Some Golden Age revenge … celebrity against corporation.
Clark Gable bitterly departed M-G-M in 1954, the movie studio with which he’d been employed for twenty-plus years.
Clark G. had long held a grudge against Metro for not cutting him in on the huge profits generated by Gone With the Wind in reissue after reissue. (Everyone knew damn well the only reason M-G-M owned the film in the first place was because Selznick desperately needed Gable for the role of Rhett Butler … and so the “Tiffany of movie studios”, was able to negotiate a sweet deal.)
M-G-M, however, was reluctant to meet Gable’s demands for a contract extension, since his recent films Across the Wide Missouri, Lone Star, and Never Let Me Go had been under-performers at the box office. But then … ka-ching, ka-CHING … Mogambo, the feature depicted above, was a huge money-maker, and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer had a change of heart about keeping Clark on its employee roster.
Clark Gable was having none of it, and broke off negotiations. Further, Gable directed his agent if Metro ever wanted his services on a freelance basis in the future, said agent was to negotiate with the studio and string it along until the last possible moment, then tell them “No”.
Which was what happened. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer tried to hire Clark Gable multiple times over the next several years, but was never successful. The last film Clark Gable ever did for M-G-M was the World War II drama Betrayed … under his last studio contract.