Boston Movie Mogul Releases First Movie
On this day in 1918, Louis B. Mayer traveled from his Boston office to New York City for the premiere of his first movie release, the silent film Virtuous Wives. A decade earlier, Mayer had opened his first movie theater in Haverhill, which he quickly built into one of the earliest and the largest theater chains in New England. He soon branched into movie distribution, and with his growing fortune, the former Chelsea scrap metal dealer moved his family from their Haverhill apartment to a Brookline estate. But Mayer's dream was to make his own movies. Virtuous Wives marked his entrance into movie production, and his exit from Massachusetts. Within months, he had moved to Hollywood, where Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer would soon become one of the world's leading motion picture studios.
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