John M. Stahl

John Malcolm Stahl (January 21, 1886 – January 12, 1950) was an American film director and producer. Life and work He was born Jacob Morris Strelitsky in Baku (Azerbaijan) to a Russian Jewish family. When he was a child, his family left the Russian Empire and moved to the United States, settling in New York City. At a young age he took the name John Malcolm Stahl and began working, first as a theatre actor and then in the city's growing motion picture industry. He directed his first silent film short in 1913. In 1919 he signed on with Louis B. Mayer Pictures in Hollywood. In 1924 he was part of the Mayer team that founded MGM Studios. In 1927, Stahl was one of the thirty-six founding members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. With the industry's transition to talkies and feature-length films, Stahl successfully made the adjustment. From 1927 through 1929 Stahl was an executive at the short-lived independent studio Tiffany Pictures, and renamed the company "Tiffany-Stahl Productions".