#mgm100

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Purr-Chance to Dream (1967 short; dir. Ben Washam)

Purr-Chance to Dream, directed by Ben Washam and produced by Chuck Jones, was the final Tom and Jerry theatrical short film under its original run (1940-1967, running 161 shorts).

In the wake of the financial smash success of Ben-Hur (1959, a film that remains the 14th highest-grossing movie ever adjusted for inflation), MGM pursued a disastrous policy of making fewer movies overall and pooling far more resources into a big-budget epic for each calendar year. The successive box office failures of Cimarron (1960), King of Kings (1961), Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, and especially Mutiny on the Bounty (1962) could not be offset by a handful of successes such as How the West Was Won (1962) and Doctor Zhivago (1965). With these losses mounting, MGM executives consumed themselves by cutting costs, getting into the real estate industry, and fighting off hostile corporate takeovers.

The knock-on effects were evident in MGM's animation division - most visibly, the outsourcing of Tom and Jerry shorts to Czechoslovak director Gene Deitch's studio Rembrandt Films and the reduction of MGM's animation to almost solely Tom and Jerry.

With the cancellation of the Tom and Jerry series, MGM shifted Chuck Jones' Sib Tower 12 Productions (formed shortly after Jones' sacking from Warner Bros.) exclusively to television - see: How the Grinch Stole Christmas! (1966) - while finishing up work on The Phantom Tollbooth (1970). MGM dissolved its animation division in 1970, briefly reviving it for mostly television productions from 1993-2001.

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Tot Watchers (1958; dir. William Hanna and Joseph Barbera)

Tot Watchers was the 114th and final Tom and Jerry theatrical short film under both William Hanna and Joseph Barbera at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM). Barbera would return to co-direct one more theatrical Tom and Jerry short in The Karate Guard (2005; by then, the pre-May 1986 MGM library had been purchased by Ted Turner and, later, acquired by Warner Bros.). Tot Watchers was shot in CinemaScope, as were a handful of the late Hanna Barbera Tom and Jerry shorts.

The Tom and Jerry series would resume for thirteen more installments from 1961-1962 under the Czechoslovak studio Rembrandt Films, founded by Gene Deitch. All of Deitch's Tom and Jerry films were released to theaters by MGM.The series would later be picked up by Chuck Jones' Sib Tower 12 Productions in 1963 for another thirty-four shorts. Sib Tower would be purchased by MGM the following year.

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The clerk who is thrown out of work By the boss who is thrown for a loss By the skirt who is doing him dirt The world is a stage The stage is a world of entertainment!

"That's Entertainment!" from The Band Wagon (1953) – music by Arthur Schwartz and lyrics by Howard Dietz; performed by Jack Buchanan, Nanette Fabray, Oscar Levant, and Fred Astaire

As perhaps the most memorable original song in one of MGM's best musicals, "That's Entertainment!" has taken a life of its own as one of the studio's (and Hollywood's) unofficial anthems. Appearing in the opening act of The Band Wagon, a friend of actors gleefully perform together just as they are about to go into rehearsals for a musical comedy.

"That's Entertainment!" was also the title name of three documentaries detailing MGM's history – the first in 1974 (when the studio was on the verge of demolishing its storied soundstages, which are now home to Sony Pictures Studios), the second in in 1976, and the final one in 1994.

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Programming note: MGM100

Having already missed out on Columbia Pictures' 100th anniversary this last January, I wasn't about to ignore yet another - and arguably more historically important - anniversary upcoming.

The upcoming marathon will be tagged MGM100 and will appear Tuesdays and Wednesdays this month (beginning later this evening). Featured films will be posted/queued in roughly chronological order.

This April marks the 100th anniversary of the founding of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), the result of a merger between three silent film-era production companies in Metro Pictures, Goldwyn Pictures, and Louis B. Mayer Pictures. Within a decade, MGM became one of the major Hollywood studios*, boasting that it had contracted "more stars than there are in heaven".

By the end of the 1930s, it was undoubtedly the biggest, most stable, financially successful, and most powerful of all of those studios. Some of the most lavish productions in film history were shot on its Culver City lot (which is now Sony Pictures Studios for Columbia's use, as well used by the American versions of Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune) and MGM's reputation for being the home of the greatest Hollywood movie musicals (1939's The Wizard of Oz, 1952's Singin' in the Rain) was unrivaled. Not until the Walt Disney Studios of the 2010s would Hollywood ever see a studio so dominant in the industry.

The good times did not last. Following the spectacular Ben-Hur (1959), MGM embarked upon a misguided financial strategy of releasing one big-budget epic film ever year and releasing fewer movies per year. Upon Kirk Kerkorian's purchase of MGM in 1969, Kerkorian decided to slowly convert MGM into a real estate and hotel and casino company and approved of the near-complete disposal of the studio's music library - thrown into a landfill now underneath a golf course.

MGM ceased being a major studio in 1986 upon Ted Turner's purchase of the studio and decision to almost immediately resell the studio back to Kerkorian (Turner, crucially, kept the rights to the pre-May 1987 MGM library, which formed the original basis of Turner Classic Movies, TCM). Multiple financial crises since 1986 (including a 2010 bankruptcy) have seen MGM fall even further from its once-lofty perch. Amazon purchased MGM (including the less cinematically interesting post-May 1987 library, although this includes the rights to the Rocky and James Bond series) in October 2023; only time will tell what Amazon plans to do with the studio.

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So please join me this month as my blog features a celebration for a century of MGM. From epics such as Ben-Hur (1925 original and 1959 remake) and 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968); romances such as Waterloo Bridge (1940) and Three Thousand Years of Longing (2022); comedies such as The Thin Man (1934) and American Fiction (2023); animation such as the Tom and Jerry series and The Secret of NIMH (1982); and musicals such as Meet Me in St. Louis (1944) and Victor/Victoria (1982), MGM's history is among the richest of any studio out there. I certainly hope you enjoy the marathon coming to your dashboards soon!

* MGM was considered a major studio alongside Paramount, RKO, 20th Century Fox, and Warner Bros.; Columbia, United Artists, and Universal were considered the "Little Three"; Disney would not be a major studio until the 1990s.