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).
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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.
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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.

The Films

The studio's releases were designed to show off its formidable roster of stars and included high quality women's pictures, adaptations and epics. "Do it right, make it big and give it class" was the studio motto. They first ventured into Technicolor in 1938 and in the 40s and 50s the process gave extra sparkle to the studio's musicals

The Stars

Lon Chaney Snr, John Gilbert, Ramon Novarro, Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford, Norma Shearer, Buster Keaton, Marion Davies, Clark Gable, Jean Harlow, John Barrymore, Lionel Barrymore, Wallace Beery, Marie Dressler, Lana Turner, Hedy Lamarr, William Powell, Myrna Loy, Freddie Bartholomew, Mickey Rooney, Judy Garland, Gene Kelly, Fred Astaire, Jeannette MacDonald, Nelson Eddy, Spencer Tracy, Katharine Hepburn, James Stewart, Eleanor Powell, Greer Garson


The Directors

Erich Von Stroheim, Fred Niblo, King Vidor, Clarence Brown, Victor Fleming, Victor Sjostrom, Tod Browning, Jack Conway, George Cukor, George Sidney, Gene Kelly, Stanley Donen, Vincente Minnelli

Academy Awards

Best Picture :

The Broadway Melody (1929)
Grand Hotel (1932)
Mutiny on the Bounty (1935)
The Great Ziegfeld (1936)
Gone with the Wind (1939) (distributed by MGM)
Mrs Miniver (1942)
An American In Paris (1951)
Gigi (1958)
Ben Hur (1959)