Later Years and Fall From Power
By 1948, due to the introduction of television and changing public tastes, MGM suffered a considerable dropoff in its success. The glory days of MGM as well as other studios were also over because of United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc. (1948), a Supreme Court decision that severed the connection between film studios and the movie theater chains that showed their films (though it would be another six years before Loew's sold majority control of MGM).
Under orders to control costs and hire "a new Thalberg," Mayer hired writer and producer Dore Schary as production chief. Schary, who was 20 years Mayer's junior, preferred message pictures in contrast with Mayer's taste for "wholesome" films.
By 1951, MGM had gone three years without a major Academy Award, which provoked further conflict between Mayer and Schenck. Believing that Mayer could not turn the tide, Schenck fired Mayer from the post he had held for 27 years, replacing him with Schary. The firing reportedly came after Mayer called New York and issued an ultimatum--"It's him or me" (or "It's either me or Schary", depending on the source). Mayer tried to stage a boardroom coup but failed and largely retired from public life.
Read more about this topic: Louis B. Mayer
Famous quotes containing the words years, fall and/or power:
“what if I’m 60 years old and not married,
all alone in a furnished room with pee stains on my underwear
and everybody else is married!”
—Gregory Corso (b. 1930)
“Follow your saint, follow with accents sweet;
Haste you, sad notes, fall at her flying feet.
There, wrapped in cloud of sorrow, pity move,
And tell the ravisher of my soul I perish for her love.”
—Thomas Campion (1567–1620)
“...I am who I am because I’m a black female.... When I was health director in Arkansas ... I could talk about teen-age pregnancy, about poverty, ignorance and enslavement and how the white power structure had imposed it—only because I was a black female. I mean, black people would have eaten up a white male who said what I did.”
—Joycelyn Elders (b. 1933)