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	Games - Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, or MGM, is a media company, involved primarily in the production and distribution of cinema and television programs until 2005. The company was acquired by a partnership led by Sony and Comcast Corporation for $US 4.8 billion. The sale was completed on April 8, 2005.

From the end of the Silent Film Era through World War II, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer was the preeminient motion picture studio in Hollywood, with the greatest output of all of the studios: at its height, it released one feature film a week, along with many short subjects and serials. A victim of the massive restructuring of the motion picture industry during the 1950's and 60's, it was ultimately unable to cope with the loss of its theater chain (due to the Paramount decrees), and the power shift from studio bosses to independent producers and agents.

Organization

MGM's principal subsidiaries are:

MGM (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios)
MGM Networks
Orion Pictures
The Samuel Goldwyn Company
United Artists

History

The beginning

The name combines those of three film production companies which merged in April, 1924: Metro Pictures Corporation (formed in 1916), Goldwyn Pictures Corporation (1917), and Louis B. Mayer Pictures (1918). M-G-M was controlled by Loews, Inc., the vaudeville-and-movie theater chain founded by Marcus Loew in 1904. Because of his success as an independent producer, Louis B. Mayer was made head of the studio, with Harry Rapf and the twenty-five year old "boy wonder" Irving Thalberg as heads of production. Though Loew's Metro was the dominant partner, Goldwyn provided the production facility at their Culver City studio, as well as mascot Leo the Lion (Metro's symbol was a parrot.) Goldwyn's corporate motto "Ars Gratia Artis' (Art for Art's Sake) also survived the merger.

Also inherited from Goldwyn was a runaway production, Ben-Hur, which had been filming in Rome for months without producing much usable film. Mayer showed his command 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 M-G-M's first great public-relations triumph, establishing an image for the company that persisted for years.

Marcus Loew died in 1927, and control of Loews passed to his associate, Nicholas Schenck. Rival theater-owner and entrepreneur William Fox saw an opportunity to expand his empire, and in 1929, with Schenck's assent, bought the Loew family's holdings. Mayer and Thalberg, employees and not shareholders, were outraged; Mayer in particular used his political connections to launch a Justice Department action. Also working for them was a bit of morbid luck: Fox was badly injured in a car accident; by the time he recovered, the 1929 stock-market crash had left him broke, and the Loew deal was off. Having seen his chance to make an instant fortune evaporate, Schenck resented Mayer immensely, and so the Fox incident led to a Hollywood-New York antagonism that would last for thirty years.
MGM's golden age
Right from the beginning, 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, William Haines, Norma Shearer and Joan Crawford. Established names like Lon Chaney, William Powell, Buster Keaton and Wallace Beery were hired from other studios. 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, Myrna Loy, Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy among them.

Like its rivals, MGM produced fifty pictures a year. Loews theaters were mostly located in New York and the northeast, so MGM films were often sophisticated, polished entertainments. As the depression deepened, MGM could make a claim its rivals could not: it never lost money. No matter how bad the economy, MGM showed a profit every quarter all through the thirties.

Irving Thalberg, always physically frail, was removed as head of production in 1932. L.B. 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. 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 in terms of quality. Still, the company remained profitable, although a change toward "series" pictures (Andy Hardy, Maisie, the Thin Man pictures, et al.) is seen by some as evidence of Mayer's restored influence.

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