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.
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.