“A well-researched and readable biography. . . . Vieira is well-versed in production costs and box-office returns. . . . Vieira's portraits of Garbo, Harlow and Crawford are detailed and fascinating.”
“Among the many virtues of Mark Vieira’s biography is the use he makes of the story conferences preserved in the MGM archives and the glimpses they offer of the Thalberg touch in action.”
“An engaging new biography . . . Film history has long been told from the vantage point of the director or the star, or focused our attention on a specific genre, period, or national cinema, but rarely has it come from the perspective of the producer. Vieira's biography offers an unusually animated and revealing tour of Hollywood in the 1920s and '30s. His detailed accounts of the personalities and the productions are replete with wonderful anecdotes.”
“The jury has been out for 70 years on the MGM studio chief, even though F Scott Fitzgerald immortalised him as the “last tycoon”. Was Thalberg art’s gift to Hollywood, with his well-bred epics (Romeo and Juliet, Marie Antoinette)? Or was he a mogul playing to the middlebrow? Read this impressively researched study and decide.”
“This is a sympathetic, diligent, and intelligent account of a wondrous era in Hollywood.”
“This is a worthy, well-documented account of [Thalberg’s] life.”
“Vieira has put the enigmatic producer back in the spotlight with his biography . . . a thorough and readable book.”
“Vieira’s excellent biography reveals a master player...[and] sheds much needed light upon significant, influential life.”
“Vieira’s work is both exhaustively researched and beautifully presented, rich in detail yet compulsively readable. If you want to know about Hollywood’s Golden Age, then you must know about Thalberg. And if you want to know about Thalberg, then you must read this book.”
“An important book on a pivotal figure in Hollywood history. . . . Vieira’s biography is an invaluable resource and would appeal to a wide spectrum of scholars.”
“A fast-paced and well-researched new biography of Thalberg. . . . This fine biography points away from a portrait of an innovator of thoughtful, quirky movies, toward one of those touching yet monstrous mythical American figures, beloved by our greatest historians and novelists, who were compelled to realize their impossible dreams on vast canvases.”
“Vieira takes students of movie history deep into the bowels of MGM.”
"I thought I knew the story of Irving Thalberg, Hollywood's fabled boy wonder, but I learned a lot from this well-written, diligently researched book. Mark Vieira immerses us in Thalberg's life and career and sheds new light on the workings of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer at the peak of its powers. This is an altogether remarkable piece of work. "—Leonard Maltin, film critic and historian
"Mark A. Vieira's book is exceptionally well researched and makes a tremendous contribution to our understanding of an extraordinary era."—Kevin Brownlow, film historian and filmmaker
"Being the son of David O. Selznick and the grandson of Louis B. Mayer, I have read many books about Irving Thalberg, but none has brought this elusive figure to life as does Mark A. Vieira's. Because he had access to Norma Shearer's memoir notes and because he painstakingly reconstructed each year of Thalberg's brief life, a new figure emerges. Where before we saw a gentle and sensitive man who devoted great care to his films, we now see fierce concentration, arrogance, impatience with stupidity, and a compulsion to oversee every detail of every MGM film. Whatever it cost—and it cost him his health—it resulted in a body of work unprecedented in the history of the medium. I found Irving Thalberg compelling reading and masterly in its ability to keep me reading chapter after astonishing chapter."—Daniel Mayer Selznick, film historian and filmmaker
