Von Stroheim' s lifelong dream had been make a film version of McTeague, the novel by Frank Norris. The mail plot depicted the destructive effects of greed on a dentist whose new wife wins $5,000 in a lottary. When he loses his practice through the machinations of his wife's refusal to use hes winnings to help them out...
The film first run to nine and a half hours, and was hailed as a masterpiece by those that saw it, but MGM cut it down to 140 minutes, with sometimes ludicrous titles covering the gaps in the story. Despite its truncated from, Greed was hailed by many critics. Seventy-five years after it was originally released, the new recontructed version was presented, with 115 minuted of Von Stroheim's narrative painstakingly added by Rick Schmidlin to the 135 minute version, through the use of 650 still images tp rebuild missing scenes, and the director's original 330-page script, hundreds of documents and the novel it was based on as a guide.