Saturday Night Cinema: Freaks

Tonight’s feature: Freaks. The normals are the real freaks in this still gut-wrenching horror classic (sounds like Obama’s America).

In mid-1931, MGM
production head Irving Thalberg summoned scenarist Willis Goldbeck to
tell him the time had come for the prestige studio to take heed of
much-smaller Universal’s success with Tod Browning’s Dracula. Browning had done many silents for MGM, so Thalberg commissioned Goldbeck to write a vehicle for Browning’s comeback, something “even more horrible than Dracula.”

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Drawing on a Tod Robbins novel called Spurs, Goldbeck created a world even more self-contained than that of Grand Hotel (made the same year) — the warped world of Freaks, the
garish world of the circus sideshow, replete with bearded lady, vain
acrobats, simpering pinheads, even a hermaphrodite. Thalberg’s reaction
to the script was: “Well, I asked for something horrifying.”

Tod Browning's FreaksFreaks was
  shot in 36 days on the sets still standing from Garbo’s Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise. Real
  freaks were brought to Culver City to populate this bizarre world, but the
  line between film and reality blurred when the freaks ate their meals in the
  MGM commissary. Even the most hardened showbiz veterans were “shocked and nauseated.” Neither
  their complaints nor those of studio executives could stop Thalberg from completing the film. Its release was another matter. It received so much bad press and
  created such ill will that MGM was forced to withdraw it from circulation, suffering a loss of $164,000.

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Thanks for sharing!