Greed (film) - Myths and Misconceptions

Myths and Misconceptions

Stroheim was known to often exaggerate events from his life and create myths about himself, such as those about his aristocratic origins and military record in Austria. He claimed that shortly after having moved to the US in the early 1910s, he had found a copy of McTeague in a motel in New York and read it in one sitting. He also said that that was the moment that he decided to make a career in filmmaking. Georges Sadoul later stated that Stroheim first read the novel in 1914, while living in poverty in Los Angeles.

Despite claims that Stroheim filmed a completely unabridged version of McTeague from cover to cover, this is not historically accurate. Stroheim's 300 page script was almost as long as the original novel, however he actually rethought the entire Norris novel and even invented or elaborated on new scenes. In the Norris novel, McTeague's back story in Placer County and relationships with his father, mother and Dr. 'Painless' Potter were remembered as a flashback and took up only two paragraphs. In Stroheim's original Greed, this sequence took up the first hour of the film and was not a flashback. Stroheim also modernized the novel's time span up to between 1908 and 1923, 25 years after the Norris novel took place.

The films length has sometimes been exaggerated as being over 100 reels. Stroheim said that his initial edit was 42 reels, although Harry Carr remembered it as being 45 reels. Idwal Jones attended the same screening as Carr and remembered the film being 42 reels and Paul Ivano said that the film was 8 hours. Jean Bertin claimed to have seen a 47 reel version that was later cut to a 42 reel version. Grant Whytock remembered the edited version that Stroheim initially sent to him as being between 26 and 28 reels. MGM's official studio files list the original cut of the film as being 22 reels. As recently as 1992, former MGM Story Editor Samuel Marx erroneously claimed that the original version of Greed was 70 reels.

June Mathis is credited with co-writing the film's script due to her work on the 10 reel version of the film. Mathis was the head of the Story Department at MGM and her contract stipulated that she would receive writing credit for all MGM films. She did not actually write any part of the screenplay. She is also said to have changed the film's title from McTeague to Greed during post-production, however a publicity still of the cast and crew taken during production clearly indicates that the film's title was Greed before the MGM merger even took place. The film's working title was "Greedy Wives", a joke on Stroheim's previous film Foolish Wives that was never seriously considered as the film's title.

The original version of Greed has been called the holy grail of film archivists. Over the years reports of the original version being found proved to be completely unfounded. These "sightings" include that a copy existed in a vault in South America that was only screened once a year for invited guests on New Year's Eve, that a copy in the possession of a Texan millionaire was sold to Henri Langlois of the Cinémathèque Française, that a film society in Boston held a private screening of a print found by a World War II veteran in Berlin from a tip by Emil Jannings, that David Shepherd of the American Film Institute had found a copy at a garage sale, that the head of a film society in Redwood City, CA owned "the longest existing version of Greed (purchased in Europe)", and that Benito Mussolini owned a personal copy (which was reported by Stroheim himself). There were also reports that MGM had retained a copy of the original version. Iris Barry of MoMA claimed that a copy was locked in the MGM vaults, which was denied by Irving Thalberg. It was also reported that John Houseman was given a private screening at MGM and that MGM owned two copies in a vault in a Utah salt mine. Lotte Eisner once claimed that in the 1950s and 1960s several cans of films labeled "McTeague" were found in MGM's vaults and destroyed by executives who didn't know that they were footage from Greed. Stroheim's son Joseph von Stroheim once claimed that when he was in the Army during World War II he saw a version of the film that took two nights to fully screen, although he could not remember exactly how long it was.