In The Addams Family movie, the vault is reached by pulling the book Greed.
Is that an actual book? Or was it made for the movie?
It was indeed a book, made into a very famous (and famously edited-down) movie by Erich von Stroheim.
The first time I saw the fillm I thought ‘Oh, yeah. Greed. I’ve heard of that. Funny.’ But when I saw it for the whateverth time last night I thought ‘Wait a minute. Who wrote Greed?’ I couldn’t find it on Google.
If the book in TAF is a reference to von Stroheim’s film, it appears the book was actually McTeague by Frank Norris. That would explain why I couldn’t find a classic book called Greed.
I heard it was good.
McTeague is an excellent novel and the movie (in it’s original version) is perhaps the most faithful adaptation of a novel ever (which is one reason it was eight hours long – something that Norris described in a single line took several minutes to show on screen).
One thing I learned from it is that it’s easy to fake being an expert. Critics for years praised Norris for the time and effort he put into writing the novel, especially his seemingly vast knowledge of dental procedure, which he used to describe the very procedures McTeague was doing as he worked as a dentist. Someone went back to show that the procedures described could be found in a book on general dentistry of the time. There was a copy in the Harvard library where Norris did his research, and records showed that Norris had checked out the book.
That’s not faking. It’s doing research. 
True, but the critics were assuming hours of research, while the evidence was it took less than half an hour.
After watching Greed, I thought, “Thalberg was right.” It might have worked on TV as a mini-series, but theatrically, you can only take so many hours of Von Stroheim.
Shakes fist
Damn you! Beat me to it!