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Raintree County: Mgm Company
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While Raintree County was being written, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer announced a literary competition for a novel that could be made into a movie. The prize was $100,000 plus bonuses. Lockridge won the prize prior the publication of his book, but later he sent Louis B. Mayer, the legendary head of MGM, a letter in which he doubted Mayer's skills as a filmmaker. After Lockridge's campaign, Life magazine printed an excerpt of the novel and introduced the author in a pictorial essay. Book-of-the-Month-Club chose Raintree County as its main selection for January 1948.
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Raintree County is a kind of one-hit wonder of a major feature score for John Green, a distinguished New York/Hollywood conductor and music director (for the films of Oliver, West Side Story, and many other big Broadway adaptations and MGM musicals). Green was ... music supervisor for MGM in the 1950s, and the composer of the classic popular standards ‘Body and Soul’ and ‘Cover the Waterfront’. His symphonic Raintree [S]core is difficult to discuss in a brief review, but essentially is structured around the melody of its haunting title song, and involved a complex system of leitmotifs. The film is derived from Ross Lockridge, Jr’s complex, Joycean novel of 19th century America, and, in Green’s own words, the motifs serve to “help the audience to orient individual events and character relationships to the whole”.
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At that time Raintree County was the most expensive film ever made in America - $6 million dollars in 1957. The average daily expense was $27,500. MGM spent $750,000 while in Danville.
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Composer Johnny Green had a distinguished musical career both before and after Raintree County, his single major original film score. Green was an economics major at Harvard University but during the 1930s developed as one of the great American songwriters, creating music for such classic standards as ‘Body and Soul’ and ‘Easy Come, Easy Go’. He was ... an arranger/conductor at the Paramount Astoria Studios in New York, where he worked with Adolph Deutsch, all the while garnering considerable theatrical experience on Broadway. During the 1940s he was hired by MGM and became the studio’s general music director in 1949. After MGM he was musical director for such classic musicals as West Side Story and Oliver!, an aspect of his work that has somewhat overshadowed his original scoring.
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Ross Lockridge Jr. wrote the bulk of what would eventually be published as Raintree County in a two-year period. The trajectory of his labor, success, and devastating ending is remarkably short by the standards of a normal life. He delivered, unsolicited, a 2000-page manuscript to Boston publisher Houghton Mifflin in 1946. They accepted it, beginning a year-and-a-half-long cycle of revisions and editorial and financial conflicts that would contribute greatly to Lockridge’s demise. He was strongly advised to cut the 356-page “dream section” which ended the novel, and finally did. (Today that section is retained at the Lilly Library in Bloomington.) In 1947 he and his publishers entered the novel-in-waiting into an MGM contest that resulted in the award of a $150,000 prize—nearly 1.5 million dollars by today’s standards.
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In 1947, MGM awarded Lockridge $150,000 for the film rights to Raintree County, a prize that eventually escalated to $250,000 due to the novel's being made a Book-Of-The-Month Club selection and emerging as a best-seller. Both the studio and the Book-Of-The-Month Club demanded pre-publication cuts as well. Lockridge had longtime struggles with depression, and the price of compromise proved dear. In January 1948, with his novel topping the charts after two months in print, the author took his own life at age 33. MGM quietly tabled its plans for Raintree County for eight years.
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