>finally one of the producers, looking for something positive to say, said "we love the music". When told it was by Gustav Mahler (on whose symphony the book was based) he said "well, we'd like to hire him".

Sounds like real Hollywood breadth of culture :).

I remember a story by one reporter who was visiting studios there, some time in mid sixties. He was shown, among others, a set of a bazaar in some Arabic place. He noticed that all the shop signs were in Cyrillic, and pointed out the inconsistency - and was told that it doesn't matter, the movie is not to be exported, nobody will notice.