The only thing I knew was MGM, where I had worked since I was 14. Unions were not even a part of my vocabulary. SAG meant a gravity problem. EQUITY meant owning a house.
Jane Powell
You hear so much about the old movie moguls and the impersonal factories where there is no freedom. MGM was a wonderful place where decisions were made on my behalf by my superiors. What`s wrong with that?
Jimmy Stewart
[on her MGM record contract] I never paid for anything. There was never any recoupment for all the sessions I did. Not one penny. I had four people I hired to work for me on letters and on foreign releases. They paid for every photograph and I kept the ph...
Connie Francis
[Challenging MGM bosses in the 1930s] "Why does every black person in the movies have to play a servant? How about a black person walking up the steps of a court house carrying a briefcase?"
Myrna Loy
[speaking in 1969] When I was under contract to MGM, with people like poor Robert Taylor and so many others, the cinema`s job was solely entertainment. It filled a public need then. Now the cinema serves so many other purposes; it functions as psychiatris...
Deborah Kerr
[MGM] had us working days and nights on end. They`d give us pep-up pills to keep us on our feet long after we were exhausted. Then they`d take us to the studio hospital and knock us cold with sleeping pills... Then after four hours they`d wake us up and g...
Judy Garland
Even more than MGM, Disney [in the early 1960s] was the most conservative studio in town....They were growing aware. They weren`t stupid. They could add two and two, and I think they were beginning to suspect my homosexuality. I noticed people in certain ...
Tommy Kirk
At MGM there was a first wave of top stars, and a second wave to replace them in case they got difficult. I was second in line of defence, behind Myrna Loy.
Rosalind Russell
For seventeen years it was Mr. Mayer [MGM studio chief Louis B. Mayer] who guided me, and I never turned down a picture that he personally asked me to do.
Robert Taylor
[on his time working as an uncredited gag writer for the Marx Brothers at MGM] "It was an event when you could get all three of them on the set at the same time. The minute you started a picture with the Marx brothers you hired three assistant directors, ...
Buster Keaton
The contract system at Hollywood studios like MGM was a very efficient system in that because we were at the studio all the time we could rehearse a lot. But it also really repressed people. There were no union regulations yet, and we were all indentured ...
Gene Kelly
What do we need another galoot for? We`ve already got Wallace Beery -- Louis B. Mayer, upon finding out that Irving Thalberg had hired Tracy to join MGM.
Spencer Tracy
At MGM, I always played the second feminine lead. I was never the star in films. I was the brassy, good-hearted showgirl. I never really had my big moment on the screen. Broadway gave me the stardom that my soul kind of yearned for.
Ann Miller
The popular Andy Hardy" series movies were MGM`s tests for its promising stars such as Judy Garland, Lana Turner and Donna Reed. If you didn`t make it in those pictures, you were never heard from again".
Esther Williams
Crikey, mate. You`re far safer dealing with crocodiles and western diamondback rattlesnakes than the executives and the producers and all those sharks in the big MGM building.
Steve Irwin
Even now I feel furious with myself because whenever there`s a camera pointed towards me my MGM training makes me smile. I don`t like it. You can see it on all the people who came from that era because there was no question of them not smiling for the cam...
Leslie Caron
I suppose I was just window-dressing at MGM. You might call me Taylor`s dummy. I wore Walter Plunkett`s costumes beautifully though. I was the last of the Englishmen, after Edmund Purdom and Stewart Granger, both of whom had been giving them trouble in Ho...
Roger Moore
[When told to cheer up at an MGM film premiere, the reporter asked, "Are you happy to be here?"] "Of course, I got off location for this!"
Buster Keaton
[on MGM chief Louis B. Mayer] Louis B. Mayer came out west with $28.00, a box camera and an old lion. He built a monument to himself -- the Bank of America.
Bob Hope
On his life-long friend and frequent co-star, Judy Garland: "Judy turned to drugs because she was in pain and because drugs made her feel good. As one of the MGM kids, she`d been treated for most of her life to magical, instant, solutions to everything......
Mickey Rooney
We`re talking to New Line. They`ve got a couple projects they`re interested in me doing and I`m having meetings at MGM. There`s a lot of available projects.
David Ellis
The reason that MGM hired Bobby for Our Gang was that they could look at him and say, cry, and he`d cry, and not many kids can do that unless they really want to cry.
Tommy Bond
My first day at MGM they decided to bring this lion out, male, and it was not the best time for him to see me. All of a sudden he thought I was in heat and this lion went into the dressing room, which was just a trailer on the sound stage, and went crazy.
Kim Novak
I think the Caribbean would be gone tomorrow, ... I still think people would rather bet with the MGM Mirage than offshore. Would I like to book to everyone in the U.S.? The answer would be a resounding yes.
Robert Walker
[On rival Joan Crawford]: "She has slept with every male star at MGM except Lassie."
Bette Davis
