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projects in Hollywood. Von Stroheim had got the go-ahead on it from Frank Godsol and Abe Lehr as one of their last reckless gambles for the Goldwyn Company, and they had given him pretty much the carte blanche that he loftily maintained was the director's due. He took full advantage of it. Spurning the "cardboard sets" of the studios, he went to San Francisco and Death Valley to shoot his grimly realistic tale. Time was unimportant to him; he took endless weeks on the film and literally tortured his actors in tearing from them a searing drama of greed for gold. What was more — and most bewildering — he had no restraint about the length of his film. When he presented his final cut to the Goldwyn people, it ran for forty reels, nearly six hours!
Told that it would have to be shortened, Von Stroheim angrily refused, held out a few weeks, and then acceded to cutting it to twenty-four reels. Beyond that amount of excision he simply would not go. He said he would not be restricted by the stupid conventions of Hollywood. Lehr despairingly gave it to June Mathis, one of his leading scenarists, to cut. She trimmed about a third more from it. And that's where it was when Mayer took control.
Greed was not the greatest of the problems to which Mayer and Thalberg fell heir, but their unhesitating handling of it gave a major indication of how they were going to run things. They did not intend to let any director have his way with them — especially Von Stroheim, with whom the youthful Thalberg had had plenty of trouble back in his Universal days. They called in another cutter, pulled two more reels from the film, and told Von Stroheim he could like it or lump it, but that was how it would be. He didn't like it, but he grudgingly submitted to the terms of his contract, which had some time to run, and started looking for another story to make for the new company. This amounted to service of notice by Mayer and Thalberg that directors had better stay in line.
Meanwhile, another top director, Victor Seastrom, had