Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer - MGM: Hollywoods greatest backlot

A forlorn faade on the distant outskirts of New York Street in the 1930s.
Previous Page: The title page from a 1929 studio promotional book.

Copyright 2011 by Steven Bingen, Stephen X.
Sylvester, and Michael Troyan

All rights reserved.

This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part or in any form or format without the written permission of the publisher.

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ISBN-13 978-1-59580-055-8

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bingen, Steven.

MGM : Hollywoods greatest backlot / by Steven Bingen, Stephen X. Sylvester, Michael Troyan.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 978-1-59580-055-8

I. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. I. Sylvester, Stephen X.

II. Troyan, Michael, 1968- III. Title.

PN1999.M4B56 2010

384.80979494dc22

2010002730

Cover and interior design and production by Future Studio

This book is dedicated to the memory of Robert W. Nudelman, who fought a gallant, doomed battle to save MGMs backlot from the wrecking ball.

T HE A UTHORS

PART ONE:
LANDS OF MAKE-BELIEVE

PART TWO:
POTEMKINS VILLAGES

PART THREE:
MYTHIC LANDSCAPES

PART FOUR:
BACKLOT BABYLON

MGMs mysterious Lot One backlot as it looked in 1925.

Someday, a guidebook will be written to Americas most pictorial ruinthe ruins of Hollywood.
New York Herald Tribune, July 19, 1936

So much of Hollywood is a facade.
D AVID O. S ELZNICK

T he first time I found myself at the gates of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios it was 1950. I was a normally innocent teenager from Burbank and I didnt really have any knowledge that MGM was the greatest studio in the world. What I really wanted to do was go to college and become a gym teacher. Working at a movie studio just seemed like something to do while I waited for my real life to start. I guess you could say that Im still waiting.

Maybe I should explain that I didnt grow up in a movie-going family. I didnt sit in the audience watching pictures and thinking how wonderful it would be to work in such a glamorous business. So I didnt have any romantic notions about show biz like other people my age probably did. When casting director Solly Baiano drove me to the lot that day, and I first saw the gigantic Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer sign atop Stage 6, well, it was certainly impressive, but I hardly thought the moment life-changing.

And yet, I did feel at home at MGM from the very first. I used to spend days walking around the big, busy lot while they tried to figure out what to do with me. Id hang out in the Makeup Department or the Music and Property Departments, or the Scoring Stages, or Rehearsal Halls, or out on the backlots. I never dreamt or cared that the composers and writers and performers I was mingling with, and not taking particularly seriously, were the finest and most famous in the world.

And yet somehow MGM, and show biz too, eventually got to me in a way I never could have predicted when I was that indifferent kid. I grew to love the studio, not only because of the thousands of memorable movies made there, but because MGM became my hometown, my prep school, my university. I grew up there. I learned about friendship and responsibility there. I laughed and cried there. Certainly I learned everything I know about acting there. Later my children grew up there as well, playing on those same backlots while their mother earned a living on them. And later, when those same beautiful, magical backlots were being sold off and destroyed, I first tried to save the place itself, and then its legacy.

Well, its all gone now. That big Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer sign atop Stage 6, which I first saw all those years ago, has been replaced. Those unbelievable backlots are now suburbs with different children playing in the streets. Children who would never believe that castles and pirate ships and Mississippi riverboats once stood exactly where their homes are now.

The good news is that, although the studio is gone, it lives on vividly in the pages of this remarkable and beautiful book. Just like I first did all those years ago, this work approaches the studio not through the perspective of its films, but rather as a very real community with its own politics and personalities and legends. Come inside and look around like I once did. Like me, you may never want to leave.

D EBBIE R EYNOLDS
Hollywood, California

I went to the lands of the moviemakers and saw them at work. As I go back over the weeks I spent within the innermost walls of these great studios and watched the master minds and master hands at their appointed tasks, I am filled with the wonder of it all. I thrill at the miracles performed before my eyes, at the sight of a thousand threads in a tangled skein wrought into afabric of exquisite design.

J OHN J. F LOHERTY, Moviemakers

I n The Wizard of Oz (1939), one of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayers most enduring films, Dorothy Gale explores a wondrous land woven entirely of her own imagination. Significantly, movie studios in Hollywoods Golden Age were labeled dream factories for their imaginative entertainments that have inspired, encouraged, and enchanted generations of filmgoers. Today, MGMthe most prodigious of those dream factoriesnow seems like a dream itself. Time has not been kind to the former empire of Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg and their lands of make-believe. Living memories of the place are quickly dissipating with the erosion of time.

Time and again, many of the people with whom we have discussed the studio and this project with have fondly mentioned a book from 1975 called The MGM Story. In that long-out-of-print book, near the title page as wallpaper for the graphics, author John Douglas Eames included a partial studio map under a superimposed section of text. More than one person we spoke to about this book has admitted to wistfully taking a virtual tour of the studio lot and exploring the various sets found there using their imagination and this truncated map as their jumping-off point.

Remarkably, we discovered that these misguided romantics werent touring the places these sets were created to mimic. No one was imagining visiting Algiers or the Bastille or the 1904 Worlds Fair. Instead, they were exploring Hollywood, which, to some of us anyway, must have been even better.