• Home
• People
• Louis B. Mayer

Louis B. Mayer

Louis Burt Mayer (/ˈmeɪ.ər/; born Lazar Meir; July 12, 1884 – October 29, 1957) (Russian: Лазарь Меир) Louis B. Mayer, born Lazar Meir, on July 4, 1885, in Minsk, Russia, was an American film producer and co-founder of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studios (MGM) in 1924. Mayer was skilled at developing star actors, including child actors, then placing them in consistently slick productions, such as musicals or comedies, for which MGM became famous. Under Mayer's management, MGM accumulated the largest concentration of leading writers, directors and stars in Hollywood.Growing up poor and quitting school at 12 to support his family, he later moved to Boston and purchased a small vaudeville theater. After expanding and moving to Los Angeles, he teamed up with Irving Thalberg, and they developed hundreds of high quality story-based films, noted for their wholesome and lush entertainment. Mayer liked his stars to portray an idealized vision of men and women, family life, virtue, and patriotism, all presented in the present world they lived in. He believed that movies should not be a reflection of life, but be an entertaining escape from life. Mayer handled the business part of running the studio, such as setting budgets and approving new productions, while Thalberg, still in his twenties, ran all MGM productions.During his reign at MGM, after Thalberg's early death in 1936, he had enemies as well as admirers. Some stars did not appreciate his control over their lives, while others saw him as a father figure, important in their lives. Joan Crawford said "Mayer was my father, my father confessor, the best friend I ever had," while Ricardo Montalban recalled that "he really thought of the people under contract as his boys and girls." Nevertheless, he believed in wholesome entertainment and went to great lengths so that MGM had "more stars than there are in the heavens".He was forced to resign MGM as its vice president in 1951, when the studio's parent company, Loew's, Inc., wanted to improve MGM's declining profits. Mayer was a staunch conservative, at one time the chairman of California's Republican party. In 1927 he was he was one of the founders of AMPAS, famous for its annual Academy Awards. Biographer Scott Eyman states that Mayer's "supreme gift was his understanding of the nature of stardom and the needs of the audience, bred by his years of being an exhibitor. . . Mayer's view of America became America's view of itself."