All we've got is cotton and slaves and arrogance.

Rhett Butler in Gone with the Wind.

Welcome to the history of the 20th century.

Music The

The Episode 413, frankly, my dear.

This episode will be the sixth and the last of our series on Hollywood in the 30s and 40s,

and I've saved the biggest studio in town for the finale, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, known to one and all as MGM.

As you can no doubt deduce from its name,

MGM was the product of a merger of three studios,

and the story begins with a man-born Laser Maire

to a Jewish family in what was then the Russian Empire in 1884.

When he was three years old, his family emigrated to Long Island in the United States,

and then later to St. John New Brunswick in Canada.

His parents did not speak much English, and the family was poor.

Young Lazer, now known as Lewis B. Mayor,

quit school at the age of 12 to help his father, who collected scrap metal for a living.

At the age of 20, he moved to Boston, Massachusetts in the United States, where he started his

own scrap metal business, and did a little of this

and a little of that. In 1907, he renovated a rundown burlesque hall and reopened it as a movie

theater. This proved to be a shrewd move. Over the next several years, Mayor and his partners put together the biggest movie

theater chain in New England, which by 1914 was big enough that the owners started a film

distribution business for the New England region. One of their early successes was 1915's

...