The following is an unedited version of an article now appearing in the Spring 2024 issue of Nostalgia Digest magazine.
Most everyone has seen, at one time or another, the image of the lion, framed by a circular strip of film, roaring his introduction to what lies ahead. It’s the famous trademark of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, a dream factory like no other. It was the studio that gave us Judy Garland on a farm, yearning for a place “over the rainbow”; Gene Kelly splashing in puddles on a rainy street and swinging around the most famous lamppost in movie history; and Charleton Heston racing his chariot of horses around the Roman Circus Maximus. It was the studio that promised more stars than there are in heaven—and delivered on its boast. It was the home of Joan Crawford, Jean Harlow, Greta Garbo, Clark Gable, William Powell, Spencer Tracy, and countless others who graced movie screens during the golden age of Hollywood. MGM was a starry kingdom where myths were made.
The year 2024 marks the centennial of MGM, the greatest studio in the world. Although the brand name persists, the days of movie studio production are long gone. It’s been a hundred years since the company’s inception, but it’s the first thirty years that audiences remember the most. MGM’s period of dominance could be bookended by two versions of the same story: 1925’s Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ and the 1959 remake. MGM itself was a movie empire that reached the grandest heights before collapsing into ruins– only to rise again in a different form. The story behind its development could be its own movie.
The creation of MGM was the inspiration of New York theatre magnate Marcus Loew. It was he who organized the Wall Street merger of three studios: Metro Pictures Corporation, Goldwyn Pictures Corporation and Louis B. Mayer Pictures. The studio was designed to produce and distribute movies for the Loew’s theatre chain. As part of the agreement, Louis “L.B.” Mayer would be retained to oversee West Coast operations in California. A former junk dealer in his youth, Mayer was a self-made man and a pioneer in the movie industry. It would be Mayer who would become the face of the studio. Loew, meanwhile, would remain on the East Coast overseeing the financial aspects. Mayer’s title was Vice-President of Studio Operations. The date was April 17, 1924. Just over a week later, the gates opened and movies became an industry like no other America had seen.
Louis B. Mayer
Assisting Mayer as Vice-President of Production was his protegee, Irving G. Thalberg. Though only in his mid-twenties and often mistaken for a junior employee, Thalberg was a major force who left his signature on just about every significant film the studio released. He had an uncanny ability to get the most out of a script, and he could doctor any story that crossed his desk. Unlike studio executives who typically looked at films strictly from a business perspective, Thalberg had an artistic sensibility that served him well. He was involved behind the scenes in a movie’s creation, but he never took any credit. Once the film went into production, Thalberg was a hands-off producer. He had the respect of all the workers at the studio. The “Boy Genius” of MGM was recognized as one of the most important executives Hollywood ever produced because he made the effort to make each production as perfect as it could be. Thalberg knew how to deliver on audiences’ dreams.
To represent their corporate identity, Loew and Mayer sought out a trademark that would suggest strength and dignity. It was New York publicity chief Howard Dietz who modified Goldwyn Pictures’ original full-body profile of a lion, giving him a head shot and a measured roar when filmed. He would be known as Leo the lion. Their motto, Ars Gratia Artis, was Latin for “Art for Art’s Sake.” The symbol would remain relatively consistent over the years; it’s the image that boldly proclaimed to the world that what followed was an MGM product.
The dream factory was based in Culver City, Hollywood. It was a sprawling operation which consisted of 45 buildings (28 soundstages) spread out over 6 lots totaling 165 acres. Lot 1, which housed the main production offices, was 44 acres. Five thousand people worked there every day. It was literally a city unto itself with its own school, fire and police department—even a power plant. Movies at this time were made on a factory assembly-line. The studio was compartmentalized and every department had very specific tasks. There were buildings for wardrobe, property, sound, special effects, and many others. Although MGM had great directors under contract, it was not a studio where filmmakers went to put their personal stamp on movies.
MGM was producer-oriented and was driven to make whatever changes necessary to ensure the success of the product. An elaborate preview process, in which early test audiences viewed the films, was in place, and movies were often re-shot based on the responses. MGM and Mayer had always pushed for a movie a week, but their production schedule—and Thalberg’s insistence on quality over quantity– never quite reached that goal. Within this factory, Louis Mayer developed movie stars. Once an actor or actress was under contract, typically long-term, they were built up by publicity. Word got out to every fan magazine on a weekly basis. Glamour shots were then taken by photographers like George Hurrell. With these measures, MGM kept their stars in the spotlight.
When the MGM merger happened, the silent version of Ben-Hur had already been in production and running considerably over budget. Viewed as a white elephant inherited from the Goldwyn studio, Ben-Hur had been launched in Rome in 1923. It was a troubled production that saw significant changes in cast and crew. Mayer had the film moved from Italy to Culver City where its production could be more closely supervised. Portions were filmed in the then new two-strip Technicolor process. The film would eventually become one of the studio’s most prestigious successes.
MGM’s first official release, though, was 1924’s He Who Gets Slapped, a circus melodrama featuring “The Man of a Thousand Faces,” Lon Chaney, and Norma Shearer. This was several years before Shearer became the Queen of the MGM lot (as well as the future Mrs. Irving Thalberg), but Lon Chaney was already a major star. At MGM, he would appear in many of the studio’s more remarkable silent films, most of which were directed by Tod Browning. Together, their macabre collaborations included such offbeat films as The Unholy Three (1925), The Unknown (1927) and West of Zanzibar (1928).
The studio’s most profitable silent movie, however, was King Vidor’s First World War drama, The Big Parade (1925). Vidor was one of the most distinguished directors on the lot, and the film’s star, John Gilbert, the most famous. Gilbert would co-star with Greta Garbo in some of the studio’s steamy romances like Flesh and the Devil (1927). On the other side of the celluloid spectrum, silent comic Buster Keaton found a home at MGM. The Cameraman (1928) would be recognized as his best film at the studio, but Keaton’s halcyon days of filmmaking, like the silent era itself, were coming to a close. The world was changing with the success of Warner Brother’s The Jazz Singer (1927). Audiences wanted to hear actors speak. MGM would be the last major studio to convert to sound filmmaking, but it didn’t take long for them to catch up.
The Broadway Melody of 1929 was the first sound film to win a Best Picture Academy Award. What it lacked in acting and direction, it made up for with the new thrill and novelty of singing and dancing on-screen. But many wondered whether the silent actors of other films could transition to sound. Can Garbo speak? In 1930’s Anna Christie, she proved she could. Others like John Gilbert were less fortunate because their voice didn’t match the persona audiences had seen on the silent screen.
Stars like Norma Shearer, however, shined in films like The Divorcee (1930), which won her an Academy Award for Best Actress. Some of the films in this period of the early talkies suffered from a stationary camera bound by the limits of a microphone. Yet many of these stage-bound dramas offered other delights, such as the Art Deco production design of Cedric Gibbons. As head of the art department, it was written into Gibbons’ contract that he be credited as the sole designer. Gibbons had been with the company since its inception and would remain with them until his retirement in 1956. In addition, he designed the Academy Award statuette, which he won 11 times. All told, he was nominated 39 times for production design.
Norma Shearer with Clark Gable in Strange Interlude (1932).
As the sound technology improved and filmmakers learned to adapt and work with it, films became grander—none more so than MGM’s 1932 production of Grand Hotel. This cosmopolitan drama tells the story of several guests staying at a European hotel where their personal stories intermingle. Perhaps no film is a better showcase for MGM’s stable of stars than this one, which offers Greta Garbo (the biggest star in the world), John Barrymore, Joan Crawford, Lionel Barrymore, Lewis Stone and Jean Hersholt. What some critics might have viewed as elaborate artifice, today remains a spectacular monument to Hollywood glamour and production design. At this time during the Great Depression, all the Hollywood studios were losing money—all except one: MGM.
Louis B. Mayer was the shrewd and energetic patriarch who viewed his studio as one big family. Mayer was a staunch Republican and very old-fashioned in his views. This was reflected in the types of family-oriented fare he typically preferred. Films like the Andy Hardy series appealed to Mayer’s sentimental nature. Irving Thalberg, by contrast, was willing to do things Mayer would not. Thalberg sanctioned King Vidor’s Hallelujah (1929), a musical which featured an all-black cast. Another example of a film very much outside the MGM norm was Freaks (1932), directed by Tod Browning. It was Thalberg who green-lit this disturbing look at carnival life in the hopes of tapping into the horror market that Universal was so successful in. Thalberg wanted horror and he got it with a film that incorporated performers who were, in modern parlance, physically challenged. Freaks was at the time the black sheep of the studio, but it remains one of the more original dramas ever produced.
Another MGM release from that year led to a series so successful it continued at another studio years later. Inspired by the success of their Trader Horn (1930), which was shot in Africa, MGM brought the character Tarzan to the big screen in 1932 with former Olympic champion Johnny Weissmuller cast as the titular hero and Maureen O’Sullivan as Jane. Incorporating stock footage from the earlier production, MGM and Woody Van Dyke memorably recreated the African jungles on the backlots for Tarzan the Ape Man. Five sequels followed at MGM, most notably 1934’s Tarzan and His Mate which, in the days before the stringent Hollywood Production Code was enforced, is now viewed as a noteworthy example of “pre-Code” cinema.
Tarzan was just one of several series films that MGM produced in the 1930s and 1940s. These were typically B-movies, but Louis Mayer insisted that they still look like an MGM film. There were the sixteen Andy Hardy movies with Mickey Rooney as the son of a judge in small-town America, the Maisie pictures with Ann Sothern as a showgirl heroine, Dr. Kildare with Lew Ayres and Lionel Barrymore, and The Thin Man movies starring William Powell and Myrna Loy as the sophisticated married couple, Nick and Nora Charles. Starting with The Thin Man in 1934, these detective mysteries would last well into the 1940s and remain some of the studio’s most fondly-remembered films nearly ninety years later.
Irving Thalberg
Irving Thalberg, who had always suffered health issues since childhood, temporarily left the studio after suffering a heart attack. During this period, Louis Mayer brought in his son-in-law, David Selznick, to run operations. It was Selznick who was responsible for films like Dinner at Eight (1933) and David Copperfield (1935). Unlike Thalberg, Selznick was involved in every aspect of actual production. Despite his efforts to fit in, Selznick felt like an interloper and that staff loyalty was always for Thalberg. Roles were evolving at the studio. In the past, Thalberg had directly supervised producers who, during his absence, began to supervise their own units. When Thalberg eventually returned from Europe after his convalescence, one of his first big productions he put together was 1934’s musical operetta The Merry Widow, which starred Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald, both of whom had appeared together earlier in the decade at Paramount. The film’s artistic success was a precursor of the musical triumphs to follow.
MGM could do many things, but comedy wasn’t one of them. Buster Keaton could’ve attested to that given the poor vehicles he was thrust into with Jimmy Durante. But there were exceptions, and one of the best collaborations came about when Chico Marx of The Marx Brothers was playing poker with Irving Thalberg one night and managed to generate interest from the young executive in doing a film together. Thalberg was intrigued and had definite ideas how the brothers could adapt their anarchic comedy style into a more traditional plotline. The result became a comeback for The Marx Brothers. With A Night at the Opera (1935), Thalberg was able to do for them what he could not do for Buster Keaton.
Clark Gable, Mutiny on the Bounty
One of the studio’s most esteemed films of the entire decade was Mutiny on the Bounty (1935), a seafaring adventure-drama starring Clark Gable and Charles Laughton. The film would go on to win the Academy Award for Best Picture. Another prestige picture was Romeo and Juliet (1936), which starred Thalberg’s wife, Norma Shearer, and Leslie Howard as two rather mature young lovers. Sadly, it was shortly after this film was released that MGM faced its first major crisis– one that threatened the studio’s future.
On September 14, 1936, Irving Thalberg, MGM’s central creative force, suffered a fatal heart attack. His loss affected not just MGM but the entire movie industry, which temporarily shut down production to pay their respects. The question became whether MGM could survive without him. In 1937, Mayer hired Mervyn LeRoy to replace Thalberg. LeRoy had been one of the top producer/directors at Warner Brothers. One of the most important projects he would supervise was 1939’s The Wizard of Oz.
Perhaps no other MGM release better captures the magic of storytelling and studio production than this film. Author L. Frank Baum’s classic children’s story was brought to the screen in one of the outstanding productions of the year. It was another slotted prestige film, and though it was by no means the biggest blockbuster the studio produced, it became one of the most beloved. Together with Ray Bolger (as the Scarecrow), Jack Haley (The Tin Man), and Bert Lahr (The Cowardly Lion), Judy Garland brought to the screen her most famous role. Dorothy Gale would take her first steps along the Yellow Brick Road in Stage 27’s Munchkinland. The Wizard of Oz was actually one of 41 movies that MGM released in 1939. Over the years, it has been recognized as one of its greatest.
Judy Garland, 35mm frame enlargement from The Wizard of Oz.
Hollywood’s boom years came between 1939 and 1946. One film in particular led the way. In the summer of 1938, MGM had secured the distribution rights for one of the most anticipated motion pictures in cinema history: the Civil War melodrama Gone with the Wind (1939). Although made by Selznick Pictures and not MGM, Louis Mayer was able to release the film because he had agreed to loan out the services of Clark Gable to Selznick. Gable was everyone’s choice to play Rhett Butler. The distribution deal proved to be lucrative for MGM. Adjusted for inflation, Gone with the Wind remains the highest grossing film of all time.
Norma Shearer was professionally adrift without Thalberg to help guide her career. Although she would have success in films like The Women (1939), she would call it a career in 1942. MGM’s biggest and most enigmatic star, Greta Garbo, who had a well-received hit with 1939’s romantic comedy Ninotchka, would precede Shearer into retirement, not just from MGM but from the movie business altogether. Joan Crawford likewise departed, but in her case, it was to find greener pastures at Warner Brothers. By that time, Louis Mayer had already made a fortune off her.
MGM was cultivating new stars at this time when world war was looming. There were new faces like Hedy Lamarr, Lana Turner, Greer Garson, and Spencer Tracy, who would appear in several films with Katharine Hepburn beginning with Woman of the Year in 1942. When conflict broke out in Europe, Mayer did not shy away from addressing the Nazi threat with films like The Mortal Storm (1940) and Mrs. Miniver (1942). The latter starred Greer Garson in an Oscar-winning performance as a British housewife coping with the war.
To support the war effort, MGM became a propaganda machine in the best sense of the word. During war-time, studio production was at its peak. Profits soared while the studio made America conscious of the European conflict and stirred it away from isolationism. After Pearl Harbor, major stars enlisted in the armed services like James Stewart, Clark Gable, Robert Montgomery and Robert Taylor. Actresses like Lana Turner, a popular pin-up girl, did their part in helping sell war bonds. The studio moguls, most of whom were Jewish and were quite aware of Nazi atrocities, felt a moral obligation to pitch in as well. Mayer was no exception and struck back at Hitler through the power of storytelling. Nevertheless, MGM still offered a wide array of movies, including escapist entertainment like National Velvet (1944) with newcomer Elizabeth Taylor.
Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland
Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland thrived during these years in several musicals in which they appeared together. Typically, the movies followed a plotline of high school kids putting on a show. Babes in Arms (1939), Strike Up the Band (1940) and Girl Crazy (1943) are a few of the ten films they made. The producer behind these was Arthur Freed who, during the 1940s and 1950s, became one of the instrumental forces behind the studio’s greatest musicals.
Lyricist-turned-producer Arthur Freed had been an associate producer on The Wizard of Oz. One of his biggest hits was Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), a nostalgic trip back to the turn-of-the-century with Judy Garland. With the “Freed Unit,” MGM released some of the finest musicals that had ever been made– films like The Pirate (1948) and Easter Parade (1948) with Judy Garland. The Stanley Donen-directed On the Town (1949) featured Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra on sailors’ leave on the streets of New York. The film was an escape from studio-bound filmmaking with authentic location settings. An American in Paris (1951) and Singin’ in the Rain (1952) starred Gene Kelly in two of his most admired films. And the Vincente Minnelli-directed The Band Wagon (1953) offered audiences Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse in gorgeous Technicolor. The films succeeded because MGM had access to the best songwriters, orchestras, directors, and performers who made all these productions a notch above what other studios were doing.
Besides their slate of features, MGM produced and released short subjects like “Crime Does Not Pay,” as well as the Pete Smith Specialties and the Robert Benchley series. The studio also distributed the Hal Roach comedies like Our Gang and the Laurel & Hardy films. In addition to numerous other two-reeler short films and newsreels (Hearst Metrotone News, for instance), MGM produced cartoons. Some of the studio’s animation included Flip the Frog, Tom and Jerry, and the Tex Avery-directed classics of the 1940s and 1950s like Red Hot Riding Hood (1943).
During the 1940s, Louis B. Mayer was spending more time at the racetrack than at the studio. This was noticed by Nicholas Schenck, who had been running the parent company, Loews, Inc., since 1927 after Marcus Loew’s passing. Mayer had been quarreling with Schenck since the 1920s when the East Coast exec attempted to sell Mayer’s studio off to William Fox of the Fox Film Corporation. By 1948, MGM began running out of steam as evidenced by failures like The Kissing Bandit (1948) with Frank Sinatra. Schenck told Mayer it was time he found another Thalberg. The new VP in charge of production became Dore Schary, who had previously been head of production at RKO under Howard Hughes. Schary envisioned the studio heading in a new direction with more realistic films like John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle (1950). Schary was a more liberal-minded individual compared to Mayer; his approach to filmmaking was in stark contrast to Mayer, who still adhered to more escapist principles of entertainment.
The Hollywood studio system began to crumble in 1948 when the federal government ruled that studios could no longer maintain control of their theatres. The Supreme Court believed this was a monopoly that hindered free enterprise and independent exhibition. They forced the movie companies to divest themselves of their theatre chains. These consent decrees essentially ended the system of distributing films— or block booking, as it was called. MGM would be the last to comply.
In the early 1950s, theatre attendance decreased considerably from what it had been just a few years before. Between 1948 and 1952, weekly attendance dropped from 90 million to 51 million. The rise of television coupled with the consent decrees was the death knell for the system that had made MGM the most successful of all the major studios. It was a chaotic time in the movie industry. Despite the losses in revenue, the musical genre was still going strong for the studio at the box office. Gigi (1958), a Best Picture winner featuring Leslie Caron, would be one of their most spectacular hits.
After years of acrimony with Nicholas Schenck, Louis Mayer announced his resignation in June of 1951. With Dore Schary now running MGM, the studio ushered in CinemaScope as a way to draw audiences away from television. MGM was a pioneer in the new widescreen format. Films as diverse as Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954) and Forbidden Planet (1956) were some of the big screen attractions of the decade. But the studio’s expenses were soaring and profits were dropping. Schenck wanted MGM to rein in its budget. Contracts with actors who had been with the studio for years were not renewed. Even stars like Robert Taylor, who had outlasted all the others, finally left in the late 1950s. In 1957, for the first time in its history, MGM lost money. That same year, Louis B. Mayer, estranged from the studio that bore his name, died.
Ben-Hur (1959) was, in some ways, MGM’s last gasp and a triumphant return to the past. Like its silent predecessor, the film became a major hit for the studio– a winner of 11 Academy Awards. Directed by William Wyler and starring Charlton Heston as Judah Ben-Hur, the film was a 1950s epic in every sense of the word and represented studio filmmaking at its zenith. One of its signature scenes is the chariot race, which remains one of the most exciting action sequences ever captured on film.
Times were changing and so were the stars. Actors like Marlon Brando and Paul Newman were in, representing a new wave of talent. By 1959, the star contract system was winding down as more actors became independent and were hired on a picture-by-picture basis. On movie screens, violence and anti-heroes became acceptable in the mainstream. Films like The Dirty Dozen (1967) found an audience. Behind the cameras, directors like David Lean sought the kind of control that would have been unheard of a generation before. MGM made the decision to make less films, but they still financed other productions like Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Unfortunately, MGM’s production schedule each year became too dependent on the success of one big epic, and in most cases, these failed at the box office.
During the tumultuous 1960s, there were massive losses at MGM—$35 million by 1969. A corporate takeover loomed. Studio heads came and went. After Dore Schary, it was Arthur Loew (son of Marcus Loew), followed by Joseph Vogel and Sol Siegel. Long gone was the continuity of management under Mayer and Thalberg. The family atmosphere that they had engendered on the lot was a distant memory. The company stock was falling, which paved the way for Las Vegas financier Kirk Kerkorian to come in and take over the studio in 1969; it became a corporate entity where film production was no longer a major concern. Real estate, gambling and airlines were Kerkorian’s main interests. In a short time, the studio went from financing films like Doctor Zhivago (1965) to distributing blaxploitation like Shaft (1971).
The studio’s history was dismantled. The MGM sign atop Stage 6 came down. In 1970, props went on the auction block. The studio’s famed backlot, where all the Andy Hardy films had been made years before, was sold off to a housing development. The corporate powers that came in lacked the foresight that other studios like Universal had, which turned tours of their backlots into big business.
The years that followed saw bankruptcy and more takeovers. By the 1970s and 1980s, MGM slowly stopped making films altogether but continued distributing them. In 1981, Kirk Kerkorian purchased United Artists and the studio became MGM/UA. One of the advantages of this deal was that MGM now had the distribution rights to the James Bond franchise. At one point, media mogul Ted Turner bought the studio but then only retained MGM’s vast film library; the other studio assets were sold back to Kerkorian. But by this time, MGM no longer represented the best in filmmaking. Instead, the brand had broken apart into new assets like the famed hotel company and resort. Forty years later in 2022, Amazon acquired MGM, and today it is a streaming channel called MGM+. The name that once evoked grandness on a big screen now provides television content.
The story of MGM is the rise and fall of an empire. At its height, it was a Mecca of make-believe. Compilation films like That’s Entertainment! (1974) remind viewers of just how extraordinary a place it was before the studio gates closed. Those memories from nearly 2,000 movies remain—the film library that Ted Turner was so keen to purchase years before. As long as those images exist, as long as the public has access to the physical media that preserves them, the lion will continue to roar. The legacy of MGM’s glory days will be here to inspire new generations of movie lovers.
~MCH
