If the films were the product, then the stars at MGM - "More Stars Than There Are In Heaven" - were the raw materials. The best and the brightest worked for Mayer; names like Buster Keaton, Jean Harlow, The Marx Brothers, Joan Crawford, Greta Garbo (though Mayer was careful to instruct that the cameras never show her "fat" ankles), Spencer Tracy, Katherine Hepburn, Clark Gable, Gregory Peck, James Stewart, Grace Kelly, and so many more. Mayer saw the studio as a big extended family with himself as the stern father and the stars as his children. But this could be a dysfunctional family at times.

Film scholar Ephraim Katz called Mayer "A ruthless, quick-tempered, paternalistically tyrannical executive," who "ruled M-G-M as one big family, rewarding obedience, punishing insubordination, and regarding opposition as personal betrayal." And Herman J. Mankiewicz is quoted as saying, "He had the memory of an elephant and the hide of an elephant. The only difference is that elephants are vegetarians and Mayer's diet was his fellow man."

Mayer borrowed, loaned, and traded big name actors like they were his personal possessions. He had begun a personal campaign of "cleaning house" to eliminate actors and directors that didn't meet his strict moral codes, failed to keep bringing in top box-office dollars or that he saw as upstarts and troublemakers. The Mayer ax fell hard on Erich von Stroheim, John Gilbert, Buster Keaton, Lillian Gish, Tod Browning (director of Freaks, a film so bizarre that it was banned in England for 30 years and MGM denied for years that the film even existed), and even Greta Garbo, Mayer's prize find.