remembered as a flashback and took two paragraphs. In von Stroheim's original Greed, this sequence took up the first hour of the film and was not a flashback. Von Stroheim also modernized the novel's time span to between 1908 and 1923, a quarter-century later than the novel. Greed has sometimes been said to be over 100 reels long. von Stroheim said that his initial edit was 42 reels, although several of the people who saw this cut remembered it as being anywhere from 42 to 47 reels. Grant Whytock remembered the edited version that von Stroheim initially sent to him as between 26 and 28 reels. MGM's official studio files list the original cut of the film at 22 reels. As recently as 1992, former MGM Story Editor Samuel Marx erroneously claimed that the original version of Greed was 70 reels. June Mathis is credited with co-writing the script due to her work on the 10-reel version. Mathis was the head of the Story Department at MGM and her contract stipulated that she would receive writing credit for all MGM films. She did not actually write any part of the screenplay. She is said to have changed its title from McTeague to Greed during post-production; however, a publicity still of the cast and crew taken during production clearly indicates that it was titled Greed before the MGM merger even took place. The film's working title was "Greedy Wives", a nod towards von Stroheim's previous film Foolish Wives; this working title never was considered as the film's actual title. The original version of Greed has been called the "holy grail" for film archivists. Various reports of the original version being uncovered have proved to be unfounded. Among these "sightings" are a claim that a copy existed in a vault in South America that only was screened once a year for invited guests on New Year's Eve. Another claim was that a copy in the possession of a Texan millionaire was sold to Henri Langlois of Cinémathèque Française. Other claims include that a film society in Boston held a private screening of a print found by a World War II veteran in Berlin from a tip by Emil Jannings, that David Shepherd of the American Film Institute had found a copy at a garage sale, and that the head of a film society in Redwood City, California owned "the longest existing version