Marcus Loew

Marcus Loew was born into immigrant poverty on New York's Lower East Side and left school at nine to hawk newspapers and lemons. He made and lost small fortunes in the fur business before discovering, alongside his friend Adolph Zukor, that a penny arcade could turn a dime into a dynasty. Where Zukor's eye went to the pictures themselves, Loew's went to the room they played in.

He grasped earlier than almost anyone that whoever owned the theaters owned the industry. Starting with a handful of nickelodeons, Loew built a national circuit of increasingly opulent movie palaces, the Loew's theaters whose marble lobbies and vaulted ceilings sold ordinary people a few hours of borrowed luxury. By the early 1920s his chain was one of the largest in the country, an insatiable machine that needed a constant supply of quality films to fill its screens.

So Loew simply bought the supply. In 1920 he acquired Metro Pictures, and in 1924 he engineered the landmark merger of Metro with the Goldwyn Pictures Corporation and the Louis B. Mayer production company, creating Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. It was a piece of backward integration executed with a theater man's logic: the studio existed, in Loew's mind, chiefly to feed the theaters. He installed Mayer and the young Irving Thalberg in California to run production while he steered the empire from New York.

He did not live to see the giant he had built reach its full glory. Marcus Loew died of a heart attack in 1927 at fifty-seven, just as MGM was ascending to the summit of Hollywood. Control of his holdings passed to his trusted lieutenant Nicholas Schenck, and the parent company kept his name over its doors for decades, a quiet monument to the exhibitor who assembled the mightiest studio by starting from the seats.