M-G-M
Metro
Goldwyn Mayer was the greatest of the Dream Factories. It was committed
to providing the movie-going public with glamour, gloss, glitz and more
"stars than there are in heaven". In charge of the studio was Louis B.
Mayer and his boy wonder producer Irving Thalberg.
MGM was born in 1924 with the merger
of Metro Pictures, Goldwyn Pictures and Louis. B Mayer's company. Mayer
got a reputation as the iron dictator of the studio dealing with
tempermental actors and actresses while Irving Thalberg actually got
the movies made. In the silent days these movies included Ben Hur
(1925), The Big Parade(1925) with John Gilbert and The Crowd (1928).
Greta Garbo made a successful
transition to sound and was the undoubted queen of the studio while
Clark Gable became the King of Hollywood. Grand Hotel (1932) was one of
the first all star movies, it featured Garbo, the Barrymore brothers
John and Lionel, Joan Crawford and Wallace Beery. Dinner at Eight
(1933) starred the Barrymore brothers, Jean Harlow, Beery and Marie
Dressler.
The genius who masterminded many of
MGM's films in the golden years of the Thirties was Irving Thalberg.
His ability to spot an almost invisible flaw in a film became
legendary. Thalberg brought the Marx Brothers to MGM for A Night at the
Opera (1935) but during the making of the Garbo weepie Camille (1936)
he died. There was no overall production chief replacement. Individual
producers were now answerable to Mayer who hadn't always agreed with
Thalberg.
The Thirties ended with the bonanza
of Gone with the Wind (1939) which the studio distributed. In the next
two decades MGM became famous for its spectacular musicals which set
new standards for the genre. The films included The Wizard of Oz (1939)
and Meet Me In St Louis (1944) with Judy Garland, On the Town (1949),
An American In Paris (1951) and Singin' In The Rain (1952) with Gene
Kelly and The Band Wagon (1953) with Fred Astaire. Despite these
sucesses by the late Forties the general quality of MGM's output had
declined to the point where Mayer was obliged to appoint a new Thalberg
to supervise production. The choice was Dore Schary who was soon openly
at war with the old moghul.
It all came to a head in 1951 when LB
gave the real power broker of MGM Nicholas Schenck an ultimatum either
Schary goes or I go Schenck chose the younger man and Mayer was
dethroned. A few years later Schary went the same way as he couldn't
prevent MGM's decline. By 1959 the studio's future depended on a
multi-million dollar remake of Ben Hur starring Charlton Heston.
MGM released a few good films in the
Sixties : Doctor Zhivago (1965) and The Dirty Dozen (1967) but in the
early Seventies new owners were reduced to selling incredible back lots
which would have made an amazing theme park and all the costumes from
MGM's great films of the past. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer no longer exists as
a film-making business
Written content copyright Derek McLellan,2005.
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