The O in David O. Selznick stood for absolutely nothing
The producer behind Gone with the Wind was born plain David Selznick. He tacked on an O to set himself apart from an uncle who shared his name, and because he liked how it looked. It never meant anything and was never made legal, yet it ended up on some of Hollywood's most famous credits.
Selznick was born in Pittsburgh in 1902 to a silent-film producer, and he apprenticed with his father until the family business went bankrupt in 1923. He reached Hollywood in 1926 as an assistant story editor at MGM, moved to Paramount, and married Irene Mayer, daughter of the MGM boss Louis B. Mayer. In October 1931 RKO made him its head of production.
His fifteen months at RKO were remarkably productive. He argued that factory-style filmmaking stifled directors and gave individual producers more freedom, and the studio turned out forty-one pictures in 1932 for $10.2 million, against forty-two for $16 million the year before. He signed Katharine Hepburn, backed King Kong, and approved a screen test for a balding stage dancer named Fred Astaire, noting in a memo that the man's charm outweighed his large ears. After another stint at MGM, he set up his own company in 1935, becoming one of the first independent producers.
The peak came fast. Gone with the Wind, released in 1939, won eight Oscars and remains the top-grossing film ever once inflation is counted, and Selznick also received the Irving Thalberg award that year. The following year he won Best Picture again with Rebecca, the first Hollywood film by Alfred Hitchcock, whom Selznick had brought over from England. It was the only Hitchcock film to take the top prize.
Nothing afterwards measured up, and Selznick came to feel he had squandered his life trying to top that 1939 epic. Duel in the Sun, starring his future wife Jennifer Jones, was a hit and the first film Martin Scorsese ever saw. He stepped back in 1948, citing exhaustion and the rise of television, and his final film came in 1957.
Source: David O. Selznick
