How a 1936 musical biopic became the most expensive, extravagant production in MGM history.

Entertainment · Published 3 October 2026 Swipe more like this →

In short: The Great Ziegfeld was a massive, sanitized tribute to the legendary Broadway impresario. With a budget ballooning past $2 million, it featured a rotating set weighing 100 tons and thousands of costumes. This cinematic spectacle defined the musical biography genre, even as it played fast and loose with historical facts.

Produced by Hunt Stromberg and directed by Robert Z. Leonard, The Great Ziegfeld was MGM's pride in 1936. The film aimed to capture the life of Florenz Ziegfeld Jr., the man who glorified the American girl through his extravagant Follies. To achieve this, the studio spared no expense, employing over a thousand people and commissioning designer Adrian to create costumes using 50 pounds of silver sequins and 11 meters of white ostrich plumes. The result was a production that far exceeded its initial $1.5 million budget, becoming MGM's most expensive film since 1925's Ben-Hur.

The film is perhaps best remembered for its technical ambition, particularly the 'A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody' sequence. This set, dubbed the 'Wedding Cake,' cost $220,000 and featured a rotating, 70-foot-wide structure with 175 spiral steps. Cinematographers used a single-take approach to capture the massive platform as it revolved to meet the camera. While critics at the time praised the film as the greatest musical biography, modern scholars like Linda Mizejewski argue the sequence serves as a symbolic visualization of women as raw material for male aesthetic design.

Despite its polish, the film is heavily fictionalized. It invents dramatic scenarios, such as the milk bath publicity stunt, and misrepresents the timeline of Ziegfeld's career, including the circumstances surrounding the original 1927 production of Show Boat. Even the casting was fraught with tension; Billie Burke, Ziegfeld's widow and a technical consultant on the film, was not considered a big enough star to play herself, leading to Myrna Loy's casting. While the film won three Academy Awards, including Best Picture, it remains a complex blend of historical homage and Hollywood myth-making.

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