Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Inc. , or MGM , is an American media company, involved primarily in the production and distribution of films and television programs. MGM was founded in 1924 when the entertainment entrepreneur Marcus Loew gained control of Metro Pictures, Goldwyn Pictures Corporation and Louis B. Mayer Pictures.
The studio's official motto, "Ars Gratia Artis", is a Latin phrase meaning "Art for art's sake." It was chosen by Howard Dietz, the studio's chief publicist, in 1924. The studio's logo is a roaring lion surrounded by a circle inscribed with the studio's motto. The logo, which features "Leo the Lion," was created by Dietz in 1916 for Goldwyn Pictures and updated in 1924 for MGM's use. Dietz based the logo on his alma mater's mascot—the Columbia University lion. Originally silent, the sound of Leo the Lion's roar was added to films for the first time in August 1928. The studio's informal motto is "more stars than there are in heaven", a reference to the large number of A-list movie stars under contract to the company in the 1930s. This second motto was also coined by Deitz, and was probably first used in 1932. The METRO-GOLDWYN-MAYER name was first used in 1924 and was officially granted trademark registration in 1961. It was renewed in 2001.
From the end of the silent film era through World War II, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer was the most dominant motion picture studio in Hollywood. It responded slowly to the changing legal, economic, and demographic nature of the motion picture industry during the 1950s and 1960s, and although at times its films did well at the box office the studio lost significant amounts of money throughout the 1960s. Edgar Bronfman, Sr. purchased a controlling interest in MGM in 1966 (and was briefly chairman of the board in 1969), and in 1967 Time Inc. became the company's second-largest shareholder. In 1969, Kirk Kerkorian purchased 40 percent of MGM from Bronfman and Time, Inc., slashed staff and production costs, forced the studio to produce low-budget fare, and then shut down production "permanently" in 1973. The studio continued to distribute films under its name, however, and resumed production of its own motion pictures in 1980.
MGM attempted to rebuild its production capacity in 1981 by purchasing United Artists (along with its lucrative James Bond film franchise). It also incurred significant amounts of debt in order to increase production. The studio took on additional debt as a series of owners took charge in the 1980s and early 1990s. On August 5, 1986, Ted Turner's Turner Broadcasting System purchased MGM in a cash-stock deal for $1.5 billion. Turner immediately sold MGM's United Artists subsidiary back to Kerkorian. But unable to find financing for the rest of the deal, Turner sold MGM's film and distribution business back to Kerkorian just 74 days after the original purchase was made. The MGM lot and lab facilities were sold to Lorimar Television. Turner kept the pre-1986 library of MGM films, along with pre-1950 Warner Bros. and RKO Pictures films which MGM had previously purchased. The series of deals left MGM even more heavily in debt. In 1989, Australian-based Qintex attempted to buy MGM from Kerkorian, but the deal collapsed. MGM was bought by Pathé Communications (led by Italian publishing magnate Giancarlo Parretti) in 1990, but Parretti lost control of Pathé and defaulted on the loans used to purchase the studio. French banking conglomerate Credit Lyonnais, the studio's major creditor, then took control of MGM. Even more deeply in debt, MGM was purchased by Australia's Seven Network in 1996.
MGM purchased Metromedia's film subsidiaries (Orion Pictures, The Samuel Goldwyn Company, and the Motion Picture Corporation of America) for $573 million in 1997, and Kerkorian bought out Seven Network the following year. MGM used debt to acquire Polygram Filmed Entertainment's 1,300-title library from Seagram in 1999 for $250 million, and obtained the broadcast rights to more than 800 of its films previously licensed to Turner Broadcasting. MGM then purchased 20 percent of Cablevision Systems for $825 million in 2001. MGM attempted to take over Universal Studios in 2003 but failed, and was forced to sell several of its cable channel investments (taking a $75 million loss on the deal).
The debt load from these business deals negatively affected MGM's ability to survive as an independent motion picture studio. After a three-way bidding war which involved Time Warner (successor to Time, Inc. and current parent of Turner Broadcasting) and General Electric, MGM was acquired on September 23, 2004, by a partnership led by Sony Corporation of America, Comcast, Texas Pacific Group (now TPG Capital, L.P.), Providence Equity Partners, and other investors.
MGM Mirage, a Las Vegas-based hotel and casino company listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol "MGM", is not currently affiliated with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.
History
Foundation
In 1924, movie theater magnate Marcus Loew bought Metro Pictures Corporation (founded in 1916) and Goldwyn Pictures (founded in 1917) to provide a steady supply of films for his large theater chain, Loew's Theatres. 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 Loew's and head of studio operations in California, with Harry Rapf and Irving Thalberg as heads of production. For decades MGM was listed on movie title cards as "Controlled by Loew's, 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, the new studio inherited Goldwyn's studios in Culver City, California, the former Goldwyn mascot Leo the Lion (which replaced Metro's parrot symbol), and the corporate motto Ars Gratia Artis ("Art for Art's Sake").
Also inherited from Goldwyn was a runaway production, Ben–Hur , which had been filming in Rome for months at great cost. Mayer scrapped most of what had been shot and relocated production 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, with the success of both The Big Parade and Ben–Hur , MGM passed Universal Studios as the largest studio in Hollywood.
Marcus Loew died in 1927, and control of Loew's passed to his longtime associate, Nicholas Schenck. William Fox of Fox Film Corporation in 1929, with Schenck's assent, bought the Loew family's holdings. Mayer and Thalberg disagreed with the decision. Mayer used political connections to persuade the Justice Department to take action against the deal on federal antitrust grounds. During this time, in the summer of 1929, Fox was badly hurt in an automobile accident. By the time he recovered, the stock market crash in the fall of 1929 had ended any chance of the Loew's merger going through. Schenck and Mayer had never gotten along and the abortive Fox merger increased the animosity between the two men.
MGM's golden age
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, William Haines, Norma Shearer, and Joan Crawford. Established names like Lon Chaney, William Powell, Buster Keaton, and Wallace Beery were hired from other studios. They also hired top talent directors such as King Vidor, Clarence Brown, Erich von Stroheim, Tod Browning, and Victor Seastrom. 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.
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 (1923), The Big Parade (1925), and Ben–Hur (1925), among others, in the process. In 1928, MGM released The Viking , the first complete Technicolor feature with sound (including a synchronized score and sound effects but no spoken dialogue). MGM's first all-color, "all-talking" sound feature with dialogue was the 1930 musical The Rogue Song . In 1934 MGM included a sequence made in Technicolor's superior new three-color process, a musical number in the otherwise black-and-white The Cat and the Fiddle . The studio then produced a number of three-color short subjects including 1935's musical La Fiesta de Santa Barbara , however MGM waited until 1938 to film a complete feature in the process, Sweethearts with Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy. This was the popular singing team's first of two films they made together in color.
From then on, MGM regularly produced several films a year in Technicolor, The Wizard of Oz and Northwest Passage being two of the most notable. MGM also released the enormously successful Technicolor film Gone with the Wind , starring Vivien Leigh as Scarlett O'Hara and Clark Gable as Rhett Butler. (Although Gone With the Wind was produced by Selznick International Pictures, it was released by MGM as par
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