7The line that made the censors rewrite their own rules
On the tile: Clark Gable1939
Rhett Butler's parting line, "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn," almost never reached the screen. The Production Code forbade "damn," and producer David O. Selznick lobbied to keep it in Gone with the Wind, telling Will Hays, head of the studios' trade association, that the word was "not an oath or a curse." On November 1, 1939, weeks before the premiere, the association amended the code to allow "hell" and "damn" where historical or literary context required them. The American Film Institute later ranked Clark Gable's line the number one movie quote of all time.
8The star nominated for an Oscar after he was gone
On the tile: James Dean1956
James Dean died in a car crash on September 30, 1955, at age twenty-four, having starred in just three films. Months later the Academy nominated him for best actor for East of Eden, making him the first actor ever nominated in that category after his death. A year later came a second posthumous nomination, for Giant, and he remains the only actor nominated twice after death. Dean never learned of either honor, and both times the Oscar went to someone else.
In 1942 MGM signed Lena Horne to a seven-year contract, only the second long-term movie deal ever offered to an African American woman. But in her MGM films with mostly white casts, she appeared only in stand-alone musical numbers, so her scenes could be cut from prints shown in the segregated South. "No one bothered to put me in a movie where I talked to anybody," Horne later recalled, "where some thread of the story might be broken if I were cut." Even in 1948's Words and Music, she simply played herself, singing in a nightclub.
The Jazz Singer is often called the first talkie, yet it was mostly silent. Warner Bros. used its Vitaphone sound-on-disc system for Al Jolson's songs and a few scenes, with recorded music covering the rest, and the picture held only about two minutes of dialogue. The famous moment came after Jolson's first song, when he told a cabaret crowd, "Wait a minute, wait a minute, you ain't heard nothin' yet," a tag line from his stage act. By March 1928, still the only feature with dialogue and singing, it was playing in 235 theaters.
The giant ape terrorizing New York in King Kong was, in reality, a set of models about eighteen inches tall. Sculptor Marcel Delgado built them with metal skeletons, rubber and foam for muscle, and rabbit fur for hair. Effects pioneer Willis O'Brien animated Kong one frame at a time, projecting footage of live actors onto tiny screens behind the models, and the 1933 film is often credited as the first to use miniature rear projection. Before a scene could start, the stage was sealed so that no breeze could stir the miniature jungle's foliage.
While Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was in production, people in the film business were calling it "Disney's Folly." Would audiences really sit through a cartoon of feature length? Walt Disney had estimated a budget of about $250,000, but he refused to cut corners, and his brother Roy had to raise that figure six times over, to nearly $1.5 million. After its December 1937 premiere, the film grossed $8 million in its first year, and Disney received an honorary Oscar made up of one full-size statuette and seven miniature ones.
The moment Dorothy steps from sepia-toned Kansas into Technicolor Oz looks like film-lab magic, but it was staged on the set. MGM had planned to hand-tint the frames, then dropped the idea as too costly. Instead, the farmhouse interior was repainted in sepia tones, and Judy Garland's stand-in, Bobbie Koshay, wearing a sepia version of Dorothy's gingham dress, opened the door on Munchkinland and backed out of the frame. Garland, in the bright blue dress, then walked forward into the color, and a whole world changed in a single doorway.
Gone with the Wind credits one director, Victor Fleming, but he was not the only one who worked on it. Producer David O. Selznick fired original director George Cukor less than three weeks into filming, after the two disagreed over how the production should proceed, and called in Fleming from MGM, where he had been directing The Wizard of Oz. When exhaustion forced Fleming to take time off that spring, Sam Wood kept the cameras rolling. Cukor's influence lingered in the finished film, yet Fleming alone won the Academy Award for best director.
Newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst was outraged by Citizen Kane, whose lonely media tycoon was widely read as a portrait of him, and fought to keep the public from seeing it. His papers refused to carry the film's advertising or even mention it, and a group of studio heads led by MGM's Louis B. Mayer offered RKO president George Schaefer upwards of $800,000 to buy and burn the negative and every print. RKO refused, and Orson Welles's first feature reached theaters in 1941, though the pressure helped ensure it lost money on its first run.
It's a Wonderful Life fell about $525,000 short of breaking even when it opened in 1946, a disappointment that dealt director Frank Capra's reputation a real blow. The film might have stayed a minor holiday title if its copyright had not lapsed in 1974, when its owner failed to file a renewal, most likely through a clerical error. Television stations, free to air it without paying royalties, ran it every December for almost two decades, and the repetition turned a box-office failure into a beloved American Christmas tradition.
All About Eve arrived at the 1951 Academy Awards with fourteen nominations, breaking the record of thirteen set by Gone with the Wind, a mark that stood for forty-seven years until Titanic tied it. Two of those nominations were for best actress alone, for Bette Davis and Anne Baxter, the only time in Oscar history that one film has landed four female acting nominations at once. The backstage drama about an aging Broadway star went on to win six awards, including best picture.
Gene Kelly filmed the title number of Singin' in the Rain while sick with the flu and a fever of about 103 degrees. His widow, Patricia Ward Kelly, has confirmed that part of the legend while dismissing another: the popular story that milk was mixed into the rain so it would show up on camera. "There's no reason to put milk in the water," she said. The drops showed up thanks to careful backlighting. Over days of shooting on a drenched street, the downpour even shrank Kelly's wool suit.
1The studio with more stars than there are in heaven
On the tile: MGM1924–1957
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, formed in 1924 from a merger of three film companies, billed itself as having "more stars than there are in heaven," a roster that at various times included Clark Gable, Greta Garbo, and Judy Garland. Its trademark lion needed understudies too. The first, Slats, never roared, because he appeared before movies had sound, and a series of different lions followed him. The studio called every one of them Leo, but only the lion that took over in 1957 was actually named Leo.
2The contract that let studios rent out their own stars
On the tile: Loan-Out1930s–1940s
Under the studio system, the majors signed their most promising performers to contracts of up to seven years, buying exclusive rights to their services and even their image. A contract player could also be rented out. Producer David O. Selznick signed Ingrid Bergman to a standard seven-year contract in 1939, then loaned her to other studios for most of it, pocketing the difference between the high fees her rising fame commanded and the smaller salary she had agreed to. One of those loans, to MGM for Gaslight, won her the first of her Oscars.
The major studios owned theater chains that showed their own films, and they forced exhibitors to book pictures in blocks, often sight unseen. In 1948 the Supreme Court ruled 7 to 1 in United States v. Paramount Pictures that the studios had violated antitrust law. It upheld a ban on block booking and asked a lower court to decide whether they must sell their theaters. Their united front soon cracked: RKO's Howard Hughes agreed to sell, then Paramount, the biggest studio, sold its theaters too, breaking the link between making movies and showing them.
4The studio that rose on one director's hot streak
On the tile: Columbia1934
Columbia Pictures started out on Hollywood's "Poverty Row," among the cut-rate studios making cheap westerns and comedies, with no theater chain of its own to guarantee bookings. Harry Cohn brought director Frank Capra to the studio in 1928, and at the 1935 Academy Awards, Capra's comedy It Happened One Night became the first film to win all five top prizes: picture, director, actor, actress, and screenplay. Capra won three best director Oscars in five years, and the American Film Institute credits him with lifting Cohn's studio from Poverty Row into a major.
RKO Radio Pictures, formed in 1928, gave audiences King Kong, Citizen Kane, and the Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers musicals. Then, in May 1948, aviation tycoon Howard Hughes bought control. He promptly shut the studio down to reorganize production, became notorious for meddling in the smallest filmmaking details, and watched its profits virtually vanish within a year. Hughes sold RKO in 1955, and by 1957 it was all but finished as a filmmaker. That year its studio lot went to Desilu, the television company owned by Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz.
William Fox's Fox Film Corporation was bold enough to introduce the first sound newsreel, Fox Movietone News, in 1927. But Fox had borrowed heavily on the eve of the Great Depression, and in 1930 he lost control of his own company. The studio foundered for five years until it merged in 1935 with Twentieth Century Pictures, a company barely two years old, founded by Joseph Schenck and producer Darryl F. Zanuck. The younger firm's name came first in the new studio's title, Twentieth Century-Fox, and Zanuck ran its production for the next two decades.
Universal Pictures, founded by Carl Laemmle in 1912, was never one of Hollywood's five major studios. In 1929 Laemmle made his son, Carl Jr., chief of production on his twenty-first birthday, and under the young executive Universal produced a cluster of horror films: Dracula and Frankenstein in 1931, The Mummy in 1932, and The Bride of Frankenstein in 1935. The monsters did not keep the studio in the family, since Laemmle sold his interests in 1936, but they became Universal's enduring legacy from Hollywood's golden age.
Art Babbitt, the animator who developed Goofy's movements and personality, was Walt Disney's highest-paid animator, and by March 1941 he was also chairing the Disney unit of the Screen Cartoonists Guild. Disney fired him in late May, and within days more than 300 Disney artists were picketing the Burbank studio, carrying signs illustrated with Disney's own characters. The walkout dragged on until federal mediators sent from Washington ruled in the strikers' favor. Disney signed with the Guild, and the studio has been a union shop ever since.
9The meeting where the studios agreed to blacklist their own
On the tile: Hollywood Ten1947
In October 1947 ten Hollywood screenwriters, directors and producers refused to tell a congressional committee whether they belonged to the Communist Party, citing the First Amendment. On November 24 the House cited all ten for contempt. The next day, after a two-day closed meeting of 48 studio executives and attorneys at New York's Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, the industry pledged to fire or suspend without pay any of the ten on its payrolls and not to knowingly employ a Communist. All ten went to prison, and the blacklist launched that day spread far beyond them.
The first Academy Awards, presented on May 16, 1929, bore little resemblance to today's telecast. About 270 guests paid five dollars each to attend a banquet in the Blossom Room of the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, and since the winners had been announced to the public three months earlier, the evening held no suspense. Academy president Douglas Fairbanks presented all fifteen statuettes in about fifteen minutes. It remains the only Oscar ceremony that no radio or television broadcast carried.
Facing threats of government censorship, the studios adopted the Production Code in 1930, and in 1934 Will Hays created the Production Code Administration, with Joseph Breen in charge of approving every film before release. Member studios agreed to distribute only pictures carrying Breen's seal, and releasing one without it could bring a $25,000 fine. For years the threat alone did the job. Then, in January 1954, Breen told RKO it owed the full $25,000 for showing Howard Hughes's Jane Russell musical The French Line without a seal.
Hollywood's forecourt of cement handprints began, the story goes, with an accident. The theater's own souvenir programs credit silent star Norma Talmadge with stepping into wet concrete during construction, giving Sid Grauman the idea. Grauman later told a radio audience that he was the one who stepped in it. Either way, the first official prints belong to Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, pressed on April 30, 1927, weeks before Grauman's Chinese Theatre opened on May 18 with the premiere of The King of Kings.
In the fall of 1930, Universal made Dracula twice on the same sets. Tod Browning shot Bela Lugosi's English-language film by day, and once that crew went home, George Melford moved in to shoot a Spanish-language Drácula by night. Melford spoke no Spanish and directed through an interpreter, but he studied Browning's footage and composed his own shots accordingly. His version runs almost half an hour longer, some film historians consider it the better film, and in 2015 it joined the National Film Registry.
Jackie Coogan earned a multimillion-dollar fortune as Hollywood's first major child star, only to learn as an adult that his mother and stepfather had spent virtually all of it. His lawsuit recovered only a small portion, but the case led California to pass the Child Actors Bill in 1939, still known as the Coogan Law. The first version had loopholes. Since 2000, California has required that fifteen percent of a young performer's gross earnings go into a blocked trust account, known to this day as a Coogan account.
6The stunt where a man let a stagecoach run him over
On the tile: Yakima Canutt1939
For Stagecoach in 1939, stuntman Yakima Canutt, playing an Apache, leaped from his pony onto the galloping coach's lead team. Shot by John Wayne's Ringo Kid, he dropped to the ground between the horses and let the teams and the coach pass over him, then rose to his knees to prove no dummy had done it. Hidden metal bars had kept the horses three feet apart. When Canutt offered to do it again, director John Ford, who had hired him on Wayne's recommendation, replied, "I'll never shoot that again. They better have it."
Hollywood legend says director Mervyn LeRoy discovered Lana Turner sipping a soda at Schwab's Pharmacy. In fact, the teenager had cut typing class at Hollywood High School for a Coke at the Top Hat Cafe across Sunset Boulevard, where Hollywood Reporter publisher Billy Wilkerson asked if she would like to be in pictures. "I'll have to ask my mother," she said. The Schwab's version came later, claimed by owner Leon Schwab once the Top Hat was gone and spread by columnist Sidney Skolsky.
Blacklisted after refusing to testify before Congress in 1947, screenwriter Dalton Trumbo kept writing under other names. In 1957 the Academy Award for best story went to The Brave One, credited to "Robert Rich," and no Robert Rich was there to accept it. A Writers Guild official took it on his behalf, then found no such name on the guild's membership lists. A producer's nephew named Robert Rich soon said he had not written it. Trumbo played coy until January 1959, when he announced on television that he was Rich. The Academy finally handed him the Oscar in 1975.
The Hollywood Sign began in 1923 as a $21,000 billboard spelling out "Hollywoodland" to promote a new hillside housing development, its letters lit by about 4,000 light bulbs. The development went bust, the neglected sign passed to the city in 1944, and its H was destroyed that same year. In 1949 the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce offered to pay to put the H back up, provided the last four letters, "LAND," came down. The shortened sign turned a real estate billboard into a lasting emblem of the movie capital.