MGM’s 100th anniversary and its spy impact

MGM logo

This year marks the 100th anniversary of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. MGM was created by a merger of three companies in 1924.

At one time, it was the most glamorous studio in Hollywood before entering a state of decline. It also had an impact on the spy genre with The Man From U.N.C.L.E. television series in the 1960s and later when it acquired United Artists, which released the James Bond films.

MGM came to be in April 1924 when Metro Pictures, Goldwyn Pictures and Louis B. Mayer Pictures merged. The new company would adopt the lion logo of Goldwyn Pictures.

MGM over the decades would release movies such as The Wizard of Oz, Gone With the Wind, Mrs. Miniver, The Band Wagon, Gigi, Battleground, 2001: A Space Oydessey, and two versions of Ben Hur, among others. Its Culver City, California, backlot was one of the biggest in Hollywood.

By the 1960s, MGM’s best days were behind it although the backlot was still intact.

MGM entered the spycraze via The Man From U.N.C.L.E. Arena Productions, headed by Norman Felton, worked out of MGM. Felton met with James Bond author Ian Fleming in New York in October 1962. That was the first step in how U.N.C.L.E. came to be, with writer-producer Sam Rolfe doing the heavy lifting.

The series ran from September 1964 until January 1968. MGM re-edited U.N.C.L.E. episodes into eight movies for international release, with a few of the early ones getting released in the U.S. MGM, in 1966, also had U.N.C.L.E. stars Robert Vaughn and David McCallum be the leads in separate feature films (The Venetian Affair and Three Bites of the Apple, respectively) that were released in 1967.

After U.N.C.L.E. had run its course, MGM got bought and sold, getting diminished in the process. Much of MGM’s Southern California real estate got sold off. Costumes and props from MGM movies were auctioned off. By the mid-1970s, what few MGM movies being made (such as 1976’s Network) were distributed by United Artists, the original 007 studio.

What’s more, as a result of all the deal-making, the pre-1986 MGM film library eventually was acquired by corporate parent companies of Warner Bros. That’s why the 2015 film version of The Man From U.N.C.L.E. was released by Warners.

UA, owned by insurance conglomerate Transamerica, had its own troubles at the end of 1970s and the start of the 1980s. MGM bought UA, a deal that closed in 1981. Now, the James Bond film franchise fell under the sway of MGM.

Eon Productions, which controls creative issues related to Bond, had a series of confrontations with various MGM management regimes. Eon and MGM had legal fights, which resulted in no Bond films being made from summer 1989 (Licence to Kill) to fall 1995 (GoldenEye). Even after that conflict was settled, Eon had plenty of differences with MGM.

For much of the Bond era of MGM, the studio was a shadow of its former self. A notable low was when MGM went into bankruptcy in 2010.

In 2021, Amazon acquired MGM for $8.45 billion. That may have firmed up MGM’s finances, but to date, it hasn’t resulted in a steady production of Bond movies.

Regardless, a merger of almost a century ago, has had a big impact on the spy film and TV genre.