Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master (Screen Classics) - Plot & Excerpts
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, preparations for The Yearling were stumbling ahead. Fleming had juggled projects before, with Red Dust and The White Sister. But The Yearling would ultimately stymie him. The Yearling would eventually be made not by Fleming but by Clarence Brown, starring not Tracy but Gregory Peck. Fleming’s reputation as a ruthlessly efficient fixer of faltering productions had taken on mythic proportions; that’s why everyone was stunned when he aborted his production of The Yearling. The director’s link to the project dates back to MGM’s acquisition of radio, TV, and motion picture rights for the book for $30,000 in May 1938. “I got them to buy it because I loved it so,” John Lee Mahin said. “I was taken off because I ‘didn’t realize the sensitivity of it.’ ” It was always slated for Fleming, and it was a natural to follow Captains Courageous. Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’s novel, like Faulkner’s classic “The Bear” and Steinbeck’s Red Pony, chronicles a youth conquering the natural world and growing into manhood.
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