Cinema Experts

In 1924, theater magnate Marcus Loew had a problem. He'd bought Metro Pictures (founded in 1916) and Goldwyn Pictures (founded in 1917) to provide a steady supply of films for his large theater chain, Loews, Inc. However, these purchases created a need for someone to oversee his new Hollywood operations, since longtime assistant Nicholas Schenck was needed in New York to oversee the theaters.
Loew addressed the situation by buying Mayer Pictures on April 16, 1924. Because of his decade-long success as a producer, Louis B. Mayer was made a vice-president of Loews and head of studio operations in California, with Harry Rapf and the twenty-five year old "boy wonder" Irving Thalberg as heads of production. For decades, MGM's legal name was "Loews, Inc." Originally, the new studio's films were presented in the following manner: Louis B. Mayer presents a Metro-Goldwyn picture, but Mayer soon added his name to the studio. Though Loew's Metro was the dominant partner.
Also inherited from Goldwyn was a runaway production, Ben-Hur, which had been filming in Rome for months without producing much usable film. Mayer took charge of the situation by scrapping most of what had been shot and bringing production back to Culver City. Though Ben-Hur was the most costly film made up to its time, it became MGM's first great public-relations triumph, establishing an image for the company that persisted for years. Also in 1925, MGM passed Universal Studios as the largest studio in Hollywood—a lead it kept for most of the next quarter-century.
Marcus Loew died in 1927, and control of Loews passed to his longtime associate, Nicholas Schenck. Rival mogul William Fox saw an opportunity to expand his empire, and in 1929, with Schenck's assent, bought the Loew family's holdings. However, Mayer and Thalberg were outraged. Despite their high posts in the company, they were not shareholders. Mayer in particular used his political connections to persuade the Justice Department to sue Fox for violating federal antitrust law. During this time, Fox was badly hurt in an automobile accident. By the time he recovered, the stock market crash had virtually wiped out his financial holdings, ending any chance of the Loews merger going through even if the Justice Department had given its blessing. Schenck and Mayer had never gotten along; in fact, Mayer reportedly called his boss "Mr. Skunk" in private. The abortive Fox merger only increased the animosity between them. Schenck blamed Mayer rather than the stock market crash for costing him an instant fortune. The animosity between the two men led to a heated rivalry between the New York and Hollywood sides of the company that lasted over 30 years.
From the outset, MGM tapped into the audience's need for glamour and sophistication. Having inherited few big names from their predecessor companies, Mayer and Thalberg began at once to create and publicize a host of new stars, among them Greta Garbo, John Gilbert and Joan Crawford. The arrival of talking pictures in 1928–29 gave opportunities to other new stars, many of whom would carry MGM through the 1930s: Clark Gable, Jean Harlow, Robert Montgomery and Nelson Eddy among them.
MGM was one of the first studios to experiment with filming in Technicolor. Using the two-color Technicolor process then available, MGM filmed portions of The Uninvited Guest (1924), The Big Parade (1925), and Ben-Hur (1926), among others, in the process. In 1928 MGM released The Viking, the first complete Technicolor feature with sound. MGM's first all-color, "all-talking" sound feature with dialogue was the 1930 musical The Rogue Song. In 1934 MGM introduced the first live-action film made in Technicolor's superior new three-color process, a musical number in the otherwise black and white The Cat and the Fiddle. In animation, MGM purchased the rights in 1930 to distribute a series of cartoons that starred a character named Flip the Frog. The first cartoon in this series (entitled Fiddlesticks) was the first sound cartoon to be produced in two-color Technicolor.
Like its rivals, MGM produced fifty pictures a year. Loew's theaters were mostly located in New York and the northeast, so MGM made films that were sophisticated and polished to cater to an urban audience. As the Depression deepened, MGM could make a claim its rivals could not: it never lost money. It was the only Hollywood studio that continued to pay dividends during the 1930s. MGM stars dominated the box office in the 30's. Norma Shearer (the top star and money maker for the studio), Joan Crawford, and Greta Garbo all reigned as not only the top three figures at the studio but in Hollywood itself. By 1943 all three had left the studio.
Mayer and Irving Thalberg's relationship was lukewarm at best; Thalberg preferred literary works to the crowd-pleasers Mayer wanted. Thalberg, always physically frail, was removed as head of production in 1932. Mayer encouraged other staff producers, among them his son-in-law David O. Selznick, but no one seemed to have the sure touch of Thalberg. As Thalberg fell increasingly ill in 1936, Louis Mayer could now serve as his temporary replacement also. Rumors flew that Thalberg was leaving to set up his own independent company; his early death in 1936, at age thirty-seven, cost MGM dearly. As a result of Thalberg's death, Mayer became head of production as well as studio chief, becoming the first million-dollar executive in American history.
In 1933, MGM began to distribute its second series of cartoons, starring a character named Willie Whopper. MGM's biggest cartoon stars came in the form of the cat-and-mouse duo Tom and Jerry, created by William Hanna and Joseph Barbera in 1940. The Tom and Jerry cartoons won seven Academy Awards between 1943 and 1953.
Increasingly, before and during World War II, Mayer came to rely on his "College of Cardinals" - senior producers who controlled the studio's output. This management-by-committee may explain why MGM seemed to lose its momentum, developing few new stars and relying on the safety of sequels and bland material. After 1940, production was cut from fifty pictures a year to a more manageable twenty-five features per year. It was during this time that MGM released very successful musicals with newly-acquired contract players such as Judy Garland, Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly, and Frank Sinatra, to name just a few. As audiences drifted away after the war, MGM found it difficult to attract audiences. By the late forties, as MGM's profit margins decreased, word came from Schenck in New York: find "a new Thalberg" who could improve quality while paring costs. Mayer thought he had found this savior in Dore Schary, a writer and producer who had had a couple of successful years running RKO.
Gradually cutting loose expensive contract, Schary managed to keep the studio running much as it had through the early 1950s. Under Schary, MGM produced some well-regarded musicals, among them An American in Paris, Singin' in the Rain and The Band Wagon. However, it was a losing fight, as the mass audience preferred to stay home and watch television. In 1954, as a settlement of the government's restraint-of-trade action, U.S. vs. Paramount Pictures, et al., Loews, Inc. gave up control of MGM. It would take another five years before the interlocking arrangements were completely undone, by which time both Loews and MGM were sinking.
As the studio system faded in the late 1950s and 1960s, MGM's prestige faded with it. In 1957 (by coincidence, the year L.B. Mayer died) the studio lost money for the first time in its 34-year history. Cost overruns and the failure of the 1957 big-budget epic Raintree County prompted the studio to release Schary from his contract. Schary's reign at MGM had been marked with few bona-fide hits, but his departure (along with the retirement of Schenck in 1955) left a power vacuum that would prove difficult to fill. By 1960, MGM had released all of its contract players, with many either retiring or moving onto television.
1957 also marked the end of the cartoon era at MGM, as the animation unit was closed due to budget issues. However, there were several major exceptions to this downslide and loss of prestige. In 1956, MGM sold what is now one of its most beloved movies, The Wizard of Oz, to CBS, which scheduled it to be shown in November of that year. In a landmark event, ‘’Oz’’ became the first theatrical film to be shown complete in one evening on prime time television over a major American commercial network. With its second showing on CBS in 1959, The Wizard of Oz became an annual tradition, drawing huge audiences in homes all over the U.S. and earning additional profits for the studio. The studio was all too happy to see Oz become, through television, one of the two or three most famous films MGM has ever made, and one of the few films that nearly everybody in the U.S. has seen at least once.
In 1958, MGM released what is generally considered their last great musical, Arthur Freed's widescreen, color production of Gigi. The film was a box office and critical smash, won nine Academy Awards including Best Picture, and from it came several hit songs. The film was the last MGM musical to win a Best Picture Oscar, an honor that had previously gone to The Broadway Melody (1929), The Great Ziegfeld (1936), and An American in Paris (1951).
In 1959, MGM enjoyed one of its most spectacular successes of later years, with the release of its nearly four hour Technicolor version of Ben-Hur. The film would go on to win 11 Academy Awards, including Best Picture, a record that held until Titanic matched it in 1997 along with "The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King" in 2003. Ben-Hur was also an immense success both critically and at the box office.
In 1961, MGM resumed releasing new Tom and Jerry shorts, and production moved to Rembrandt Films in Czechoslovakia. In 1963, the production of Tom and Jerry returned to Hollywood under Chuck Jones and his Sib Tower 12 Productions studio. Tom and Jerry folded in 1967. MGM fell into a habit in this period that would eventually sink the studio: an entire year's production schedule relied on the success of one big-budget epic each year. This policy began in 1959, when Ben-Hur was profitable enough to carry the studio through 1960. However, later attempts at big-budget epics failed, among them Cimarron (1960), King of Kings (1961), Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1961), and most notoriously, the 1962 remake of Mutiny on the Bounty. One other epic that was a success, however, was the MGM-Cinerama co-production How the West Was Won, with a huge all-star cast. King of Kings, while a commercial and critical flop at the time, has since come to be regarded as a film classic.
As MGM sank (along with the other main-line studios), a series of studio heads came and went, along with a succession of corporate managers, all hoping to bring back the studio's glory days. In 1967, MGM was sold to the Canadian investor Edgar Bronfman. Two years later, an increasingly unprofitable MGM was bought by Nevada millionaire Kirk Kerkorian. What appealed to Kerkorian was MGM's Culver City real estate, and the value of 45 years' worth of glamour associated with the name, which he attached to a Las Vegas hotel and casino. As for film-making, that part of the company was quickly and severely downsized under the supervision of James T. Aubrey, Jr. Aubrey sold off the studio's accumulation of props, furnishings and historical memorabilia, including Dorothy's red slippers from The Wizard of Oz. Through the 1970s studio output slowed considerably - Aubrey preferred four or five medium-budget pictures each year, along with a smattering of low-budget fare. With output cut back so severely, Kerkorian closed MGM's sales and distribution offices in 1973, handing that duty to United Artists. Kerkorian now distanced himself from the operations of the studio, focusing on his casino properties. Another chunk of the back lot was sold in 1974; the last shooting done on the backlot was the introductory material for That's Entertainment! a retrospective documentary that became a surprise hit for the studio. The shoddy look of the famous MGM exteriors and back lots, shown in That's Entertainment! (for instance, the "New York" street), was startling; a studio that had previously had so much glamour and expertise in making big-budget films looked as if it had been reduced to nothing more than the average, low-budget studio. In addition to MGM's fast declining image, the MGM Recording Studios were sold in 1975.
The "Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer" lettering on the studio's logo was changed to reflect their acquisition of UA, now reading "MGM/UA Entertainment Co." - the new name for the company. Following a failed attempt to take over CBS in 1985, the ambitious Georgia-based media entrepreneur Ted Turner bought MGM/UA. But his bankers, concerned about the already heavy debt-load his companies carried, refused to back him, and exactly seventy-four days later, Turner announced he was re-selling most of MGM/UA to Kirk Kerkorian. Turner retained the one MGM asset he really craved, the MGM film library, as well as the United Artists Television package. Kerkorian got United Artists and the rights to the MGM name and trademark. The venerable Culver City lot, home to MGM and its predecessor since 1918, was sold to Lorimar-Telepictures, a television production company. How much of MGM's back catalog Turner actually obtained was a point of conflict for a time; eventually it was determined that Turner owned all of the MGM library, dating back to pre-merger days, as well as the pre-1948 Warner Bros. catalog, the entire RKO library, and a good share of United Artists's own backlist.
In 1990, an obscure Italian promoter, Giancarlo Parretti, announced that he had taken control of France's Pathé Frères, and was about to buy MGM/UA. Despite a cloudy past Parretti got backing from Credit Lyonnais and took control of MGM/UA through a leveraged buyout. The well respected executive, Alan Ladd, Jr., a former President of MGM/UA, was brought on board to Chair Pathe, then ultimately as CEO of MGM in 1991. However the same year Parretti's ownership dissolved in a flurry of lawsuits and a default by Crédit Lyonnais, and Parretti faced securities fraud charges in the United States and Europe. Pathé was purchased by Chargeurs in 1992.
Despite a few commercial successes, Credit Lyonnais was unable to stem the tide of red ink during the mid-1990s; putting the studio up for sale, it found only one willing bidder: Kirk Kerkorian. Now the owner of MGM for the third time, Kerkorian at last conceded that a solid business plan was the studio's only hope. Credit Lyonnais then ordered Kerkorian and the Board of Directors of MGM to fire Alan Ladd, Jr. as CEO of the company and was replaced by former Paramount executive, Frank Mancuso Sr. By committing to more and better pictures, selling a portion of the studio to Australia's Seven Network, and installing a professional management team, Kerkorian was able to convince Wall Street that a revived MGM was worthy of a place on the stock market. However, despite a few successful pictures and a re-built film library, it was clear that MGM could not compete in a business that required hundreds of millions in capital for even the most ordinary picture.
Until 2001, MGM severed ties with UIP (United International Pictures) a joint venture between MGM, Universal Pictures and Paramount Pictures. In January 2001, MGM began distributing films internationally through 20th Century Fox.
Many of MGM's competitors started to make bids to purchase the studio, beginning with Time Warner. It was not unexpected that Time Warner would bid, since the largest shareholder in the company was Ted Turner. His Turner Entertainment group had risen to success in part through its ownership of the pre-1986 MGM library. After a short period of negotiation with MGM, Time Warner was unsuccessful. The leading bidder, though, proved to be Sony Corporation of America. Sony's primary goal was to ensure Blu-Ray support at MGM; cost synergies with Sony Pictures Entertainment were secondary. MGM and Sony agreed on a purchase price of nearly $5 billion, of which about $2 billion was to pay off MGM debt. Since 2005, the Columbia TriStar Motion Picture Group has domestically distributed films by MGM and UA
MGM announced that it would return as a theatrical distribution company. MGM negotiated and struck deals with The Weinstein Company, Lakeshore Entertainment, Bauer Martinez, and many other independent studios, and then announced its plans to release 14 feature films for 2006 and early 2007. MGM also hoped to increase the amount to over 20 by 2007.
Lucky Number Slevin, released April 7, is the first film to be released under the new MGM era. Other recent films under the MGM/Weinstein deal include Clerks II and Bobby. On May 31, MGM announced that it would transfer home video output (MGM Home Entertainment) from Sony Pictures Home Entertainment to 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment. MGM also announced plans to restructure its worldwide television distribution operation. In addition MGM signed a deal with New Line Television in which MGM would handle New Line's U.S. film and series television syndication packages. MGM will also serve as New Line's barter sales rep in the television arena for the next two years.
In April, it was announced that MGM movies will be able to be downloaded through iTunes. MGM is bringing an estimated 100 of its existing movies to Apple’s iTunes service, the California-based computer company revealed. And those movies will include the likes of modern classics such as Rocky, Ronin, Mad Max, and Dances with Wolves, along with more golden classics such as Lilies of the Field and The Great Train Robbery.
MGM continues to produce and fund its own products, most of which will be distributed by MGM domestically and 20th Century Fox internationally, while others will be distributed via Columbia TriStar or Sony. Current films include Casino Royale and Rocky Balboa. The studio owns the distribution rights to a live-action film version of The Hobbit, which is being planned for production with New Line Cinema. MGM has also announced that it will continue to work on sequels for Casino Royale, The Pink Panther and The Thomas Crown Affair.