Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1188730
57 F A L L Q 4 I S S U E F E A T U R E modern-day story analysts — a classifi- cation represented by the Motion Picture Editors Guild since 2000 — Corbaley was tasked with determining whether a story was worthy of being turned into a screenplay, or whether a screenplay should make it before cameras. It was a vital role, if an unheralded one. "She is nonexistent, insofar as the mo- tion-picture public is concerned," wrote Gene Fowler, who made Corbaley the subject of a write-up in gossip columnist Sidney Skolsky's "Hollywood" column in 1938. "She does not strut among the fash- ion-plate sirens of the preview, nor does she scream for recognition in the confer- ence when the scenario hacks make great kennel-sounds while fighting for the bones of story credit," Fowler continued. "Yet Irving Thalberg once said that Kate Corbaley was the most important person in the entire studio." According to Saroyan biographers L a w r e n c e L e e a n d B a r r y G i f f o r d , Corbaley earned the nickname of "May- er's Scheherazade" for her ability to ca p t i va te M aye r w i t h h e r g i f ts a s a storyteller. "And she lived up to it," the biographers wrote. Indeed, according to Mayer biogra- pher Bosley Crowther, Corbaley herself claimed that the studio boss wept on t h re e o cca s i o n s a s s h e wa s re a d i n g Saroyan's words. During her years at MGM, Corbaley became a kind of reciter-in-chief to May- er who, for all his acumen in matters of business, had an aversion to the written word. This is unlikely to have fazed Cor- baley, who understood that she gleaned the pearls of culture for enterprising men, but not erudite ones. She was among the contributors to the Palmer Photoplay Corporation's guidebook "The Essentials of Photoplay Writing," which offered the following pragmatic advice to would-be screen- Clark Gable nuzzled Jean Harlow in 'Red Dust,' a project Corbaley championed. Below: Mayer in his studio heyday. P H O T O : P H O T O F E S T