Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

“ KEEP YOUNG. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Released by Loew’s. 9 min., sd., b&w, 35mm. (Pete Smith Specialty) © Loew’s Incorporated; 17Dec54 (in notice: 1951) ; LP4731.
KEEP YOUR GRIN UP. Paramount Pictures Corp. 1 reel, sd., color, 35mm. (Casper Cartoon) © Paramount Pictures Corp.; 4Mar55; LP4494.
KEEPING CLEAN AND NEAT. Encyclopaedia Britannica Films. 11 min., sd., b&w, 16mm. With film guide. © Encyclopaedia Britannica Films, Inc.; 9Aug56; MP8128.
KELLY AND ME. Universal Pictures Co. 10 reels, sd., color, 35mm. A Universal International picture. CinemaScope. Technicolor. © Universal Pictures Co., Inc. ”

“ In addition to the drawing power of the 'motion picture stars', other factors in creating the profits were found in the artistic conceptions and in the expert supervision and direction of the various processes which made possible the composite result with its attractiveness to the public. ”

“ When you reflect that to-day he receives approximately five thousand dollars a week, together with a large percentage of the returns on every production, it helps you to realise that the jinnee of the screen has functioned almost as well as did his ancestor of the “Arabian Nights.”
And in no place is the magic more apparent than in California. When De Mille went out to Los Angeles to look around for a site, Hollywood promised nothing of its present pomp. The vast studios, the beautiful villas, the famous pleasure-places—all21 have arisen in the past decade. ”

“ Like Chaplin, I can not think of myself out of pictures. For to do that would be to turn my back on the far horizon which has always called me to it.
In the ten years since I entered that little Broadway motion-picture theatre with its static Western drama, its player-piano, and its far-flung peanut-shells, giant changes have taken place. Then film-production attracted few men and women of real intellectual capacity. ”

“ While I was with the Lasky Company I had tried always to march in its direction. Now that I was head of the Goldwyn Company I was determined upon really catching126 up with it. Far from limiting myself to those who, like Mabel Normand and Mae Marsh, were representative screen stars, I reached out toward the far lights of opera and the legitimate drama. To draw to the screen the most finished histrionic ability, the names of deepest import in the world of art—to this ambition may be traced the great disasters of my professional career. ”

“ In other words, "We don't buy this Boston Strangler business: if your business model can't survive the emergence of this general-purpose tool, it's time to get another business-model or go broke."
Hollywood found another business model, as the broadcasters had, as the Vaudeville artists had, as the music publishers had, and they made more art that paid more artists and reached a wider audience.
There's one thing that every new art business-model had in common: it embraced the medium it lived in. ”

“ Nowadays it's all advertising; actors and actresses are put on the market like patent medicines. Isn't it the truth Elaine? . . . Advertising, advertising."
"But that isn't what makes success. . . . If you could do it with advertising every producer in New York'd be a millionaire," burst in Goldweiser. "It's the mysterious occult force that grips the crowds on the street and makes them turn in at a particular theater that makes the receipts go up at a particular boxoffice, do you understand me? ”

“ I was accustomed to a life where every working hour was inspired by the one thought, “How can I make the Lasky Company more significant?” You can imagine, therefore, the terrible blankness of those days following my resignation. Feverishly I cast about me for a new outlet for my organising energy, and in the Autumn of 1916 I, together with my friends Archie and Edgar Selwyn, the theatrical producers, Margaret Mayo, and Arthur Hopkins, the theatrical producer, founded the Goldwyn Motion Picture Company. ”

“ That novel was also based upon the story of Madeleine Smith and the motion picture rights were bought by respondents. There had been negotiations for the motion picture rights in petitioners' play, and the price had been fixed at $30,000, but these negotiations fell through.
As the Court of Appeals found, respondents in producing the motion picture in question worked over old material; 'the general skeleton was already in the public demesne. A wanton girl kills her lover to free herself for a better match; she is brought to trial for the murder and escapes'. ”

“ Aside from the unfamiliarity of the stage and operatic star with the medium of motion-pictures, a difficulty enhanced by the arrogance with which they usually approach the new field, there is another fundamental obstruction in the path of the film-producer who exploits them. Although their names may be on the lips of every inhabitant of a large city, many a small town knows them not. Main Street, which counts enormously in pictures, is apt to be much more familiar with some comparatively obscure film actress than with Farrar or Garden. ”

“ The older Sennett studio, like the stable which first cradled the Lasky Company, presented a striking contrast to the modern film background with its meticulous divisions of labour, its attempts to introduce the efficiency methods of a business establishment. Everybody knew everybody else; all the performers talked over in the most intimate fashion the details of the day’s work; the stars could and did do all such chores as cutting films.
Instead of a honeycomb of dressing-rooms, there was a communal space where all the men put on their make-up ”

“ Her first day at Famous-Players studio was a record breaker. She made thirty-nine scenes, whereas twelve scenes are considered a good day’s work. She not only learns her own rôle, but the rôles of all the others acting in the picture with her.
She objects strongly to visitors being brought to the “set” where she is working. It interferes with her mood, she declares, and she is right. The making of moving-pictures is a business, just as the making of steel, or the growing of flowers, or the sculping of a great statue, and there is no reason for it being made a curiosity shop. ”

“ There is absolutely no swank about her. An illustration of the quality which has so endeared her to many other members of her profession is found in a benefit performance given last year at Hollywood. Space was limited and when the dressing-rooms were assigned no such poignant cry of outraged property rights has been uttered since the little bear whimpered, “Who’s been sitting in my chair?”
“What!” cried one of the motion-picture duchesses only just recently elevated to the peerage. “Do you mean to say that I have to dress in a room with three other people?” ”

“ Eight years ago the twenty thousand dollars which the Lasky Company expended upon “Carmen” was considered a vast sum. To-day the Goldwyn Company is investing nearly a million in its production of “Ben Hur.”
With the development of our industry has come a corresponding development in the life of the country. Motion-pictures are, in truth, the magic travelling carpet on which those in the most remote village may fly to distant lands, to other ages, to realms of romance hitherto denied them. ”

“ Farther down Broadway stood a theatre, and there was now a throng about its broad door-way. Another theatre faced the square, gay with prismatic signs and besprinkled with electric lights. McDowell Sutro watched men and women step up to the box-office of this place of amusement and buy their tickets and disappear within. He wondered why these men and women should have money to spare on a show, when he had not enough to pay for a meal and a night's lodging. ”

“ The sun was our only electrician in those days. And with the aid of three or four men De Mille set to work in a studio where the weekly pay-roll now numbers eleven hundred and fifty people.
Yet, in spite of such simplified conditions, it cost us forty-seven thousand dollars to make that first picture. Nowadays that sum is inadequate for any long production, but in those times it was unprecedented. Of course the cost of the motion-picture rights of our first drama accounted for this expenditure. ”

“ Here in the heart of theatredom was the players' curb market, the theatrical rendezvous of the metropolis, where the mummer comes both to talk shop with his fellow actor, and seek a new engagement. On every side luxurious theatres reared their stately facades, box-offices open for business invited all to enter, obstreperous ticket speculators jostled passersby in their eagerness to sell their seats. ”

“ There was no Hollywood in that halcyon day, no picture Hollywood. That “particularly irrational” corner of the universe had as yet neither name nor fame. The Biograph studio was in Los Angeles, on Pico Street, a building thought to be rather large, being one hundred or one-hundred-and-fifty feet long—a narrow shack, used chiefly as a carpentry shop, and for dressing-rooms—one each, for men and women. ”

“ Their organization, under the name of the Paramount Pictures Corporation, requisitioned one hundred and four films a year, of which our company agreed to supply thirty-six. As this was just three times the number we had planned to produce, you will see the urgency of growth. It is equally evident why our capitalisation now increased from the original67 twenty thousand to two hundred and fifty thousand dollars.
But the domestic market by no means exhausted our outlet. Always I have been penetrated by a sense of international possibilities in the film industry. ”

“ At this time I had a contract with her providing a salary of one hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars for twelve weeks of annual service. The contract had still two more years to run when, very regretfully, I went to Miss Farrar and asked if she did not think it might be155 better to stay off the screen for a year. Gently as I could do so I added that very often a star’s popularity went under a temporary eclipse and that a limited absence from films did much to restore the public demand. ”