His name in the credits is as synonymous with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer as hearing Leo the Lion roar before a film. Douglas Shearer was MGM’s head sound designer and recording director. By some, Douglas Shearer could simply be reduced to the brother of actress Norma Shearer. He moved to Los Angeles from Canada to join his mother and two sisters (after not seeing them for four years). Norma became not only one of MGM’s movie queens but one of the biggest global stars of the 1930s.

The transition from silent to talking pictures was an uncertain time in Hollywood. Shearer, an engineer by trade, muscled his way in and with his significant inventions, transformed talking pictures and filmmaking. “During his more than 40 years with MGM, he contributed more than any other man in Hollywood to the perfection of motion picture sound,” said writer and filmmaker, Ephraim Katz. But Douglas paved his own way and was conscious of the implications of nepotism. He went so far as living by himself away from his family, making a point that he was not connected to Norma. He didn’t need Norma’s star power, though it probably didn’t hurt in making initial connections.

Shearer’s first job in Hollywood was in the prop room, where he called himself “assistant animal guy,” as he wrangled several pigeons, cows, chickens and pigs, according to film historian Gavin Lambert. While working with the livestock, it was the discussion of sound that peaked Shearer’s interest. He pitched an experiment to MGM of adding sound to a film trailer, and in turn, was given a job in special effects at MGM. “I had enough background in industrial plants and mechanicals so that I thought the competition wouldn’t be too tough,” Lambert quotes Shearer.

By 1928, Shearer was the head of MGM’s sound department — a position he held for 40 years. “Overnight, I was the one-man sound department,” Lambert quotes Shearer. MGM was the last major studio to make the conversion to sound, and they relied heavily on Shearer. He visited Bell Laboratories in New Jersey to study the latest equipment and hired a team.

With “more stars than there are in heaven,” MGM’s look was important, but so was its sound. “Douglas gave it a clarity and spaciousness unequalled at the time,” Lambert wrote. But Shearer didn’t just learn how to produce sound in the early days, he had to eliminate extraneous sounds. The cameras of the late-1920s were loud, so his team developed a quieter camera. He also faced issues of microphone placement, which was solved by creating a moving microphone on the boom to move with the actors, according to film historian Charles Foster.

Shearer created other innovations that became industry standards and landmarks, such as:

• The first lion’s roar that was heard behind the MGM logo.
• Shearer suggested synchronized singing with already recorded music for THE BROADWAY MELODY (’29), which became standard procedure with the playback system.
• He electronically created Tarzan’s famous yell.
• Shearer was able to “retouch” singing. For example, he would adjust the soundtrack frame by frame if a singer like Jeanette MacDonald went flat in the high-note range.

With a total of 14 Academy Awards, Shearer was awarded seven competitive awards from 1930 to 1958, ranging from Best Sound, Recording to Best Special Effect and seven others for technical and scientific achievements. He received the award for Best Sound the first year it was introduced for the film THE BIG HOUSE (’30).

Always innovative, Shearer’s projects took him outside of sound as well. He developed an improved system of color process photography. He also worked on the 65mm big screen look for BEN-HUR (’59).

During World War II, he took a hiatus from films to help the government. Shearer helped with the research and development of radar and devices that determine when and where nuclear explosions take place, according to his New York Times 1971 obituary. When President Roosevelt offered Shearer a civilian award for his work, this was one accolade he declined. “I didn’t do it for the personal glory,” Shearer told Roosevelt. “I did it to help save lives and get the war over and done with.”

Though Shearer is considered by many one of the most influential figures of Hollywood history, it’s those in front of the camera, like his sister Norma, that are better remembered today. In a 1963 interview, actor Spencer Tracy noted that Shearer was the only person he knew to have a plethora of Academy Awards and to never be seen on screen. “He has made many stars by his achievements … I wonder where I would have been today if it wasn’t for the genius of this man,” Tracy said. “He is a star himself, but he will never admit it.”

Douglas Fairbanks, Rudolph Valentino and John Gilbert are usually mentioned as the top silent film stars of the 1920s. But there was also Richard Barthelmess, who came to fame opposite Lillian Gish in the D.W. Griffith classics BROKEN BLOSSOMS (‘19) and WAY DOWN EAST (‘20). In fact, Gish once said Barthelmess’ face was “the most beautiful of any man who had ever been before the camera.”

A fan once wrote to the editor of Picture Play magazine that “Dick is getting more and more popular every day and why? Because his wonderful black hair and soulful eyes are enough to make any young girl adore him.” At the height of his career, he received 6,000 fan letters.

And then there was my grandmother, aka, Nana. She always seemed nonplussed about Hollywood and actors. But she didn’t feel that way about Barthelmess. Though I remember some of our trip to Miami Beach when I was four, I don’t recall that we encountered him at the Miami Airport. Many years later, my mother related to me with much glee that Nana was beside herself when she saw the then 64-year-old actor checking in for a flight.

Besides the swoon factor, Barthelmess had the acting chops. He received strong reviews playing a kind Chinese man who falls in love with a Caucasian woman (Gish) in BROKEN BLOSSOMS and was equally strong in WAY DOWN EAST as the earnest young man who rescues the love of his life (Gish) from death on a fast-moving ice flow.

And he further cemented his popularity with critics and audiences in TOL’ABLE DAVID (‘21), Henry King’s drama about the youngest son of a tenant farmer who yearns to be treated as a man. The film went on to win Photoplay magazine’s Medal of Honor.

During the 1920s, Barthelmess generally was cast as the all-American hero. As his New York Times obituary stated, he was “masculine, but gentle, modest and unassuming” and possessed a “shy smile” and “sleek black hair.” Fairbanks, Valentino and Gilbert were seen as far more sexual than Barthelmess.

He formed his own production company, Inspiration Pictures, making 12 films under that banner before he sold it when he was offered a financially strong contract with first National Pictures. Barthelmess was one of the founders of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, and he was a double nominee for lead actor at the first Academy Awards for THE PATENT LEATHER KID (‘27) and THE NOOSE (‘28). Silents were golden for Barthelmess; talkies less so. Audiences first heard Barthelmess in WEARY RIVER (‘29), one of those hybrid films Hollywood made at the beginning of the talkies era that featured both silent and sound sequences. And, there was a bit of a Lina Lamont/Kathy Selden trick going on behind the scenes for Barthelmess. Initially, it was thought that he actually was singing in the film.

The New York Times Mordaunt Hall even said in his review that “[Barthelmess] does sing it quite well.” It was later revealed that singer Johnny Murray provided the vocals and the actor was lip-synching.

I’ve seen a lot of Barthelmess’ talkies, and personally I found him uncomfortable on screen. His voice was rather weak, and his glacial beauty seemed to hurt his performances instead of enhancing his work, as it did in the 1920s. Still, the critics were giving him good reviews, and audiences seemed to like his pre-Code melodramas and his Depression-era persona.

Barthelmess worked with a lot of the top directors of the day, including Howard Hawks in THE DAWN PATROL (‘30); William A. Wellman in CENTRAL AIRPORT (‘33) and HEROES FOR SALE (‘33) and even the legendary German filmmaker G.W. Pabst (PANDORA’S BOX, ‘29) in his only Hollywood film, A MODERN HERO (1934).

But by this time, his star was fading. And around the time of his 40th birthday, Barthelmess decided to get plastic surgery. The procedure was botched and left him with visible scarring. It was three years before he felt ready to go back in front of the camera. And when he did, he gave the performance of his sound career in Hawks’ ONLY ANGELS HAVE WINGS (‘39), one of my favorite films starring Cary Grant, Thomas Mitchell and Jean Arthur about a group of daredevil pilots working for a small company in South America.

Barthelmess plays a pilot who comes to work at the company with a black mark on his name for having left his former crew to die. Grant gives him the hardest and most dangerous assignments. Hawks didn’t want his scars to be covered. According to IMDB, Hawks told Barthelmess “those scars tell the story and are important to your character.” Barthelmess is a revelation. There is a gravitas to his voice and, no longer strikingly handsome, he turns the supporting role into a character performance to remember.

His scars are also present in THE SPOILERS (‘42), a rip-roaring Western starring John Wayne, Randolph Scott and Marlene Dietrich. Though he was sixth billed, Barthelmess made the most of his role as the Bronco Kid who pines after Dietrich. He also has a great death scene. After making one more film, he retired from Hollywood and enlisted in the US. Navy Reserve during World War II. He lived off of his substantial real estate investment, which included a 50-acre beachfront estate in Southampton, which he sold in 1955 to Henry Ford II.

In 1957, Barthelmess was among the recipients of the second George Eastman Award given by the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, for his distinguished contribution to the art of film. And three years later, he received a motion picture star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Barthelmess died of throat cancer at the age of 68 in 1963, but not before making Nana’s heart beat a little faster in 1959.

Ruth Chatterton was so much more than a two-time Oscar-nominated actress (MADAME X [‘29], SARAH AND SON [‘30]). She was a great friend.

Back in 1936, she supported her BFF and DODSWORTH (’36) co-star Mary Astor at a custody trial despite being told by executives and other friends not to attend the hearings. The scandalous hearings revolved around Astor trying to gain full custody of her daughter from her second husband, Franklyn Thorpe, proclaiming he was abusing their child. The problem was her ex-husband had Astor’s diary in which she wrote in detail of her love affair with playwright George S. Kaufman.

Chatterton was more than a supportive friend. She was also a mensch. A young Bette Davis was a huge fan of the actress and wrote in her autobiography The Lonely Life about working with her in the 1932 comedy-drama THE RICH ARE ALWAYS WITH US, in which Chatterton played the richest “girl” in the world. Chatterton made Davis so nervous she “literally could not get a word out of my mouth. I’m so damned scared of you I’m speechless.”

The veteran put the young Davis quickly at ease.

“She was the most helpful in her scenes with me after that,” Davis recalled. “I never forgot that experience and in later years, when young actors were terrified of me, I would always help them get over it.”

Both of the women were enamored with co-star George Brent. It was Chatterton who married Brent after the film was completed. Two films and two years later they divorced. Years later, Davis and Brent had an affair.

Chatterton also took a young Christopher Plummer under her wing in New York in the early 1950s, where she introduced him to the right people. “She might have been created by F. Scott Fitzgerald and Sinclair Lewis,” he wrote in his autobiography In Spite of Myself.

At the height of her career, she took to the skies and became an accomplished aviatrix and good friends with the legendary Amelia Earhart. She flew across the U.S. several times, sponsored the Ruth Chatterton Air Derby and even opened the National Air Races in Los Angeles 83 years go. And this renaissance woman also wrote four novels including the 1950 best-seller Homeward Borne.

By the time she made her first silent movie in 1928, Chatterton, who was born in 1892, had been working in the theater since she was 14. She made her Broadway debut in 1911’s The Great Name and became star on Broadway in 1914 with Daddy Long Legs.

The first Oscar-winning actor Emil Jannings saw Chatterton on stage and helped her get a role in his film SINS OF THE FATHERS. In 1929, she began playing a string of fallen women roles with the melodrama MADAME X. She earned a Best Actress Oscar nomination for the role and Lionel Barrymore received a nomination for his direction.

Though it’s a bit of a creak to watch, 80 years ago Mordunt Hall in The New York Times thought Chatterton was the greatest thing since sliced bread, writing: “…without a doubt the acting of Ruth Chatterton in the title role is the outstanding achievement of the picture. She portrays the emotional spells of the saddened woman with intelligence and artistry…Miss Chatterton lends to her part acting rarely beheld on the screen.”

Though some of her films are dated, Chatterton is still fascinating to watch. Because of her long history on the stage, she had a voice that was made for talkies and when a lot of actresses and actors had a hard time taming their over-the-top histrionics, Chatterton was very natural and engaging. And she was tailored made for the pre-Code era.

She left Paramount and moved to Warner Bros. in 1932, where she starred in several films beginning with THE RICH ARE ALWAYS WITH US. She made two more films with her then-husband Brent. First 1932’s melodrama THE CRASH, which finds her and hubby Brent losing money in the 1929 stock market. She’s the best thing about the film and wears some fabulous clothes.

Second, and a year before they divorced in 1934, they teamed up for the fabulous gender-bender drama FEMALE, which even in the pre-Code era was considered pretty steamy. Chatterton played the CEO of an automobile company who has plenty of men in her life but no wedding ring. Enter handsome engineer Brent who initially rebuffs her advances but eventually falls for her charms. But considering it’s the 1930s, love wins out with Chatterton telling Brent she’s willing to risk even her company’s bankruptcy for the man she loves.

Her last film for Warner Bros. is the undistinguished crime drama from 1934, JOURNAL OF A CRIME. Two years before her film career came to an end, Chatterton gave her best performance in William Wyler’s 1936 film DODSWORTH, in which she plays the spoiled, social climbing wife of a retired midwestern auto manufacturer (Walter Huston) who decides to take her on a cruise to Europe. Because Chatterton’s Fran is over 40 and is trying to keep middle age at bay, she engages in several flirtatious encounters with younger men which leads to a deep chasm in the couple’s marriage. The film earned seven Oscar nominations including Best Film, Actor and Supporting Actress for Maria Ouspenskaya as the grim mother of Fran’s much younger fiancée who puts the yet-to-be divorced Fran in her place. Surprisingly, Chatterton received no nomination.

Though her film career was over by the late 1930s, Chatterton returned to the stage and even did some live TV including a 1950 production of DODSWORTH with Walter Abel in the title role. Chatterton was married for 19 years to actor Barry Thomson, who died in 1960. And she died a year later of a brain hemorrhage at the age of 67.