The Goldwyn in MGM never owned, ran or produced anything at that studio
A Warsaw boy who walked out of Poland penniless became a glove salesman in upstate New York, then helped shoot the first feature film made in Hollywood. Samuel Goldwyn's name ended up on Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, yet he had left the company behind it before the merger and never had any role there.
He began life as Szmuel Gelbfisz, son of a Hasidic peddler in Warsaw. He probably arrived in July 1879, though he later gave his birthday as 27 August 1882; Jews then commonly shaved years off their age to dodge conscription into the Tsar's army. After his father died he headed for Hamburg, learned glove making, spent six weeks with relatives in Birmingham under the name Samuel Goldfish, and in January 1899 crossed from Liverpool to Philadelphia.
Gloves made his first fortune. In Gloversville, New York, his flair for selling lifted him to vice-president of sales at the Elite Glove Company. In 1913 he joined his brother-in-law Jesse Lasky, Cecil B. DeMille and Arthur Friend in a company to make feature-length pictures. They paid 4,000 dollars for the rights to the stage play The Squaw Man, and filming began on 29 December 1913, the first feature shot in Hollywood.
Studio politics then took over. Lasky's firm merged with Adolph Zukor's Famous Players in June 1916, the ancestor of Paramount, and Goldwyn briefly chaired the combined board before clashes with Zukor pushed him out that September. With the Broadway producers Edgar and Archibald Selwyn he formed Goldwyn Pictures, a blend of their two surnames, and liked the invented word so much that he legally adopted it in December 1918. That company's lasting gift was its roaring lion trademark. He quit in 1922, and in April 1924 Marcus Loew folded it into Metro, creating MGM.
By then Goldwyn had set up Samuel Goldwyn Productions in 1923, a pure production outfit with no distribution of its own, which he ran for 35 years. William Wyler directed many of its most admired films, and the writers he hired included Lillian Hellman, Ben Hecht and Dorothy Parker. Legend credits Parker with a barbed reminder of his glove-making past during one heated script meeting. Late honours included the Thalberg award in 1947 and the Cecil B. DeMille award in 1973; he died on 31 January 1974.
Source: Samuel Goldwyn
