Thalberg

Tod Machover’s 2018 opera depicts the only-in-Hollywood weirdness of the composer’s encounters with studio head Irving Thalberg as they haggle over the eccentric notion of the uncompromising modernist scoring a feature film of Pearl S. Buck’s bestseller “The Good Earth,” which takes place in a Chinese village.

He has one other Oscar, for the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award from 1995.

But after Sinclair suggested that the state hire idle studios and pay unemployed actors to make movies on their own, the head of Hollywood’s MGM Studios, Louis B. Mayer, a bigwig state Republican, and studio executive Irving Thalberg set to work making the first batch of attack ads, airing them in movie theaters before the features played.

Nothing could be funnier than Irving Thalberg’s attempt to get Arnold Schoenberg to score “The Good Earth.”

As always, the festival does not neglect hidden gems of the silent era, including 1923’s beautifully tinted “Man and Wife,” an early Norma Shearer feature which showcased the New York-based actor before Irving Thalberg and Louis B. Mayer brought her out to Hollywood.