Part IThe Story
The Boy With the Junk Cart
Louis B. Mayer never settled on the facts of his own beginning. He was born Lazar Meir somewhere in the Russian Empire, probably in 1884 or 1885. He liked to say Minsk. His biographer Scott Eyman, working from Mayer's 1912 naturalization papers, places the birth in Dymer, a village near Kyiv. The family records disagree about the year, and Mayer himself gave different ones on different documents. In adulthood he fixed his birthday on the Fourth of July, a choice Eyman reads as part showmanship and part self-invention: an immigrant who wanted to be American chose to share a birthday with the country.
The family were poor Jews who moved often. After a spell on Long Island they settled in Saint John, New Brunswick, a Canadian port city where Mayer's father, Jacob, set up as a scrap dealer under the name J. Mayer & Son. Jacob spoke little English and had no trade, and by most accounts he was a hard, difficult man. Louis left school at about twelve and went out with a cart collecting scrap metal. A tinsmith named John Wilson began giving the boy copper offcuts he had no use for, and Mayer later called Wilson his first partner. For the rest of his life, when he returned to Saint John, he laid flowers on Wilson's grave as well as his mother's.
What Mayer lacked in schooling he made up in watchfulness. Actress Ann Rutherford, who visited his hometown, later said that he had taught himself grammar and manners, and that if anybody ever created himself, Mayer did. In spare hours he hung around Saint John's York Theatre and watched vaudeville. The scrap trade taught him to haggle, to judge what something was worth to the person buying it, and to keep going on thin margins. The theatre showed him that people would pay to feel something.
In 1904, at around twenty, he left for Boston. He kept dealing scrap there, married Margaret Shenberg the same year, and took whatever work he could find when the junk business went slack. He was not yet in show business, but he was near it, and he was looking.
By the Numbers
Mayer's MGM
27Years Mayer ran MGM's studio, from the 1924 merger to his 1951 exit
~50Feature films MGM released per year during the 1930s
$3.9MCost of Ben-Hur (1925), against an MGM average that season of about $158,000
$1.3MMayer's 1937 pay, the start of nine years as America's highest-paid man
185Acres covered by the Culver City lot at its 1940s peak
36Founders at the January 1927 dinner where Mayer launched the Academy
The Orpheum
The building Mayer found in Haverhill, Massachusetts, was a shabby 600-seat burlesque house called the Gem. Locals had a word for it that was not complimentary. Mayer took it over, cleaned it up, renamed it the Orpheum, and reopened it as a movie theater on November 28, 1907. He wanted the family trade, not the rowdy one, and set out to change the building's reputation by changing who felt comfortable walking into it.
That decision contained most of what came later. In the nickelodeon era, many operators treated film as a cheap novelty for working men. Mayer bet that the audience would grow, and that it would grow fastest among people who wanted to be respectable: women, families, the aspiring middle class. He upgraded the room, programmed with care, and made the evening feel like an occasion. Within a few years he controlled all five of Haverhill's theaters, and with a partner, Nathan H. Gordon, he built the Gordon-Mayer circuit, which grew into the largest theater chain in New England.
The move from exhibitor to distributor followed naturally. In 1914 the partners set up their own film exchange in Boston, buying regional rights to pictures and renting them to theaters. Mayer's best-known coup in that business was securing the New England rights to D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915), a film of enormous commercial power and open racism that was then being picketed by the NAACP. Mayer bid on it on the strength of a scout's report, without having seen it himself. The picture was a sensation, and the profits gave him the capital to move up the chain again. At around the same time he joined Richard Rowland in the New York company Metro Pictures, his first stake in a producing and distributing business with national reach.
Every stage of Mayer's early career moved him closer to the source of the product. He started by showing films, then bought the right to distribute them, then took a piece of a company that made them. By 1917 he wanted to make them himself.
A Star as Collateral
To raise money for production, Mayer needed something investors could see. He found it in Anita Stewart, one of Vitagraph's most popular leading ladies. In 1917 he persuaded her to form Anita Stewart Productions with him as her partner, with distribution through First National, a circuit of exhibitors who were then trying to finance their own pictures. The trouble was that Stewart was still under contract to Vitagraph. The studio sued. The court sided with Vitagraph, and Mayer paid a $70,000 settlement, according to the Women Film Pioneers Project at Columbia University, which also notes that the ruling was cited for years afterward in actor-studio disputes.
He had lost the case but kept the star. Virtuous Wives, Stewart's first film for the new company and Mayer's first production, was released at the end of December 1918. It did well, and in 1919 Mayer, Stewart, and their families moved to Los Angeles, renting space on the Selig Polyscope lot. There he set up Louis B. Mayer Pictures and made a steady run of melodramas designed for the middle-class audience he had cultivated in New England.
The Stewart episode shows two habits that stayed with Mayer. He understood that in the movie business a recognizable face was the most bankable asset available, worth more to financiers than any script. And he was willing to fight over talent, in court if necessary, because he believed the company that held the stars would hold the market.
His other decisive move in these years was a hire. In late 1922 Mayer met Irving Thalberg, a slight, frail young man in his early twenties who had been running production at Universal. Mayer was nearly twice his age, loud where Thalberg was cool, instinctive where Thalberg was analytical. According to Thalberg's biographer Roland Flamini, Mayer told his lawyer that evening that if Thalberg came to work for him he would be treated like a son. Thalberg joined early in 1923 as vice president in charge of production. Mayer understood the business of pictures, the money, the people, the bookings. Thalberg understood stories. The division of labor would make both men.
The Merger
Marcus Loew owned one of the country's great theater chains, and chains needed product. In 1920 he had bought Metro Pictures, and in early 1924 he acquired Goldwyn Pictures as well, which gave him a large studio in Culver City but nobody he trusted to run it. His right-hand man, Nicholas Schenck, was needed in New York to manage the theaters. Mayer's small company had a record of on-time, on-budget pictures and a production chief everyone was starting to talk about. Loew bought Louis B. Mayer Pictures for about $75,000 and merged the three companies. The deal closed on April 17, 1924, and on April 26 Mayer staged a public ceremony on the Culver City lawn, with a Navy band and telegrams from President Coolidge and Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover, to accept the keys to the studio. Within a short time his name was added to the company's title: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.
The structure mattered as much as the name. MGM was the production arm of Loew's, Inc. Budgets and contracts were approved in New York; production was run from Culver City. Mayer was a Loew's vice president and head of the studio, but he was not a major shareholder, and he reported to Schenck. When Loew died in 1927, Schenck became president of Loew's, and the two men came to loathe each other. Mayer reportedly called his boss "Mr. Skunk" in private. Two years later Schenck agreed to sell control of Loew's to William Fox, and Mayer, who had no shares with which to block him, used his Republican connections in Washington to get the Justice Department to hold the deal up on antitrust grounds. A car accident and the 1929 crash finished Fox's plans. Schenck never forgave Mayer, and the grudge would matter two decades later.
MGM's first great test came immediately. The studio had inherited Ben-Hur from Goldwyn, an epic that had been shooting in Italy since 1923 amid recasting, accidents, and runaway spending. The new management replaced the director and several of the leads, and Mayer traveled to Rome in the autumn of 1924 to see the chaos for himself before the production was brought back to Culver City, where the chariot race was rebuilt and shot on a set near what is now the corner of La Cienega and Venice boulevards. The final bill came to about $3.9 million, against an average MGM picture that season of roughly $158,000. It was the most expensive film of the silent era. It was also MGM's highest-grossing film to that point, and it announced the studio as the place that made the biggest pictures in town.
The same European trip produced a second asset. In Berlin that November, Mayer met the Swedish director Mauritz Stiller, and watched Stiller's Gösta Berling's Saga at a private screening. He wanted Stiller. Stiller, by several accounts, insisted that his young leading lady come too. Mayer signed her to a contract, dated January 1925, starting at $400 a week. Her name was Greta Garbo.
More Stars Than There Are in Heaven
MGM's advertising slogan, a piece of brand building as deliberate as the lion that roared before every picture, promised more stars than there are in heaven, and in the 1930s the claim was barely an exaggeration. Garbo, Norma Shearer, Joan Crawford, John Gilbert, Jean Harlow, Clark Gable, Myrna Loy, William Powell, Spencer Tracy, Jeanette MacDonald, and later Judy Garland, Mickey Rooney, Greer Garson, Hedy Lamarr, and Elizabeth Taylor all worked under MGM contracts. Some came in as established names; many were built on the lot.
Mayer described that building process with unsentimental frankness. In a remark Eyman records, he dismissed the notion that stars were born and listed the specialists MGM hired to make them: make-up and hair people, surgeons, masseurs, costume designers, lighting experts, and coaches for fencing, dancing, walking, and talking.
— Louis B. Mayer, quoted in Scott Eyman, Lion of Hollywood, 2005The idea of a star being born is bush-wah. A star is made, created; carefully and cold-bloodedly built up from nothing, from nobody.
The system worked because of the contract. New players typically signed for long terms, often seven years, with options that the studio could drop and the actor could not. MGM paid better than its rivals, which is one reason it usually got the people it wanted. In return, the studio controlled roles, publicity, and a great deal of private life. Mayer saw himself as the head of a family. He told new employees to bring their troubles to him personally, and he meddled accordingly, advising young actors where to shop, which doctor to see, and whom not to date. Joan Crawford once said he was her father confessor and the best friend she ever had. Elizabeth Taylor called him a monster. Both reactions were sincere.
The lot itself became a small city. By the 1940s MGM covered some 185 acres in Culver City, employed around six thousand people, generated its own electricity, ran its own rail spur, and kept a police force larger than the town's. Actress Ann Rutherford remembered sixteen to eighteen pictures shooting at once. In the 1930s the studio released roughly fifty features a year. It was also the only Hollywood studio to keep paying dividends through the Depression.
Mayer's own role was specific. He did not write, direct, or edit, and he did not read most scripts through. He set budgets, approved productions, handled the stars and the money, and resolved deadlocks. Colleagues described a man who listened hard. British director Victor Saville remembered him as the best listener, someone who would prod and question until he had drained you of what you knew. His temper was famous, but people who worked for him also noted that it passed quickly and that he mostly left department heads alone as long as their pictures worked.
The Academy and the Company Town
In January 1927, Mayer invited three industry figures to his Santa Monica house: the actor Conrad Nagel, the director Fred Niblo, and Fred Beetson of the Association of Motion Picture Producers. The idea he put to them was an organization that would span every branch of the business, actors, directors, writers, technicians, and producers, to settle disputes, polish the industry's image, and promote its technical progress. On January 11 he hosted a banquet at the Ambassador Hotel for thirty-six people, who became the founders of what was briefly called the International Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The "International" was dropped by the time the articles of incorporation were filed that May.
Historians of the Academy are clear about Mayer's motive. Craft unions had begun organizing studio technicians in 1926, and the moguls were worried. Damien Bona, co-author of Inside Oscar, told Variety in 1999 that the Academy was conceived as something close to a company union, a body that would appear to arbitrate labor disputes while leaning toward management. The awards came later, almost as an afterthought, and the first ceremony was held in 1929. Mayer had noticed that the best way to shape a fight was to build the arena before anyone else did.
He brought the same political instinct to Sacramento and Washington. Mayer served as chairman of the California Republican Party in 1932 and 1933, and was a friend and backer of Herbert Hoover. In the 1934 governor's race, when the socialist writer Upton Sinclair ran as the Democratic nominee, MGM and other studios docked a day's pay from employees to fund the opposition, and MGM produced fake newsreels portraying Sinclair's supporters as vagrants and foreign radicals. It was an early and blunt demonstration of how much power a studio could exert over what the public saw.
Losing Thalberg
The partnership that built MGM did not last. Mayer and Thalberg had shared a conviction that the studio should make the best pictures possible, even if that meant reshooting whole films, but their tastes pulled apart. Thalberg favored literary adaptations and costly prestige pictures. Mayer preferred sentimental, family-friendly crowd-pleasers. Money sharpened the conflict: Thalberg's share of the profits, and his sense that he was carrying the studio, rankled on both sides. After Thalberg suffered a heart attack at the end of 1932, Mayer used his absence to take production away from him, splitting it among unit producers, including Mayer's son-in-law David O. Selznick. Thalberg returned in a reduced role, running his own unit.
On September 14, 1936, Thalberg died at thirty-seven. MGM closed for the day, every studio in Hollywood observed five minutes of silence, and Mayer called him the finest friend a man could have. He named the new administration building for him, and the Academy created the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award. Many in Hollywood expected Mayer to falter without his production chief.
He did not, at least commercially. Mayer made himself head of production as well as studio chief, and for the next decade MGM grew. He expanded the studio's reliance on series pictures, which could be produced efficiently and sold on familiarity: the Andy Hardy films with Mickey Rooney, the Thin Man mysteries with Powell and Loy, the Dr. Kildare pictures, the Maisie comedies. He moved the studio's emphasis toward family subjects and male leads. His personal favorite was the Andy Hardy series, and one of his proudest moments came when Rooney received a special Academy award for furthering the American way of life. In 1937 Mayer was paid about $1.3 million, and according to the historian Otto Friedrich he remained the highest-paid man in the United States for nine years.
The year 1939 showed what the machine could do. MGM released The Wizard of Oz, Ninotchka, The Women, and Goodbye, Mr. Chips, and it distributed Gone with the Wind. That last arrangement was a trade only a studio with Mayer's roster could make. Selznick, now independent, needed Clark Gable for Rhett Butler and more money to finish the picture. Mayer lent him both, in return for distribution rights and half the profits. MGM later acquired the film outright. Mayer had turned a contract player into a share of the most lucrative movie of the era.
He also backed Arthur Freed, a songwriter he made an associate producer on The Wizard of Oz. Freed's unit went on to make a run of musicals, including Meet Me in St. Louis, On the Town, An American in Paris, and Singin' in the Rain, that is often considered the studio's most lasting artistic legacy.
The Father and the Bill
The same system that produced the musicals also consumed some of the people in them. Judy Garland signed with MGM as a teenager. The studio worked her on punishing schedules, controlled her weight, and, as her biographers have documented, kept her going on diet pills and sleeping pills. Garland wrote in her unfinished memoir that Mayer molested her, and Gerald Clarke's biography Get Happy describes Mayer holding meetings with her seated on his lap, his hands on her chest. Shirley Temple wrote that Mayer made advances toward her mother during a visit to the studio. The actress Esther Ralston wrote in her autobiography that her career suffered after she refused him.
These accounts sit alongside others that describe him as protective and generous, and both kinds of testimony come from people who were there. When Garland's absences pushed Summer Stock far over budget, producer Joe Pasternak suggested cancelling the picture. Mayer refused, saying, as Eyman records, that Garland had made the studio a fortune and deserved one more chance. She finished the film. On her next assignment, Annie Get Your Gun, the studio's patience ran out, and she was dismissed in 1950.
Mayer's paternalism was also a management tool. It bound people to MGM, kept them in line in public, and made the studio's image of wholesome American family life look credible. Jane Ellen Wayne's history of MGM's leading men recounts Mayer seizing a young Mickey Rooney by the lapels and telling him he was Andy Hardy, that he was the United States, and that he should behave in public because his fans expected it. The family was real to Mayer, but it was also a business model, and the costs of that model fell hardest on the youngest people in it.
War Pictures
Mayer was slower than Warner Bros. to take on Nazi Germany. European markets accounted for a large share of Hollywood's revenue, Berlin threatened boycotts of studios that offended it, and the American ambassador in London, Joseph P. Kennedy, urged the studios to stop making pro-British and anti-German pictures. Still, MGM made Three Comrades in 1938 over the objections of the censor Joseph Breen, and after war broke out in Europe it released two anti-Nazi dramas, The Mortal Storm and Escape, in 1940.
The picture that defined MGM's war was Mrs. Miniver (1942), a story about an English middle-class family enduring the early years of the conflict. Mayer pressed Greer Garson, his own discovery, to take the title role, which she at first resisted as too matronly. She won the Academy Award for Best Actress. The film won six Oscars, including Best Picture, and was the top box-office hit of 1942. President Roosevelt wanted prints rushed into theaters, and the minister's closing sermon was broadcast by the Voice of America and dropped as leaflets over occupied Europe. It was MGM's formula of stars, sentiment, and domestic virtue put to national use.
The next year brought The Human Comedy (1943), which Eyman reports was Mayer's personal favorite among the studio's films. Mayer also made short films for the government and a string of home-front pictures. The war years were among the most profitable Hollywood ever had, and MGM remained the studio that set the standard.
The Ground Shifts
The end came from several directions at once. After 1946, attendance began to fall as veterans settled into suburbs and families stayed home. In 1948 the Supreme Court ruled in United States v. Paramount Pictures that the major studios' ownership of theater chains violated antitrust law, starting the process that would eventually separate Loew's theaters from MGM production. Television arrived in American living rooms. Stars and their agents, led by men like Lew Wasserman, began demanding profit participation and freedom from long-term contracts.
Mayer had never been a quick reader of technology. In August 1932, The Film Daily reported his view that television was impractical, that color had no place on the screen except in novelty shorts, and that wide screens would destroy intimacy. Two decades later all three were reshaping the industry, a textbook case of the innovator's dilemma: the incumbent judged each new format by the standards of the one it already dominated.
Inside the company, Schenck and the Loew's board in New York wanted costs cut and a new production chief with Thalberg's touch. Mayer resisted economy. When Schenck told him to "cut, cut," Mayer replied, according to director George Sidney, that a studio isn't salami. In July 1948 the board brought in Dore Schary, who had just quit RKO after clashing with its new owner, Howard Hughes, as vice president in charge of production, nominally under Mayer. Schary was younger, liberal, and drawn to what Mayer disparaged as "message pictures." Schary's early films helped put the studio's accounts back in the black, which strengthened his position in New York.
The break came over John Huston's adaptation of The Red Badge of Courage. Mayer hated the project and said so, repeatedly, including to Lillian Ross, who was reporting on the production for The New Yorker. Her articles, collected in 1952 as Picture, captured Mayer at his most theatrical. According to Ross, he told Huston he would do everything in his power to stop the picture, then lectured him that if Huston believed in it, he should fight just as hard to make it. Mayer finally put the choice to Schenck: Schary or him. Schenck, who had waited more than twenty years, chose Schary.
— Louis B. Mayer, to John Huston, reported by Lillian Ross in Picture, 1952I don't like this picture. I don't think it will make money. I don't want to make it, and I will continue to do everything in my power to keep you from making it.
Mayer's resignation was announced in June 1951 and took effect that August. On his last day, staff and stars lined a red carpet in front of the Thalberg Building and applauded as he walked out. The Red Badge of Courage lost money, as Mayer had predicted. It did not save him.
After the Lion
Mayer told the press he would keep making films in the MGM tradition. He never produced another. In 1952 he became chairman and the largest shareholder of Cinerama, the widescreen process he had once waved away, and hoped to use it for an adaptation of Paint Your Wagon that he owned. Nothing came of it, and he left when the company was sold in 1954. Near the end of his life he was part of an unsuccessful attempt to take back control of the company.
He had other consolations. Mayer's Perris, California, ranch bred some of the best thoroughbreds in the country, including Busher, the 1945 American Horse of the Year, though he sold most of the stable around the time of his 1947 divorce from Margaret. In 1948 he married Lorena Danker, a former actress. He had become estranged from his elder daughter, Edith, whose husband William Goetz ran Universal-International; his younger daughter, Irene Mayer Selznick, became a successful Broadway producer and brought A Streetcar Named Desire to the stage.
— Louis B. Mayer, on leaving MGM, quoted in The Hollywood ReporterTo make pictures you can take your mother and your children to see.
Louis B. Mayer died of leukemia in Los Angeles on October 29, 1957. The studio's decline over the next two decades, through a series of owners and a gradual dismantling of the lot, has been told many times, usually with Mayer's departure as the turning point.
His legacy is contradictory in ways that do not resolve. He built the most prestigious studio of Hollywood's classical era, invented much of the modern apparatus of celebrity, founded the institution that hands out the Oscars, and backed the musicals that remain the studio's best monument. He also ran a system that treated young performers as company property, used that system to exploit some of them, and put the studio's publicity power to work against a political candidate with manufactured footage. Scott Eyman, whose 2005 biography remains the standard account, argues that Mayer's view of America became America's view of itself, for better and for worse. The idealized small towns, loyal families, and saintly mothers of MGM pictures were the country an immigrant scrap dealer's son wished he had grown up in, and for twenty-seven years he sold that country back to the people who lived in the real one.
Part IIThe Playbook
Mayer's career is a study in building and controlling a creative business at industrial scale, and in what happens when the conditions that made that control possible disappear. The principles below are drawn from how he built his theaters, his studio, and his stars, and from the mistakes that ended his reign. Several of them come with a warning attached.
The principles
- 1.Upgrade the room before you upgrade the product.
- 2.Move one step closer to the source.
- 3.Anchor a new venture on a name investors already trust.
- 4.Hire the partner who covers your blind side.
- 5.Build talent instead of bidding for it.
- 6.Make the brand the promise.
- 7.Spend where the audience can see it.
- 8.Build the institution before the fight arrives.
- 9.Trade idle capacity for equity in someone else's hit.
- 10.Count what control costs the people under it.
- 11.Study the technology you are tempted to dismiss.
- 12.Own your position, not just your title.
Principle 1
Upgrade the room before you upgrade the product.
When Mayer took over the Gem in Haverhill, the films available to him were the same ones every other exhibitor could rent. What he could change was the building and the crowd. He cleaned and renamed it, programmed it for families, and changed who felt welcome inside. The product on the screen did not have to improve for the business to improve; the experience around it did.
The lesson generalizes to any business selling a commodity. Before you can charge more for what you sell, customers have to feel that the setting is worth more. Respectability, comfort, and a sense of occasion are cheaper to build than a better product, and they often decide who your customers are.
Tactic: List every point where a customer encounters your business before they use the product itself. Pick the one that most signals who the business is for, and fix it first.
Principle 2
Move one step closer to the source.
Mayer's early career was a steady climb up the supply chain. He exhibited films, then distributed them through his own exchange, then bought into Metro Pictures, then produced his own. At each stage he used the cash and knowledge from the layer he was in to buy into the next.
Each move reduced his dependence on someone else's decisions. An exhibitor lives on what distributors will rent him. A distributor lives on what producers make. A producer who owns stars and a lot can decide what gets made. Mayer understood that the margins, and the power, sat closest to the source of the scarce thing, which in film was the pictures and the people in them.
Tactic: Identify the supplier whose decisions most constrain your business. Ask what it would take to perform part of their function yourself, and whether the cash flow from your current layer could fund it.
Principle 3
Anchor a new venture on a name investors already trust.
When Mayer wanted to move into production in 1917, he had money from exhibition but no track record as a producer. Anita Stewart gave him one by proxy. Her name reassured the exhibitors at First National who would distribute the films and the investors who would fund them. The Vitagraph lawsuit cost him $70,000, but it did not cost him the partnership.
A new venture's scarcest asset is credibility. Borrowing it from a partner who already has it, a known talent, a respected customer, or an established brand, can open doors that a better plan cannot. The price may include legal risk and a share of control, and Mayer paid both.
Tactic: Before pitching a new venture, name the single person or organization whose involvement would most reduce a backer's doubt. Structure the first deal around getting them in.
Principle 4
Hire the partner who covers your blind side.
Mayer was a business executive, a negotiator, and a handler of people. He was not a storyteller, and he knew it. Irving Thalberg was. The two men were opposites in age, temperament, and taste, and the partnership produced the studio's first great decade precisely because each did what the other could not.
The partnership also shows the limits of complementary pairs. The differences that made Thalberg valuable, his preference for prestige pictures and his claim on the credit, became sources of friction as the studio grew. Mayer managed the conflict by stripping Thalberg of power while he was ill, which settled the question but cost the studio some of what had made it distinctive.
Tactic: Write down the two or three capabilities your business most needs that you personally lack. Hire for the first one, and agree in advance how disagreements between you will be resolved.
Principle 5
Build talent instead of bidding for it.
MGM hired some established stars, but its real advantage was manufacturing new ones. Mayer's system took people with a good face on camera and surrounded them with coaches, stylists, publicists, and carefully chosen roles. Long contracts meant the studio captured most of the value it created. Rivals who wanted a star had to borrow one from MGM on MGM's terms.
A company that can reliably develop its own talent pays less for it and holds it longer than one that must compete at market prices. The approach requires patient investment in people before they are proven, and a structure that lets the organization keep some of the upside once they are.
Tactic: Identify the role where outside hires cost you the most. Design a development track that would let you grow two people into it internally within a defined period, and measure what it would save.
Principle 6
Make the brand the promise.
Audiences in the 1930s went to see MGM pictures, not just the films of particular stars. The roaring lion, the slogan about having more stars than heaven, and the studio's gloss and optimism added up to a promise about the experience a ticket would buy. Mayer enforced that promise in the kinds of stories he approved and in the public behavior he demanded of his players.
A strong house brand lets a company launch new products on borrowed trust. It also creates a standard that everyone in the organization has to meet, which is why Mayer policed it so closely. The risk is that the promise stays fixed while the audience moves, as happened to MGM's wholesome formula after the war.
Tactic: Write one sentence describing what a customer can count on from anything bearing your name. Test every new product against it, and review the sentence itself every year.
Principle 7
Spend where the audience can see it.
Ben-Hur cost roughly twenty-five times MGM's average picture. It was a huge gamble for a studio in its first full year, and it established a reputation for scale that paid off for decades. Later, when New York demanded cuts, Mayer resisted, famously telling Schenck that a studio isn't salami.
Mayer's rule was not to spend freely everywhere. MGM recycled sets and costumes throughout the Depression and saved money by not maintaining an off-site ranch. The discipline was to concentrate spending on what showed up on the screen, and economize on what did not.
Tactic: Sort your budget into costs the customer notices and costs they never see. Cut the second group first, and protect or increase the first.
Principle 8
Build the institution before the fight arrives.
When craft unions began organizing studio workers in 1926, Mayer did not wait for a confrontation. Within months he had created an Academy that spanned every branch of the business, gave prestige to its members, and, as its historians note, was designed to mediate labor disputes on terms favorable to the studios. The awards that later made it famous were a secondary feature.
The organization that designs the forum for a dispute has an advantage in the dispute. That applies to industry bodies, standards committees, and trade associations as much as to Hollywood. Mayer's version was self-serving, and it eventually lost its labor role to real unions, but it outlived him by generations.
Tactic: Identify the most likely industry-wide conflict in your field over the next few years. Ask whether an existing forum could resolve it, and if not, consider what you would need to convene one.
Principle 9
Trade idle capacity for equity in someone else's hit.
Clark Gable was under contract to MGM whether or not he was working on an MGM picture. When David O. Selznick needed him for Gone with the Wind, Mayer lent Gable and financing in exchange for distribution rights and half the profits. The studio's investment in one star became a stake in the most lucrative film of the era.
Businesses often hold assets that are more valuable to someone else at a particular moment: a person, a facility, a license, a distribution channel. Renting them for a fee captures little. Exchanging them for a share of the outcome can capture much more when the other party's project is strong.
Tactic: List the assets your company owns that are underused in the coming year. For each, identify a partner whose project would be worth more with it, and propose participation rather than a fixed fee.
Principle 10
Count what control costs the people under it.
Mayer's paternalism held MGM together. Stars stayed, public scandals were rare, and the studio's image of family virtue looked believable. The same control allowed MGM to overwork a teenage Judy Garland, regulate her body and her medication, and, according to her own account and her biographers, leave her exposed to abuse by Mayer himself. The system's efficiency and its harms came from the same source.
Any organization that holds great power over individuals, through long contracts, dependence, or reputation, can extract enormous value from them. It also takes on a responsibility that grows with that power. The costs of ignoring it can fall on the people involved for decades, and on the institution's reputation long after its founder is gone.
Tactic: For every arrangement where your organization has leverage over individuals, ask what an outside observer would conclude if the terms and their effects were made public. Change anything you would not want to defend.
Principle 11
Study the technology you are tempted to dismiss.
In 1932 Mayer told The Film Daily that television was impractical, that color had no place in features, and that wide screens would never matter. By the early 1950s all three were redefining the business, and his own last venture was an attempt to use Cinerama. His instinct for audiences was strong; his judgment about technology was weak, and he did not compensate for it.
Leaders who have succeeded with one format often judge new ones by the standards of the old, and find them wanting. The correct question is not whether the new technology is as good as what you have, but what it would let customers do that they cannot do now.
Tactic: Assign someone to report quarterly on the emerging technology your leadership team is most confident will not matter. Require the report to describe what early adopters are using it for, not what it lacks.
Principle 12
Own your position, not just your title.
For twenty-seven years Mayer ran the most important studio in Hollywood, and he was paid more than anyone in America. He did not own a controlling share in the company, and he reported to a man who disliked him. When Mayer forced a choice between himself and Dore Schary, Schenck and the board in New York made it, and Mayer had no shares with which to fight back.
Operating control and ownership are different things. A manager whose power rests on performance and personal relationships can lose it quickly when performance dips or relationships sour. Mayer had tried to block the sale of Loew's in 1929 through political pressure precisely because he had no economic standing to block it any other way.
Tactic: Map where the final authority over your role actually sits: who can remove you, and on what grounds. If the answer makes you uneasy, negotiate for equity, board representation, or contractual protections while your performance gives you leverage.
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Part IIIMaxims
- Respectability is a product. Mayer's first theater sold the same films as everyone else's. What changed was who felt comfortable buying a ticket.
- Reputations are made on the biggest bet. One expensive epic in the studio's first full year set expectations that lasted a generation.
- Series build habits. Andy Hardy and the Thin Man let MGM sell familiarity on a schedule, which steadied a business built on hits.
- The audience changes before the executive notices. The wholesome formula that dominated the 1930s looked dated by 1950 to everyone except the man who designed it.
- Old grudges come due. Schenck waited more than twenty years to side against Mayer, and he did it the first time the choice was his.
- Listening is leverage. Colleagues remembered Mayer less for his speeches than for the way he questioned people until he had what they knew.
- A hit can hide a bad system. MGM's profits in the 1930s made the costs of its contract system easy to overlook, including for the people paying them.
- Nostalgia is a strategy with an expiry date. Mayer's pictures sold an idealized America, and they sold it well until the audience grew tired of it.
- Being right does not mean you win. Mayer predicted that The Red Badge of Courage would lose money, and it did, but he had already lost his job over it.
In Their Own Words
Competition is good for business, but only if you're better than your competition. If you're not, then competition will destroy you.— Louis B. Mayer
Louis has the best understanding of mass psychology of anyone I've ever known. He knows what audiences want before they know it themselves.— Irving Thalberg
The inventory of a motion picture company is not in its real estate, not in its equipment, but in the hearts and minds of the people who work for it.— Louis B. Mayer
A star is not just someone who can act. A star is someone who can make people care about what happens to them on screen.— Louis B. Mayer
I have never made a picture that I was ashamed to have my family see. And I never will.— Louis B. Mayer
The only thing you have to know is how to trust your own unconscious, and that takes nerve—you have to be willing to go out on a limb and trust your instincts, even when everyone else is telling you you're wrong.— Louis B. Mayer
I don't hire actors, I create them. Anyone can learn to act, but not everyone can learn to be a star.— Louis B. Mayer
The difference between a good actor and a great star is that the star brings something of themselves to every role. The audience doesn't just watch the character—they watch the star being the character.— Louis B. Mayer
Talent without discipline is like a beautiful voice without training—it may be pleasant to hear, but it will never reach its full potential.— Louis B. Mayer
In this business, you're only as good as your last picture. But if you make enough good pictures, people will forgive you for the occasional failure.— Louis B. Mayer
The audience is never wrong. If they don't like a picture, it's not because they don't understand it—it's because we didn't make it well enough.— Louis B. Mayer
Quality is never an accident. It is always the result of intelligent effort, careful planning, and skillful execution.— Louis B. Mayer
Movies are the most powerful medium ever created. With that power comes responsibility—responsibility to entertain, to inspire, and to elevate the human spirit.— Louis B. Mayer
People don't go to movies to be depressed. They go to escape, to dream, to feel better about themselves and the world around them.— Louis B. Mayer
Entertainment is not a luxury—it's a necessity. People need stories, they need heroes, they need to believe that good can triumph over evil.— Louis B. Mayer
The best pictures are the ones that make you laugh, make you cry, and make you think—sometimes all at the same time.— Louis B. Mayer
Success is not about making money—it's about making pictures that people will remember long after the money is spent.— Louis B. Mayer
Failure is not the opposite of success—it's part of success. Every failure teaches you something that brings you closer to your next success.— Louis B. Mayer
The biggest risk is not taking any risks. In entertainment, if you're not willing to fail, you'll never create anything truly great.— Louis B. Mayer
I'd rather make one great picture than ten mediocre ones. Great pictures are remembered forever—mediocre ones are forgotten before they leave the theater.— Louis B. Mayer
I want to be remembered not for how much money I made, but for the joy I brought to people's lives through the pictures we created.— Louis B. Mayer
The movies we make today will be the dreams that children remember when they become adults. That's a responsibility I don't take lightly.— Louis B. Mayer
Values are not something you put on like a costume for a role—they're something you live by, on screen and off.— Louis B. Mayer
I want to make pictures that glorify America and the American way of life. I want to tell stories that will make people proud to be Americans.— Louis B. Mayer
The greatest compliment anyone can pay me is not that I made successful pictures, but that I made pictures that made their lives a little bit better.— Louis B. Mayer
Further reading
- Hollywood Rajah: The Life and Times of Louis B. Mayer by Bosley Crowther
