One year after the merger that formed MGM, the studio released a short documentary. Studio Tour 1925 offered viewers a tour of the premises, with an intertitle capturing their impressive dimensions: “The Studio embraces an area of 43 acres, and its 45 buildings, including 14 big stages, are connected by 3 miles of paved streets.” Far from the Mission Road compound with its bucolic associations, the Culver City lot depicted here is effectively a city in itself: a site replete with its own laboratory that processed 40 million feet of film annually, a restaurant that fed “over 2,000 people a day,” and power plants that generated enough energy “to light a city of 8,000 homes.” The documentary presents a number of personnel, from directors, stars, and screenwriters to cameramen, publicists, and the head nurse of the studio hospital. It is only at the very end of the film that the audience is introduced to Mayer, Rapf, and Thalberg—“three executives responsible for [the studio’s] progress, its success, its future—three men who pull the strings.”

Given that MGM was only about a year old, the documentary is a fascinating record of not only the inhabitants of this enclave, but also of the way that the corporation wanted to present itself. Even as the short film extols the up-to-the-minute, state-of-the-art technologies and amenities offered by the studio, there is an underlying sense of watching MGM write its own historical narrative—preserving, for posterity, the dawning of a new age of filmmaking. The studio emerges as a veritable society, governed by the “three men who pull the strings”; artistically minded but utterly efficient, already successful but still ambitious, MGM is a dream factory built on an epic scale.

What did “pulling the strings” mean in practice for Thalberg in 1925? The day-to-day running of the studio—and the responsibility, then shared with Rapf, for producing a slate of 48 films for Loew's theaters (Rapf 2016: 40)— would obviously have been even more dynamic than the documentary let on. Though in the coming years Thalberg would go on to devolve some of the more logistical responsibilities to associate producers, such a process of delegation was not yet in place.