Arthur Freed

Born in Charleston, South Carolina, Freed knocked around vaudeville and song-plugging before the arrival of sound made lyricists valuable in Hollywood. With composer Nacio Herb Brown he wrote standards for MGM's early talkies — "Singin' in the Rain," "You Are My Lucky Star," "Broadway Melody" — songs so durable they would later furnish whole films.

He wanted to produce, and after serving as an uncredited associate on The Wizard of Oz — where he fought to keep "Over the Rainbow" in the picture — Louis B. Mayer gave him a unit. Over two decades the Freed Unit became the most gifted assembly line in Hollywood history, gathering directors Vincente Minnelli and Stanley Donen, star Gene Kelly, arranger Roger Edens, and a roster that ran from Judy Garland to Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse.

The results defined the genre: Meet Me in St. Louis, On the Town, An American in Paris and its climactic seventeen-minute ballet, The Band Wagon, Gigi, and Singin' in the Rain — assembled largely from his own back-catalog of songs and now routinely called the greatest musical ever made. Freed championed the "integrated musical," in which numbers advanced story and character rather than interrupting them.

He produced two Best Picture winners, An American in Paris and Gigi, and collected the Thalberg Award. As tastes shifted and the studio system crumbled, the musical's economics collapsed with it, and Freed's kind of picture became unaffordable. He produced the Academy Awards ceremony for several years late in life and died in 1973. The genre he perfected never found another patron like him.