Samuel Goldwyn

Goldwyn left Warsaw as a teenager, walked across Germany to Hamburg, worked his way across England, and arrived at Halifax and then New York in 1898. He sold gloves in upstate New York, then in 1913 produced his first film with brother-in-law Jesse Lasky and a then-unknown Cecil B. DeMille — The Squaw Man, the first feature shot in Hollywood. He co-founded the company that became Paramount Pictures and then, in 1924, the studio that became Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, though he was bought out before MGM bore his name. As an independent producer for the next four decades he made Wuthering Heights (1939), The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), and Guys and Dolls (1955). The malapropisms — "include me out," "a verbal contract isn't worth the paper it's written on" — were real and sometimes burnished.