The Beginning of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

I originally wrote this blog post over a year ago at another movie website. Since I feel that it is one of the best blogs I wrote, I represent it here to all of you.

In the beginning there were three different studios: Metro Pictures, Goldwyn Pictures, and the Louis B. Mayer Film Company. These three companies would eventually merge to create the most famous movie studio in the world. But in order to learn about this wonderful company, it is important to know about what happened before the merger. Metro Pictures was founded by Richard A. Rowland in 1915. In its first few years, Metro Pictures developed significant money troubles. In fact, the company was in danger of filing for bankrupcy. Nevertheless, in 1919, the Loew's theatre chain bought Metro Pictures. Loew's had been looking for a studio to call their own for quite a while by this time, and when Metro was offered to them, they bought them quickly for $3.1 million. Metro had their biggest hit in 1921 with The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, but suffered a major setback when that film's star Rudolph Valentino, left the studio after being denied a $100 pay raise. However, the studio had two more giant hits, The Prisioner of Zenda and Scaramouche, and signed contracts with Buster Keaton and Jackie Coogan. They also signed a contract with Louis B. Mayer, provididing Metro with four films a year. Yet, despite all this, Metro was still a constant problem to the Loew's theatre chain due to the way it was run. In 1924, Loew's bought Goldwyn Pictures. Metro was quickly merged with Goldwyn Pictures to create Metro-Goldwyn Pictures. Goldwyn Pictures had a tumultous history of its own by the time that this merger went into effect. The studio was started by Samuel Goldfish and Edgar Selwyn in 1915. On the surface, Goldwyn pictures looked prosperous due to its contract players and directors, its gorgeous studio in Culver City that had previously belonged to the defunct Triangle Studios (This eventually became the MGM studio), its movie theatres, and its distribution offices. But Goldwyn Pictures was near bankruptcy itself due to feuding executives and bad management. What money it had was being spent on Mare Nostrum (1926), Ben-Hur (1927), and Greed (1924), three films that went drastically overbudget. Samuel Goldwyn (ne Goldfish) had even been fired from his own company.Knowing that the new studio needed better executives than the ones that were presently at Metro and Goldwyn, Loew's searched extensively for a better executive. They solved this problem in 1924, by buying the four-year-old Louis B. Mayer Film Company for $75,000. Louis Mayer was hired as chief executive, and he brought "boy wonder" Irving Thalburg along with him. On April 18, 1924, a formal merger was signed that united the three companies into one: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, or MGM for short. The new studio kept Goldwyn's lion logo, because it thought of itself as "king of the beasts." Soon after the merger, He Who Gets Slapped (1924) introduced the new studio to the world. A Hollywood legend was born.