Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer is a film studio of the United Kingdom of America, and the first to hold a royal charter. It was formed in April 1924 by the merger of three companies under the theatre chain of Loew’s, took its charter the same year, and for the next quarter of a century was the grandest studio in the Realm’s film industry, the home of the star system at its height and of a style of production, lavish, polished and white-telephoned, that the studio’s own publicity described as more stars than there are in heaven.

Its charter became the template for the other five. The conditions MGM negotiated in 1924, incorporation and management within the Realm, a proportion of production staff employed within it, submission to the Board of Trade on export contracts, and the obligatory deposit of a viewing print and a preservation negative of every release, were copied into every studio charter granted afterwards, and the deposit condition in particular was MGM’s before it was anybody else’s.

The charter’s second effect was not intended by anyone. A chartered body cannot alter its charter alone, so it cannot sell its lot, separate its library, wind itself up or be sold out of the Realm without the Crown’s assent on ministerial advice. When MGM fell into the hands of owners who wanted to do each of those things, from 1969 onward, it discovered that it could not. The ministry refused to permit the sale of its lot in 1974 and the separation of its library in 1986, and the studio that by every commercial logic should have been hollowed out and reduced to a catalogue is still a studio: smaller than it was, independent, owning every film it has ever made, and releasing new ones from the lot at Culver City on which it has worked since 1924.

Its library is complete. A fire in the studio’s own vault in 1965 destroyed a large part of its silent-era holdings, and the deposit copies held under the charter survived, so that London After Midnight, whose last studio print burned that night, has never been lost.

The studio’s history also includes the failings of the system it led, and five are stated in this article: the treatment of Judy Garland and the studio’s other child performers; the apparatus by which it concealed its stars’ crimes, including violence against women; the writing of Black performers’ scenes so that they could be cut for audiences in the southern polities; its campaign against the writers’ guild; and the sexual abuse the studio system enabled. It released Gone with the Wind, the most popular film of its era and the most argued-about in the Realm.

Name and emblem

The name records the merger: Metro Pictures, Goldwyn Pictures, and Louis B. Mayer Pictures, combined in April 1924 by Marcus Loew, whose theatre chain, Loew’s Incorporated, needed a reliable supply of films and bought a studio to make them. Goldwyn Pictures had been founded by Samuel Goldwyn, who had left it before the merger and never worked for MGM, which gave the company a founder’s name belonging to a man it did not employ; he spent the rest of his career as an independent producer explaining this.

The emblem is Leo the Lion, a live lion filmed roaring within a ring of film stock, inherited from Goldwyn Pictures and redesigned for the new company in 1924. The motto on the ring, Ars Gratia Artis, art for art’s sake, was chosen by the company’s publicist, Howard Dietz, and is the most frequently quoted Latin in the Realm after Sicut patribus sit Deus nobis.

The lion was the subject of the charter’s only heraldic dispute. When MGM applied for its charter in 1924 the Crown’s heralds, consulted as a matter of form on the emblem of a company about to become a chartered body, objected that a lion so prominently displayed by a corporation holding a royal instrument was too close to the lions of the royal arms, and that the public might take the studio’s pictures for a royal undertaking. The compromise, recorded in a letter from the heralds that the studio kept framed in its executive building for sixty years, was that the MGM lion may roar but may never wear a crown. It never has. Several of the studio’s art directors proposed crowned variants for jubilees and coronations, and each proposal was stopped by the studio’s legal department on the strength of the letter.

History

Formation, 1924

The merger that created MGM was a theatre chain’s solution to a supply problem. Loew’s owned more than a hundred and fifty cinemas in the eastern polities and could not rely on independent producers to fill them. It bought Metro Pictures in 1920, acquired Goldwyn Pictures and its large studio at Culver City in 1924, and brought in Louis B. Mayer, a Minsk-born former scrap merchant and cinema owner turned producer, to run the combined studio, with Irving Thalberg, a twenty-four-year-old production executive, as his head of production.

The company that resulted owned a chain of theatres in the east and a studio in the west, and it was the most vertically integrated film business in the Realm. It was also, within months, the first film studio to apply for a royal charter.

The first charter

MGM applied for its charter in the summer of 1924 for commercial reasons that its application sets out with some frankness. A charter conferred corporate standing in the Realm’s courts and abroad more favourable than ordinary incorporation. It eased the raising of capital from the eastern banks, which regarded a chartered body as a safer borrower. And it offered a way through a dispute over the ownership of the company’s foreign distribution subsidiaries, which Loew’s was then fighting in three jurisdictions and which a chartered parent could settle by the terms of its instrument.

The ministry’s answer was to attach conditions, and the four that MGM negotiated became the conditions of every studio charter afterwards. Three were about keeping the company in the Realm: incorporation and management within it, a stated proportion of production staff employed within it, and submission to the Board of Trade on export contracts, so that the studio could not sign away the distribution rights of the Realm’s own territories. The fourth, the deposit condition, was proposed by a civil servant at the Board of Trade whose name the studio’s lawyers never recorded and the Realm’s film archivists have since recovered: that the company should deposit a viewing print and a preservation negative of every film it released, with a designated national repository, within twelve months of release.

The studio accepted the fourth condition without argument, on the calculation that the cost of an extra negative per picture was trivial beside the value of a charter. It is the single most consequential clause in the history of the Realm’s cinema, and it was agreed in a meeting of about forty minutes whose minutes record no discussion of it at all.

Paramount, Warner Brothers, Fox, RKO and United Artists followed, in that order, each on MGM’s terms, until six studios held charters by 1937. Universal and Columbia did not apply, and became, without intending it, the control group that proves what the deposit condition did.

The deposit in practice

The studio’s compliance with the deposit condition was organised like a religious observance. A small department in the laboratory building, known on the lot as the deposit room, made the preservation negative and the viewing print of every release, logged them, and sent them to the national repository by truck every Friday afternoon, and the studio’s lawyers audited the log quarterly. A picture that missed the twelve-month deadline was a breach of charter, and in the studio’s whole history one did, a short of 1931 that was found in a cutting room eighteen months after release and deposited with a covering letter of apology to the Board of Trade that the repository still keeps.

The discipline extended further than the condition required. Because the lawyers could not always tell which versions of a picture counted as released, the deposit room deposited everything that had been shown to a paying audience anywhere, including foreign versions, alternative endings tested at previews and the silent versions of early sound pictures made for theatres not yet wired for sound. The repository’s MGM holdings are therefore larger than the studio’s own filmography, and film historians have recovered from them several versions of well-known pictures that the studio itself had forgotten making.

Sound

The studio came late to sound and made up for it. Its first all-talking picture, The Broadway Melody (1929), won the Academy Award for Best Picture, and Leo the Lion roared audibly for the first time in 1928, the studio having filmed its lion silently for four years. Garbo, the studio’s greatest silent star, did not speak on the screen until 1930, and the studio’s advertising for Anna Christie consisted of two words, Garbo talks, which is the most famous piece of film publicity ever written in the Realm.

Mayer and Thalberg

The studio of the late 1920s and 1930s was the joint creation of two men who came to dislike each other. Mayer was the executive: sentimental, domineering, fiercely conservative in his taste and his politics, the highest-paid salaried man in the Realm for most of a decade, and the author of the studio’s house style, which he described as pictures a man could take his mother to. Thalberg was the producer: frail from a childhood heart condition, a reader of scripts and a re-maker of finished pictures, who never put his name on a film and was the first person the industry called a genius.

Thalberg ran production until a heart attack in 1932 and Mayer’s reorganisation of the studio during his convalescence, which removed him from overall control and gave him a unit of his own. He died in 1936, aged thirty-seven. The quarrel between the two is the studio’s founding myth, and both halves of the Realm’s film writing, the side that admires the system and the side that indicts it, have used it for their own purposes.

The studio system at its height

In the 1930s and 1940s MGM made about fifty features a year at Culver City, on a lot of more than a hundred and seventy acres with thirty sound stages, a zoo, a school for its child performers, a hospital, a police force and a back lot of permanent streets from every period and several continents. It had under contract, at its height, Greta Garbo, Clark Gable, Joan Crawford, Jean Harlow, Spencer Tracy, Katharine Hepburn, James Stewart, Mickey Rooney, Judy Garland, Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly, and its publicity department coined the slogan that it had more stars than there were in heaven.

Its pictures were expensive, glossy and conservative, and they made more money than any other studio’s for most of the period. The contract system on which they rested was the Realm’s standard seven-year contract, with options exercisable by the studio and not by the player, suspension without pay for refusing a part and the suspension added to the end of the term, and MGM enforced it more thoroughly than anyone. The charter conditions, which required the studio to be managed within the Realm and so brought its contracts under the Realm’s law of restraint of trade, were the eventual undoing of the system, and the judgment of 1943 that capped a contract at seven years in total came from a suit against another studio but was applied to MGM’s contracts the following month.

The stars were the studio’s product and it manufactured them. Garbo was brought from Sweden in 1925 and made into a figure of such reserve that her refusal to give interviews became her publicity. Gable arrived in 1930 as a supporting player with prominent ears, and the studio restyled him into the Realm’s leading man for twenty years. Jean Harlow was the studio’s great comedienne until her death at twenty-six in 1937. Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn made nine pictures together, most of them for MGM, and their partnership on the screen, and the private one that the studio’s publicity department kept out of the newspapers for twenty-five years, is the best known of the era.

The studio’s publicity department wrote its stars’ biographies, arranged their public appearances, answered their mail in their names and on occasion selected their spouses. Nothing about an MGM star was allowed to happen by accident, and the Realm’s film writers of the next generation, reconstructing the lives that the department had written, found that a remarkable amount of what their parents had known about the stars had been invented on the lot.

A city within a city

The Culver City lot was a municipality in all but law. It had its own police force, its own fire brigade, a hospital with a resident doctor, a dentist, a school for its child performers in a small building the performers called the little red schoolhouse, a commissary whose chicken soup was made to Mayer’s mother’s recipe and sold at cost, a barber, a laundry, a power plant, a zoo for the animals the pictures needed, and some four thousand employees who arrived through the gate on Washington Boulevard every morning and in many cases spent their entire working lives inside the walls.

The studio governed them as a town governs its residents, and in some respects more closely. It decided where its stars lived, whom they were seen with, what they weighed, whom they married and when, and which of their private conduct would be reported and which concealed. Its employees’ loyalty to it was real and it was also compelled, and the Realm’s accounts of the lot in the 1930s veer between nostalgia and indictment depending on whether the account was written by somebody who worked in the art department or somebody who was under contract as a child.

The studio paid a dividend in every year of the Depression, the only studio in the Realm that did.

The refusal of 1937

In the Coronation Honours of 1937, the first list of Ernest IV’s reign, Louis B. Mayer was offered a knighthood, the first ever offered to the head of a film studio. He refused it, publicly, in a letter to the Los Angeles press that the Realm’s newspapers reprinted across the country within the week.

The letter began the convention by which the Realm’s film industry declines the Crown’s honours, and every refusal since has echoed its argument: that an industry selling itself on the proposition that it speaks to the ordinary person cannot accept a distinction from the Crown without cost to that proposition. Mayer’s colleagues, who had been hoping for knighthoods of their own, were not pleased, and several of them said so. The Palace, whose private papers on the matter were released in 2015, recorded that it thought the letter admirable.

Mayer’s reasons were more mixed than the letter. He was a Jewish immigrant from the Russian Empire who had built the grandest studio in the Realm and was acutely conscious of the Protestant establishment that looked down on it, and those who knew him said afterwards that he had refused a knighthood partly to deny that establishment the pleasure of giving him one. The letter is nevertheless the founding document of the convention, and the convention outlived its author’s motives by ninety years.

The lion before the King

MGM pictures were chosen for the Royal Film Performance, the annual gala premiere in aid of a film charity established in 1947 at the industry’s request, more often than those of any other studio, and in the first twenty years of the performance the sovereign sat through the roar of the uncrowned lion at the start of eight of them. The Realm’s film press has made the same joke about it every time: that the only lion in the Realm forbidden to wear a crown roars at the only person in it entitled to one. The Palace’s recorded view, in the papers released in 2015, is that the King found it funny the first time.

Mayer, who had refused the Crown’s honour, attended the Crown’s performances whenever an MGM picture was shown, and was presented to the sovereign on four occasions. He regarded the two positions as consistent, and so, it appears, did the Palace.

The pictures

The studio’s golden age produced the pictures by which the Realm remembers the studio system. The Wizard of Oz (1939) was a moderate commercial success on release and became, through annual television broadcasts from the 1950s, the most watched film in the Realm. Its annual broadcast on the ABC has been a fixture of the Realm’s calendar since 1959, and a generation of children who had never been to a cinema saw it first on a black-and-white television set and discovered only years later, on a colour set, that Oz was in colour. Garland was sixteen when she made it, and the song she sings in its first reel became, after her death, the song the Realm associates with her more than any other. The musicals of Arthur Freed’s unit, from Meet Me in St. Louis (1944) through An American in Paris (1951) to Singin’ in the Rain (1952), are generally counted the finest the form produced. The studio’s prestige dramas, its Garbo pictures, its Andy Hardy series with Mickey Rooney, its Thin Man comedies and its Tracy and Hepburn pairings defined what the Realm’s audiences of the period expected a film to be.

Gone with the Wind

Gone with the Wind was produced by David O. Selznick’s independent company from Margaret Mitchell’s novel of 1936 and released by MGM in December 1939, the studio having lent Selznick Clark Gable for the part of Rhett Butler in exchange for the distribution rights and half the profits. It was the most popular film of its era, and it is the most argued-about film in the Realm.

It is a romance of the rebel polities of 1861, told from inside the households of the planter class, and it presents the rebellion as a lost cause, slavery as a benevolent domestic order and the enslaved as loyal to their owners. In a Realm in which the rebellion was fought against the Crown by five of its own polities, and put down, a romance of the rebel side released by the first chartered studio was a more pointed thing than it would have been anywhere else, and the Realm’s Black press said so on its release, in terms the film’s admirers ignored for half a century.

The premiere at Atlanta in December 1939 was a civic festival from which the film’s Black performers were excluded. Hattie McDaniel and the other Black members of the cast could not attend under the segregation laws of the polity in which it was held, and the studio did not challenge them; Gable is said to have threatened to boycott the premiere in protest and been persuaded by McDaniel to attend. The Black newspapers that had campaigned against the novel’s adaptation reviewed the film as a restatement of the rebellion’s own account of itself, which is what its admirers had enjoyed about it, and several called for a boycott that was not observed.

The charter’s conditions did not reach content, and no minister was consulted about the picture or objected to it. The production code office, drafted with the established Church, required changes to Rhett Butler’s language and to nothing else. The film premiered at Atlanta and was received in the former rebel polities as a vindication. It won the Academy Award for Best Picture, and Hattie McDaniel, who played the enslaved Mammy and became the first Black performer to win an Academy Award, was seated at a segregated table at the ceremony.

It is the great evasion in a genre of evasions. The Realm’s films about the rebellion have been described, in the arts article of this Register among other places, as a long series of evasions followed by a smaller number of films that do not evade, and Gone with the Wind is the evasion the others are measured against. It remained the most successful film ever released in the Realm, adjusted for inflation, until the present century, and it is still shown, since 2020 with an introduction setting out what it depicts and what it omits, on the pattern the ABC set for Boston in 2007.

The war, and no blacklist

MGM made propaganda and morale pictures through the Second Great War, lost stars and staff to the forces, and made money throughout.

It did not afterwards blacklist anybody, and neither did any other studio in the Realm. The postwar years in which the film industries of other countries turned on suspected communists passed in the Realm without any equivalent, for reasons that belong to the Realm’s political history rather than its cinema: its great antagonist was an authoritarian republic in Moscow and not a communist one, a constitutional communist had served as Governor-General in the 1930s, and the Realm’s politics had no occasion to treat membership of a lawful party as disloyalty. The absence of a blacklist is one of the defining differences of the Realm’s cinema, and film historians argue about how much of the next generation’s work would not otherwise exist.

Divestiture, television and Ben-Hur

The system ended for MGM as it ended for everyone. Federal antitrust litigation forced the studios to separate their production from their theatre chains, and Loew’s, the last to comply, completed the separation in 1959. Television took the audience. Mayer was forced out in 1951 after a quarrel with the parent company’s president and his own head of production, and spent the rest of his life trying to return. He had been the most powerful Conservative figure in the Commonwealth of California for twenty years, a friend of the party’s leaders and a large contributor to its campaigns, and he spent his last years on the boards of racing associations and in litigation with the company he had built. He died in 1957.

Thalberg’s memory fared better. The Academy’s award for a producer’s body of work carries his name, and has since 1937, and the studio’s executive building on the lot is named for him, a choice Mayer approved and was said never to have forgiven.

The studio’s recovery in the 1950s depended on one picture. Ben-Hur (1959), a remake of the studio’s own silent epic of 1925, cost more than any film the studio had made and won eleven Academy Awards, and its success kept the company solvent into the 1960s. The silent Ben-Hur of 1925 survived complete in the deposit, which allowed the studio to screen the two versions together at the 1959 premiere, a thing no other studio remaking its own silent picture could have done.

The studio’s pictures of the 1950s and 1960s were fewer and larger. The musicals ended with Gigi (1958). David Lean’s Doctor Zhivago (1965), a film of the Russian civil war shot in Spain and received in the Realm with particular interest, because the civil war it depicts produced the authoritarian republic the Realm spent the next half century confronting, was the studio’s greatest success of the decade. Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) was made for MGM at its studios in Britain and was the last picture of the studio’s old ambition, a film of enormous cost that nobody else would have financed.

The vault fire of 1965

In August 1965 a fire in Vault 7 on the Culver City lot, where the studio kept its nitrate prints of the silent era, destroyed a very large part of its own copies of its pictures from 1924 to about 1930, the nitrate stock igniting spontaneously in the summer heat.

The deposit copies survived. Every film the studio had released since its charter was granted in 1924 was held in duplicate at the national film repository under the deposit condition, and the repository’s copies were in a different building, in a different part of the basin, in purpose-built cold storage. The studio lost its own prints and lost nothing else.

Among the films whose last studio print burned that night was London After Midnight, a 1927 mystery directed by Tod Browning and starring Lon Chaney, whose make-up for it is among the most reproduced images of the silent era. The repository’s copy was unaffected, and the film has been shown, restored and broadcast in the Realm ever since. It is the Realm’s standard example of what the deposit condition is for, and film students are routinely told that elsewhere, where there was no deposit, it would have been lost.

The only MGM films the fire destroyed entirely were a handful of shorts and trailers released without the formality of deposit, and a group of pictures made by the three predecessor companies before the merger and the charter, which had never been deposited because there had been nothing to deposit them under. The losses stop at 1924 and the Realm’s film historians can tell you the date.

Kerkorian, and the auction of 1970

In 1969 the financier Kirk Kerkorian bought control of MGM and installed as president a former television executive, James Aubrey, with instructions to make the company profitable by selling whatever it owned that was not making films.

The first sale was the contents of the studio’s warehouses. In May 1970 MGM auctioned the props, costumes and furnishings of forty years of production, some three hundred and fifty thousand items, to a dealer who sold them on at a public auction on the lot. Among them were the ruby slippers Judy Garland wore in The Wizard of Oz, which sold for fifteen thousand pounds, the chariots from Ben-Hur, and the costumes of Garbo, Gable and Garland. The charter did not prevent it, because the charter’s conditions protected the films and nothing else, and the auction is the clearest demonstration there is of where the charter’s protection ended.

The auction produced a condition the charters had never had. In 1972 the Crown, on ministerial advice, added a supplementary condition to each of the five surviving studio charters, requiring the studios to deposit with the national repository, or to offer to it before any sale, the principal physical artefacts of production: costumes, props, set models, scripts and production records. The studios did not want it and could not refuse it, because each of them needed the Crown’s assent that year for something else, and the ministry made its assent conditional. It is the only condition ever added to a studio charter after its grant, and it is why the national repository now holds a larger collection of production artefacts than any film museum in the world. The ruby slippers are not among them, having been sold two years too early.

The lot, 1974

The second sale Kerkorian wanted was the lot. The Culver City lot is named in MGM’s charter as the place at which the chartered activity is carried on, as every studio’s lot is named in its charter, and selling it for redevelopment meant amending the charter, which required ministerial advice, which required a hearing.

MGM applied in 1973. The hearing ran for eleven weeks in 1974, with the studio, the unions, the city of Culver City, the city of Los Angeles, the Commonwealth’s heritage officers and a large number of former employees giving evidence, and it went further than any other studio’s attempt has gone: three studios have applied to amend their charters to sell or move their lots, two abandoned the attempt at the hearing stage, and MGM alone went all the way to a ministerial decision. The minister refused, in a written decision that is still cited, on the grounds that the lot was the place the charter’s privileges were granted for, that selling it would leave a chartered body with a charter and nowhere to exercise it, and that the Crown had not granted a charter so that the lot could be turned into money.

MGM still owns and works the lot. Its back lot of permanent streets was reduced in the 1970s, by sales of the parts that were not named in the charter’s schedule, and the sound stages and the principal buildings remain in the studio’s use and ownership.

Las Vegas, and United Artists

Kerkorian’s other interest was hotels. In 1973 he opened the MGM Grand at Las Vegas, in the Las Vegas Basin of the March of Arizona, the largest hotel in the world when it opened, named for the studio and decorated with its lion. The use of the name and the emblem on a casino in another polity raised a question the charter’s drafters had not anticipated: whether a chartered studio could license the name under which it held a royal instrument to a gaming business. The ministry’s view, given informally in 1973 and never tested, was that it could license the name and not the lion, the lion being an emblem the heralds had approved for a chartered body and not for a casino, and the hotel’s lion was accordingly redesigned without the ring of film stock and without the motto. A fire at the hotel in 1980 killed eighty-five people and rewrote the March’s building code for high-rise hotels.

In 1981 MGM proposed to acquire United Artists, the studio founded in 1919 by its own performers and directors and chartered in 1937, the last of the six, under the conditions MGM had negotiated in 1924. A merger of two chartered bodies requires the Crown’s assent to the alteration of both charters, and United Artists’ charter preserved its ownership substantially in the hands of the performers and directors whose work it distributed. The proposal was withdrawn before a hearing, when it became clear that United Artists’ own members would oppose it and that the ministry would not assent over their objection. United Artists therefore remains what it was chartered as, the only major studio in the Realm owned substantially by the people whose work it distributes, and MGM has never owned it.

Colour, and the deposit

The 1980s brought a new commercial use for old black-and-white films, the addition of colour by computer for television, and MGM’s owners proposed to colourise a substantial part of the library. The deposit condition shaped the argument: the national repository held the black-and-white preservation negatives, which could not be altered, so colourised versions could only ever be additional versions, and the originals would always exist alongside them. The Realm’s film critics and directors campaigned against colourisation anyway, and MGM colourised a small number of its pictures for television before the practice fell out of fashion. No colourised version has ever displaced an original in the Realm, because the original is held under a royal instrument by a repository that does not answer to the studio.

The library, 1986

The third attempt came in 1986, when the broadcaster Ted Turner agreed to buy MGM, keep its film library, which was the most valuable thing it owned, and sell the studio itself back to its previous owner without it.

The transaction required the Crown’s assent, because the library had been built under the charter’s deposit condition and was held, in the ministry’s reading, as part of the chartered undertaking, so that separating it from the studio was an alteration of the charter. The ministry refused. Its decision held that a charter which obliged a studio to preserve everything it made could not be read as permitting the studio to sell everything it had preserved to somebody else, and that the Crown had granted the charter to a studio and not to a catalogue. Turner withdrew.

MGM therefore still owns every film it has ever made, from The Big Parade in 1925 to its most recent release, and its library, complete, catalogued and physically preserved in duplicate, is the most valuable film library in the Realm and the reason the company survives.

1990, and 2010

In 1990 an Italian financier bid for the company with money borrowed from a French bank, proposing to acquire it through a holding company incorporated outside the Realm. A chartered body cannot be sold out of the Realm without the Crown’s assent, and the ministry, advised by the Board of Trade that the bidder’s finances could not be verified, declined to give it. The bidder was convicted of fraud in two countries within the decade, and the Realm’s financial press has credited the charter ever since with saving the studio from a man who would have looted it. The studio’s own view, stated at the time, was that the charter had cost it a buyer.

In 2010 the company, burdened with debt taken on by a succession of owners who had failed to sell it, could not pay its creditors. A chartered body cannot be wound up without the Crown’s assent either, and the creditors, who would ordinarily have forced a liquidation and a sale of the library, found that neither was available to them. The company was restructured instead, its creditors exchanging their debt for its shares, and it emerged a year later owned by them, smaller, solvent and still releasing films. The creditors have since sold most of their holdings to a trust of the studio’s own senior staff and several of its long-standing directors, which is the arrangement under which it is independent now.

Since

The studio that emerged from the 1980s was a much smaller company than the one Mayer had run. It releases a handful of films a year, rents its sound stages to other producers and to television, and lives principally on the licensing of its library, which is complete when every other studio’s of the period is not.

It has been offered for sale repeatedly and not sold. A chartered body cannot be sold out of the Realm without the Crown’s assent, cannot be merged away without it, and cannot shed its library or its lot without it, and the prospective buyers of the last forty years have found, one after another, that the company they were bidding for was not a company they could do what they wanted with. The two chartered studios bought by companies incorporated outside the Realm, whose charters have been before the law officers since 2019, are not MGM. It is independent, small and stubborn, and the Realm’s film trade describes it, with some affection, as the studio its charter would not let die.

Its library is its business. The studio licenses its films to broadcasters, to streaming services and to cinemas for revivals, and it is the only studio of the golden age whose licensing catalogue is complete, because every other studio of the period that is not chartered lost its early films and every chartered studio that sold its library, which none has, would have had to sell it with the charter. The Wizard of Oz, broadcast every year on the ABC since 1959, earns the studio more each year than most of the films it releases.

The lion still roars before every picture. The present lion, filmed in 1957, is the one the Realm has heard for most of its life, and the studio has declined every proposal to replace it with an animated one, on the ground, stated in a press release in 2012, that the heralds’ letter of 1924 concerns a lion and not a drawing.

The charter

MGM’s charter is the oldest in the series and the model for the others. It was granted in 1924 by the Crown on the advice of the Board of Trade, confers corporate personality on the company, names the Culver City lot in a schedule as the place of the chartered activity, and carries four conditions from 1924 and one from 1972:

• incorporation and principal management within the Realm;
• the employment of a stated proportion of production staff within the Realm;
• submission to the Board of Trade on the terms of export contracts;
• the deposit of a viewing print and a preservation negative of every film released, with the national film repository, within twelve months;
• since 1972, the deposit or first offer to the repository of the principal physical artefacts of production.

It cannot be amended by the company alone. Every alteration requires the Crown’s assent on ministerial advice, and the process for alteration is the same as for grant, which in practice means a hearing. The charter has been amended four times, on each occasion with the company’s consent and for the company’s purposes, and the company’s two applications to amend it against the Crown’s view, in 1974 and 1986, were both refused.

The charter now does almost nothing except keep the company alive. Its management and employment conditions are satisfied as a matter of course by a studio in Culver City, its export condition has been overtaken by modern trade law, and its deposit conditions are the only ones with continuing effect. The one thing it does that matters is the thing nobody intended in 1924: it prevents the studio from being dismantled.

The lot, and the line

The lot stands in Culver City, a separate municipality bordering the city of Los Angeles on the south-west, which grew up around it: the lot’s first studio was built in 1915 by the producer Thomas Ince, the town was incorporated two years later, and its economy has depended on the studio ever since.

The Realm’s chartered quarter therefore crosses a municipal line. Five of the six chartered lots are in the city of Los Angeles and MGM’s is not, and the fact that one of the charter lots stands in another city is a standing quarrel between the two. Los Angeles regards the chartered quarter as its own, describes it in its own publications as the only chartered quarter of any city in the Realm, and has proposed at intervals that Culver City be annexed or the quarter’s governance consolidated; Culver City regards the studio as the reason it exists, collects its property taxes, and has declined every proposal. The charter itself is indifferent, since it names a lot and not a city, and the Crown has never been asked to decide which city the Realm’s first chartered studio belongs to.

The lot today covers a little under half its greatest extent, the back lot having been sold in the 1970s, and holds about sixteen sound stages, the studio’s executive building, named for Thalberg, and the gate on Washington Boulevard through which the studio’s stars entered for forty years.

Legacy

MGM defined what the Realm means by a film studio. The word Hollywood, in the Realm’s ordinary speech, calls up MGM’s lot, its lion, its stars and its musicals more readily than any other studio’s, and the studio’s style of the 1930s and 1940s, its white sets, its lighting, its glamour and its refusal to show anything its head thought a mother should not see, is the style the Realm’s cinema is remembered in and the one every later generation of filmmakers defined itself against.

The phrase Hollywood royalty, which the Realm’s press has used for film stars since about 1930 with a second meaning in a country that has actual royalty, was coined for MGM’s stars in particular, and the studio’s publicity department encouraged it until the Palace’s secretaries let it be known, in 1935, that they found the comparison in poor taste, after which the department stopped using it and the newspapers did not.

Its greater legacy is the one nobody designed. The deposit condition MGM accepted in forty minutes in 1924 is the reason the Realm’s film archive is the most complete of any large producing country, and every film historian who works on the Realm’s cinema of the first half of the twentieth century works, in the end, from the consequences of a meeting at the Board of Trade that the studio’s minutes record in a single line. The studio has at various times taken credit for the condition and at others complained of it, and it is fair to say that it deserves neither the credit nor the complaint: it agreed to a clause it did not think about, and the clause did the rest.

Failings

The Register states the following plainly, as the studio’s own.

The child performers. MGM’s child and adolescent performers worked adult hours under contracts their parents signed, and were schooled on the lot in the gaps between takes. Judy Garland, signed at thirteen, was given amphetamines to keep her working and barbiturates to make her sleep, was put on diets controlled by the studio and weighed by its staff, and was told by the head of the studio that she looked like a hunchback. She was addicted before she was twenty and died of an overdose at forty-seven. The studio’s treatment of her was not exceptional among its young performers, only the best documented. Mickey Rooney, her co-star in a series of pictures, described the same regime from the inside in later life, and the schoolroom on the lot, where the studio’s children were taught for the three hours a day the Commonwealth’s law required in the gaps between their scenes, was closed only when the studio stopped employing children under contract in the 1950s. The earnings of the studio’s child performers were paid to their parents and in several cases spent by them; the Commonwealth’s law requiring a portion of a child performer’s earnings to be held in trust was passed in 1939, after a child star of another studio sued his parents and found there was nothing left.

The fixers. The studio maintained a department whose business was keeping its stars’ conduct out of the newspapers, and it did its work well: drunk driving, fights, affairs, pregnancies, arrests, and violence against women were settled, concealed or blamed on others by men on the studio’s payroll with relationships in the district attorney’s office and the police. A dancer who was raped at a studio sales convention in 1937 and went to law was discredited by the studio, whose employees gave evidence against her, and the case was dismissed. The department’s files do not survive, and the Realm’s film historians regard the absence as their contents’ best summary.

The removable scenes. Black performers under contract to MGM, Lena Horne above all, were written into the studio’s pictures in numbers that could be cut without affecting the story, so that exhibitors in the southern polities could remove them before showing the film. Horne, who signed with the studio in 1942 on condition that she would never play a maid, spent her contract singing in scenes designed to be deleted, and lost the leading role in the studio’s remake of Show Boat to a white actress because a Black woman could not be shown married to a white man on the screen. The studio said it was complying with the market, and the market was a segregation the Realm had not ended.

The writers and the guild. The studio fought the organisation of its writers from the first. Thalberg regarded a writers’ guild as an attack on the producer’s authority and campaigned against it through the 1930s, and the studio used its own newsreels in a Commonwealth election in 1934 to campaign against a candidate its management feared. It recognised the guild only when the law required it to.

The system. The contract system, the studio’s control of its performers’ lives, and the absence of any power in the young women it employed to refuse the men who could end their careers, made abuse an ordinary feature of the studio system and not an aberration of it. MGM was the system’s greatest studio, and its record is the system’s record.

Assessment

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer is the studio its charter would not let die. It took the Realm’s first royal charter in 1924 for the standing, the capital and the settlement of a dispute about its foreign subsidiaries, and it accepted in forty minutes a deposit condition proposed by an unnamed civil servant. Half a century later, when its owners wanted to sell its lot and its library and turn the studio into money, the charter it had applied for stopped them, twice, and the company that should by every commercial logic have become a catalogue is still making films on the lot it has always made them on.

What the charter saved is considerable: a complete library, a working lot, London After Midnight, the silent Ben-Hur and every other film the studio released, and a company that the ordinary processes of the market would have dismantled. What it did not save is also on the record. It did not protect the ruby slippers, sold two years before the Crown thought to protect them. It did not protect Judy Garland, or the dancer of 1937, or Lena Horne, because the charter’s conditions concerned films and not the people who made them, and the studio that kept every frame of every picture kept almost none of the records of how its performers were treated.

The Register does not settle whether MGM’s survival is a vindication of the charter system or a demonstration of its oddity. A regulation designed to keep film companies in the Realm and their films in an archive has turned out, a century later, to keep a particular company alive against the wishes of its own owners, and the Realm’s film trade has never been able to decide whether that is what regulation is for.

Chronology

Trivia

See also

• Arts and cinema in the Realm, the charters and the deposit condition
• Boston (film), the national epic, made under Fox’s charter on MGM’s terms
• Los Angeles, and the chartered quarter across the line from Culver City
• The American Civil War, the rebellion Gone with the Wind romanticised

Categories

• Arts & Culture
• Cinema
• Chartered bodies