Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in the 1920’s
The roaring twenties would be nothing without the roar of the MGM Lion. “If Hollywood had no other studio than Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the town still would have been the movie capital of the world” (Fricke para 1). MGM enchanted audiences with its high-budgeted films and glamorous list of stars (Hanson para 1). Three failing movie companies came together in 1924 in hopes to make it big in the motion picture industry, and it did (Fricke para 3). Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer created spectacles of movies after its merging which made MGM one of the most prosperous motion picture companies in the 1920’s (Hanson para 2).
MGM’s name was derived from the three subsumed companies: Goldwyn Pictures, Metro Pictures, and Louis B. Mayer Productions (Hanson para 2). MGM was formed under the finance of Marcus Loew (Collins para 1). Marcus Loew merged Metro Pictures and Goldwyn Pictures on April 17, 1924. After he bought the two companies he went after Louis B. Mayer Productions; he bought the company for $75,000 (Hay 15). Louis B. Mayer was chosen to be the vice president-general manager of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (Collins para 1). The new studio resided in Culver City, California on Goldwyn Pictures’ old lot (Collins para 3).
The merger was the crowning achievement of Marcus Loew, a self-made business tycoon (Hay 10). Marcus Loew, born Max Loew, was born in New York to Australian-Jewish Immigrants. Loew grew up in poverty and had dropped out of school at the age of 9 to help support his family (Edwards para 1). He was a very ambitious child. He was uneducated but he worked his way up from meaningless jobs to high paid business man through real estate investments (Edwards para 2). He started at a meager job at a fur busi...
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Clara’s experience with the motion picture industry gives us a picture of what it was like in the 1920’s. It was new and intriguing, enticing and corrupt. The motion picture industry underpaid Bow, which is almost inconceivable today. The environment of Hollywood now pays actors and actresses corpulent amounts of money...but that may be the only change. The “star-maker” environment is still as enticing and corrupt as yesterday’s.
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explode in popularity and the introduction of theaters specifically for film. Firstly, amid the circuses, the wild...
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Another change in society was the glamour of motion pictures. During the 1920s, movies began to capture the interest of the nation. The film industry began to flourish during this time. By the end of the decade twenty Hollywood studios were created and released and average of eight hundred films in one year. Young women of America loved the glamour of the silver screen and began to follow the fashion of their favorite actresses.
For the next three decades, the movie industry in the United States and the rest of the world operated by according to these principles. Cultural, social and economic changes ensured the demise of this system after the Second World War. A new way to run Hollywood was required. Beginning in 1962, Lew Wasserman of Universal Studios emerged as the key innovator in creating a second studio system. He realized that creating a global media conglomerate was more important than simply being vertically integrated.
I am Bobby Cramer, the CEO and co-founder of MFB Productions. I am going to discuss how this film production empire began and the inspirations that trail blazed the way for our dreams to come to be realized.
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Franchises are dominating the film industry as they control the most of the spots in top of the highest grossing movies of all time. Just this year, of the top 5 grossing films, 3 of those were massive franchise hits from, Jurassic world, Avengers to Furious 7. Don’t get me wrong these films are