‘We had a tour of the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio. It is a huge institution, located on fourteen acres of land. Everything here is large scale [. . .] We were shown the stores, set installations of entire streets and even towns, a huge set with a pool into which a submarine dives (this has been prepared for the new production of The Mysterious Island by Jules Verne), fragments of different shootings (for instance, the scene where a huge live boa constrictor is winding around the body of a half naked girl).’ This is from a diary kept when the influential Russian theatre director Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko visited Hollywood. Nemirovich-Danchenko - who died 80 years ago today - was a co-founder of the famous Moscow Art Theatre.
In 1898, Russian theatre practitioner Konstantin Stanislavski (later to be renowned for his Method Acting) and Nemirovich-Danchenko founded the Moscow Art Theatre. This was conceived as a venue for naturalistic theatre, in contrast to the melodramas that were the main form of theatre in Russia at the time. Its first season featured plays by Ibsen, Aleksey Tolstoy and Shakespeare, but it was not until it staged several of Chekhov’s plays that the theatre became famous. Chekhov had envisioned that fellow playwright and friend Maxim Gorki would succeed him as the theatre’s leading dramatist but this was not to be. The theatre went into decline, until that is it took on international tours. With tensions growing between the two co-founders, Nemirovich-Danchenko set up, in 1919, a musical theatre studio branch. This was reformed into the Nemirovich-Danchenko Musical Theatre in 1926.
In 1943 Nemirovich-Danchenko established the Moscow Art Theatre School, which is still extant. He was awarded the State Prize of the USSR in 1942 and 1943, the Order of Lenin, and the Order of the Banner of Red Labor. He died in Moscow on 25 April 1943. Further information is available from Wikipedia, Encyclopaedia Britannica, IMDB, and Moscow Art Theatre.
Nemirovich-Danchenko did not leave behind any diaries as far as I know, or certainly none that have been translated into English. However, a close associate of his, Sergei Bertensson who joined the Moscow Art Theatre in 1918, did keep a diary during a trip, taken with Nemirovich-Danchenko, to the United States in the 1920s. This was translated by Anna Shoulgat into English, edited by Paul Fryer, and published by the Scarecrow Press in 2004 as In Hollywood with Nemirovich-Danchenko, 1926-1927: The Memoirs of Sergei Bertensson. A few pages can be previewed at Googlebooks and Amazon.
According to the publisher: ‘Sergei Bertensson’s diary of his trip to Hollywood with Russian theatre great Nemirovich-Danchenko is a unique record of an extraordinary and under-documented chapter in film and theatre history. For a year Bertensson followed his employer as he met with directors, producers, and stars, forever discussing projects that would never be realized. Some of the leading figures in Hollywood history appear in this record, including Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, and John Barrymore. Bertensson’s observations of life in Hollywood on the eve of the talkies revolution provide us with a compelling snapshot of movie history in the making, seen from the unusual perspective of an outsider.’
Here are a few extracts.
6 October 1926
‘The whole day has been spent on the reading of the script of François Villon; however, we have finished it. Vladimir Ivanovich likes the denouement, but on the whole he has found lots of vague and absurd details.’
10-11 October 1926
‘Vladimir Ivanovich remains keen on The Snowmaiden and fantasizes on this subject a lot.
The scheduled lessons with Marceline Day did not take place. She did not come, having informed us that she had been called for shooting. We went to see how a big mass scene on the square before Notre Dame de Paris was shot at the Universal studio. This involved about 600 people. There was much noise, animation, banal gesticulation, and swinging of hands. Barrymore himself, in the comic makeup mask of “the king of fools,” sitting on the head of a statue of a horse, played with full nerve, was brave, vivid, and graceful like a statue.
When I met Ms. Day there, I suggested that she should continue her lessons with Vladimir Ivanovich on the next day, but she became somehow confused and said that first she had to discuss this with Considine. When Barrymore finished his scene, Vladimir Ivanovich told him about this. The former got awfully angry and called it a shame and a disgrace and promised to sort it out by the evening.’
15 October 1926
‘We had a tour of the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio. It is a huge institution, located on fourteen acres of land. Everything here is large scale: the wardrobe - a four-story house, the storage of props and furniture - a four-story building as well, and it has enough furniture to furnish approximately 250 apartments. On a permanent basis they have thirty-four directors, fifteen “stars,” a group of actors (fifty people), 1,200 technical staff members, and 250 administrative people. The work is simultaneously carried out on seven to eight stages. They produce thirty movies a year, among them such big productions as Ben Hur, The Big Parade, and others.
We were shown the stores, set installations of entire streets and even towns, a huge set with a pool into which a submarine dives (this has been prepared for the new production of The Mysterious Island by Jules Verne), fragments of different shootings (for instance, the scene where a huge live boa constrictor is winding around the body of a half naked girl). During one of the shootings Vladimir Ivanovich was photographed together with the “stars” Alice Terry and Ramon Navarro.
Upon completion of the tour, we were introduced to the director of the studio, Thalberg.
We had to wait for him for about ten minutes. Thalberg is a young man; he is not yet thirty, but his authority is absolutely unlimited, and he receives an enormous salary plus a royalty from the completed movies. He is said to be exceptionally smart and good at business. We stayed with him for just a few minutes and left with a strong impression that the whole organization was hallmarked with bad taste. As if after visiting the backstage of the Moscow Art Theatre you happen to visit the backstage of a provincial theater. If at Schenck’s studio there is not enough artistic atmosphere, here you do not feel such atmosphere at all. This is just a big and perfectly arranged factory.’
24-25 October 1926
‘We continued reading Camilla. We observed how a short love scene between Barrymore and Marceline Day was shot. The usual cliché: on her part - self-admiration and pleasant smiles; on his part - banal operatic gestures and movements (and he seems to feel uncertain and awkward inside).
The set is ultrarealistic. A piece of stone castle, a real stone staircase and landing leading to it; below there is a large garden and a pool with a fountain. The garden is a huge hedgerow made up of natural greenery, pruned in the style of Versailles. The entire garden is laid out with pieces of live green turf, and among this grass there are artificial trees with paper rose camellias. Paper roses decorate the branches of the bushes, fringing the castle windows. They persuade that in a photograph the artificial will brilliantly merge with the natural and will give quite a real picture. The arrangement of this garden demanded no less than two days of the most thorough work and lots of money.
Vladimir Ivanovich sent Mary Pickford a bouquet of flowers. He was greatly impressed with her artistry.’
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