director Erich von Stroheim’s The Wedding March (1928), as well as writing the screenplay for director Mauritz Stiller’s The Street of Sin. Ernst Lubitsch told newspaper columnist Gilbert Swan that the background story for The Last Command had a real-life inspiration: a General in the Imperial Russian Army named Theodore A. Lodigensky whom Lubitsch had met in Russia, and again in New York, where he had opened a Russian restaurant after fleeing the communist revolution. Lubitsch encountered the ex-general once more, when the latter appeared in full uniform looking for work as an extra at $7.50 a day, the same rate as Sergius. Lubitsch later told Lajos Bíró the anecdote. Under the name Theodore Lodi, Lodigensky went on to play a handful of roles between 1929 and 1935, including Grand Duke Michael, a Russian exile who is forced to work as a hotel doorman in the 1932 film Down to Earth. Production In 1927, Paramount’s sister film company in Germany, Ufa, yielded its foremost actor Emil Jannings and producer Erich Pommer to make a number of movies in Hollywood. Sternberg and Jannings had established a friendly rapport when they met in Berlin in 1925. Jannings starred in director Ernst Lubitsch’s The Patriot and in Victor Fleming’s The Way of All Flesh, but his performance in The Last Command surpassed these two productions. The source of the script for the film has been termed “somewhat controversial”. Paramount attributed the original story entitled “The General” to screenwriter Lajos Bíró, the scenario to John S. Goodrich, and the titles to Herman J. Mankiewicz. Nevertheless, Sternberg's significant additions and alterations to the plot are “incontestable” and form the basis of his claim to “ultimate authorship” of this cinematic "masterpiece." The Last Command was among “the most ambitious Sternberg ever shot”. The shooting was completed in five weeks. The release of The Last Command was stalled when Paramount executives reviewed the film and discovered that Sternberg had inserted material portraying Hollywood as heartless and cynical. They further complained that he had historically misrepresented the Russian Revolution, including "recognizable portraits of Trotsky and the young Stalin". Only under duress from a wealthy Paramount stockholder did the studio relent and distribute the film. This was the "only time in his career that Sternberg confronted his own craft as a subject." Reception Despite opening to “remarkable critical success” and eliciting “ecstatic reviews”, the box-office profits never materialized. American