The film begins with a passage from the novel McTeague: “ ‘I never truckled; I never took off the hat to Fashion and held it out for pennies. By God, I told them the truth. They liked it or they didn't like it. What had that to do with me? I told them the truth; I knew it for the truth then, and I know it for the truth now.’ Frank Norris.”
       The following acknowledgment appears in opening credits: “Dedicated to my mother.”
       An opening title card identifies the time and place as “The Big Dipper Gold Mine, Placer County, California. A.D. 1908.” The wanted poster for "John McTeague" displayed near the end of the film reveals that "Trina’s" murder took place fourteen years later, in late Dec 1922. However, Frank Norris’s McTeague, published in 1899, took place in the late nineteenth century.
       The 30 December 1922 Moving Picture World and 27 January 1923 Exhibitors Trade Review noted that as soon as Metro-Goldwyn Pictures signed a long-term contract with director Erich von Stroheim, he went to San Francisco, CA, to write the continuity for his first production, based on Norris’s realistic novel, McTeague. As part of the deal, the studio also purchased the musical comedy The Merry Widow (1925, see entry) for von Stroheim’s second project. According to M-G-M advertisements in the 10 February 1923 Motion Picture News and 3 March 1923 Exhibitors Trade Review, as well as items in several other magazines, including the 19 February 1923 FD, the studio’s early title for Greed was Greedy Wives, most likely inspired, perhaps facetiously, by von Stroheim’s previous film, Foolish Wives (1922, see entry).
       The Blue Book of the Screen for 1924 contained an article called “Realism” that discussed von Stroheim’s obsession with filming Greed on location, at or near the places Norris described in McTeague. The article stated that “not one single scene was produced or filmed in the studio.” Having first envisioned filming the book a decade earlier “against its original background,” von Stroheim scouted locations with his production manager and technical director two months before production began. Much of the story took place at a downtown building on Polk Street in San Francisco, where McTeague had both his dental parlor and living quarters, but that part of the city had burned down following the 1906 earthquake. Searching surviving neighborhoods, von Stroheim found and leased a late nineteenth-century building at 602 Hayes Street, at the corner of Laguna, “that fitted in exact detail with the building Norris described.” His staff changed the 1923 storefronts to resemble those of thirty years earlier (despite von Stroheim’s decision to move the story into the twentieth century), and remodeled the rooms to fit the story. A vacant lot on an adjoining alley provided a place for von Stroheim to construct “one of the picture’s few artificial settings—the junk yard,” including the owner’s hovel and “a tremendous amount of real junk.” (The junkyard and its owner, “Zerkow,” the husband of the janitress “Maria” who sold “Trina” the lottery ticket, were ultimately excised from the final release.)
       An item in the “Flashes from Frisco” column in the 17 February 1923 Camera reported that production manager Ernest Traxler “spent most of last week at Colfax [in Northern California], and the neighborhood of the Big Dipper mine at Iowa Hill, getting locations for the mine scenes in Van Stroheim’s production of ‘McTeague.’”
       The 7 April 1923 Motion Picture News announced that filming began on Wednesday, 28 March 1923. On one day alone, according to the 23 June 1923 Camera, von Stroheim filmed over thirty “script scenes” between nine A.M. and two A.M. the following morning. Among San Francisco’s landmarks used in the production were the 1909 Cliff House and nearby Seal Rocks at the northern end of Ocean Beach, the Ferry Building on the Embarcadero, Market Street, and the original San Francisco Orpheum Theatre on O’Farrell Street, the 12 May 1923 Camera noted.
       From San Francisco, the production moved across the San Francisco Bay to Oakland, CA, where they used the Southern Pacific Railroad’s B Street Station, found a small cottage of the type Norris described as belonging to the “Sieppe” family, and picked the city’s Shell Mound Park to stage a picnic sequence at which the main characters, McTeague and “Marcus Schouler,” had a fist fight. (Jean Hersholt, who portrayed Marcus, was accidentally knocked unconscious during the scene and rushed to the hospital, but quickly recovered, according to the 23 June 1923 Camera. The scene was edited out of the film before its release.) An item in the 11 August 1923 Camera reported that the company recently finished the San Francisco-Oakland portion of the film after four-and-a-half months. One of von Stroheim’s scouting parties discovered that the Big Dipper mine near the town of Colfax in Placer County, CA, had barely changed since Norris wrote about it, and another found that Keeler, CA, a little Inyo County mountain town where McTeague hid out before escaping into Death Valley, was similarly unchanged, so the production used both locations. However, von Stroheim’s obsession for realism became a problem in Death Valley itself. According to an article in the January 1925 Motion Picture Magazine called “Thru Death Valley with von Stroheim,” the director was warned by the studio and its insurance company to avoid filming in the United States’ hottest and most inhospitable place, where thousands of prospectors, explorers, and travelers had perished over the years. Von Stroheim reportedly told executives, “Do you think that to make this picture I’ll drag some sand into the studio, put my actors before the camera, and say, ‘You’re out in a desert, old chappie—frightfully uncomfortable, you know. You’re dying of heat and thirst; tarantulas are crawling over you. Look the part, old fellow; register agony.” He demanded that his cast and crew “follow McTeague’s flight into Death Valley.” To get an establishing shot, the crew scaled Sheep’s Mountain to a spot eight thousand feet above the desert floor. Then, they entered Death Valley over the “Emigrant Trail.” The fight to the death between McTeague and Marcus was filmed at “the Sink,” the lowest spot on earth not covered with water, 337 feet below sea level, in the month of August. Since Death Valley well water was poisonous because of arsenic, an airplane dropped a cast-iron tank of water, which had to be given out in small measures and guarded by two armed men “to beat back the crazed members of our party.”
       The final scenes were filmed at the Big Dipper gold mine in Placer County, where von Stroheim cinematically captured how rocks were crushed and gold extracted, the December 1923 Motion Picture Magazine noted. While shooting there, the cast and crew of ninety-three men “were pressed into service by the Fire Marshall” to fight a huge forest fire approaching the mine, according to the 6 October 1923 Motion Picture News.
       The director’s attention to detail included McTeague’s dentistry practice. To insure that the scenes were correct, von Stroheim hired Dr. Henry Smulson, a “well-known San Francisco dentist,” as technical advisor, according to items in the 28 April 1923 and 5 May 1923 Camera.
       Von Stroheim also occasionally used live musicians to get his actors into a scene’s proper mood. The Dec 1924 Motion Picture Magazine mentioned that for one particularly atmospheric scene, the director told the musicians to play the score backwards. “The effect is all I want,” he said.
       The December 1923 Screenland announced that after seven months on location, the production exceeded the $1 million mark, and von Stroheim still had not returned to Metro-Goldwyn Pictures Studios in Culver City, CA.
       In the 10 November 1923 Camera, von Stroheim blamed his mania for faithfully recreating the novel cinematically on the press and the viewing public, which routinely criticized Hollywood’s “mutilation of literature.” “I decided to make an absolutely literal film transposition of a novel that has been accepted as a classic of American literature,” he said. He made Greed “without a single important change, except [for] the title. I made it so that it could be said, ‘As Norris wrote it, so von Stroheim produced it.’” He promised to give up filmmaking if the public did not like the movie.
       Metro-Goldwyn predicted a 25 November 1923 opening for Greed in a 22 September 1923 Camera news “flash,” adding that the film might premiere in San Francisco. The film would not have its premiere until more than a year later, in December 1924.
       The 20 October 1923 Camera reported that von Stroheim “barricaded himself in his cutting room at the Goldwyn studios,” where he worked sixteen hours at a time. He reduced his initial forty-two reels of film to twenty-four reels and then refused to cut any more. His friend, director Rex Ingram, further edited the film to eighteen reels. June Mathis then reduced the film to ten reels and added new titles. Jos. W. Farnham received screen credit as film editor.
       After nearly two years in production, Greed was set to have its world premiere on 4 December 1924 at New York City’s Cosmopolitan Theater, which William Randolph Hearst, president of Cosmopolitan Corporation, leased to Metro-Goldwyn because he felt it was “absolutely the most powerful motion picture” he had ever seen, the 22 November 1924 Moving Picture World reported. Greed was the theater’s first non-Cosmopolitan motion picture presentation.
       Critics were generally impressed with the film. An article in the 3 January 1925 Moving Picture World detailed many of the New York newspaper reviews: The New York Journal called Greed “an epic of almost ruthless realism…It is a remarkable picture.” The New York Daily News deemed it “one of the most conspicuous pictures of all times,” while the New York Daily Mirror raved, “Greed is a masterpiece.” Even the February 1925 Photoplay reviewer James R. Quirk had to temper his negative review with a sense of awe: “Greed is sordid. Greed is depressing. Greed is brutal. Greed is shocking. It reeks with good acting and wonderful direction….Von Stroheim has emphasized the detail of a sordid story until it becomes almost repulsive. It is the realism of vulgarity to the nth degree, and if that is art, Von Stroheim has produced a masterpiece.” However, Quirk added that he gave Greed a place in the pages of Photoplay “only because of its news value.”
       Frank Norris' novel, McTeague, also known as McTeague, A Story of San Francisco, was first adapted to film in 1916's Life's Whirlpool (see entry), whose working title had been McTeague of San Francisco. Because of a stipulation in Norris' contract with World Films, the motion picture's ending had to be shot in Death Valley, CA, instead of being "faked" in a studio.
       In 1999, Greed was reissued in a 250-minute length, with added footage obtained from photographic stills taken on the set.