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Sep 18, 2015 · Thalberg quickly became part of the fabric of the place, wooing and marrying Mayer’s contract ingénue, Norma Shearer. Louis B. Mayer, right, sees Norma Shearer and her new husband, producer ...
His relationship with Louis B Mayer had become strained, and on his return to work he found that Mayer had taken the opportunity to replace him. Thalberg’s role was vastly reduced, but he still held great sway at the studio, and masterminded some of MGM’s most prestigious movies, such as Grand Hotel (1932) and Mutiny on the Bounty (1935).
- Biography
- America and First Marriage
- Hollywood and Movie Production
- Creation of MGM
- MGM and The Golden Age
- Decline and Fall
- Final Years
He was the middle child of five, with two younger brothers and two older sisters. As a young boy, when his parents fled the oppression of Imperial Russia, Mayer immigrated with his family, first to Rhode Island and then to Canada. He attended school in Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada but was an unwilling pupil and left when he was 12 to join a sm...
Mayer left the family home and moved to Boston in 1904 to expand the family junk dealership. He met and married a local girl, Margaret Shenberg and the couple had two girls, Edith in 1905 and Irene in 1907, both of whom would later marry into the movie business. Mayer was young, energetic and ambitious and he began to look round for opportunities o...
Mayer quickly established a formula for his pictures. He enjoyed romantic films with sentimental plots in which a poor but morally "good" girl triumphs over adversity. The public flocked to his movies and to the new stars whom Mayer excelled at discovering. He quickly added glamorous actresses Norma Talmadge and Renee Adoree as well as brilliant of...
In 1924 Marcus Loew had the vision to imagine a movie company where everything took place under one roof - studio management, film production and theater management. He already owned Loew's Theatres, which was the largest movie theater chain in the country, and he had purchased Metro Pictures and Goldwyn Pictures to make the movies. The company he ...
One of their first big productions was the silent epic 'Ben-Hur' in 1925, starring Ramon Novarro and Francis X. Bushman, and directed by Fred Niblo. The movie had already been started and was in deep financial trouble. Mayer and Thalberg rescued it just in time and created a movie triumph from the jaws of disaster. They began making their own produ...
Mayer was seriously out of touch with post-war changing tastes. He rejected the new wave of so-called "message pictures" and film noir movies and he also made the cardinal, and financially catastrophic, error of underestimating the importance of the new medium of television. The unbelievable was about to happen. Mayer was about to lose his job. Muc...
Louis B. Mayer died from leukaemia on October 29th, 1957. He is interred at the Home of Peace Memorial Park in Los Angeles. Mayer was one of the smartest and most ruthless executives in Hollywood. He created MGM and ruled it for almost three decades as the studio set the standard for its competitors to follow. He employed thousands of people and co...
Dec 7, 1998 · December 7, 1998 12:00 AM EST. D an Quayle would have loved Louis B. Mayer, a man for whom the words family values had real meaning. Motherhood, the Stars and Stripes and God were equal parts of a ...
- Budd Schulberg
Sep 15, 2015 · Podcast Episode · You Must Remember This · 09/15/2015 · 39m
Later that evening, after Thalberg had left, Mayer told the studio's attorney, Edwin Loeb, to let Thalberg know that if he wanted to work for Mayer, he would be treated like a son. [ 31 ] : 46 Although their personalities were in many ways opposite, Mayer being more outspoken and nearly twice the younger man's age, Thalberg was hired as vice president in charge of production at Louis B. Mayer ...
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Sep 15, 2015 · Established in 1924, MGM was the product of a merger of three early Hollywood entities, but the only person working there who got to have his name in the title was studio chief Louis B. Mayer. For the first dozen years of its existence, Mayer’s influence over the company would be at least matched by that of producer Irving Thalberg, who was perceived as the creative genius to Mayer’s ...
