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59 F A L L Q 4 I S S U E F E A T U R E and Mary Astor. Directed by Victor Fleming, "Red Dust" was remade by John Ford in 1953 ("Mogambo," also starring Gable) and was selected for inclusion on the Library of Congress's National Film Registry in 2006. Corbaley advanced through the story department at MGM, with one p ro m o t i o n a n n o u n c e d i n T h e L o s Angeles Times in connection with the hiring of Albert Lewin as an assistant to producer Irving G. Thalberg in 1928: "Kate Corbaley, novelist, playwright and pioneer screen writer, has been appoint- ed Lewin's assistant in handling the story department at the plant." Eventually, though, Corbaley was not only part of the story department but, in a sense, came to embody the story department. "She was one of the readers, what they called a reader at the time," veteran MGM picture editor Margaret Booth said in an oral history with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. "She was one of them, and was the head one." A 1932 item in Fortune magazine described Corbaley — "a plump, ruddy lady who looks like a good character actress made up to resemble a county dowager" — as overseeing a staff of 12 readers tasked with sifting through as- sorted printed matter, from novels to articles in magazines and newspapers. According to The San Bernardino County Sun, around 2,000 stories cycled through the department each week — probably a very high estimate. There were countless inter-off ice communications between Corbaley and Selznick, Mayer's then-son-in-law who, years before he oversaw "Gone with the Wind," managed his own production unit at Metro. The memos reflect the dizzying array of projects considered for production at the studio. In one memo from 1933, Corbaley suggests that the studio consider stars first (and, presum- ably, story second), proposing the idea of British actor Charles Laughton as Falstaff in an adaptation of Shakespeare's "The Merry Wives of Windsor" and regretting that screen legend John Barrymore no longer had the looks to carry off Hamlet. In another, from February of 1935, Cor- baley advanced Sir Walter Scott's novel "Ivanhoe" as subject matter that might satisfy audiences' appetite for adventure — provided they could pry it from Uni- versal. Selznick's reply was encouraging, though "Ivanhoe" was not produced by the studio until 1952. Corbaley always seemed to be peering around the next corner. Writing to Selz- nick in March of 1935, she makes mention of a new biography of English statesman Warren Hastings titled "Strange Desti- ny." "Is it too soon to do another story of this type in that locale—or would you be interested in seeing a good outline of the book?" Corbaley wrote to her famous boss, who agreed it was too soon but asked her to revisit the idea in a few months. The back-and-forth between story editor and producer suggests MGM's ea- gerness to identify film-ready material. In another exchange from March of 1935, a few months after the studio had a hit with an adaptation of Charles Dickens' "David Copperfield" (with W.C. Fields SEE PAGE 96 Some Corbaley correspondence