Movie Moguls
Studio Heads, Independent Producers and key Movie Makers during the Golden Years of Hollywood
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The roots of Universal Pictures can rightfully be traced back to 1906 when Carl Laemmle returned home to Chicago after a stint as a bookkeeper in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, and opened up a chain of nickelodeons. This in turn led to the ambitious 39-year-old organizing a film exchange network he boldly called the Laemmle Film Service, which expanded west and north into Canada. Although he was an original member of the Edison Patents Company, he bristled at the idea of paying royalties to move to the next level: film production. Laemmle founded IMP (Independent Motion Picture Company) in New York in 1909 and for the next three years produced a number of economical multi-reel films while Edison's agents did their best to shut him down. Thomas Edison's General Film Company (known as "The Trust") filed incessant claims of patent infringement on those companies that refused to pay. Many of these independents (which included such future film moguls as Adolph Zukor and Jesse L. Lasky) pulled up stakes and left for California. As for Laemmle, he doggedly fought 289 legal actions brought about by GFC from 1909-12 and was ultimately victorious. IMP reformed in 1912 as Universal, filming two final productions in New York, The Dawn of Netta (1912) and a one-reeler, The Nurse (1912), before relocating his company to Los Angeles. From 1912-14 Universal operated two California studios, one in Hollywood and the Universal "Oak Crest Ranch" in the San Fernando Valley. The two operations were move to the new Universal City ("Taylor Ranch") in 1914 For a short time in 1912, the New York Film Company battled with Universal over the ownership of the Bison Motion Picture properties at Evendale and Santa Monica. New York Film Company wins the right to withdraw from Universal. Universal/Bison Evendale plant was returned to the New York Film Company. Universal was given the rights to trade names "Bison" and 101 Bison" Universal/Bison brand began production at the Providencia Ranch ( Universal Oak Crest ranch- the first Universal City) in 1912.
Universal began newsreel production in 1913 under Jack Cohn. In 1914 Laemmle acquired the Taylor Ranch on the north side of the Hollywood Hills and set about building Universal City. Damon and Pythias (1914) was Universal's first film completed there, just prior to the studio's official opening in March 1915 and, until 1925, Universal City would be the largest and most prolific studio in the world (eventually supplanted by MGM soon after its inception). Organized studio tours began in 1915 (they were discontinued in 1928 with the arrival of talkies, but resumed in 1964), which proved highly profitable. Laemmle, lacking a theater network, instituted a three-tiered branding system to market Universal's releases: Red Feather (low-budget), Bluebird (mainstream/medium budget) and Jewell (prestige releases, often roadshow attractions commanding premium prices). Heavy emphasis was placed on one-, two- and three-reel productions.
Universal became known as the most paternalistic of all the Hollywood studios. Virtually all of "Uncle" Carl's relatives (including his son Carl Laemmle Jr. and his vastly more talented nephew, William Wyler, were employed there). The studio enjoyed enormous hits during the 1920s, especially Lon Chaney's The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923) and The Phantom of the Opera (1925) before the actor was lured away to MGM. Lacking a theater network, Universal concentrated on independent rural theatrical houses, offering affordable exhibitor's packages which allowed them to change bills numerous times per week. This marketing strategy largely concentrated on product that would appeal to rural theaters through 1930. During the 1920s Europe also became a major source of revenue, with Universal actively involved in co-productions overseas. Sound productions became the norm by 1929 and Universal responded by increasing the number of quality productions, scoring its first Academy Award for Best Picture with All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) the following year. The studio became famous for popularizing the monster craze, beginning with Dracula (1931), that remained strong into 1935. Unfortunately, the studio's other product was proving less successful as the ravages of the Depression took hold. Laemmle's emphasis on quality productions misfired in the mid-'30s and he was forced to take an unfavorable $750,000 loan from Standard Capital which, after cost overruns on the production of Show Boat (1936), resulted in his ouster from the studio. He was forcibly retired from the movie industry in 1936 and sold Universal to Standard Capital Company, headed by Charles R. Rogers, who instituted drastic cost-cutting measures that coincided with the signing of Deanna Durbin, whose popularity virtually single-handedly saved the studio from financial disaster from 1937-40, until other popular stars (notably the comedy team of Bud Abbott and Lou Costello) were added to the studio's roster by a later management team headed by J. Cheever Cowdin. Universal was also--briefly--home to displaced low-budget veteran producers Trem Carr and W. Ray Johnston, who worked there in 1936 while reforming Monogram Pictures after breaking off from an unhappy association with Republic Pictures.
While many contemporary observers disliked Rogers' handling of the so-called "New" Universal, the undeniable fact is that he saved the studio at a critical point in its history. Carl Laemmle died in 1939 of a heart attack in Los Angeles at age 72. As with most Hollywood studios, production boomed during WW2, and by 1945 the studio was averaging a release of one feature film per week. Universal merged with International Pictures, an independent studio headed by ex-20th Century-Fox executives William Goetz and Leo Spitz in 1946 and renamed Universal-International Pictures (reverted to Universal in 1963). Since the company had consciously avoided building a proprietary theater chain it was unaffected by the 1949 Supreme Court theater anti-trust decision. Indeed, the studio was actually better positioned than the other majors as it's revenue stream continued unabated. Universal was purchased by and merged with Decca Records in 1952.
While not a pioneer in television production (most majors, with the notable exception of Columbia, initially stonewalled it), the medium became a huge part of Universal City in the late 1950s. In 1962 Universal was purchased by and merged with The Music Corporation of America (MCA) and became MCA Universal. MCA's television production company, Revue Televsion Productions with its Leave It to Beaver (1957) unit, would relocate to the sprawling Universal lot. Matsushita Electrical Industrial Co. purchased MCA in 1991. The Seagram Co. purchased MCA in 1995 and MCA Universal was renamed Universal Studios. In 1998 Universal purchased the USA television network. The company merged with a French global media company, Vivendi Media Group, and became Vivendi Universal in 2000. In April 2004 Vivendi Universal was purchased by and merged with the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) and became NBC Universal.Universal- Producer
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One of the kingpins of Hollywood's studio system, Zanuck was the offspring of the ill-fated marriage of the alcoholic night clerk in Wahoo, Nebraska's only hotel and the hotel owner's daughter. Both parents had abandoned him by the time he was 13. At 15, he joined the U.S. Army, and he fought in Belgium in World War I. Mustered out, he kept himself alive with a series of desultory jobs -- steelworker, foreman in a garment factory, professional boxer -- while pursuing a career as a writer. He turned his first published story (for "Physical Culture, " a pulp magazine) into a film scenario for William Russell; his next important sale was to Irving Thalberg. Although often described as barely literate, Zanuck turned out to have a knack for movie plots. After a well-paid apprenticeship with Mack Sennett, Syd Chaplin and Carl Laemmle, Zanuck hit his stride by devising (with Malcolm St. Clair) the Rin Tin Tin series of police-dog movies for Warner Brothers. For Warner, under his own name and three pseudonyms, he ground out as many as 19 scripts a year and became head of production at age 23. He helped forge that studio's style with such films as The Jazz Singer (1927), The Public Enemy (1931) and I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932). In 1933, after the Warners made it clear that Zanuck would never be more than an employee, he quit to form Twentieth Century Films (with backing from Louis B. Mayer and Joseph M. Schenck). In 1935, Twentieth absorbed a bankrupt giant, Fox. Zanuck ruled the combined studio for decades. He became known as the most "hands-on" of the major studio bosses, taking particular pride in his talent for remaking movies in the cutting room. His signature productions were such sentimental, content-laden dramas as How Green Was My Valley (1941), The Grapes of Wrath (1940), and Twelve O'Clock High (1949). In the late fifties, Zanuck relinquished day-to-day control of the studio, left his wife, and moved to Europe to concentrate on producing. Many of his later films were designed in part to promote the careers of his successive girlfriends, Bella Darvi, Juliette Gréco, Irina Demick and Geneviève Gilles -- none of whom found much favor with directors or audiences. After the success of The Longest Day (1962), Zanuck returned to run 20th Century-Fox; he promoted his son, Richard D. Zanuck, to head of production, then engineered his firing in a messy boardroom brawl. Within a few months, in May 1971, Zanuck himself was deposed. He was the last studio boss of his era to go down.20th Century Fox- Additional Crew
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Mayer was born Lazar Meir in the Ukraine and grew up in Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada after his parents fled Russian oppression in 1886. He had a brutal childhood, raised in poverty and suffering physical and emotional abuse from his nearly-illiterate peddler father. In the early 1890s, he changed his name to Louis and fudged his birth date to reflect the more "patriotic" date of July 4, 1885. He moved to Boston in 1904 and struggled as a scrap-metal dealer until he was able to purchase a burlesque house. Although he made large sums by showing films (he made a sizable fortune off The Birth of a Nation (1915)), his early business ventures favored legitimate theater in New England. As his theater empire expanded, he had acquired and refurbished enough small movie theaters that he was able to move his business to Los Angeles and venture into movie production in 1918. Along with Samuel Goldwyn and Marcus Loew of Metro Pictures, he formed a new company called Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM).
Over the next 25 years, MGM was "the Tiffany of the studios," producing more films and movie stars than any other studio in the world. Mayer became the prime creator of the enduring Hollywood of myth, home to stars like Clark Gable, Judy Garland, Joan Crawford, and Jean Harlow. Mayer became the highest-paid man in America, one of the country's most successful horse breeders, a political force and Hollywood's leading spokesman. Both he and MGM reached their peaks at the end of World War II, and Mayer was forced out in 1951. He died of leukemia in 1957.Metro/Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer- Additional Crew
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Lasky, one of the first pioneers of the Hollywood film industry and its first genuine 'mogul', was not only a consummate showman and entrepreneur, but a jack-of-all-trades. Born in San Francisco in September 1880, the son of a shoe salesman, he attended high school in San Jose and held down his first job at seventeen as a reporter for the San Francisco Post. He supplemented his scant income by moonlighting as a cornettist at local theatres. In 1899, he became infected with the prevailing gold fever and joined the rush to Alaska. He found no gold, but instead lost his own money. The next ten years saw him playing his cornet in Honolulu as the only white musician in the Royal Hawaiian Band, and then forming a vaudeville double act with his sister Blanche, touring on the East Coast and in Europe. By 1911, Lasky had established himself in New York. Already corpulent, balding, and wearing his trademark rimless glasses, looking every inch the promoter, Lasky started to produce musicals and comedy sketches for vaudeville. He also set up his own nightclub in New York, but it turned out a financial fiasco to the tune of $100,000. Having befriended the actor and writer Cecil B. DeMille, Lasky then decided to make his fortune in the burgeoning film industry.
In 1913, along with DeMille and his brother-in-law Samuel Goldfish (later to become Samuel Goldwyn), Lasky established the Jesse L. Lasky Feature Play Company with a starting capital of $26,500. His first feature was to be an epic western, The Squaw Man (1914), acquired for the then-princely sum of $15,000. It was to be filmed not at the regular facilities at Ft. Lee, New Jersey, but - for added realism - on location out west. Once arrived at their destination, Flagstaff, Arizona, Lasky and his companions found themselves in the middle of an old-fashioned range war between cattlemen and sheepmen. They wisely decided to keep on going and ended up in the small Californian town of Hollywood, where they rented a barn at the corner of Vine and Selma Street for $75 a month.
Production on the first ever feature shot in Hollywood began with one barn, one truck and a single camera (operated by Oscar Apfel) in January 1914. 'The Squaw Man' was a huge financial success, enabling Lasky to contract several new stars, including Blanche Sweet, Wallace Reid and Ina Claire. In 1915, he scooped his competitors again, by signing popular opera diva Geraldine Farrar to a three-picture deal for a fee of $20,000, a house (complete with servants), a chauffeur-driven limousine and a private railway carriage for her trip from, and back to, the Big Apple. At this time, the company counted among its regular roster, five directors, five cinematographers and some eighty contract players. All output was released through the Paramount Pictures Corporation, which had been formed by Adolph Zukor in partnership with Lasky, Goldfish and West Coast theatre proprietor W.W. Hodkinson. In 1916, Lasky merged with Zukor's Famous Players to become Famous Players Lasky (re-formed as Paramount in 1927), serving as vice president in charge of production under Zukor . In this capacity, he imprinted his artistic vision on much of the studio's output during the silent era, signing Rudolph Valentino for The Sheik (1921), discovering Maurice Chevalier in 1929, and so on. His input was also reflected in Paramount's overall predilection for adventure films and romances with a continental flavour. Paramount emerged from the silent era as the pre-eminent studio in Hollywood with the most cosmopolitan roster of stars and directors. Lasky himself became enormously wealthy, amassing a fortune estimated somewhere between $12 and $20 million - and losing it all during the Wall Street Crash.
Under pressure from the IRS and back-stabbed by his own personal assistant, Lasky was eventually ousted from his executive position at Paramount in 1932. Unsettled, he worked as an independent producer for Fox, then Warner Brothers and RKO. There was also a short-lived partnership with Mary Pickford in 1935, and, between 1938 and 1940, he produced his own radio talent show, 'Gateway to Hollywood'. During his final creative spell at Warners, he produced three seminal motion pictures: Sergeant York (1941), The Adventures of Mark Twain (1944) and Rhapsody in Blue (1945). For the last few years of his life, he was virtually unemployed. In 1957, Lasky finally returned to Paramount to work on a project which was to settle his dept with the IRS. He never completed it, dying in January 1958, almost forgotten by the industry he helped to create.Paramount- Additional Crew
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Adolph Zukor was a poor Hungarian immigrant when he arrived in the United States in 1889. He tried his hand in the fur trade (starting as a sweeper for $2 a week pay) and proved his entrepreneurial acumen by steady advancement, eventually setting up successful businesses in New York and Chicago. By the time he reached thirty, he had already amassed a considerable personal fortune. As early as 1903, Zukor astutely forecast the prospective financial rewards to be made from the burgeoning celluloid medium. Within a decade, he became heavily involved in the independent production of 'flickers', setting up penny arcades with nickelodeons and shooting galleries. In partnership with Marcus Loew, Zukor soon operated a major chain of cinemas. In 1912, he acquired the American rights to a popular French four-reel feature film, Les amours de la reine Élisabeth (1912), starring Sarah Bernhardt. The picture premiered at New York's Lyceum Theatre and its inevitable box office success led Zukor to challenge the notion -- commonly held by thespians of the period -- that motion pictures were inferior to the stage and were 'beneath' stage actors. In short order, he succeeded in persuading important Broadway-based stars like Minnie Maddern Fiske and James K. Hackett to join his Famous Players Film Company (set up in partnership with Loew Enterprises and veteran impresario Daniel Frohman). Other big names soon followed: Marie Doro, Pauline Frederick, Henry Ainley, Florence Reed, to name but a few. The undisputed star on the Famous Players roster, however, was Mary Pickford -- signed for two years in August 1916.
Four days after Pickford signed her contract, Zukor inaugurated the forthcoming wave of Hollywood mergers by combining his interests with those of pioneer producer Jesse L. Lasky to create Famous Players-Lasky. Several other companies -- Morosco, Bosworth and Pallas -- were also acquired. The distribution chain Paramount Pictures Corporation, jointly created by Zukor and Lasky in 1914, served to ensure nationwide distribution (more than a hundred additional cinemas were purchased near the end of the decade, including prestige venues such as the Rialto and Rivoli on Broadway). By 1919, Zukor effectively dominated the film industry in America. At least half of the major stars in the business were on his payroll. Realart Pictures Corporation was added to the mix as an outlet for second features while the A-grade output was released through Artcraft. Two production facilities were in place, one in Hollywood, the other, Astoria Studios, in New York. A partnership between Zukor and newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst also resulted in the formation of Cosmopolitan Productions (as a vehicle for films starring Hearst's mistress, Marion Davies). In 1924, Zukor's theatres began to proliferate even in Europe with the opening of the Paris Paramount and the London Plaza. Zukor further cemented this preeminent position in the industry by promoting the practice of 'block-booking'. This was a way of coercing independent theatre owners who wished to exhibit the films of a bankable box office star to also take a package -- sight unseen -- which was bound to include much of the lesser Realart product.
Between 1920 and 1923, Paramount averaged an annual profit of $4.5 million. By 1930, that figure had risen to $18.4 million. Wile this was largely the result of clever marketing and effective distribution, Zukor's shrewd, multifarious financial machinations had also contributed greatly to that success. He was not particularly concerned with film making itself, other than the monetary aspects (a long-standing dispute between Zukor and Cecil B. DeMille over budgets and salary demands led to Paramount's premier director departing the company in 1925). The artistic impetus for Paramount's rise to preeminence in the 20's was provided by the likes of Lasky and the creative genius of B.P. Schulberg (an independent producer with a keen eye for talent, hired in 1926 to head the West Coast studios as vice president in charge of production). Zukor, conversely, rarely left New York (except for a brief visit West in 1936 to help restructure the company).
In 1932, Paramount went bankrupt and declared a $ 15.8 million deficit. Chiefly to blame for this decline was an over-expansion propelled by Zukor himself, in particular the acquisition of the Publix theatre chain which had been bought with Paramount stock -- stock rendered all but worthless after the Wall Street Crash. Heads rolled, including those of Schulberg, sales chief Sidney Kent, and, ultimately, Lasky. Zukor, the consummate survivor, remained in place as company president until 1936, thereafter holding the position of chairman of the board and chairman emeritus until his death at the extraordinary age of 103. He went on to preside over a revitalised and profitable organisation (though no longer the industry leader it had been the 1920's -- a mantle now held by MGM). During the 1940's, Paramount showed record profits ($39.2 million in 1946)), a trend which continued through the 50's.
Zukor was described as mild-mannered, lean and aquiline in appearance, a reserved man who did not make friends easily. He also had a reputation for ruthlessness, which people like Samuel Goldwyn and Lewis J. Selznick could certainly attest to. Above all, he was a shrewd financier, never more than a self-proclaimed merchant with a 'calculated vision' who 'looked ahead a little and gambled a lot'.Paramount- Producer
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Famed for his relentless ambition, bad temper and genius for publicity, Samuel Goldwyn became Hollywood's leading "independent" producer -- largely because none of his partners could tolerate him for long. Born Shmuel (or Schmuel) Gelbfisz, probably in 1879, in the Jewish section of Warsaw, he was the eldest of six children of a struggling used-furniture dealer. In 1895 he made his way to England, where relatives Anglicized his name to Samuel Goldfish. There he begged (or stole) enough money for a ticket in steerage across the Atlantic. He reached the US, probably via Canada, in 1898. He gravitated to Gloversville, New York, in the Adirondack foothills, which was then the capital of the US leather glove industry; he became one of the country's most successful glove salesmen. After moving his base of operations to Manhattan and marrying the sister of Jesse L. Lasky, who was then a theatrical producer, Goldfish convinced Lasky and Cecil B. DeMille to go into film production. The new company's first film, The Squaw Man (1914), was one of the first features made in Hollywood; the company later became the nucleus of what would later become Paramount Pictures. As his marriage fell apart, Goldfish dissolved his partnership with Lasky. His next enterprise was the Goldwyn Co., founded in 1916 and named for himself and his partners, brothers Edgar Selwyn and Archibald Selwyn--Goldfish liked the name so much he took it for his own. The Goldwyn Co.'s stars included Mabel Normand, Madge Kennedy and Will Rogers, but its most famous legacy was its "Leo the Lion" trademark, which was adopted by its successor company, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM). Goldwyn himself was ousted from his own company before the merger, which was why his name became part of MGM even though he himself had nothing to do with the company. After his firing Goldwyn would have nothing to do with partners and went into independent production on his own, and for 35 years was the boss and sole proprietor of his own production company, a mini-studio specializing in expensive "quality" films, distributed initially by United Artists and later by RKO. His contract actors at various times included Vilma Bánky, Ronald Colman, Eddie Cantor, Gary Cooper, David Niven and Danny Kaye. In some cases, Goldwyn collected substantial fees for "lending" his stars to other producers. Touted by publicists for his "Goldwyn touch" and loathed by many of his hirelings for his habit of ordering films recast, rewritten and recut, Goldwyn is best remembered for his films that teamed director William Wyler and cinematographer Gregg Toland.Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer/Samuel Goldwyn Productions- Producer
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He was crude, uneducated, foul and, even on his best behavior, abrasive. No major studio executive of the so-called "Golden Age" was more loathed (although at times the dictatorial Samuel Goldwyn and the hard-nosed Jack L. Warner came close) than Harry Cohn.
Born in the middle of 5 children to Joseph Cohn, a Jewish tailor, and Bella, a Polish émigré, Harry was raised on New York's rough lower-class East 88th St., where he followed his older brother Jack Cohn into show business. Harry's life and the origins of Columbia Pictures are closely associated with Jack, whose early career paved the way for Harry's own ambitions, despite the fact that the two brothers fought bitterly and each harbored deep resentment over the other's success. By 19 Jack had left a job with an advertising agency to work for Carl Laemmle's newly formed Independent Motion Picture Company (IMP), rapidly working his way from entry-level job in the processing lab and through various positions where he founded Universal Weekly, one of the first newsreel outfits, for Laemmle. Jack soon found himself in charge of IMP's shorts as an uncredited producer. He was involved in Laemmle's first stab at feature production, Traffic in Souls (1913), which returned a then-whopping $450,000 on a $57,000 negative cost, convincing Uncle Carl to head west and invest in his own studio, Universal City. During this period Jack had convinced Laemmle to hire Joe Brandt, an attorney he'd worked for in advertising. Brandt, who would become the head of Universal's East Coast operations, would later be a key factor in the brothers' success.
Harry had grown up in his brother's shadow, working for much of the first decade of the 20th century as a lowly shipping clerk for a music publishing company. In 1912 he teamed with Harry Ruby at a local nickelodeon, singing duo for $28 per week, with Ruby receiving the biggest slice of the pie. The act would split up within a year and, after a brief stint as a trolley-car fare collector, Harry hit on the idea of applying song plugging to motion pictures. He produced a handful of silent shorts in which popular songs were mimed by actors, inviting the audiences to join in. His relatively modest success at this greased the skids for his brother to recommend him for a job at Universal. At age 27 Harry was working for Laemmle.
By 1919 Jack was itching for a change and wanted to become an independent film producer--he produced a series of shorts called Screen Snapshots, which purported to show stars' lives off-screen. Their popularity encouraged Jack to jump ship and Harry, sensing an opportunity, went with him. With them went Joe Brandt. The three formed CBC Film Sales, which released shorts, mostly terrible--so terrible, in fact, they earned the studio the nickname "Corned Beef and Cabbage Productions" (Harry would explode into a rage whenever he heard this). Desperate to put distance between he and his brother, Harry headed for Hollywood to oversee CBC productions there. By design or opportunity he ended up working out of the old Balshofer Studio on Hollywood Boulevard and gradually created his own studio, renting out the Independent Studios lot on Sunset and Gower. This was the heart of "Poverty Row"--so-called because it was an area filled with the offices of low-budget production companies and fly-by-night producers, who ground out ultra-cheap programmers (mostly westerns) hoping to make a few bucks. Harry was home.
He began producing two-reelers cheaply and nearly everything he sent east made money for CBC. It soon dawned on him that the big money wasn't in shorts but features, and the company scraped $20,000 together and produced More to Be Pitied Than Scorned (1922). Through the then-complex system of exchange releasing and so-called states rights sales, CBC netted $130,000 on the picture and, even more importantly, scored a deal for five additional features. By the end of 1923 CBC had released ten features, none of which lost money--a remarkable event along Gower Gulch. Harry was extremely conscious of his place in Hollywood and took offense at the derision CBC films received. He finally had enough, and on January 10, 1924, the company's name became Columbia Pictures Corporation. The next year the company paid $150,000 for a property at 6070 Sunset Boulevard. The partners made a fateful decision about the same time: unlike most of the other major studios (and this definition certainly didn't include Columbia at the time), they opted to forego theater ownership. This decision would prove extremely wise over the next 3three decades. Under Harry, Columbia rose from the Gower Gulch ash heap. His releases rarely featured A-list stars but consistently made money. Columbia took its first tentative stab at A-list feature production with The Blood Ship (1927) (its first featuring the now-familiar torch lady logo), and even that was made using a faded star, Hobart Bosworth, who agreed to appear in the melodrama for free.
Fate smiled on Harry when former Mack Sennett writer/director Frank Capra became available, and he was able to initially secure Capra's services for $1000 per picture. Capra's importance to the fortunes of Columbia Pictures cannot be overstated and, to be fair to Cohn, he recognized it. With rare exceptions the studio utilized competent journeymen directors like Erle C. Kenton, Malcolm St. Clair or Edward LeSaint, usually assigned to projects starring capable B-level actors hired on a one-shot basis (every so often Columbia would splurge and hire an "A"-list director like Howard Hawks. With each of his features, Capra's significance to Columbia grew, and with each hit Capra was given increasing carte blanche; the congenitally tightfisted Cohn would still fight bitterly with his star director over budgets, but would usually relent to the demands of his productions. Strangely, Columbia's status as a Poverty Row outfit actually helped. The major studios loaned them temperamental stars who demanded pay raises or script approval--since working for a "low-rent" studio like Columbia was considered punishment in the class-conscious world of Hollywood--and Harry enthusiastically assigned them to Capra's pictures, a tactic that usually paid off big. A top actor from MGM or Warners was expected to suffer in the low-budget purgatory of Gower Gulch but usually left eagerly wanting to work for Capra again. One such production, It Happened One Night (1934), single-handedly propelled the studio into the ranks of the majors and garnered Columbia its first Oscars (although the studio had been nominated for productions infrequently since 1931). Cohn never looked back; signing directors to contracts was one thing, but hordes of potentially unruly actors was another thing entirely--he held firm to his long-standing belief that contract stars were nothing but trouble, after paying keen interest to Jack L. Warner's battles with James Cagney, Bette Davis and Olivia de Havilland. In 1934 he signed The Three Stooges (who would enjoy a 22-year run at Columbia) and recent German émigré Peter Lorre (Cohn was at a loss on how to utilize him and Lorre would spent most of his time at Columbia being loaned out to other studios) to long-term contracts, but wouldn't begin to build a roster of contract stars in earnest until the late 1930s, beginning with Rosalind Russell, and always he kept their numbers comparatively small (William Holden, Glenn Ford and Rita Hayworth were among the select few in the late 1930s and early 1940s).
The vast majority of Columbia's output remained at the B-level well into the 1950s, but most of its films were profitable. It took Columbia until 1946 to experience its first bona fide blockbuster with The Jolson Story (1946), which netted $8 million on a $2-million investment and resulted in a profitable sequel in 1949. Among the major studios only Paramount and Columbia eagerly welcomed the intrusion of television, and Columbia responded by creating a subsidiary, Screen Gems (created by Harry's nephew Ralph Cohn) in the early 1950s. The division would pay off handsomely over the next 20 years.
Harry and his brother Jack continued to fight fiercely over business matters until Jack's death in 1956. Harry himself died of a heart attack in 1958. Despite his undeniable crudeness--the boorish, thuggish, crooked, loudmouthed "Harry Brock" character in Garson Kanin's classic Born Yesterday (1950), memorably played by Broderick Crawford, was largely based on Cohn), Harry Cohn's Columbia Pictures never had a negative year during his 30-year-plus reign--a record only approached by Louis B. Mayer, who ruled MGM from 1924 through mid-1951. Columbia began from a far more disadvantaged position than MGM did, though, and it thrived due to Cohn's keen judge of talent and his near-fanatical adherence to early business policies that were originally ridiculed.Columbia- Producer
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David Sarnoff was one of the giants of 20th Century mass media as the head of Radio Corp. of America (RCA) and the National Broadcasting System (MBC). Sarnoff, who was of Jewish descent, was born on February 27, 1891 in Belarus in the old Russian Empire and emigrated with his family to the United States in 1900.
Sarnoff quit his job as an office boy with the Commercial Cable Co. when he was refused time off to observe Rosh Hashanah. In 1906, he was hired by the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Co. of America and, in an "Only in America" Horatio Alger-like story, rose to become of the head of the firm through determination and hard work.
Sarnoff learned all he could about "wireless" (radio broadcasting) technology, serving at Marconi stations (radio stations) both on land and at sea. One of his posts was at the Wanamaker Department Store in New York City, where he and other Marconi operators followed radio traffic to determine the fate of the Titanic. He would later circulate the story that he was the first operator to actually receive a Titanic S.O.S. signal via wireless.
The industrious Sarnoff rose steadily in the company, eventually becoming chief inspector and contracts manager. He pioneered the use of radio on a railroad, music broadcasting (from Marconi's station at the Wanamaker Store), and long-distance wireless telephony. Wireless telephony convinced him of the viability of mass commercial radio broadcasting (transmission from a radio station to many receivers rather than the station-to-station "point-to-point" broadcasting that was the norm). He urged the company to develop a "Radio Music Box", a proposal that was put on the back burner during World War One.
The purchase of American Marconi by General Electric prepared the groundwork for his rise to the top of the electronic communications industry. G.E. rechristened the company the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) to serve as a holding company for its radio patents monopoly, To promote his idea of the Radio Music Box for the mass public, Sarnoff helped arrange the broadcast of the 1921 heavyweight title fight between Jack Dempsey and Georges Carpentier. Reaching an audience of over a quarter of a million listeners, it helped proved the viability of "broadcasting", the transmission of a signal to multiple receivers. There was an audience out there, and Sarnoff was determined that RCA cash in, both from the production of radio sets and the creating content to be broadcast to those sets.
The radio medium started to explode as more "amateur" radio operators bought sets. As radio become more popular, Sarnoff's rise at RCA was assured since the commercialization of radio was now viable. RCA bought its first radio station in 1926, WEAF-New York, and established the National Broadcasting Co. (NBC), America's first radio network. It also bought the Victor Talking Machine Co., a major manufacturer of sound recordings, and renamed it RCA Victor.
Sarnoff became RCA's president in 1930. The success of NBC meant that it eventually was divided into two networks, Red and Blue, becoming the dominant force in commercial radio broadcasting. (The Blue Network eventually becoming the American Broadcasting Co. when it was spun-off under threat of anti-trust action during World War II.) As head of RCA and NBC, Sarnoff established himself as the major figure in the development of radio broadcasting in America and in television.
Under Sarnoff's leadership, RCA and NBC became leaders in the development of electronic television and color television, with RCA's equipment and standards dictating national standards. He also had a presence in the movies, with RCA providing the "R" in R.K.O. Pictures (Radio-Keith-Orpheum), which initially used RCA's patents for a sound system for motion pictures.
David Sarnoff retired as CEO of RCA in 1970 and died on December 12, 1971, at the age of 80. His mausoleum in Kensico Cemetery in Valhalla, New York is outfitted with a stained-glass window depicting a vacuum tube, an essential component in the development of radio and television broadcasting.FBO/RKO- Producer
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David O. Selznick was a son of the silent movie producer Lewis J. Selznick. David studied at Columbia University until his father lost his fortune in the 1920s. David started work as an MGM script reader, shortly followed by becoming an assistant to Harry Rapf. He left MGM to work at Paramount then RKO. He was back at MGM in 1933 after marrying Irene Mayer Selznick the daughter of Louis B. Mayer. In 1936, he finally set up his own production company, Selznick International. Three directors and fifteen scriptwriters later, Gone with the Wind (1939) was released.Selznick International Pictures- Producer
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Billionaire businessman, film producer, film director, and aviator, born in Humble, Texas just north of Houston. He studied at two prestigious institutions of higher learning: Rice University in Houston and California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California. Inherited his father's machine tool company in 1923. In 1926 he ventured into films, producing Hell's Angels (1930), Scarface (1932) and The Outlaw (1943). He also founded his own aircraft company, designed, built and flew his own aircraft, and broke several world air speed records (1935-1938). His most famous aircraft, the Hercules (nicknamed "The Spruce Goose"), which was as he discovered, an under-powered wooden seaplane designed to carry 750 passengers. That plane was completed in 1947, but flew only once over a distance of one mile despite having eight Pratt & Whitney Wasp Major engines, among the most powerful radial piston engines of the day. Throughout his life he shunned publicity, eventually becoming a recluse but still controlling his vast business interests from sealed-off hotel suites, and giving rise to endless rumors and speculation. In 1971 an "authorized" biography was announced, but the authors wound up in prison for fraud, and the mystery surrounding him continued until his death in Houston. He is buried in Glenwood Cemetery, HoustonRKO- Additional Crew
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Herbert J. Yates, the cigar-chomping force behind Republic Pictures, spent his early adulthood as a salesman for the American Tobacco Co. (and later, at age 23, for Liggett & Meyers as an account executive). At the beginning of World War I, Yates saw an opportunity to apply his hard-nosed business skills in the burgeoning film processing business, which led him to create Consolidated Film Industries (CFI) in 1922 (a company that is still in existence today, although Republic Pictures ceased operations in 1959).
The 1933 bankruptcy of slapstick producer Mack Sennett presented a unique opportunity for a handful of enterprising (though some would call them cheapskate) producers along Gower Gulch (a section of Gower Street in Hollywood, also called "Poverty Row," where many small, independent producers and production companies had their offices). Sennett, who had fallen on hard times due to a combination of circumstances he was both unable and unwilling to confront, had his own well-equipped studio production facility. Nat Levine, the head of serial specialist Mascot Pictures, had his headquarters in a cramped building above a building contractor's office on Santa Monica Boulevard. He immediately saw an opportunity to go big time and approached Monogram Pictures chiefs Trem Carr and W. Ray Johnston about a joint venture to buy the studio, an offer they declined. Rebuffed but not discouraged, Levine obtained an option for the shuttered facility. At the same time, Yates was entering into film production with his fledgling Republic Pictures, and since both Monogram and Mascot were customers of his film lab (to which they owed a considerable amount of money), he held more influence than Levine in convincing the Monogram executives to join under the wings of the Republic eagle. Neither Monogram nor Mascot had owned much in the way of any real production facilities, instead renting studio space whenever it was needed. When Mascot and Monogram (along with Liberty Pictures, Chesterfield Pictures and Invincible Pictures, three small production companies that Yates basically foreclosed on) merged into Republic, Mascot was killed off and the Monogram name was (temporarily) shelved when production began at Republic in 1935 (beginning with a John Wayne oater, Westward Ho (1935), released that August. This "marriage," however, was not one of equals. Carr and Johnston, nominally the studio's chieftains, constantly clashed with Yates, who they felt was a tyrannical Hollywood interloper. One thing became clear, however--Yates was, as Republic's chief stockholder, the financial force of the studio. Levine managed to largely remain out of the fray (he was later bought out by Yates and blew his money on the ponies), and by using many of the same production techniques he had used at Mascot, the new studio's output came to resemble the best of Levine's Mascot product. Republic could also boast of having the best special effects/miniatures department (headed by former Mascot employees Howard Lydecker and his brother Theodore Lydecker) in the industry, a factor that greatly contributed to the quality level of Republic's output. Chafing under Yates' autocratic business style, Carr and Johnston finally departed Republic in 1937 to reform Monogram Pictures. Republic would, for a time, dominate the B-movie industry and often defy expectations by producing several notable A-pictures (Lewis Milestone's The Red Pony (1949), Orson Welles' Macbeth (1948), John Ford's The Quiet Man (1952), among others), along with a number of excellent programmers that temporarily blurred Republic's image as a Poverty Row studio. Yates' reign at Republic would last until 1956, when he was ultimately ousted by stockholders who'd grown increasingly dissatisfied with him. Much of the resentment was based on the blatant favoritism Yates showed toward his wife, Vera Ralston, a former ice-skating champ from Czechoslovakia who Yates repeatedly cast in big, expensive vehicles that almost always lost money because of her near total lack of acting skills. Also, Yates refused to license Republic's film library to be shown on television, believing that TV was just a fad, a mistake that cost the company hundreds of thousands of much-needed dollars. He eventually "saw the light" and not only licensed Republic's library for television showing but actually got the studio itself involved in television production. By that time, however, it was too late. With no strong production head and faced with the onslaught of television in an era of declining theater revenue, Republic Pictures' sprawling studio became more valuable as a real estate and film library portfolio than as a functioning production company. The facilities were sold to CBS and became CBS Studio Center, Studio City, CA. Yates died an extremely wealthy man and eventually left Vera Ralston a very rich widow.Republic- Spyros Panagiotis Skouras was born on 28 March, 1893 at Skourahorian, Greece, the son of a sheepherder. Originally committed to studying for the priesthood, Skouras decided to emigrate to the United States with his two brothers, eventually settling in St Louis, Missouri. While working as a busboy there Skouras spent his nights studying English, business practices, accounting and law. In 1912, the three brothers pooled their money and purchased a rundown nickelodeon in a poor St Louis neighborhood. After turning around the theater's fortunes, the brothers built on their success by borrowing $150,000 to buy and refurbish the city's old Grand Central Theater. Eventually the Skouras brothers would go on to control a chain of 650 theaters across the United States.
Skouras, along with his younger brother, George, joined the U.S. Army's Signal Corps during World War I. Demobilized after the war, they returned to St. Louis and their theater interests.
The Skouras brothers sold their theater franchise in 1928 to Warner Brothers, which made Skouras and his younger brother George officers in the company. Charles Skouras went on to become president of National Theaters Inc. In 1931 Spyros Skouras left Warner's to work for Paramount and, the following year, was lured away to take over Fox Metropolitan Theaters in New York, which had been losing a million dollars a year. He was able save the franchise from bankruptcy and, by 1942, was in a position to take over the presidency of all of 20th Century-Fox. During his tenure as president, Skouras is credited with embracing the technologies of CinemaScope and stereophonic sound in an attempt to save the movie industry from the growing competition from television. By the early 1960s, mounting losses compounded by the 30 million over-budget production of Cleopatra (1963), led to Skouras being forced out of Fox's presidency and into what was then the figurehead position of chairman, which he retained until retiring in 1969 to devote more time to his shipping-line business, Prudential -Grace Lines.
Skouras died of a heart-attack at his home in Mamaroneck, NY, on 16 August, 1971. He was survived by his wife of 51 years, the former Saroula Bruiglia, two daughters and two sons.20th Century Fox - Producer
Barney Balaban was born in 1887. He was a producer. He died in 1971.Paramount- Harry M. Warner was born on 12 December 1881 in Krasnoshiltz, Russian Empire. He was a producer, known for The Lost City (1920), My Four Years in Germany (1918) and Cleaning Up (1920). He was married to Rea Ellen Levinson. He died on 25 July 1958 in Hollywood, California, USA.Warner Brothers
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People liked Joseph M. Schenck. Anyone who knew both him and his brother Nicholas Schenck would comment on how different they were. He came to New York in 1893 and, with his younger brother, built a drugstore business. They risked some profits and made more money in amusement parks. Marcus Loew bought one of their parks in 1907, then made the Schencks partners in Consolidated Enterprises, his theater and movie house chain in 1912. The brothers' personalities were quite different; Joe was affable and enjoyed keeping a deal together by finding common ground between business associates that often despised each other. His brother Nick was a cold, driven, hard-nosed businessman who thoroughly enjoyed keeping people on short leashes. In short, people were drawn to Joe and feared Nick.
Joe booked films, which gave him the opportunity to meet movie stars, among them Norma Talmadge, who became his wife in 1916. He was fascinated by Hollywood and wanted to get involved with movie production, whereas Nick was quietly managing Loew's burgeoning theatrical empire. Joe was far more enamored by the Hollywood lifestyle than his brother and wanted to take a much more active role in the production rather than the high finance end of the business. He saw his opportunity in 1917 to produce Roscoe 'Fatty' Arbuckle, Buster Keaton and the later D.W. Griffith films. At this point the brothers' lives took separate paths; Joe left Consolidated while Nick remained and soon became Marcus Loew's #2 man, assisting him in his dream of combining Metro Pictures with Goldwyn Pictures in order to provide the expanding theater chain with a steady flow of quality films (morphing into MGM, after bringing Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg on board in 1924), later ascending to the presidency of Loew's Incorporated's--MGM's parent company--after Marcus Loew's sudden death (quietly becoming the most powerful man in the motion picture industry) in late 1926. Joe became chairman of United Artists (which, somewhat ironically, lacked a theater chain--a factor that would ultimately cripple his brother's studio in the 1950s after the Supreme Court's anti-trust decision required theatrical divestment) in 1924, then its president in 1927.
In 1933 he helped Darryl F. Zanuck establish 20th Century Pictures, which merged with the ailing Fox Film Corp. in 1935, with Schenck as chairman of the renamed 20th Century-Fox. Organized crime had coveted Hollywood from a distance for years, but had been unable to make serious inroads into the area thanks to the brutally effective work of the Los Angeles Police Department's so-called "hat squad," which was tasked with keeping the city Mafia-free. The studio's weak link was through the growing thorns in their collective sides: the unions, whose membership and collectives spanned across state lines. In 1936 Willie Morris Bioff, a Chicago mobster out of the remnants of the Al Capone gang who ran the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees & Moving Picture Machine Operators behind the scenes, told the studios they could avoid strikes (along with the implied work slowdowns and spontaneous theater fires) for $2 million. All agreed to pay, but Schenck made one of the payoffs with a personal check, which came to the attention of U.S. Internal Revenue Service agents. Thanks to the paper trail, Schenck was indicted for income tax evasion. With some applied pressure and soul-searching, Joe testified against Bioff and the titular union president, George E. Browne, in 1941 as part of a plea bargain. In 1946 he began to serve a one-year sentence for tax irregularities and bribery (of the union officials) but was pardoned by President Harry Truman after having served only four months.
After leaving prison he immediately returned to Fox as head of production. Marilyn Monroe became friendly with him in 1947 and was known as one of his "girlfriends", although she said the relationship was platonic. He was helpful in her career in any case, getting her a very small part in Fox's Scudda Hoo! Scudda Hay! (1948) and convincing Harry Cohn at Columbia to give her a contract after Fox dropped her.
AMPAS awarded Schenck a special Oscar for services to the film industry in 1952. In 1953 he co-founded the Magna Corp. with Mike Todd to market the Todd-AO wide-screen system, which was wildly profitable (and remains a technological force in the movie industry to this day). Shortly after he retired in 1957, Schenck had a stroke and never fully recovered.20th Century Fox- Producer
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With his brothers Harry M. Warner, Albert Warner, and Sam Warner, he founded Warner Bros. Pictures Inc. in 1923. They released the first motion picture with synchronized sound, The Jazz Singer (1927) with Al Jolson. In the 1930s they gave employment to a parade of stars, including Bette Davis, Errol Flynn and Paul Muni, as well as James Cagney, Edward G. Robinson, and a man whose star would eventually rise in the 1940s, Humphrey Bogart. Decades later, the firm's successor, Warner Communications Inc., merged with Time Inc. to become Time Warner Inc., the world's largest media and entertainment company.Warner Brothers- Editor
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Arguably there wouldn't have been a Columbia Pictures without him. Jacob (Jack) Cohn was born into an impoverished immigrant family that eventually numbered four children. Hollywood history may credit his younger brother Harry Cohn for a begrudging amount of greatness but he not only followed in Jack's footsteps into the film business, he was a vital part of everything Harry ever built. Jack quit a job at a New York advertising agency in 1908 and jumped on board with the fledgling "Film Service Company", owned by Carl Laemmle. This company morphed into the "Independent Motion Picture" (or IMP) Corporation and began producing its own films (it would, in turn, morph into Universal after moving to Hollywood during the industry's film patent war). The 19-year old quickly rose from a lowly position in the film lab and literally b.s.'d his way up the company's hierarchy. By 1913, he had talked Laemmle into producing newsreels, forming "Universal Weekly". Jack was soon placed in charge of Laemmle's short subject department, which then comprised all of its output. He was placed in charge of cutting Universal's first feature, a $57,000 gamble called Traffic in Souls (1913); its then whopping return of $450,000 was not lost on Jack (or Laemmle for that matter, he committed himself to feature films after this early success and moved west). It was about this time that Jack convinced Uncle Carl to hire an old friend from his days in the advertising business, Joe Brandt, a lawyer who would prove instrumental in the brothers' affairs over the next dozen or so years. With Universal's formation in Hollywood, Jack remained in New York and recommended his brother Harry for a job within the studio. Since Laemmle was an ardent believer in paternalism (practically all his relatives were employed there), it was no great push to get him to hire Harry, who became Laemmle's personal secretary. By 1920, Jack had grown anxious to branch out on his own in the movie business and enlisted Harry and Brandt to form their own production company as CBC (Cohn-Brandt-Cohn) Film Sales. Their initial endeavor, a series of three shorts shot in New York based on H.A. McGill's "Hall Room Boys" cartoons proved a dismal failure and nearly doomed the embryonic firm. Harry needed a 3,000 mile buffer zone between his brother and Brandt and headed West to base CBC's product where most of the talent was. For the next few months, he managed to bring CBC's shorts in cheaply, using excess film stock purchased from other studios. He rented or borrowed everything possible and, incredibly, managed to send marketable product East. Harry rented an old studio at the corner of Sunset and Gower that stood as the portal to Poverty Row, a notorious area that had a reputation of being a place where careers went to die. Like Laemmle, Harry rather belatedly realized that the big money was in feature film production and convinced Jack and Joe to pony up $20,000 for a 6-reel production of More to Be Pitied Than Scorned (1922). The modest production realized a profit of $130,000 which was remarkable considering CBC lacked a theatrical network and had to split profits with innumerable (and often greedy) film exchanges for distribution. The success of this first feature resulted in a deal for 5 additional features - CBC enthusiastically jumped in with both feet, producing 10 features by the end of 1923... each one proving profitable. Despite this success, CBC was met with derision in Hollywood, and dubbed "Corned Beef and Cabbage" Productions, which enraged Harry. Seeking to reposition the firm as a major player in town, Harry successfully lobbied for a name change to "Columbia Pictures Corporation" and, with the change, went public and, by 1925, physical ownership of the Gower studio. Throughout, the brothers fought like wet cats in a burlap bag. Harry, although possessing remarkable instincts for talent, was universally disliked by everyone who ever worked for him. He was cheap, crude, profane, uneducated and enthusiastically belittled anyone at the slightest provocation. Jack remained in the East and acted as the company's banker, remaining mostly disconnected with the creative process. Joe Brandt acted as an intermediary between the two bothers, who continued to fight incessantly (he would be bought out by the end of the decade and leave the company). Columbia Pictures rose out of the ash pile of Poverty Row by making a handful of wise business decisions hashed out by the partners in the 1920s: the company rejected theater ownership (which proved even more intelligent after the Supreme Court ruled against other studio's chain ownership in the 1940s), eschewed longterm talent contracts (with the notable exception of wunderkind director Frank Capra and The Three Stooges, which proved too good a deal to pass up) and virtually fed off its early Poverty Row reputation. Columbia's ability to attract talent was a direct result of being able to contract with loaned-out actors whose studios wanted to punish for perceived unreasonable pay and script disputes. These stars would invariably be placed into Capra's first-class productions; notably, It Happened One Night (1934) which single-handedly propelled the company into the ranks of the majors - and earned its first Oscars. Aside from Capra's films and a precious few other top notch directors like Leo McCarey, the vast majority of Columbia's pre-war output was decidedly B-level, featuring mostly supporting level quality stars; it didn't enjoy its first blockbuster hit until The Jolson Story (1946), an $8 million earner. But Columbia Pictures incredibly never had a year in the red during his brother's reign... a record unequaled by any other Hollywood studio, even MGM, which suffered greatly after WW2. Unlike the other majors, Columbia embraced television. Jack's son, Ralph Cohn, with the blessing of the corporation, formed the Screen Gems subsidiary in the early 1950s - another fortuitous move that paid big dividends in the 1960s. The brothers love-hate relationship continued until Jack's death in 1956 at age 67. Harry died of a heart attack in 1958 at age 66.Columbia- Producer
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Hal Roach was born in 1892 in Elmira, New York. After working as a mule skinner, wrangler and gold prospector, among other things, he wound up in Hollywood and began picking up jobs as an extra in comedies, where he met comedian Harold Lloyd in 1913 in San Diego. By all accounts, including his own, he was a terrible actor, but he saw a future in the movie business and in Harold Lloyd. Roach came into a small inheritance and began producing, directing and writing a series of short film comedies, under the banner of Phun Philms (soon changed to Rolin, which lasted until 1922), starring Lloyd in early 1915. Initially these were abysmal, but with tremendous effort, the quality improved enough to be nominally financed and distributed by Pathe, which purchased Roach's product by the exposed foot of film. The Roach/Lloyd team morphed through two characters. The first, nominally tagged as "Will E. Work", proved hopeless; the second, "Lonesome Luke," an unabashed imitation of Charles Chaplin, proved more successful with each new release. Lloyd's increasing dissatisfaction with the Chaplin clone character irritated Roach to no end, and the two men engaged in a series of battles, walkouts and reconciliations. Ultimately Lloyd abandoned the character completely in 1917, creating his now-famous "Glasses" character, which met with even greater box-office success, much to the relief of Roach and Pathe. This new character hit a nerve with the post-war public as both the antithesis and complement to Chaplin, capturing the can-do optimism of the age. This enabled Roach to renegotiate the deal with Pathe and start his own production company, putting his little studio on a firm financial foundation. Hal Roach Productions became a unique entity in Hollywood. It operated as a sort of paternalistic boutique studio, releasing a surprising number of wildly popular shorts series and a handful of features. Quality was seldom compromised and his employees were treated as his most valuable asset.
Roach's relationship with his biggest earner was increasingly acrimonious after 1920 (among other things, Lloyd would bristle at Roach's demands to appear at the studio daily regardless of his production schedule). After achieving enormous success with features (interestingly, his only real feature flop of the 1930s was with General Spanky (1936), a very poorly conceived vehicle for the property), Lloyd had achieved superstar status by the standards of "The Roaring Twenties" and wanted his independence. The two men severed ties, with Roach retaining re-issue rights for Lloyd's shorts for the remainder of the decade. While both men built their careers together, it was Lloyd who first recognized his need for creative freedom, no longer needing Roach's financial support. This realization irked Roach, and from this point forward he found it difficult, if not impossible, to offer unadulterated praise for his former friend and star (while Lloyd himself was far more generous in his later praise of Roach, he, too, could be critical, if more accurate, in his recollections). Lloyd went on to much greater financial success at Paramount.
Despite facing the prospect of losing his biggest earner, Roach was already preoccupied with building his kiddie comedy series, Our Gang, which became an immediate hit with the public. By the time he turned 25 in 1917, Roach was wealthy and increasingly spending time away from his studio. He traveled extensively across Europe. By the early 1920s he had eclipsed Mack Sennett as the "King of Comedy" and created many of the most memorable comic series of all time. These included the team of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, Charley Chase, Edgar Kennedy, 'Snub' Pollard and especially the long-running Our Gang series (AKA "The Little Rascals" in TV distribution). Pathe, which distributed his films, shut down its U.S. operations after its domestic representative, Paul Brunet, returned to France in 1927. But Roach was able to secure an even better deal with MGM (his key competitor, Mack Sennett, was also distributed by Pathe, but he was unable to land a deal, ultimately declaring bankruptcy in 1933). For the next eleven years Roach shored up MGM's bottom line, although the deal was probably more beneficial to Roach. In the mid-'30s Roach became inexplicably enamored of 'Benito Mussolini', and sought to secure a business alliance with the fascist dictator's recently completed film complex, Cinecitta. After Roach asked for (and received) assurances from Mussolini that Italy wasn't about to seek sanctions against the Jews, the two men formed RAM ("Roach And Mussolini") Productions, a move that appalled the powers at MGM parent company, Leow's Inc. These events coincided with Roach selling off "Our Gang" to MGM and committing himself solely to feature film production. In September 1937, Il Duce's son, Vittorio Mussolini, visited Hollywood and Roach's studio threw a lavish party celebrating his 21st birthday. Soon afterward the Italian government took on an increasingly anti-Semitic stance and, in retribution, Leow's chairman Nicholas Schenck canceled his distribution deal. Roach signed an adequate deal with United Artists in May 1938 and redeemed his previous record of feature misfires with a string of big hits: Topper (1937) (and its lesser sequels), the prestigious Of Mice and Men (1939) and, most significantly, One Million B.C. (1940), which became the most profitable movie of the year. Despite the nearly unanimous condemnation by his industry peers, Roach stubbornly refused to re-examine his attitudes over his dealings with Mussolini, even in the aftermath of World War II (he proudly displayed an autographed portrait of the dictator in his home up until his death). His tried-and-true formula for success was tested by audience demands for longer feature-length productions, and by the early 1940s he was forced to try his hand at making low-budget, full-length screwball comedies, musicals and dramas, although he still kept turning out extended two-reel-plus comedies, which he tagged as "streamliners"; they failed to catch on with post-war audiences. By the 1950s he was producing mainly for television (My Little Margie (1952), Blondie (1957) and The Gale Storm Show: Oh! Susanna (1956), for example). His willingness to delve into TV production flew in the face of most of the major Hollywood studios of the day. He made a stab at retirement but his son, Hal Roach Jr., proved an inept businessman and drove the studio to the brink of bankruptcy by 1959. Roach returned and focused on facilities leasing and managing the TV rights of his film catalog.
In 1983 his company developed the first successful digital colorization process. Roach then became a producer for many TV series on the Disney Channel, and his company still produces most of their films and videos. He died peacefully just shy of his 101st birthday, telling stories right up until the end.Hal Roach Studios- Additional Crew
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Edward R. Alperson was an ambitious 39-year old manager of a film exchange when he decided to organize a new studio he called Grand National in 1936. The company headquartered in New York City with the First Division Picture Exchange as it's distribution arm and received a tremendous boost when Warner Brothers' prime star, James Cagney, walked over long standing disputes with Jack L. Warner. Alperson dangled a lucrative offer at Cagney and he signed on, knowing that Warner could effectively blackball him from working at a major studio. With Cagney on board, Alperson flew into high gear. Aging cowboy superstar Tom Mix (by then a far flung circus owner in serious financial straights) rented out his home to Grand National as their Hollywood headquarters while Alperson set about creating an all-important image for his new company, signing on producers and developing projects. Things began well for Grand National... the company initially made profitable films that, if not of the same caliber as that of the majors, were fast paced and enjoyable B's. Cagney scored decent returns with Great Guy (1936) although it was somewhat of a shock to see him in a film with such obviously low production values. Alperson spent $25,000 for the rights of a sure-fire Cagney hit, 'Angels Wth Dirty Faces' but despite all pleading from his associates, opted to produce Something to Sing About (1937) next. It proved a devastating mistake for Grand National, production costs soared to $900,000 and the film, easily Cagney's worst of the 30's, immediately flopped. The fledgling company was ruined. Creditors were held at bay for most of 1938 while production was cut back to a dozen or so features of declining quality and the company, bleeding red ink at the rate of $35,000 a week, failed in 1939, with over $700,000 in outstanding debts. Alperson resigned as the studio's head on Feb. 25, 1939.Grand National- Additional Crew
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W. Ray Johnston had years of silent film production experience (at Florida's Thanhouser Company and Syndicate Pictures) behind him when he became an independent producer, founding Big Productions Corp. in 1924 and, later, Rayart. These companies paved the way for his entry into sound pictures at the dawn of the Great Depression, forming Monogram Pictures in October of 1929. Falling back on his distribution background, Johnston set about lining up a group of film exchanges covering 39 key geographical areas of North America. For an independent film producer, distribution to rural and second-run theaters was crucial for success (typically a first-run "B" picture would be shown with an older second-run major studio release, or a smaller theater would choose two new Bs as a double feature. In those pre-TV days, theaters would change their bills completely three times a week! The demand for product in second-run theaters was insatiable until the end of WWII). Johnston assigned production responsibilities to his longtime friend and partner Trem Carr, who was a very capable manager. In the beginning Monogram had no real production facilities, operating similarly to the way United Artists operated later, albeit without the prestige and production budget. Johnston's and Carr's extensive distribution network became a magnet for a number of independent producers, and collecting franchise fees enabled them to begin producing their own low-budget features. Despite it being the darkest days of the Great Depression, Monogram succeeded, releasing its first small number of features in 1931. That grew to 32 releases in 1932 and 24 in 1933. Monogram had a roster of veteran producers under its banner, including Paul Malvern, Herbert Brenon, I.E. Chadwick, and M.H. Hoffman. Johnston and Carr could literally squeeze the buffalo off a nickel; their headquarters were nominally out of the old Talisman lot at 4516 Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood and were not put under contract but hired on a per-film basis. With a heavy emphasis on westerns--some of them starring a young John Wayne--many of its pictures were shot on locations near the studio itself, keeping overhead costs to a bare minimum. Silent-film mogul Mack Sennett went bankrupt in 1933 and his sprawling studio was an attractive target for several ambitious "Poverty Row" producers. Mascot Pictures chief Nat Levine, who ran his modest serial empire in rented space above a contractor's office, was the first to come up with a workable plan: buy an option, locate someone with deep pockets and attract experienced production staff. Levine approached Johnston and Carr (who initially snubbed the offer, fearing the overhead) and the head of a major film processing company, the overbearing but wealthy Herbert J. Yates of Consolidated Film Industries (CFI). Yates, relatively inexperienced in production, had his mind set on becoming a film mogul. A deal was dangled at Johnston and Carr in which they would serve as rotating chiefs with "autonomy" and the pair agreed to enlist. The result was Republic Pictures, which was formed in 1935.
The idea must have seemed great--on paper. The Monogram name was shelved and Johnston was installed as the nominal studio chief, a title that initially rotated among the three lesser partners. But principal stockholder Yates made it crystal clear--he was in charge and he ruled with an iron fist. Johnston and Carr almost immediately clashed with Yates (Levine preferred to remain out of the fray, quietly and competently churning out modest, yet successful, films that mirrored his earlier Mascot productions; Yates bought him out in 1939 and his career in movies would be soon over), and it wasn't long--1937, actually--before things got so bad that Johnston and Carr left the company in disgust and resurrected Monogram. They quickly ramped up production to 20 features for the remainder of 1937, working out of rented office space at Universal Pictures (Carr actually produced a handful of "B" pictures for Universal while he was there), itself in its tumultuous post-Carl Laemmle period. If they learned anything from their experience at Republic, it was that having actual studio facilities had its advantages, and they finally located a production facility at Sunset Dr. and Hoover St. The little reborn studio specialized on producing two-week quickies that emphasized action, with many stories designed to capitalize on current events (such as Dick Merrill's trans-Atlantic flight), radio show tie-ins and venerable westerns. Johnston and Carr also saw a gold mine in pressing on with the major studios' cast-off programmers, correctly calculating that the Dead End Kids and Charlie Chan still had money left to wring out of them. With the major studios drastically reducing their "B" units in the 1940s, Monogram saw its niche expanding. Even so, the spunky little studio's average profit per picture into the mid-'40s was embarrassingly small (a mere $1932.12 in 1942, a figure that would cause even a short-subject producer at a major studio to howl with laughter), which may explain the rough edges, recycled music and continuity lapses ignored by the stable of hack directors Monogram hired to make its films. Continuing to operate more as a collection of independent producers under one brand, Monogram gained two notable additions, the colorful and legendary tight-fisted Sam Katzman (a man so cheap that he would rip out unfilmed pages of a script whenever a production fell behind) and the always parsimonious agent-turned-"B"-mogul Jan Grippo, who morphed Samuel Goldwyn's delinquent Dead-End Kid cast-offs into the East Side Kids and later as the Bowery Boys (the series would last well into the late 1950s in ever-cheaper-looking installments that seemed to get oddly more endearing the less money was thrown at them and the older and more complacent they became). The same can't be said for the Chan series, which suffered greatly in the move. Lifted from Fox nearly whole, with aging Sidney Toler pressing on in increasingly (and exponentially embarrassingly) cheap productions and replaced by the ineffective Roland Winters after his death in 1947.
Monogram's product remained decidedly B-level; overall, its releases were generally fast-paced and satisfied the lower half of a three-day double bill in thousands of independent movie theaters making them, if not art, than at least profitable. Sadly, Trem Carr died of a heart attack in 1946. In November 1946 Johnston moved to merge Monogram into Allied Artists, a name more fitting the true nature of the company (with Steve Broidy), first with AA as a subsidiary company. The Monogram name increasingly became associated with cheap and shoddy product, and the company sought to increase its standing in the industry and the company eventually dropped the Monogram name in favor of Allied Artists. While loftier sounding, Allied Artists would continue to release the same low-budget product, with few exceptions, into the next decade.Monogram- Steve Broidy (born Samuel Broidy) was born in Malden, Massachusetts, and attended Boston University. His entrance into the film business was as a salesman for an independent company in 1925, and he moved to Universal Pictures in 1926 and then Warner Bros. in 1931. He was hired by Monogram Pictures in 1933 as a sales manager, and by 1940 was on the board of directors as VP and general sales manager. By 1945 he had been named President. Broidy presided over Monogram during its metamorphosis into Allied Artists, a change that came about because he believed that the Monogram name had for too long been associated with low-budget, low-quality productions, and he wanted to upgrade the company's reputation. He remained president until 1965, when he left to become an independent producer. In 1962 he was awarded the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.Monogram/Allied Artists
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Ben Judell was a man with a vision; he holds an important position in Hollywood history, but sadly very few people know his name. Judell's entire career was spent in movies, primarily as manager of the Mutual Film Exchanges (one-time producer of Charles Chaplin's shorts) and became an independent film distributor in 1917, learning the ins and outs of marketing low-budget feature films, and spent 20+ years developing a solid industry reputation.
In 1938 he briefly joined Progressive Pictures and produced a small number of exploitation pictures, which whet his appetite for bigger things. Judell formed Producers Distributing Corporation, better known as "PDC", and boldly placed a two-page ad in Box Office Magazine during the summer of 1939, proclaiming that the American public demanded action-based features (and, by inference, PDC was going to give it to them). Judell soon announced an ambitious 1939 production schedule, which included three separate western series, each with eight features, to star Tim McCoy, George Houston and an oddball-sounding Andy Hardy series clone, "The Sagebrush Family", set in the southwest starring veteran character actor James Gleason and his real-life wife and son. The energetic Judell then took out another trade ad announcing PDC's securing a million-dollar production budget for the 1939-40 season and doubled the number of pictures to be released. Puffery or not, Judell went to work lining up a competent production staff and building a studio in Prescott, AZ. Former Puritan Pictures (another "Gower Gulch" company) producer Sigmund Neufeld signed on, six associate producers and veteran directors were hired, deals were cut and all-important distribution agreements with 12 film exchanges (assuring cash flow) were finalized. Everything should have cruised along nicely, but Judell made essentially the same crucial misstep that had killed off Grand National Pictures in 1937: he chose to produce an expensive feature he couldn't derive cash flow from. Grand National's Something to Sing About (1937) was its $900,000 time bomb; Judell's equivalent was Hitler: Beast of Berlin (1939) (later retitled "Goose Step") which, while not technically a "bomb", just couldn't pass the censorship boards of various states, localities (some scandalously sympathetic to Nazi Germany) and foreign countries. Cash failed to flow in, liens piled up and PDC was on the verge of collapse. Sigmund Neufeld stepped in after the distributors asked the principal lien holder, Pathe Film Labs, to delay foreclosure on a $90,000 processing bill (six other features were in various stages of completion), then kicked in to pay past debts. Neufeld's new company, Sigmund Neufeld Productions, was backed by Robert S. Benjamin, an attorney for Pathe, and neither had any further use for the services of Ben Judell.
In a span of three months, Judell had built a studio in Arizona, established a distribution network, fought a number of censorship battles, produced seven low-budget features that were in various stages of completion and burned through $1 million. Not even nine months from his first press release, however, Judell's dream was over. His place in Hollywood history lies in what emerged from the ashes of his dream. Pathe, a French company, had a major presence in the US during the silent era--it once distributed product from such powerhouses as Hal Roach and Mack Sennett--but its film distribution operations virtually disintegrated when its US representative, Paul Brunet, returned to France in the mid-'20s, leaving only its processing operations intact domestically. At the time of PDC's collapse, Neufeld successfully cut a deal giving Pathe a percentage in the new company. With France under Nazi occupation, Pathe likely saw the deal only as a means to recoup what it was due, not as a tactic to re-enter the market as a production player. This is evidenced by Pathe not pressing for a recognizable brand connection, despite its equity position with the reorganized studio (having its name associated with Neufeld's films would have been an embarrassment compared to its glory days distributing superstar Harold Lloyd's early films for Roach). Regardless, in November 1940 Neufeld's company was reworked as Producers Releasing Corporation, better known as PRC, which became infamous for a long line of notoriously cheap B-grade features. Even independent theater owners showing its films complained about the poor production values of its earliest releases. PRC's product improved to some degree and, truth be known, a small number of its productions remain curiously interesting (The Devil Bat (1940), Corregidor (1943), Detour (1945), The Enchanted Forest (1945) and Railroaded! (1947) usually constitute the rather short list). PRC's name would last until 1948, when it was absorbed by Eagle-Lion and eventually became a subsidiary of United Artists.PDC (Producers Distributing Corporation)- Producer
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A.W. Hackel was born on 18 December 1882 in Austria-Hungary [now Austria]. He was a producer, known for Borrowed Hero (1941), Phantom Killer (1942) and Murder by Invitation (1941). He was married to Beckie Samelson. He died on 22 October 1959 in Los Angeles, California, USA.Supreme Pictures Corporation- Producer
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During the 1930's, a number of low budget film companies proliferated in Hollywood known collectively as Poverty Row. One of their more productive and ambitious residents was young Maurice H. Conn who had served his apprenticeship at another one of the 'minors', Mascot Pictures, as assistant to its president Nat Levine. Deciding to go into independent production himself, Conn set himself up at Talisman Studios on Sunset Boulevard and proceeded to release feature films under three separate labels: Ambassador-Conn Pictures, Conn Pictures and Melody Pictures Corporation. The majority of these were westerns which Conn exhibited via "states rights" film exchanges across thirteen cities in the United States.
Conn's single notable signing was Kermit Maynard, younger brother of established cowboy star Ken Maynard (in whose pictures he sometimes appeared as a stunt double). Kermit was a top class athlete and circus performer, excelling in horsemanship. He was once billed as "The World's Champion Trick and Fancy Rider". Kermit eventually starred in (as well as doing his own stunts) eighteen of Conn's horse operas, including ten in the Northwest Mounted series for Ambassador which were based on stories by James Oliver Curwood. Other semi-regular performers included Frankie Darro and the Native American Olympic athlete Jim Thorpe, who was invariably cast as Indians or henchmen. These low-budget features usually made money at the box office, partly due to a strong supporting cast of character players and mostly due to superior production values. Picturesque on-location shooting and a minimum of stock footage proved to be a definite advantage.
Often filming at breakneck pace, helmed by experienced directors like John English, Conn turned out eight pictures per year from 1935. He hit his peak in 1937 with fourteen releases. For Conn, running a small film studio in competition with the 'majors' was always going to a high risk enterprise. Following a series of expensive flops under the Melody banner in 1938, Ambassador became one of Poverty Row's many fatalities. Conn continued in the industry for most of the 1940's, producing low budget pictures for Monogram, 20th Century Fox and Eagle-Lion.Ambassador/Conn Productions/Melody Pictures Corporation- Producer
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Robert L. Lippert, the son of a hardware store owner in Alameda, Califorinia, was born there shortly after the turn of this century. Having little interest in his father's business, young Lippert became enthralled with the new fascination of moving pictures. He began working odd jobs in the local movie house, soon working his way into the projection room. During this period he made many improvements on the projectors and developed new variations, many of which are still on display at the Alameda County museum. By the mid-'40s Lippert owned an extensive chain of theaters in California and Oregon. Around 1948 he decided to begin making his own pictures to show in his theaters. His first picture was Last of the Wild Horses (1948), which was also the only one he ever directed. He produced/released hundreds of movies from the late 1940s through the mid-'50s. Movie fans knew when they saw the "Lippert Pictures" logo on he screen that they were in for something different. During this period some real classics were put out by Lippert: Rocketship X-M (1950), Little Big Horn (1951), The Steel Helmet (1951) and The Tall Texan (1953), among others. In 1956 Lippert made a deal with 20th Century-Fox to finance and distribute his pictures, although under the newly created "Regal Films" label rather than "Lippert Pictures". Under this arrangement he turned out a string of low-budget westerns and crime thrillers, virtually all of which made money for both Lippert and Fox.
Robert Lippert may haver been a "B" movie producer, but he gave talented directors like Samuel Fuller and Charles Marquis Warren their starts, and while many of his pictures were routine, there were definitely some gems scattered among them.
He died in 1976.Lippert Pictures Inc./Regal Films- Producer
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James H. Nicholson was a longtime theater owner and exhibitor and worked as a promo man for Realart Pictures prior to 1954, when he founded American Releasing Corp., Two years later, he decided he wanted to expand globally and, with lawyer Samuel Z. Arkoff, formed American International Pictures. The company turned out hundreds of movies over the next 35 years. AIP discovered an audience that was being ignored by mainstream Hollywood--teenagers--and in its early years, it turned out movies about monsters, hot rods and rock'n'roll, and the drive-ins filled with kids. In the 1960s, AIP turned out a string of zany, inexpensive but highly profitable "Beach Party" movies full of sand, songs, surf and (tame) sex. In 1964, 48-year-old Nicholson divorced his wife Sylvia and married 24-year-old actress Susan Hart. When the biker craze hit, AIP was there with The Wild Angels (1966). Nicholson continued to make AIP movies until June 1972, when he resigned as AIP's president and immediately formed a new company, Academy Pictures Corp., headquartered at the brand new Luckman Building, 9200 Sunset Blvd. He soon announced a six-picture deal with 20th Century Fox, who had sought him out. The six pictures included "The Legend of Hell House," "Dirty Mary Crazy Larry," "The Blackfather," "Street People" and "The Thousand Year Old Man," the latter based on a Nicholson original. (The sixth title, unannounced, was to have been "Death Race," on which he had collaborated with his good friend Robert Thom. Nicholson re-titled it "Death Race 2000.") In December 1972, two of those movies were "in the can" when Nicholson died of lung cancer that had metastasized. "Dirty Mary Crazy Larry," budgeted at $1,000,000, reaped $28,000,000, 20th's largest grossing film of that year; it has been reported that its huge profits enabled 20th to make "Star Wars." In the meantime, the floundering AIP became a subsidiary of Filmways, with Filmways' head Richard Bloch now calling the shots. When Arkoff left Filmways in 1980, he attempted to follow in Nicholson's footsteps, basing his new distribution company Arkoff International Picture (notice the identical initials, AIP) at 9200 Sunset. It was responsible for just one theatrical release, the sex- and nudity-filled "Hellhole" (1985).American International Pictures (AIP)- Producer
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By the early 1950s, future movie mogul Samuel Z. Arkoff was a brash 30-ish lawyer scratching out a living by representing his in-laws and the Hollywood fringe, which included many of now infamous director/angora-clad transvestite Edward D. Wood Jr.'s social circle. As a shark, Arkoff was physically imposing and capable of scaring the snot out of anyone who opposed him. One of his penny ante clients was Alex Gordon, a screenwriter who had submitted an unsolicited script to Realart Pictures, an outfit that was profitably re-releasing 20-year-old movies, often under new titles conjured up by its owner, Jack Broder. One such film, Man Made Monster (1941), had just been re-issued as "The Atomic Monster", coincidentally the same title of Gordon's screenplay. Arkoff, smelling blood in the water, paid Broder a visit and, incredibly, obtained a $500 settlement. Broder's sales manager, James H. Nicholson, was dumbfounded by Arkoff's ability to extract a dime, let alone $500, out of his notoriously tightfisted boss. He met with Arkoff and proposed a partnership, which led to the formation of American Releasing Corp. in 1954. The company's first release was Monster from the Ocean Floor (1954), a low-budget feature by 29-year-old producer'Roger Corman'. Made for less than $50,000, it netted $850,000 and Corman was brought into the fold as a silent partner. By 1955 the company was renamed American-International Pictures, generally known as AIP in the industry. Initially focusing on westerns on the premise that shooting on location was cheaper than renting space in a studio. Although the films were profitable, Arkoff was unhappy with the returns and solicited theater owners for advice on what types of films filled seats.
By the mid-'50s, thanks to television, movie audience numbers had dwindled considerably, with the key demographic now teenagers and young adults, who craved horror movies and, especially, drive-ins (where they could gather together without their parents). AIP jumped into the horror genre with both feet and made a fortune. Under the aegis of Nicholson and Arkoff, the company survived in a constricting industry by catering to the whims of the teenage trade and adapting to trends. AIP's long (350-plus) roster of kitsch classics, running the gamut from horror to rock-'n'-roll, from juvenile delinquency to Italian muscle men and from Edgar Allan Poe to Annette Funicello, have formed their own unique niche in film history. His company became infamous for clever advertising schemes that were often more entertaining than the films themselves. Arkoff never tolerated egos and his films were more often than not profitable, thanks to tight budgets and a clear understanding of the company's target market. After Nicholson's 1972 resignation, Arkoff assumed full control of the company and remained in charge until the 1979 merger with Filmways prompted his own departure. He then became the head of Arkoff International Pictures.American International Pictures (AIP)- Producer
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A graduate of Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, Walter Wanger was among the more literate and socially conscious American film producers of his time. At the peak of his career, his salary was exceeded only by that of Louis B. Mayer at MGM. Wanger had served in the air force on the Italian front during World War I. He joined the staff of President Woodrow Wilson as an attaché after the armistice, attending the peace conference in Paris. Having already staged theatricals at college and briefly directed on Broadway, he began in the film industry at Paramount as assistant to studio vice president Jesse L. Lasky in 1921. He worked his way up to a senior executive position, with the power to hire and fire writers, directors and stars. A disagreement with Lasky brought about his departure, but he was re-hired after having success in England as a theatrical producer and agent.
In 1923, he was appointed head of Paramount's Long Island Studio. Shortly after, he was made chief of production, holding that position until 1931. After leaving the company due to personality clashes with new senior management, he had brief spells with Columbia and MGM, producing several big hits, such as The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1932) and Queen Christina (1933). Nonetheless, he didn't get on particularly well with either Harry Cohn or L.B. Mayer and decided to turn independent, releasing his films through Paramount and United Artists. By 1936, Walter Wanger's own production company had the most substantial star roster of any independent filmmaker in Hollywood, including Madeleine Carroll, Charles Boyer, Henry Fonda and Sylvia Sidney.
Wanger's first major success as an independent was The Trail of the Lonesome Pine (1936), the first Technicolor feature for Paramount, and also the first to be shot primarily outdoors. In between solid black & white action films and dramas like You Only Live Once (1937) and Algiers (1938), Wanger also produced several expensive all-colour extravaganzas, not all of which paid off at the box office (point in case, Vogues of 1938 (1937), which failed to recoup its cost of $1.4 million). This rather forced United Artists to keep a closer reign on his future expenditure. However, by the end of the decade, Wanger's reputation increased, with films like Stagecoach (1939) and The Long Voyage Home (1940) (for John Ford) and Foreign Correspondent (1940) (for Alfred Hitchcock). Between 1946 and 1949, Wanger succeeded both in strengthening his own production company and in establishing a distribution network (in conjunction with the independent owners of Film Classics), the Wanger-Nassour Releasing Organisation.
Inevitably, the financial vagaries of independent production were beginning to take their toll. Already hamstrung by the financial woes of one of his subsidiaries, Diana Productions (formed in partnership with his wife Joan Bennett, screenwriter Dudley Nichols and director Fritz Lang),Wanger badly overextended himself in his financing of the 145-minute studio-bound Technicolor epic Joan of Arc (1948), starring Ingrid Bergman. The venture effectively bankrupted another of his production companies (Sierra Pictures), set up with Bergman exclusively for the making of the expensive fiasco. "Joan of Arc" ended up being shunned by audiences (who found it long and boring) and critics (who thought it naïve and altogether missing its spiritual mark) alike. Wanger's financial miscalculation was further compounded in 1951, by his shooting of his wife's paramour. It landed him in jail for four months for attempted murder.
That notwithstanding, Wanger bounced back, finagling a $5 million deal with Allied Artists. After his release from jail, he produced a socially conscious prison film, Riot in Cell Block 11 (1954), on a relatively modest budget. He followed this with one of the most iconic science fiction films ever made, the marvellous Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), directed by Don Siegel. On the flipside, Wanger's last throw of the dice, Cleopatra (1963) , with its excessive cost and production difficulties, almost ruined 20th Century Fox and brought about his own premature retirement. After his death from a heart attack in November 1968, a mere $18,000 remained of his estate.
In spite of its highs and lows, the career of Walter Wanger had been nothing but amazing. During his early days at Paramount (then Famous Players Lasky), he had bought the rights to The Sheik (1921), which made a star out of Rudolph Valentino. At the time of his second spell with the studio, he introduced headliners like Claudette Colbert, Hedy Lamarr, and The Marx Brothers to the screen. As a man of strong intellectual inclinations, he recognised the value of good writing. Indeed, many of his films combine a socio-political message with good entertainment. James Mason thought, Wanger had always longed 'to be European'.
In later years, Wanger openly criticised the established Hollywood hierarchy for being over-reliant on star power. His own self-proclaimed rebelliousness also engendered the enmity of practically every major studio boss and his liberal leanings got him into trouble during the HUAC witch hunts of the early 1950's. Nonetheless, Wanger was twice elected president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and, at the height of his influence, was able to successfully lobby the Academy to introduce Best Foreign Film and Best Documentary as Oscar categories.Walter Wanger Productions- Producer
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The son of a dry goods salesman, Jerry Wald was the go-getting Hollywood writer-producer of popular imagination: charismatic, ambitious, shrewd, frequently brilliant, and filled with a nervous energy driving him from one project to another. An avid reader, with an innate sense of literary judgement, Wald began in the industry in 1929 as a radio columnist with a less-then-glamorous publication, The New York Evening Graphic. At the same time, he completed his studies in journalism at New York University. Before long, his skills as a writer for popular radio stars, such as crooner Russ Columbo, led to further work writing short features for RKO which, in turn, attracted the attention of Warner Brothers. Signed to a contract in 1934, Wald started as a screenwriter, often in collaboration with Julius J. Epstein, Mark Hellinger or Richard Macaulay. He worked on such seminal films noir as The Roaring Twenties (1939), Torrid Zone (1940) and They Drive by Night (1940), his role being essentially that of the 'ideas man', who comes up with a catchy title, original storyline, twists and plot devices. Never without pad or pencil, Wald constantly brainstormed ideas. He eventually acquired a reputation of being able to promote a picture before it had even left the drawing board. Once he had a clear vision, shooting could well commence within a week.
By 1941, Wald had taken the departing Hellinger's place as associate producer and, a year later, was promoted again, to producer. During the next decade, he turned out a brace of hits for Warner Brothers, which spanned every genre, from war (Across the Pacific (1942)), to melodrama (Flamingo Road (1949)), to swashbucklers (Adventures of Don Juan (1948)). In keeping with his credo, that there were "no washed up actors, only washed up stories", he rejuvenated the careers of some of Warner's biggest female stars by casting them in some of the best-written films of the period: Joan Crawford in Mildred Pierce (1945) and Humoresque (1946); Claire Trevor - in Key Largo (1948); and Jane Wyman - in Johnny Belinda (1948)). For the latter, Wald received the Irving Thalberg Award at the Oscars in 1948. For all his ebullience and larger-than-life personality, Wald appeared to most as easygoing, jovial and affable. Unlike a lot of other producers, he was rather well-liked within the industry. Of course, when it came to the financial side of things, he was - and needed to be - uncompromisingly tough.
In 1950, the ever-restless Wald left Warners to form an independent production company with Norman Krasna at RKO. The resulting co-production deal with Howard Hughes, rather grandiosely, stipulated some sixty films. In the event, only four were ever made by the time Wald moved on to become vice president in charge of production under Harry Cohn at Columbia. He lasted three years. In 1956, he formed another company, Jerry Wald Productions, releasing through 20th Century Fox. He worked out of his own lot, referred to by the New York Times as 'a one man studio'. Unlike his intensely realist, gritty, primarily black & white output at Warners, Wald's films during this period were mostly lavish and glamorous, frequently shot in Technicolor. Among the most successful of these with critics and public alike, were the archetypal romantic weepie An Affair to Remember (1957); the hugely popular melodrama Peyton Place (1957), based - and improving on - a 'scandalous' best-seller; and the film that launched Paul Newman's road to stardom, The Long, Hot Summer (1958). Jerry Wald's astonishing resume of hits may well have extended into the 1960's, if not for his untimely death at the age of fifty in July 1962.Jerry Wald Productions- Producer
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Soon after World War II he started selling Red Ryder radio scripts written by his Shakespeare professor at Rutgers university. He was soon handling literary talent such as Raymond Chandler and Ben Hecht. He later joined Famous Artists Agency representing Lana Turner, Kirk Douglas, Richard Burton and many others. He resigned in '57 to form Seven Arts Productions with Elliot Hyman and supervised over 50 films including 'Night of the Iguana'and 'Reflections in a Golden Eye'.In 1966 he formed Rastar Productions to produce film versions of Broadway plays such as 'Funny Girl', winning an Oscar nomination for Best Picture, 'The Way We Were', 'Sunshine Boys', 'California Suite' and 'Robin and Marion'.Seven Arts Productions- Additional Crew
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Lord Rank, known professionally as J. Arthur Rank was the millionaire flour miller and devout Methodist who got into films to spread the gospel. When some early films that he was involved with didn't get an exceptionally good circulation he realized that control of cinemas was the key to success. He quickly established the Odeon chain of cinemas, started by Oscar Deutsch. Odeon's publicists liked to claim that the name of the cinemas was derived from his motto, "Oscar Deutsch Entertains Our Nation", but it had been used for cinemas in France and Italy in the 1920s, and the word is Ancient Greek. The word "Nickelodeon" was coined in 1888 and was widely used to describe small cinemas in the United States starting from 1905. With builder Charles Boot he bought the grounds of an old Victorian house (Heatherden Hall) in Hertfordshire and turned it into Pinewood Studios. A long-term collaborator of Rank was 'Lady Yule' the wife of a Jute merchant. She helped him with the building and running of Pinewood studios. After Alexander Korda ran into financial difficulties in the late 30's Rank also bought Denham Studios. One of the best things about movie-making for Rank was the freedom given to people like The Archers (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger), David Lean, Carol Reed, etc. that allowed them to make some of the most successful and spectacular movies ever made in Britain. An over-ambitious attempt to expand into America brought him to near bankruptcy in the 1940s which in turn led to the sale of Denham and Pinewood Studios and a severe restriction on the ambitions of the Rank empire. Today the Rank name is best known (outside the UK) for the Rank Cintel, the standard device used for the transfer of film image to videotape.Eagle-Lion Films- Arthur Krim was born on 4 April 1910 in New York City, New York, USA. He was a producer, known for The Montecarlo Story (1956), Playhouse 90 (1956) and 47th Annual Academy Awards (1975). He was married to Mathilde Krim. He died on 21 September 1994 in New York City, New York, USA.United Artists
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Considered to be one of the most pivotal stars of the early days of Hollywood, Charlie Chaplin lived an interesting life both in his films and behind the camera. He is most recognized as an icon of the silent film era, often associated with his popular character, the Little Tramp; the man with the toothbrush mustache, bowler hat, bamboo cane, and a funny walk.
Charles Spencer Chaplin was born in Walworth, London, England on April 16, 1889, to Hannah Harriet Pedlingham (Hill) and Charles Chaplin, both music hall performers, who were married on June 22, 1885. After Charles Sr. separated from Hannah to perform in New York City, Hannah then tried to resurrect her stage career. Unfortunately, her singing voice had a tendency to break at unexpected moments. When this happened, the stage manager spotted young Charlie standing in the wings and led him on stage, where five-year-old Charlie began to sing a popular tune. Charlie and his half-brother, Syd Chaplin spent their lives in and out of charity homes and workhouses between their mother's bouts of insanity. Hannah was committed to Cane Hill Asylum in May 1903 and lived there until 1921, when Chaplin moved her to California.
Chaplin began his official acting career at the age of eight, touring with the Eight Lancashire Lads. At age 18, he began touring with Fred Karno's vaudeville troupe, joining them on the troupe's 1910 United States tour. He traveled west to California in December 1913 and signed on with Keystone Studios' popular comedy director Mack Sennett, who had seen Chaplin perform on stage in New York. Charlie soon wrote his brother Syd, asking him to become his manager. While at Keystone, Chaplin appeared in and directed 35 films, starring as the Little Tramp in nearly all.
In November 1914, he left Keystone and signed on at Essanay, where he made 15 films. In 1916, he signed on at Mutual and made 12 films. In June 1917, Chaplin signed up with First National Studios, after which he built Chaplin Studios. In 1919, he and Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford and D.W. Griffith formed United Artists (UA).
Chaplin's life and career was full of scandal and controversy. His first big scandal was during World War I, at which time his loyalty to England, his home country, was questioned. He had never applied for American citizenship, but claimed that he was a "paying visitor" to the United States. Many British citizens called Chaplin a coward and a slacker. This and other career eccentricities sparked suspicion with FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover and the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), who believed that he was injecting Communist propaganda into his films. Chaplin's later film The Great Dictator (1940), which was his first "talkie", also created a stir. In the film, Chaplin plays a humorous caricature of Adolf Hitler. Some thought the film was poorly done and in bad taste. However, the film grossed over $5 million and earned five Academy Award Nominations.
Another scandal occurred when Chaplin briefly dated 22 year-old Joan Barry. However, Chaplin's relationship with Barry came to an end in 1942, after a series of harassing actions from her. In May 1943, Barry returned to inform Chaplin that she was pregnant and filed a paternity suit, claiming that the unborn child was his. During the 1944 trial, blood tests proved that Chaplin was not the father, but at the time, blood tests were inadmissible evidence, and he was ordered to pay $75 a week until the child turned 21.
Chaplin also was scrutinized for his support in aiding the Russian struggle against the invading Nazis during World War II, and the United States government questioned his moral and political views, suspecting him of having Communist ties. For this reason, HUAC subpoenaed him in 1947. However, HUAC finally decided that it was no longer necessary for him to appear for testimony. Conversely, when Chaplin and his family traveled to London for the premier of Limelight (1952), he was denied re-entry to the United States. In reality, the government had almost no evidence to prove that he was a threat to national security. Instead, he and his wife decided to settle in Switzerland.
Chaplin was married four times and had a total of 11 children. In 1918, he married Mildred Harris and they had a son together, Norman Spencer Chaplin, who lived only three days. Chaplin and Harris divorced in 1920. He married Lita Grey in 1924, who had two sons, Charles Chaplin Jr. and Sydney Chaplin. They were divorced in 1927. In 1936, Chaplin married Paulette Goddard, and his final marriage was to Oona O'Neill (Oona Chaplin), daughter of playwright Eugene O'Neill in 1943. Oona gave birth to eight children: Geraldine Chaplin, Michael Chaplin, Josephine Chaplin, Victoria Chaplin, Eugene Chaplin, Jane Chaplin, Annette-Emilie Chaplin, and Christopher Chaplin.
In contrast to many of his boisterous characters, Chaplin was a quiet man who kept to himself a great deal. He also had an "un-millionaire" way of living. Even after he had accumulated millions, he continued to live in shabby accommodations. In 1921, Chaplin was decorated by the French government for his outstanding work as a filmmaker and was elevated to the rank of Officer of the Legion of Honor in 1952. In 1972, he was honored with an Academy Award for his "incalculable effect in making motion pictures the art form of the century". He was appointed Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 1975 New Year's Honours List. No formal reason for the honour was listed. The citation simply reads "Charles Spencer Chaplin, Film Actor and Producer".
Chaplin's other works included musical scores that he composed for many of his films. He also authored two autobiographical books, "My Autobiography" (1964) and its companion volume, "My Life in Pictures" (1974).
Chaplin died at age 88 of natural causes on December 25, 1977 at his home in Vevey, Switzerland. His funeral was a small and private Anglican ceremony according to his wishes. In 1978, Chaplin's corpse was stolen from its grave and was not recovered for three months; he was re-buried in a vault surrounded by cement.
Six of Chaplin's films have been selected for preservation in the National Film Registry by the United States Library of Congress: The Immigrant (1917), The Kid (1921), The Gold Rush (1925), City Lights (1931), Modern Times (1936), and The Great Dictator (1940).
Charlie Chaplin is considered one of the greatest filmmakers in the history of American cinema, whose movies were and still are popular throughout the world and have even gained notoriety as time progresses. His films show, through the Little Tramp's positive outlook on life in a world full of chaos, that the human spirit has and always will remain the same.United Artists- Actress
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Mary Pickford was born Gladys Louise Smith in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, to Elsie Charlotte (Hennessy) and John Charles Smith. She was of English and Irish descent. Pickford began in the theater at age seven. Then known as "Baby Gladys Smith", she toured with her family in a number of theater companies. At some point, at her devout maternal grandmother's insistence, when young Gladys was seriously ill with diphtheria, she received a Catholic baptism and her middle name was changed to "Marie".
In 1907, she adopted a family name Pickford and joined the David Belasco troupe, appearing in the long-running The Warrens of Virginia". She began in films in 1909 with the 'American Mutoscope & Biograph [us]', working with director D.W. Griffith.
For a short time in 1911, to earn more money, she joined the IMP Film Co. under Carl Laemmle. She returned to Biograph in 1912, then, in 1913 joined the Famous Players Film Company under Adolph Zukor. She then joined First National Exhibitor's Circuit in 1918. In 1919, she co-founded United Artists with D.W. Griffith, Charlie Chaplin and then-future husband, Douglas Fairbanks.United Artists- Director
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David Wark Griffith was born in rural Kentucky to Jacob "Roaring Jake" Griffith, a former Confederate Army colonel and Civil War veteran. Young Griffith grew up with his father's romantic war stories and melodramatic nineteenth-century literature that were to eventually shape his movies. In 1897 Griffith set out to pursue a career both acting and writing for the theater, but for the most part was unsuccessful. Reluctantly, he agreed to act in the new motion picture medium for Edwin S. Porter at the Edison Company. Griffith was eventually offered a job at the financially struggling American Mutoscope & Biograph Co., where he directed over four hundred and fifty short films, experimenting with the story-telling techniques he would later perfect in his epic The Birth of a Nation (1915).
Griffith and his personal cinematographer G.W. Bitzer collaborated to create and perfect such cinematic devices as the flashback, the iris shot, the mask and cross-cutting. In the years following "Birth", Griffith never again saw the same monumental success as his signature film and, in 1931, his increasing failures forced his retirement. Though hailed for his vision in narrative film-making, he was similarly criticized for his blatant racism. Griffith died in Los Angeles in 1948, one of the most dichotomous figures in film history.United Artists- Actor
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Douglas Fairbanks was born Douglas Elton Thomas Ullman in Denver, Colorado, to Ella Adelaide (nee Marsh) and Hezekiah Charles Ullman, an attorney and native of Pennsylvania, who was a captain for the Union forces during the Civil War. Fairbanks' paternal grandparents were German Jewish immigrants, while his mother, a Southerner with roots in Louisiana and Georgia, was of British Isles descent. From the age of five he was raised by his mother due to her husband's abandonment. She changed her sons' surnames to Fairbanks (her former husband's surname) and covered up their paternal Jewish ancestry.
He began amateur theater at age 12 and continued while attending the Colorado School of Mines. In 1900 they moved to New York. He attended Harvard, traveled to Europe, worked on a cattle freighter, in a hardware store and as a clerk on Wall Street. He made his Broadway debut in 1902 and five years later left theater to marry an industrialist's daughter.
He returned when his father-in-law went broke the next year. In 1915, he went to Hollywood and worked under a reluctant D.W. Griffith. The following year he formed his own production company. During a Liberty Bond tour with Charles Chaplin he fell in love with Mary Pickford with whom he, Chaplin and Griffith had formed United Artists in 1919. He made very successful early social comedies, then highly popular swashbucklers during the 'twenties. The owners of Hollywood's Pickfair Mansion separated in 1933 and divorced in 1936. In March 1936, he married and retired from acting.United Artists- Producer
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One of a large group of Hungarian refugees who found refuge in England in the 1930s, Sir Alexander Korda was the first British film producer to receive a knighthood. He was a major, if controversial, figure and acted as a guiding force behind the British film industry of the 1930s and continued to influence British films until his death in 1956. He learned his trade by working in studios in Austria, Germany and America and was a crafty and flamboyant businessman. He started his production company, London Films, in 1933 and one of its first films The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933), received an Oscar nomination as best picture and won the Best Actor Oscar for its star, Charles Laughton. Helped by his brothers Zoltan Korda (director) and Vincent Korda (art director) and other expatriate Hungarians, London Films produced some of Britain's finest films (even if they weren't all commercial successes). Korda's willingness to experiment and be daring allowed the flowering of such talents as Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger and gave early breaks to people such as Laurence Olivier, David Lean and Carol Reed. Korda sold his library to television in the 1950s, thus allowing London Films' famous logo of Big Ben to become familiar to a new generation of film enthusiasts.London Films/British Lion Films- Additional Crew
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Ilya Lopert was a producer, known for Summertime (1955) and No Greater Love (1943). He died on 27 February 1971.Lopert Pictures Corporation- Producer
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Walter Elias Disney was born on December 5, 1901 in Chicago, Illinois, the son of Flora Disney (née Call) and Elias Disney, a Canadian-born farmer and businessperson. He had Irish, German, and English ancestry. Walt moved with his parents to Kansas City at age seven, where he spent the majority of his childhood. At age 16, during World War I, he faked his age to join the American Red Cross. He soon returned home, where he won a scholarship to the Kansas City Art Institute. There, he met a fellow animator, Ub Iwerks. The two soon set up their own company. In the early 1920s, they made a series of animated shorts for the Newman theater chain, entitled "Newman's Laugh-O-Grams". Their company soon went bankrupt, however.
The two then went to Hollywood in 1923. They started work on a new series, about a live-action little girl who journeys to a world of animated characters. Entitled the "Alice Comedies", they were distributed by M.J. Winkler (Margaret). Walt was backed up financially only by Winkler and his older brother Roy O. Disney, who remained his business partner for the rest of his life. Hundreds of "Alice Comedies" were produced between 1923 and 1927, before they lost popularity.
Walt then started work on a series around a new animated character, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. This series was successful, but in 1928, Walt discovered that M.J. Winkler and her husband, Charles Mintz, had stolen the rights to the character away from him. They had also stolen all his animators, except for Ub Iwerks. While taking the train home, Walt started doodling on a piece of paper. The result of these doodles was a mouse named Mickey. With only Walt and Ub to animate, and Walt's wife Lillian Disney (Lilly) and Roy's wife Edna Disney to ink in the animation cells, three Mickey Mouse cartoons were quickly produced. The first two didn't sell, so Walt added synchronized sound to the last one, Steamboat Willie (1928), and it was immediately picked up. With Walt as the voice of Mickey, it premiered to great success. Many more cartoons followed. Walt was now in the big time, but he didn't stop creating new ideas.
In 1929, he created the 'Silly Symphonies', a cartoon series that didn't have a continuous character. They were another success. One of them, Flowers and Trees (1932), was the first cartoon to be produced in color and the first cartoon to win an Oscar; another, Three Little Pigs (1933), was so popular it was often billed above the feature films it accompanied. The Silly Symphonies stopped coming out in 1939, but Mickey and friends, (including Minnie Mouse, Donald Duck, Goofy, Pluto, and plenty more), were still going strong and still very popular.
In 1934, Walt started work on another new idea: a cartoon that ran the length of a feature film. Everyone in Hollywood was calling it "Disney's Folly", but Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) was anything but, winning critical raves, the adoration of the public, and one big and seven little special Oscars for Walt. Now Walt listed animated features among his ever-growing list of accomplishments. While continuing to produce cartoon shorts, he also started producing more of the animated features. Pinocchio (1940), Dumbo (1941), and Bambi (1942) were all successes; not even a flop like Fantasia (1940) and a studio animators' strike in 1941 could stop Disney now.
In the mid 1940s, he began producing "packaged features", essentially a group of shorts put together to run feature length, but by 1950 he was back with animated features that stuck to one story, with Cinderella (1950), Alice in Wonderland (1951), and Peter Pan (1953). In 1950, he also started producing live-action films, with Treasure Island (1950). These began taking on greater importance throughout the 50s and 60s, but Walt continued to produce animated features, including Lady and the Tramp (1955), Sleeping Beauty (1959), and One Hundred and One Dalmatians (1961).
In 1955 he opened a theme park in southern California: Disneyland. It was a place where children and their parents could take rides, just explore, and meet the familiar animated characters, all in a clean, safe environment. It was another great success. Walt also became one of the first producers of films to venture into television, with his series The Magical World of Disney (1954) which he began in 1954 to promote his theme park. He also produced The Mickey Mouse Club (1955) and Zorro (1957). To top it all off, Walt came out with the lavish musical fantasy Mary Poppins (1964), which mixed live-action with animation. It is considered by many to be his magnum opus. Even after that, Walt continued to forge onward, with plans to build a new theme park and an experimental prototype city in Florida.
He did not live to see the culmination of those plans, however; in 1966, he developed lung cancer brought on by his lifelong chain-smoking. He died of a heart attack following cancer surgery on December 15, 1966 at age 65. But not even his death, it seemed, could stop him. Roy carried on plans to build the Florida theme park, and it premiered in 1971 under the name Walt Disney World. His company continues to flourish, still producing animated and live-action films and overseeing the still-growing empire started by one man: Walt Disney, who will never be forgotten.Walt Disney Animation Studios- Camera and Electrical Department
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Roy O. Disney was an American businessman, becoming the partner and co-founder, along with his younger brother Walt Disney, of Walt Disney Productions, since renamed The Walt Disney Company.
While Walt was the creative man, Roy was the one who made sure the company was financially stable. Roy and Walt both founded Disney Studios as brothers, but Walt would buy out most of Roy's share in 1929 so, unlike Max and Dave Fleischer of rival Fleischer Studios, Roy was not a co-producer. However, Roy would be equal partner in all facets of the production company.
Roy became the company's first CEO in 1929, although the official title was not given until 1968. He also shared the role of chairman of the board with Walt from 1945. Walt however dropped the chairman title in 1960 so he could focus more on the creative aspects of the company. After Walt Disney's death in 1966, Roy postponed his retirement to oversee construction of what was then known as Disney World. He later renamed it Walt Disney World as a tribute to his brother. Roy became the president of Walt Disney Productions on December 15, 1966, and remained so until 1968.
He died in December 20, 1971 at age 78, a few months after the Walt Disney World was opened.Walt Disney Animation Studios- Producer
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Producer, songwriter and author, brother to Ralph Freed, Walter and Ruth Freed. He was educated at the Phillips Exeter Academy, and became associated with Gus Edwards musical acts. He performed in vaudeville with Louis Silvers, with whom he wrote revues for New York restaurants. During World War I, he staged military shows, then managed a theatre, eventually producing his own musical shows, finally joining MGM under contract. His Academy Award winning films include An American in Paris (1951), _Gigi(1958)_ and Irving Thalberg Awards. In 1964, he became President of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Joining ASCAP in 1924, his chief musical collaborator was Nacio Herb Brown, and also included Gus Arnheim, Al Hoffman and Harry Warren.at MGM- Producer
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The son of an out-of-work bookkeeper, Pasternak arrived in the U.S. from Hungary in 1921. After working in a belt factory in Philadelphia, he moved to New York where he plucked chickens and worked in a cafeteria. Becoming increasingly infatuated with the film business, it didn't take him long to find a job at the Long Island Paramount studio as a busboy and washing dishes in the commissary for 15 $ a week. His easy manner earned him the sobriquet 'Smiling Joe' and he was invited to do a screen test, which went rather badly. As acting seemed out of the question, one of Paramount's directors took pity on the young man and gave him a tryout as fourth assistant. By 1923, Joe had advanced to second assistant and was regularly associated with the films of his protégé, Allan Dwan. When Paramount closed their Long Island facility, Joe made the trip to Hollywood, but found work scarce. However, his effort as director of a low budget two-reel comedy was noticed by the director Wesley Ruggles, who promptly engaged him as his assistant at Universal studios. In 1926, he was packed off to Europe to act as talent scout and, after another two years, was offered the position of manager of their European operation, Deutsche Universal-Film AG, based in Berlin.
From 1929, Joe also worked as producer of a string of German, Austrian and Hungarian light entertainments, a mixture of musicals, comedies and romances. In 1935, Universal, in dire financial straits, wound down their European unit and a new management recalled Joe to Hollywood. Within a year, he managed to almost single-handedly save the studio from bankruptcy through his canny promotion of charismatic teenage singing sensation Deanna Durbin (a recent acquisition from MGM) to star status. At the same time, he imported several fellow Hungarian émigrés into Hollywood, notably his close friend, the talented director Henry Koster, and his brother-in-law, the character actor S.Z. Sakall, who was to become fondly known as 'Cuddles'. Assigning direction to Koster, Joe produced the hugely successful box office hit Three Smart Girls (1936), followed by nine more musical outings in a similar vein, which brought fame and fortune to both Deanna and Joe, and put Universal financially in the pink. Joe stuck to the same formula (wholesome , Cinderella-type stories with polished musical interludes) on every occasion, using a tried-and-tested crew of writers and directors - all musical comedy experts - including Koster, Norman Krasna, Edward Ludwig and Norman Taurog. After launching the career of another talented juvenile soprano named Gloria Jean, Joe proceeded to revive the flagging fortunes of former Paramount star Marlene Dietrich, remodelling her image into one that was more approachable to a general audience. He effectively recast her original 'Blue Angel' bar room singer as wisecracking, good-hearted saloon girl Frenchy in Destry Rides Again (1939), a gently self-mocking western, which turned out to be one of the biggest hits for Universal in 1939.
In 1941, now firmly ensconced in Hollywood as the 'king of musicals', Joe made the natural progression by joining MGM, the organisation most adept at this particular genre. While Arthur Freed headed the A-team, Joe was assigned the second string production unit at MGM, which handled operettas and light musical entertainments. During his tenure, Joe became protégé to Kathryn Grayson and Jane Powell and helped to make swimming talent Esther Williams into a bankable movie star. He had huge successes with operatic films, like Mario Lanza's The Great Caruso (1951) and The Merry Widow (1952). He also handled some lavish, big budget extravaganzas, including Thousands Cheer (1943), Anchors Aweigh (1945) and the compelling, though fictionalised, story of Ruth Etting, Love Me or Leave Me (1955). Joe rounded off his career with a trio of Elvis Presley musicals and produced the 1966 Academy Award ceremonies (the first to be filmed in colour), at which one of the most honoured films was the David Lean-directed epic Doctor Zhivago (1965) - which just happened to have been authored by Joe's distant relative Boris Pasternak. Joe retired in 1968 with an impressive one hundred production credits to his name, and died in Hollywood in September 1991 at the age of 89.at MGM- Producer
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Irving Grant Thalberg was born in New York City, to Henrietta (Haymann) and William Thalberg, who were of German Jewish descent. He had a bad heart, having contracted rheumatic fever as a teenager and was plagued with other ailments all of his life. He was quite intelligent with a thirst for knowledge but, convinced that he would never see thirty, he skipped college and became, at 21, a high-level executive at Carl Laemmle's Universal Studios, then the largest motion picture studio in the world.
After hitting a career impasse at Universal (partly as a result of a failed romance with Laemmle's daughter), Thalberg jumped ship and enlisted with the relatively obscure Louis B. Mayer Productions overseeing its typically turgid yet profitable melodramas. While the two men shared a common vision for their company, they approached their responsibilities from radically different angles. Mayer was a macro-manager; like a chess master, he would typically engineer business moves far in advance. Given the opportunity, Mayer could've succeeded as CEO of any multi-national corporation. Thalberg was at heart, all about movies, literally pouring his life into his work, largely leaving the managerial duties of the studio to Mayer. Modest, he disavowed screen credit during his lifetime, decrying any credit that one gives themselves as worthless. This working partnership would keep Louis B. Mayer Productions consistently profitable and would extend into their heydays as masters of MGM but would lead to an acrimonious later relationship.
By 1923 theater mogul Marcus Loew had a big problem. In an effort to secure an adequate number of quality films for his theatrical empire, he had merged Metro Pictures with his latest acquisition, Goldwyn Pictures only to discover his new super-studio had inherited a handful of projects (the Italian-based Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (1925) and Greed (1924)) that had spun wildly out of control. He soon discovered that his problems were magnified by inheriting an incompetent management team. He instructed his attorney to conduct a headhunting expedition with instructions to investigate Louis B. Mayer Productions --- which Loew had previously visited on one of his trips west. Mayer's east Los Angeles studio actually had few tangible assets --- most of his equipment was rented. Loew ended up paying a pittance for Mayer's company but offered both men (after initially rejecting Thalberg!) huge salaries and even more generous profit participation allowances. Answering to New York-based Loew's Inc., Mayer and Thalberg moved into the then-state-of-the-art Goldwyn lot in Culver City and, with Loew's deep pockets, set about creating the most enviable film studio in Hollywood, quickly eclipsing Thalberg's former employer, Universal. Greed was largely scrapped (Thalberg recognizing director Erich von Stroheim's vision of a 7-hour film was unmarketable, had it extensively edited) and written off after a truncated release, with Ben Hur being called home and re-shot with a new director. Saddled with an unfavorable contract and millions in the red, the film would ultimately benefit the new company from prestige more than net profit, despite drawing huge crowds.
Mayer and Thalberg quickly moved past these inherited nightmares and created their dream studio. From 1925 through the mid-1940s there was MGM and then everyone else. It's roster of stars, directors and technicians were unmatched by any other studio. Indeed, to work for MGM meant that you had reached the top of your profession, whether it was front of or behind the cameras. Under Mayer and Thalberg, the studio refined the mechanics of assembly-line film production --- even their B-pictures would outclass the other major's principal productions (arguably MGM's only weakness was comedy). Their formula for quality made MGM the only major studio to remain profitable throughout the Great Depression (although a lesser studio, Columbia also did so, it achieved "major" studio status after 1934, ironically assisted by loaned out stars from MGM).
Thalberg himself was a workaholic and his health, which was never good, suffered. In his position as production supervisor, Thalberg had no qualms about expensive retakes or even extensively re-working a picture after it had completed principal photography --- one such case was with King Vidor's The Big Parade (1925), where he recognized the modest $200,000 WWI drama was lacking the war itself and could be turned into a true spectacle with a few epic battle scenes added. These few additional shots cost $45,000 and turned the film into MGM's first major home-grown hit (and its biggest hit of the silent era), grossing nearly $5 million. If he micro-managed productions there was no one in Hollywood who did it more effectively. Thalberg fell into a deep depression after the mysterious death of his friend and assistant Paul Bern (the two had worked extensively together on the hit Grand Hotel (1932)) and he demanded a one-year sabbatical. Loew's Inc. head Nicholas Schenck (Marcus Loew had died in late 1926) responded by throwing more money at him --- more than Mayer himself was scheduled to earn for the year, alienating Mayer. This, to his ostensible boss was an insufferable insult, one that would drastically alter their relationship. Thalberg remained on the job but suffered a heart attack following a 1932 Christmas party. Mayer quickly engineered a coup of sorts, recruiting a new inner circle of producers (including David O. Selznick and Walter Wanger) to replace him. Thalberg recuperated in Europe with his wife Norma Shearer and returned to MGM in August, 1933 resuming his somewhat reduced duties as a unit production head. He continued to score hits, supervising The Merry Widow (1934), The Barretts of Wimpole Street (1934), the rousing, definitive version of Mutiny on the Bounty (1935) and the lavish Marie Antoinette (1938) (released after his death).
Thalberg also sought to rectify the studio's poor record in comedy films, signing the Marx Brothers, who had just been released from their contract at Paramount after string of flops. He felt the brilliant comedy team had been seriously mismanaged and ordered their MGM films to be shot in sequence and after their routines had been well tested on stage. The Thalberg-produced A Night at the Opera (1935) was a big hit but he wasn't infallible, stumbling with the critically well-received production of Romeo and Juliet (1936), which went on the books as a $1 million loss. Over Mayer's objections, he delved into the film adaptation of Pearl S. Buck's The Good Earth (1937) but died of pneumonia on September 14, 1936 at age 37. The Good Earth (1937) was released soon afterward, MGM honoring him by providing him his only screen credit (Thalberg had always eschewed a producer's credit on his films).
He was survived by his widow Norma and their two children; Irving, Jr. and Katherine. After his death the Motion Picture Academy created the Irving Thalberg Award, given for excellence in production.at MGM- Director
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Sidney Franklin was involved in amateur filmmaking while still at school. With his brother Chester M. Franklin, he wrote, directed and edited a short film, The Baby (1915), at a cost of $400. Somehow it attracted the interest of D.W. Griffith, who decided to put the brothers to work making children's films for the Triangle Film Corporation. After three years they went their separate ways. Sidney ended up with the more successful career. He established his reputation with Smilin' Through (1922), and went on to direct some of the great female stars of the silent era, including Norma Talmadge, Mary Pickford and Greta Garbo. He joined MGM in 1926 and remained affiliated with the studio until his departure in 1958.
A protégé of the similarly inclined chief of production at MGM,Irving Thalberg, Franklin was thought of as a "literate" filmmaker. He was at his best bringing classics to the screen, like the Noël Coward adaptation of Private Lives (1931); Reunion in Vienna (1933), based on a play by Robert E. Sherwood; Rudolph Besier's period melodrama The Barretts of Wimpole Street (1934) or Pearl S. Buck's tale of struggling Chinese farmers, The Good Earth (1937). All were lavishly produced as A-grade features, with A-grade budgets.
From 1939 Sidney spent most of his time as producer on similarly prestigious films, with a strong inclination towards sentimental melodrama. The biggest box-office hits were Waterloo Bridge (1940), Random Harvest (1942), Madame Curie (1943),The White Cliffs of Dover (1944) and Mrs. Miniver (1942), a picture he thought would lose money but needed to be made. It turned out to be the most popular picture of the year and contributed in no small way to Sidney winning the Irving Thalberg Memorial Award in 1943, for "consistent high quality of production and achievement".at MGM- Producer
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William Goetz, a producer and studio boss who revolutionized the industry with the development of the profit participation deal, was born on 3/24/1903 in Philadelphia, PA, to ship's purser Theodore Goetz and his wife Fanny. William was the youngest in a brood of eight children (six boys and two girls). After Fanny's death in 1913 Theodore abandoned his family, and William was raised by his older brothers.
All of the Goetz brothers wound up in the movie business. Two of his brothers worked at Monogram and were among the founders of Republic Pictures (see Herbert J. Yates), and another worked for Corinne Griffith Productions. In 1924 Goetz took advantage of the well-known Hollywood practice of nepotism and moved to Hollywood where his brothers got him a job at Corinne Griffith Productions as a crew member. Within three years he had worked his way up to associate producer. Goetz then moved on to production jobs at MGM and Paramount before becoming an associate producer at Fox Films in March 1930. The first movies Goetz produced at Fox were two Spanish-language westerns, El último de los Vargas (1930), based on a Zane Grey novel, and Figaro and His Great Day (1931), both of which starred George J. Lewis as "Jorge Lewis."
A dashing man with an earthy sense of humor, Goetz married Louis B. Mayer's daughter Edith in 1930. Edith said her husband was a fast talker who persistently telephoned her for a date after they met at Los Angeles' Ambassador Hotel. When Goetz asked Edith to marry him Mayer objected, wanting to know how he was going to support her. Goetz won Mayer's consent when he replied, "If necessary, Mr. Mayer, with my own two hands." The two men would continue to argue about the proposed marriage right up until the ceremony itself. Their marriage was Hollywood's wedding of the year. William and Edith's marriage lasted until his death, and they had two daughters. His ultra-conservative father-in-law would eventually disinherit Edith, perhaps because of his son-in-law's key role in undermining the studio system in the 1950s, or because he was a staunch Democrat, or possibly due to the brothers' ties to a man with reputed underworld connections (although Mayer's ostensible boss Nicholas Schenck, Chairman of Loew's Inc. had the same connections).
One of the most influential figures in Goetz's life would prove to be Warner Bros.' production chief Darryl F. Zanuck, who had remarkably risen through the ranks of Hollywood on his own merits and who had a natural disdain for nepotism. Nearly every one of Warner Bros.' successes after 1924 could be directly credited to the workaholic (many would add sexoholic) producer-writer-production chief. In 1933 Zanuck had quit Warners after a long-simmering rift with Harry M. Warner. Despite being offered several positions at other studios, Zanuck had a burning desire to run his own studio and was approached by the affable Joseph M. Schenck with an offer that would result in the creation of Twentieth Century Pictures. The deal was a conglomeration of backers, each with his own agenda, but each having enormous confidence in Zanuck's enviable track record of delivering a prodigious number of hits. Twentieth Century Pictures was created as a partnership between Louis B. Mayer, former United Artists president Joseph M. Schenck and Loew's Inc. (the parent company of MGM) head Nicholas Schenck (Joe's brother and officially Mayer's boss), who arranged for underwriting by the Bank of America with additional backing by the cunningly abrasive Herbert J. Yates, who keenly sought out guaranteed business for his Consolidated Film Labs (and who would soon form Republic Pictures out of a merger among Mascot Pictures, Monogram Pictures and Liberty Pictures when bankrupt producer Mack Sennett's studio became available). Goetz's involvement was based on a string Mayer attached for his money: he wanted his son-in-law out from under his thumb. Whatever talents William Goetz possessed as a young man in Hollywood were lost on his father-in-law. Twentieth Century merged with ailing Fox Films (which owned a desirable theater chain) in 1935, and Goetz was named vice president of Twentieth Century-Fox, with Zanuck over him as production head and Joe Schenck serving as president. In its infancy the studio relied heavily on the talents of a small roster of popular stars such as Tyrone Power, Don Ameche and Alice Faye, but found a gold mine in an adorable and monumentally talented six-year-old moppet named Shirley Temple, who literally kept the the ink from turning red. Among the 20th Century-Fox pictures Goetz personally produced were The House of Rothschild (1934), for which he received an Academy Award nomination for Best Picture along with Zanuck; Les Misérables (1935), a classic Hollywood production of Victor Hugo's novel; and a hit adaptation of Jack London's Call of the Wild (1935), which starred MGM loan-out Clark Gable, Loretta Young (who got pregnant by Gable during production) and Jack Oakie. Goetz's stock at the studio began to rise and he gained a reputation for being an efficient, unassuming producer who (most importantly) could bring a project in at or under budget. At the outbreak of WWII, Zanuck eagerly accepted an army commission and placed Goetz as acting head of the studio in 1942. As production head, Goetz was responsible for some prestigious films that brought credit to both him and the studio, including Guadalcanal Diary (1943) and the The Song of Bernadette (1943), which was nominated for 12 Academy Awards and won four, including a Best Actress Oscar for Jennifer Jones, who would eventually become the wife of Goetz's then brother-in-law, David O. Selznick.
Like his father-in-law Louis B. Mayer, Goetz emphasized quality to distinguish his product in the market, and he did not flinch from spending money to achieve it. Unlike Mayer, however, Goetz learned the mechanics of bringing a project through to completion. Hollywood is a town where paranoid bosses push many ambitious men out of their positions, though, and 20th Century-Fox was no different. Zanuck still regarded Goetz as an unimaginative administrator and began hearing rumors that Goetz was growing ambitious. Goetz, however, resigned upon Zanuck's return in 1943 to avoid any conflict. Zanuck was also said to be furious that Goetz had turned his special 4:00 p.m. casting couch interview room into a storage area.
Mayer, belatedly recognizing Goetz's production talents, offered him a chance to be the head of MGM's creative development, but Goetz told his wife that he had to turn her father down, since the first thing he would have done at MGM was fire Mayer. Zanuck's 1942-43 absence had given Goetz a taste of running a studio, and since there were no jobs on offer to become a studio boss, he created International Pictures in 1943 with lawyer Leo Spitz, who had been an adviser to Goetz's brother-in-law David O. Selznick. One of the great independent producers, Selznick had produced the most successful movie of all time, Gone with the Wind (1939), which he found impossible to bring to the screen without help from Mayer, given MGM's irreplaceable Rhett Butler: Gable. Like Zanuck a dozen years earlier, Goetz opted to strike out on his own with International Pictures (Selznick was furious about that name, believing it conflicted with his own Selznick International Pictures).
During its brief life as an independent company, International Pictures produced ten middling films distributed by United Artists before merging with Universal Pictures to create Universal-International Pictures in 1945, with Goetz being appointed production chief. As U-I studio boss, Goetz partnered with British producer J. Arthur Rank to release Rank's British-produced films in America. A major stockholder, Rank at one point tried to take over the studio, but he proved unsuccessful. Under Goetz's direction, U-I became known for family fare and well-crafted B-pictures, including the long-running Bud Abbott and Lou Costello series of comedies, the "Francis the Talking Mule" series and the popular "Ma and Pa Kettle" movies. These would eventually become repetitious and Goetz had no particular fondness for inane comedies, but they were money in the bank for U-I.
Goetz participated in the 1946 Waldorf Conference with his father-in-law, MGM capo di tutti capi Nicholas Schenck, and other top studio executives. The conference was a studio boss pow-wow called by Motion Pictures Producers Association President Eric Johnston, who was in a panic over the so-called "Hollywood Ten", a group of Hollywood creative people who were indicted after failing to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee looking for evidence of Communist "subversion" in the motion picture industry. It was at the Waldorf Conference that the Hollywood blacklist was devised, with the aim of ridding the industry of any Communistsm real, suspected or imagined. What it did do was rein in the effect of New Deal progressives who may have proved too radical for the movie moguls' tastes when it came to labor relations.
Some commentators believe the real deal struck at the Waldorf Conference was an agreement to break the militants in the craft unions by tarring them as "Reds". An ancillary part of this deal, as the argument goes, was an agreement to place in control of the unions men who had strong ties to organized crime, in order for them to offer the bosses sweetheart deals and put an end to the labor unrest that Hollywood experienced as World War II came to a close. The studios had already suffered through a 13-week strike the year before.
The strike was launched on March 12, 1945, when the Conference of Studio Unions (CSU) went out in protest of the studios' delay in renewing the contract for interior decorators. The strike had been opposed by IATSE, which had been under the control of the Chicago mob in the 1930s and early 1940s. The studios had surreptitiously called on Mafia muscle to attempt to break up the strike. CSU officials were branded "Reds" and "Communist subversives" and harassed. Ronald Reagan, the future Screen Actors Guild (SAG) president, had volunteered to be an informer against the CSU, snitching to the FBI on its activities.
Goetz signed on to the blacklist, perhaps realizing he could not alienate his fellow studio bosses if he was to establish Universal-International Pictures on a sound footing, as he needed to curry their favor to get loan-outs of their stars. U-I's major problem was that it had no box-office stars. Rock Hudson, Tony Curtis and Jeff Chandler were contract players, but their careers had not yet bloomed. U-I thus had to rely on the good will of the other studio bosses until it could establish itself as a major player.
In 1949 Goetz and his good friend, super-agent Lew Wasserman, engineered the first profit participation deal in motion picture history. U-I wanted Wasserman's client, James Stewart, recently out of his contract at MGM, to appear in Anthony Mann's new Western, Winchester '73 (1950). Goetz felt he was unable to obtain funds necessary for such a costly production up front, so he signed Stewart to a deal that gave him half of the profits of the picture rather than a set fee.
Wasserman had wanted to establish Stewart, an independent contractor, as a corporation to protect him from the then-prohibitive income tax, which topped out at 90% for earners of Stewart's caliber. By making him a producer, Wasserman put Stewart in a lower tax-rate via a production company that would take a tax-favored stake in his movies in lieu of a personal fee. Stewart's production company would then be taxed at the lower corporate rate.
Stewart netted $750,000 from the deal, with U-I netting the same amount (while the deal cost the studio a greater percentage of profits from a hit, it was also insulated from the losses that possibly could be generated by a failure, as it lowered production costs). Regardless, it was a fortuitous deal since the picture was, deservedly, a smash hit. A profit participation deal was again used on U-I's excellent Stewart-Mann western Bend of the River (1952).
The profit participation deal was revolutionary--- it would ultimately unravel the entire studio system, and would soon be copied by other independent-minded stars. Many of them would refuse to sign new contracts with their studios in order to go independent and take advantage of percentage deals. It proved to be the straw that finally broke the studio system's back (having lost proprietary theater ownership in the 1950s was another crippling blow, along with the competition from a new medium, television). With profit participation deals, power shifted from the studios to the stars and their agents. Studios now became financiers and renters of production facilities.
Although U-I shared in the profits of its profit-participation contracts with Stewart, who became a top-10 box office star for the first time in the 1950s appearing in U-I westerns, it did not reverse a financial slump the studio underwent in the early 1950s. U-I was financially weak and succumbed to a 1952 take-over by Decca Records.
Wasserman's MCA, an entertainment conglomerate that began as a talent agency but thrived as a leading TV producer due to a secret waiver granted it by SAG when it was headed by Wasserman client Ronald Reagan, ultimately would buy U-I by acquiring Decca Records in 1962 (Wasserman and MCA chairman Jules Stein reportedly had close ties to the Chicago mob; as late as 1984, a Mafia enforcer belonging to John Gotti's Gambino crime family with "a past history of arranging narcotics smuggling," according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, was serving as a middleman for MCA despite having no prior experience in the music industry. An investigation into MCA in the mid-'80s was quashed by then-President Ronald Reagan's Justice Department. Wasserman had remained close to Reagan, a man he had made a millionaire by giving him an ownership stake in the TV series Death Valley Days (1952) and also through a land deal. Through Wasserman, Reagan had become wealthy enough to pursue a political career after his acting career ended in 1964. Despite being a liberal Democrat, Wasserman raised money for Reagan's first gubernatorial campaign as a right-wing Republican and served as the chief fundraiser for his presidential library.
Goetz left the studio in 1954 and went independent, having obtained a distribution deal through Columbia for his William Goetz Productions. Films produced by the independent Goetz were nominated three times for Golden Globes: Sayonara (1957), which garnered Academy Award nominations for Goetz, director Joshua Logan, star Marlon Brando and Best Supporting Oscars for featured players Red Buttons and Miyoshi Umeki; Me and the Colonel (1958), a Holocaust comedy starring Danny Kaye; and Song Without End (1960), a musical about composer Franz Liszt co-directed by George Cukor, which won Goetz the Best Musical Song from the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, and an Oscar for Best Music.
Like many movie moguls, including Nicholas Schenck and his father-in-law, Goetz raised thoroughbreds. He bought his first racing stock from L.B, a famous horse breeder who got out of the racing business after World War II, as it was bad for his image. Goetz's horse Your Host won the 1950 Santa Anita Derby and subsequently sired Kelso, one of the all-time money winners.
Goetz terminated his production company in 1961 after making the Glenn Ford service comedy Cry for Happy (1961), but he came out of retirement in 1964 to take the job of vice president at Seven Arts Productions Ltd., a Canadian-controlled production and distribution corporation. Goetz possibly took the job as a favor to his friend Lew Wasserman, as the major stockholder in Seven Arts, Louis Chesler, had ties to the Chicago mob, as did Wasserman in his early days as a musician and recording artists' agent. Significantly, Chesler had served on the board of directors of Allied Artists, a subsidiary of his brothers' defunct Monogram Pictures.
Chesler, an aficionado of horse-racing like Goetz and a reputed gambler, was the driving force behind Seven Arts Productions, which was capitalized on Toronto's stock exchange. In addition to investing in the entertainment field, the 300-pound entrepreneur was a major housing developer in Florida. Chesler was described as a front or associate of underworld crime bosses Vito Genovese and Meyer Lansky through the Florida real estate company General Development Corp., which he owned with another Lasky associate, Wallace Groves.
General Development's board of directors included gangster "Trigger Mike" Coppola and Max Orovitz, who was Lansky's stockbroker. Another partner was Eddie DeBartolo, a shopping mall developer and racetrack owner with a taste for high-stakes gambling. DeBartolo, who bought the San Francisco 49ers professional football team for his son, Edward DeBartolo Jr., was close to Lansky and Lansky associates Carlos Marcello, who controlled Florida's narcotics and gambling, and New Orleans Mafia boss Santo Trafficante Jr.. Both Marcello and Trafficante, who owed fealty to the Chicago mob, had been recruited via Chicago boss Sam Giancana to assassinate Cuban leader Fidel Castro for the CIA, which they were glad to do, as Castro had booted them and Lansky out of Cuba--where they controlled lucrative gambling, narcotics, prostitution and other criminal activities--after the 1959 revolution (some conspiracy theorists place the responsibility for President John F. Kennedy's assassination on Marcello and Trafficante, though that has never been proven.)
Through General Development Corp., Chesler and Groves introduced gambling to the Bahamas, buying half of Grand Bahama Island and setting up the Grand Bahama Development Co. in the early 1960s to build a hotel cum casino. It was through Chesler that the Bahamian gaming business was penetrated by Lansky, looking for a new territory after losing Cuba, and Dino Cellini, a mob banker described as Lansky's right-hand man, the person he most trusted with the receipts from his gambling operations. One of Chesler's partners in the Bahamas was Carroll Rosenbloom, owner of the Los Angeles Rams and one of the three largest shareholders in Seven Arts, who was described as a notorious gambler.
Although Chesler is credited with opening up the British crown colony to gambling, having done most of the schmoozing and covert bribery through the awarding of "consulting fees" to well-connected politicians and colonial bureaucrats, he was forced out of the Bahamas in a power struggle in 1964. Chesler's story, well known in the 1960s, likely was one of the inspirations for Michael Corleone's Cuban sojourn and business dealings with Hyman Roth--a character based on Meyer Lansky--in The Godfather Part II (1974).
Lansky's gang ran the "skim" of Bahamian casino money that was repatriated to mob banks in Miami controlled by Cellini, who had to work in London and Rome, as he was persona non grata in Florida and the Bahamas. Subsequently, development in the Bahamas hit a downturn and the Canadian holding company Atlantic Acceptance, a major source of capital, went bankrupt in June 1965. The company's $104-million default touched off an international financial scandal. Although Chesler liquidated the rest of his holdings by the end of 1966, he had put his stamp on the Bahamas by creating the island's gaming industry and introducing the Lansky gang to the islands.
In 1967 his company, now called Seven Arts Ltd., acquired Jack L. Warner's controlling interest in Warner Bros. Pictures and other interests, including Warner Bros. Records and Reprise Records (the $84-million price tag of the acquisitions was worth approximately $640 million in 2003 dollars). The company was renamed Warner Bros-Seven Arts. The ambitious studio bought Atlantic Records for $17 million in stock that same year but, crippled by debt, the company itself was acquired by the conglomerate Kinney National Services Inc. in 1969, the year of Goetz's death.
One of the major shareholders in Warner Bros-Seven Arts was the Bahamas- and Switzerland-based mutual fund Investors Overseas Service (IOS), owned by Bernard Cornfeld, a reputed money launderer for Lansky and the mob. Allegedly in cahoots with Dino Cellini, swindler Robert Vesco took over IOS during the period Cornfeld was being held in prison by Swiss authorities investigating fraud (nothing was proven, and he was eventually released). Vesco defrauded IOS of $224 million in 1972, while major Democratic Party figures like former California governor Edmund G. Brown and President Franklin D. Roosevelt's son James Roosevelt served on the board of directors. Vesco was no partisan; he made a huge illegal campaign contribution to President Richard Nixon's 1972 re-election committee before going on the lam.
Nixon paid Vesco back by firing Robert Morgenthau, the U.S. Attorney for the southern district of New York, who was investigating Mafia money laundering through Switzerland. Morgenthau already had won a conviction against Max Orovitz for violating stock registration laws, and he was moving in on IOS' John King when he was unceremoniously sacked. Although King was later convicted, he received a relatively light sentence.
While it may seem ironic that a Democrat like Goetz would be involved with a possibly mobbed-up firm, one must remember that in the mid-'60s, at least 10% and as much as 20% of the Democratic Party's revenues were derived from organized crime, as in many cities, like Chicago, the Democratic ward headquarters usually doubled as a syndicate clubhouse. The Chicago organization swung the 1960 Presidential vote in Illinois to Kennedy. The Mafia had infiltrated Hollywood in the early 1940s, and many of the moguls rubbed shoulders with organized crime figures at the racetracks they haunted and at which they contested their own horses. Steve Ross, the Kinney conglomerate owner that acquired Warner Bros-Seven Arts, himself was reputed to have Mafia connections (former Paramount production chief Robert Evans boasts of his connections to mob lawyer and Hollywood fixer Sidney Korshak, whom he was not above asking favors from, in his autobiography "The Kid Stays in the Picture"). Democratic Senator Estes Kefauver had investigated the Mafia in 1951, holding televised hearings that put mob bosses such as Frank Costello on the spot and Kefauver in the spotlight. Later, Sen. John Kennedy and his brother Robert F. Kennedy were part of the committee investigating the Teamsters Union for its links to the mob (interestingly, Kefauver beat Kennedy out for the vice presidential slot on the 1956 ticket headed by Adlai Stevenson). The Democratic establishment was more interested in investigating labor corruption than it was in elucidating and ending the mob's links with politicians and legitimate businesses and businessmen, which included Kennedy's own father Joseph P. Kennedy, who had financed rum running by Detroit's Purple Gang during Prohibition.
This focus on labor to the detriment of the businessmen who actually did business with organized crime was a prejudice portrayed in Hollywood films such as On the Waterfront (1954). In "Waterfront," union officials are shown as corrupt killers, whereas the warehouse-owner-surrogate is a sort of savior to the martyred longshoreman played by Marlon Brando, who leads the flock of his co-workers away from the mobbed-up union boss Johnny Friendly into the warm bosom of the owner's warehouse at the end of the movie. (ironically, playwright Arthur Miller had written a screenplay, "The Hook," about corruption on the New York waterfront for "Waterfront" director Elia Kazan. Columbia boss Harry Cohn, an attendee of the Waldorf Conference and a supporter of the blacklist, had demanded that Miller change the corrupt union officials to Communists, as it would then make the script "pro-American." Miller refused.).
Goetz's father-in-law, Louis B. Mayer, had been the driving force behind the foundation of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences in 1927, which he had envisioned as a company union that would forestall unionization by more militant craft guilds. Mayer, through the Academy, managed to hold off unionization until the mid-'30s, when the crafts bolted the Academy and formed their own guilds. Mayer's dream of controlling labor and keeping absolute control over labor costs was dashed, and the Academy morphed into a scientific and research organization focused on publicity. By the end of the 1930s, the New York Mafia began infiltrating Hollywood through the projectionists' union. Studio bosses such as Mayer still kept tight control over labor costs, though that power began to decline in the 1940s due to concessions made to rebellious stars. The DeHavilland decision--named after a lawsuit brought against Warner Bros. by actress Olivia de Havilland--which forbade the studios from adding on suspension time to the end of the standard seven-year contracts, also helped erode the studio's power. However, it was Goetz's and Wasserman's profit participation contract that effectively destroyed the studios, that and the loss of their profitable theater chains (Loew's Inc. managed to fend off the divestiture for years, until well after Louis B. Mayer was forced out of MGM in favor of Dore Schary by Nicholas Shenck in 1951).
As the power of the vertically integrated studios waned after their Justice Department-enforced divestiture of their movie chains, agents representing the now-free serfs who were stars moved into the breach, creating independent production companies. At the same time, the power of organized crime, which began at roughly the same time as Hollywood organized itself vertically to control the chaos of movie production and distribution, apparently waxed. A major landlord in vice districts, the Mafia controlled many old inner-city theaters abandoned by the studios that were subsequently turned into grindhouses showcasing exploitation fare and later pornography after the breakdown of censorship in the 1960s and early 1970s. Corruption extended to first-run houses as well. Warner Communications executives in the 1970s were convicted of accepting kickbacks from movie theaters, a case in which Warner boss Steve Ross was considered an unindicted co-conspirator, though he vigorously denied any knowledge of wrongdoing and was never himself indicted for any crime.
Goetz was never implicated in any improprieties in all his years as a movie executive. In fact, he was something of an anomaly in Hollywood. Although he was a member of one of Hollywood's royal families, Goetz was unusual in that he enforced a "no nepotism" policy in his companies. He was renowned for his erudition and good manners in an industry studded with vulgar (Columbia's Harry Cohn being a stellar example) and semi-literate moguls. He eschewed a chauffeur and drove his own car to work, where he cultivated a persona as paterfamilias (as did his father-in-law at MGM), helping his employees with personal problems. Goetz had his personal chef oversee the preparation of food at the studio fare.
Goetz was known for his exquisite taste, and he and his wife were counted among the movie colony's premier art collectors, specializing in the impressionists and post-impressionists. Some of his Vincent van Gogh paintings were used in MGM's Lust for Life (1956). In 1959 the Goetzs' art collection had its own show at San Francisco's art museum, The Palace of the Legion of Honor. Speaking about Goetz, fellow art collector Billy Wilder said that he was "the very antithesis of being pompous . . . he had a funny cynicism." A respected member of the community, Goetz served as a director of the City National Bank of Beverly Hills and as a trustee of Reed College (Portland, Oregon). His last motion picture production was the mediocre Assault on a Queen (1966), scripted by Rod Serling.
William Goetz contracted cancer and was treated at the Mayo Clinic. On August 15, 1969, he died in his Los Angeles home from complications of the disease. He was buried in Hillside Memorial cemetery.20th Century Fox- Producer
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Bryan Foy started in showbiz as a vaudevillian, touring nationally for ten years as one of the 'Seven Little Foys' (the oldest). He left the act in 1918 to embark on a solo career in Hollywood, at first devising gags for Buster Keaton then filming two-reelers at Fox. In 1927, he began his long association with Warner Brothers where he famously produced the first all-talking feature, Lights of New York (1928), at the cost of a mere $18,000. The film, shot in just eight days, grossed well over a million dollars for Warner Brothers and contributed to Foy being promoted head of the B-unit.
Under his sobriquet 'Keeper of the B's', Foy turned out as many as 26 pictures a year for the next two decades. Some were prison films, such as Crime School (1938) with Humphrey Bogart and the Dead End Kids (another winner: it cost $210,000 and returned a million, not to mention reissues). Much of Foy's other output consisted of thrillers like the 'Torchy Blane' series, or its juvenile counterpart, 'Nancy Drew'. By the mid-30's, Warners were also competing with RKO and Columbia in the B-western stakes, turning out a series of oaters starring Dick Foran.
After a spell at 20th Century Fox beginning in 1942 (which took in some of the last films made with Laurel & Hardy), Foy returned to Warner Brothers to produce the most popular film associated with his name, the gimmicky but hugely enjoyable House of Wax (1953), shot in 3-D and 'WarnerPhonic' sound. Curiously, the director André De Toth was blind in one eye and thus unable to fully appreciate the fruits of his labour. A year later, Foy produced another 3-D low budgeter which featured the same combination of Vincent Price (star), Bert Glennon (cinematographer), and Crane Wilbur (writer). The Mad Magician (1954) wasn't quite on par with 'House of Wax' but still provided some decent entertainment for fans of the genre. Foy's last film as producer was the much criticised JFK biopic PT 109 (1963), after which he decided to call it a day. Though he received little praise from the critics during the course of his career - a source of some bitterness on his part - he remained proud of his 'little' pictures and their proven record at the box office.at Warner Brothers- Producer
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Until the advent of television in the late 1940's there were two distinct Hollywoods. Populated on one extreme were the major studios (many of which owned their own theater chains) with the glamor made possible with million dollar film budgets. On the other extreme, centered along Gower Street off Sunset, was Poverty Row, where innumerable independent producers of varying repute ground out three and four-day wonders costing next-to-nothing by comparison. It's films, most often westerns, featuring actors with vaguely familiar names in material written to satisfy undemanding, largely rural audiences. Lacking theater chains, these outfits sold their releases to a complex network of film exchanges which would rotate bills up to three times each week, keeping films circulating between theaters across the country for years. Any given film would drift up and down these theaters' double bills, ping ponging Saturday afternoon matinées, literally until the prints wore out. Gower Gulch saw scores of these companies come and go during it's two decade heyday. One studio, Columbia Pictures, managed to break into the ranks of the A-list studios (thanks to a wunderkind director, a crude-yet-crafty studio boss and unique relationships with MGM and Warner Brothers). Another, Republic, would briefly blur the definition of a B-studio by occasionally producing exceptional films. The rest would survive by eking out minuscule profits on a volume basis or fail miserably by rolling the dice on a few ill-conceived projects. Trem Carr spent the majority of his career in the latter of Hollywood's extremes. He's most closely associated with his close friend and partner, W. Ray Johnston. Together these two low-budget veterans successfully established Monogram Pictures, shelved it, only to resurrect it to even greater success... all within a span of less than 6 years. Ray had learned the film business from the ground up, having been the treasurer of Syndicate Pictures and a producer at Florida's Thanhouser Studio. Based on his experience, he saw the key to a company's success lay more in its distribution network than the actual films themselves. With the advent of talkies, he set about to build a tight knit distributor franchise and the first incarnation of Monogram was born in 1931. Trem had joined up with Ray just prior to the company's formation as production manager and operated through 1935 without any studio facilities of its own. Monogram entered into deals with independent producers (including Paul Malvern, M.H. Hoffman and I.E. Chadwick) to release their product under its banner while occasionally renting studio sound stages and producing their own product as well. Ray was the finance and distribution end and Trem was the hands-on production chief of Monogram Pictures from 1931-35. In late 1933, the pair were approached by serial-specializing Mascot Pictures' Nat Levine about joining forces under one banner at the recently foreclosed-upon Mack Sennett studio. Fearing the overhead, they refused. By 1935, Nat Levine's reputation had grown significantly since the release of his Tom Mix serial, The Miracle Rider (1935) and it's reported $1 million gross, an eye-popping accomplishment in Gower Gulch. Levine next approached the head of Monogram's film processing company, the wealthy, domineering Herbert J. Yates. As the owner of Consolidated Film Industries, Yates had amassed a fortune along Poverty Row by providing processing services and advancing raw film stock on credit to struggling producers, many of whom fail, leaving Yates free to sue and distribute their product at huge profit. In his years doing this, Yates had harbored a desire to become a legitimate movie mogul. While both Trem and Ray had rejected Levine's proposition previously, Yates' involvement made the deal worth serious reconsideration, since Monogram's debts to Yates would be extinguished as part of the deal. Monogram was shelved and the new company, Republic Pictures, was born. Yates made several similar offers to other small outfits that were rolled into the new studio, including Victory and Chesterfield. Under the original plan, Carr, Johnston and Levine were to rotate as production heads, unfortunately it soon became a test of wills; Yates' money bankrolled the operation and he held all the cards. Trem's management style severely clashed with the autocratic Yates and it soon became clear that the unequal partnership was unworkable. Trem was the one-time theoretical head of Republic and regarded Yates as a meddling interloper. Levine did his best to remain neutral, but ultimately sided with the money (ironically, he would be bought out by Yates in 1939 for $1 million in cash and would soon find himself broke and washed up in pictures). Their clashes with Yates escalating violently, Trem and Ray left Republic in 1937 and after a brief stint producing B-pictures for Universal Pictures they resurrected Monogram Pictures using rented offices there, managing to release a remarkable 20 low budget features that same year. With Trem as production manager and Ray as president, this "new" version of Monogram became a label for independent producers to group together largely for the convenience in distributing their product through its network of film exchanges - and the relative prestige of the Monogram name. This concept was virtually identical to United Artists, albeit on a comparatively minuscule budget (Monogram's published profits averaged less than $2,000 per release well into the 40's--- a laughable figure to most studios). For the 1938-39 season, Monogram announced its intention to release 26 features and 16 westerns. The company became known for its ability to quickly capitalize on topical news stories (Atlantic Flight (1937)), modest westerns starring Jack Randall and Tex Ritter and even managing to snag Boris Karloff for the "Mr. Wong" detective series. While none of these films could be considered classics, they were mostly above-par by prevailing Poverty Row standards and most importantly, profitable, an elusive goal for many of it's neighbors. An extremely efficient production manager, Trem continued to attract a number of equally efficient (meaning in most cases, extremely cheap) producers under the Monogram banner in the early 40s, and scooping up other studios' cast-off properties that he keenly sensed still had money left to wring out of them. Among these were former 20th Century Fox's Charlie Chan series (lifted nearly whole with it's aging star Sidney Toler, albeit with diminishing returns with each added entry) and getting tremendous mileage with Samuel Goldwyn's recently unemployed Dead End Kids (re-branded as the East Side Kids and later as the Bowery Boys for legendary skin flint producer Jan Grippo). Monogram maintained a heavy emphasis on cheaply produced westerns, through the war (tragically losing one of their biggest stars, Buck Jones, in the infamous Coconut Grove Fire in 1942). Trem and Ray made a fantastic business partnership and remained close friends. Ray was devastated when Trem died of a coronary in 1946 and the Monogram name gradually morphed into Allied Artists (a name more reflecting the concept of primarily distributing other producers' films) in the late 1940s. Despite the loftier sounding name, Allied would continue to release films with the same low-budget production values well into the 1950's. In retrospect, Monogram was neither the best poverty row studio (the title ironically befitting Republic) or the worst (inarguably, PRC), but largely thanks to Trem Carr, successful, resilient and remarkably prolific.at Monogram- Producer
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New York-born Sam Katzman entered the film industry as a prop boy at age 13, and worked his way up the ladder, learning virtually every facet of film production before becoming a producer himself. Starting out producing action/adventure serials (where he got the nickname "Jungle Sam"), Katzman's output encompassed virtually every genre imaginable. In the 1930s he turned out Tim McCoy westerns for Puritan and Victory, the next decade he was grinding out the East Side Kids series at Monogram, the 1950s saw him making sci-fi opuses and teenage musicals for Columbia and in the 1960s he was cranking out hippie/biker films for AIP and Elvis Presley musicals for MGM. Due to a combination of astute marketing and the fact that he ground out films so quickly and cheaply that he could cash in on a fad before it faded away, Katzman's movies seldom if ever lost money.at Monogram and Columbia- Producer
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Producer, songwriter, composer and author, educated at the University of Chicago and New York University. He wrote a number of Broadway stage scores and libretti, and worked as the managing editor of Cosmopolitan magazine between 1918 and 1919, then was the director general of Cosmopolitan Productions until 1924. Coming to Hollywood in 1924, he began producing films. Joining ASCAP in 1933, his popular-song compositions include "American Serenade" (from "Her Regiment", "Brothers", "Canzonetta", "Days That Used to Be", "Deep in Your Eyes", "First Love", "Girls Along Fifth Avenue", "Half Moon", "Her Regiment", "I'm in Love" (from "Apple Blossoms"), "I'll Be True to You", "Letter Song" (from "Apple Blossoms"), "Little Book" (from "The Half Moon", "Little Girl's Goodbye" (from "Apple Blossoms"), "Little Old New York", "The Marriage Knot" (from "Apple Blossoms"), "Nancy's Farewell", "On Miami Shore", "Overture", "Second Violin", "Serenade", "Soldier Men", "Someday", "Sometime We Will Meet Again", "Star of Love", "Superlative Love", "Twixt Love and Duty", "When Knighthood Was in Flower", "When Wedding Bells are Ringing", "Who Can Tell?", and "You Are Free". His wife, Mabel Hollins, was a British musical-comedy actress.at RKO, Paramount and 20th Century Fox- Producer
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In 1920, Merian C. Cooper was a member of volunteer of the American Kosciuszko Squadron that supported the Polish army in the war with Soviet Russia, where he met best friend and producing partner Ernest B. Schoedsack. On 26 July 1920, his plane was shot down, and he spent nearly nine months in the Soviet prisoner-of-war camp. He escaped just before the war was over. He was decorated by Marshall Jozef Pilsudski with the highest military decorations: Virtuti Military. He had a successful career in the military and in the movie business.RKO, Pioneer Pictures, MGM- Sidney R. Kent was born on 30 July 1885 in Marysville, Kansas, USA. Sidney R. is known for Manhandled (1924). Sidney R. was previously married to Lillian Edith White and Mabelle Evelyn Eaves.20th Century Fox
- Walter Mirisch and brothers Marvin Mirisch and Harold Mirisch were one of the most successful producing teams in Hollywood history. Their Mirisch Company produced such diverse hits as Some Like It Hot (1959), The Magnificent Seven (1960), West Side Story (1961), The Great Escape (1963), The Pink Panther (1963) and many others. Most of their films were financed and released by United Artists, and through a stock swap in 1963 the brothers acquired the company. They stayed on with UA and their production relationships with producer/directors like Billy Wilder, Blake Edwards and John Sturges became the model by which Hollywood makes movies today.
Starting out as a producer on such low-budget "B" fare at Monogram Pictures as Bomba: The Jungle Boy (1949), Mirisch rose to become one of Hollywood's leading industry statesman. He was a visionary who, in the declining years of the Hollywood studio system, could see that the future lay with the independent producers. Operating out of rented office space at the old Samuel Goldwyn lot in Hollywood, the Mirisches kept their overhead low by such tactics as renting studio stages and facilities only when needed. Whereas the major studios were still burdened by high overhead and salaries, the brothers were in a position to attract top talent and offer high fees and flexible control to up-and-coming directors like Norman Jewison, who responded with three hits in a row for them - The Russians Are Coming the Russians Are Coming (1966), In the Heat of the Night (1967) and The Thomas Crown Affair (1968).the Mirisch Corporation/United Artists - Producer
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Winfield R. Sheehan was born on 24 September 1883 in Buffalo, New York, USA. Winfield R. was a producer and writer, known for Marie Galante (1934), Stand Up and Cheer! (1934) and Now I'll Tell (1934). Winfield R. was married to Maria Jeritza and Kay Laurel. Winfield R. died on 25 July 1945 in Hollywood, California, USA.20th Century Fox- Producer
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Pat Powers was born on October 8, 1869 in Waterford, Ireland as Patrick A. Powers. He is known for his work on The Galloping Cowboy (1926), For the Good of All (1912) and A Frozen Ape (1910). He worked on Steamboat Willie (1928), starring Mickey Mouse as the lead role. He died on July 30, 1948 in New York City, New York, USA.Universal- Producer
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Born in Germany he went to America some time before the second World War and spent a year in Hollywood reading foreign scripts after which he returned to Berlin where he set up his own company to organise the remaking of foreign films into German language versions. One he handled was 'All Quiet on the Western Front', an anti war film that became a kind of personal crusade for him. On the opening night the Nazi's, then in power, put a bomb in the cinema. When the Nazis came into power he left Germany and divided his time between Britain, France and America. He changed his name to the more international sounding S.P. Eagle but changed it back when with 'On the Waterfront' he realised he'd made a film to which any man would be proud to put his name.Horizon Pictures