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Louis B. Mayer was a movie mogul before the term even existed.
In 1907, when Mayer was just 22, he purchased a dilapidated movie theater in the town of Haverhill, Massachusetts. Mayer refurbished the theater and turned it into a success. Within a few years, Mayer owned the largest theater chain in New England. Mayer's experience as a theater owner taught him that the real money in the movie theater business was in distribution, so he formed his first distribution company-the Louis B. Mayer Company. One of the first deals by the company (in 1915) was the New England rights to distribute D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation, which turned out to be the biggest movie of its time.
The rest, as they say in Hollywood, is history.
The $450,000 earned by Mayer off of Birth of a Nation gave him the bankroll he needed to expand his interests into movie production. In 1917, and still barely into his 30s, Mayer moved out west to the creative heart of the movie business. That year he would form the company that would soon evolve into Metro Goldwyn Mayer Studios (MGM). In a career that would span five decades, Mayer would be the business mind behind such enormous blockbusters as Ben Hur, Wizard of Oz, Gone With the Wind, Mutiny on the Bounty and even the Marx Brothers' Night at the Opera.
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