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  At the 3rd Academy Awards ceremony, MGM's hugely successful prison drama The Big House (1930) earned writer Frances Marion an Oscar for Best Writing. Hoping that she would be inspired to repeat that accomplishment, Irving Thalberg, head of production at Metro, sent Marion to Chicago, Illinois to research story ideas. While flicking through the pages of The Saturday Evening Post , she found an article revealing that, in a city where people distrusted the police, a small group of leading citizens met in secret to arrange their own justice for criminals. Marion took inspiration from that story and wrote The Secret Six (1931), in which Wallace Beery and Lewis Stone, stars of The Big House , play two mobsters prosecuted by a half a dozen vigilantes. Thalberg was pleased with the leading roles Marion wrote for Beery and Stone, but asked if she could also fill out one of the minor leads for Clark Gable , a tall, dark and handsome 30-year-old actor whom Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer had recen...

Original release poster for Red Dust Wilson Collison's 1928 play Red Dust had been gathering quite a bit of dust of its own on the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer shelves since 1930 as a fifteen-page treatment of a «very purple melodrama about a poor little slaving whore.» At various times, Joan Crawford and Norma Shearer had been considered for the lead until screenwriter John Lee Mahin and producer Paul Bern settled on turning it into a comedy starring Jean Harlow and John Gilbert, with Jacques Feyder occupying the director's chair. Since Harlow's first film as an MGM contract player, Red-Headed Woman (1932), had proved to be just controversial enough to ensure its firm success, the studio figured that pairing her with Gilbert would help the former matinée idol's ailing image.   While Mahin was working on the script in late July 1932, he reportedly saw Clark Gable in William A. Wellman's Night Nurse (1931) or George W. Hill's Hell Divers (1932), dependi...

The original «Blonde Bombshell» was born Harlean Harlow Carpenter on March 3, 1911 in Kansas City, Missouri. Her parents were Mont Clair Carpenter, a successful dentist from a working-class background, and his wife, Jean Poe (née Harlow), the daughter of a wealthy real estate broker. Nicknamed «Baby,» Harlean was afflicted by poor health throughout her childhood; she contracted meningitis at age five and suffered from scarlet fever when she was 15.   In September 1922, Jean divorced her husband and moved with her 11-year-old daughter to Hollywood, with hopes of pursuing a career as an actress. While in Los Angeles, Harlean attended the Hollywood School for Girls and met future movie stars Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and Joel McCrea, as well as Louis B. Mayer's daughter, Irene. In 1925, unable to find a single acting job, Jean returned in defeat to Kansas City with her daughter.   Jean Harlow at six months, five years old and ten years old, respectively. In order to be close to he...