Design MGM history

No way a lion from 1917 can still be alive.

The corporation was formed when Marcus Loew, a film exhibitor and distributor, bought into Metro Pictures in 1920.

It was founded in April 1924 by the celebrated motion-picture executive and entertainment tycoon Marcus Loew who acquired Metro Pictures, Goldwyn Pictures Corporation and Louis B. Mayer Pictures to form a single privately held media company.

Four years later the company merged with the Goldwyn production company. (The Goldwyn Studios in Culver City, near Hollywood, eventually became the studio headquarters of MGM.) In 1925 Louis B. Mayer Pictures joined the group, and Mayer was executive head of the studio for 25 years.

In 1927-28, those fizzy brains in the MGM publicity department decided to take their mascot lion on a world tour.

The lion gave an audible roar on July 31, 1928 for the debut of the movie White Shadows in the South Seas.

In 1929 his older brother, Herman J. Mankiewicz, a successful screenwriter, introduced the younger Mankiewicz to Hollywood, where he got his start composing subtitles for silent versions of Paramount talkies, which were distributed to theatres not yet equipped for sound.

Mankiewicz moved to MGM in 1934 hoping to direct, but studio head Louis B. Mayer made him a producer.

In 1936, Slats sadly died.

In 1943 Mankiewicz signed a contract with Twentieth Century-Fox to work as a producer and a screenwriter.

The Gothic mystery, released in 1946, featured Gene Tierney, Vincent Price, and Walter Huston.

The Late George Apley (1947) was a more typical Mankiewicz project, a comedy of manners that preserves the literary flavour of the J.P. Marquand novel on which it is based; Ronald Colman played a Boston blue blood concerned only with his social standing.

Mankiewicz then made House of Strangers (1949), a potent if somewhat heavy-handed drama about a Machiavellian businessman (Edward G. Robinson) who exploits his own sons.

No Way Out (1950), coscripted by Mankiewicz, was an excellent noir and one of the first films to deal directly with racism.

In 1955 Mankiewicz directed his first musical, Guys and Dolls, which was based on a popular Broadway play.

The sixth lion, officially named George, was introduced in 1956.

He appeared at the start of most MGM films starting from 1957 and was the youngest lion at the time (you can see this if you look at his relatively small mane!).

In 1963 Mankiewicz took over direction from Rouben Mamoulian of the ill-fated Cleopatra.

In 1965, in attempt to update its image, MGM recruited Lippincott to create a more contemporary logo.

Taken from the 1984 Release of The Terminator

Mankiewicz was the recipient of countless industry awards, including the Directors Guild of America’s D.W. Griffith Award in 1986.