Welcome to a you must remember this flashback.

Almost every week this season, we're going to rerun an older episode of You Must

Remember This that has some relevance to the upcoming new episodes of our new

season, The Old Man is Still Alive. This is our second to last flashback, leading up to the

penultimate installment of The Old Man is still alive. Next week's episode is about the director

Stanley Donnan. The flashback is not really

about Stanley Donan, whose name is mentioned only once within it. It is about how Louis B. Mayer's

empire at MGM declined during the late 1940s and early 50s. Donnan's name comes up in the context of his directorial debut, On the

Town, which was a break from the norms of MGM's extremely profitable musical factory. A good

chunk of the episode is devoted to explaining how business as usual usually went when it came to

producing MGM musicals. On The Town was successful

after breaking that mold, but that success was one of the signs that the MGM mold was

starting to become a little moldy. I wanted you to hear this episode before you hear the

Donnan episode because I didn't have time or space to talk much about Donnan's

earlier career in next week's episode, because he made so many films that I find interesting

in the 60s and 70s. Donan got his start in movies as a dancer and then choreographer, working

primarily on classical MGM musicals. With co-director Gene Kelly, Donnan redefined what movie musicals could do and be.

But by the 1960s, the decline of the studios combined with his own itch for change, caused Donnan to move away from the genre that made him.

As you'll hear in next week's episode, he had to leave behind not just musicals,

but Hollywood itself, to find the third act of his career. Another reason to listen to this

flashback is that it includes a tidbit about a pivotal moment in the early career of our final

old man, John Houston. In our final episode, you'll hear

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