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George Walton Lucas, Jr. was raised on a walnut ranch in Modesto, California. His father was a stationery store owner and he had three siblings. During his late teen years, he went to Thomas Downey High School and was very much interested in drag racing. He planned to become a professional racecar driver. However, a terrible car accident just after his high school graduation ended that dream permanently. The accident changed his views on life.
He decided to attend Modesto Junior College before enrolling in the University of Southern California film school. As a film student, he made several short films including Electronic Labyrinth THX 1138 4EB (1967) which won first prize at the 1967-68 National Student Film Festival. In 1967, he was awarded a scholarship by Warner Brothers to observe the making of Finian's Rainbow (1968) which was being directed by Francis Ford Coppola. Lucas and Coppola became good friends and formed American Zoetrope in 1969. The company's first project was Lucas' full-length version of THX 1138 (1971). In 1971, Coppola went into production for The Godfather (1972), and Lucas formed his own company, Lucasfilm Ltd.
In 1973, he wrote and directed the semiautobiographical American Graffiti (1973) which won the Golden Globe and garnered five Academy Award nominations. This gave him the clout he needed for his next daring venture. From 1973 to 1974, he began writing the screenplay which became Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope (1977). He was inspired to make this movie from Flash Gordon and the Planet of the Apes films. In 1975, he established ILM. (Industrial Light & Magic) to produce the visual effects needed for the movie. Another company called Sprocket Systems was established to edit and mix Star Wars and later becomes known as Skywalker Sound. His movie was turned down by several studios until 20th Century Fox gave him a chance. Lucas agreed to forego his directing salary in exchange for 40% of the film's box-office take and all merchandising rights. The movie went on to break all box office records and earned seven Academy Awards. It redefined the term "blockbuster" and the rest is history.
Lucas made the other Star Wars films and along with Steven Spielberg created the Indiana Jones series which made box office records of their own. From 1980 to 1985, Lucas was busy with the construction of Skywalker Ranch, built to accommodate the creative, technical, and administrative needs of Lucasfilm. Lucas also revolutionized movie theaters with the THX system which was created to maintain the highest quality standards in motion picture viewing.
He went on to produce several more movies that have introduced major innovations in filmmaking technology. He is chairman of the board of the George Lucas Educational Foundation. In 1992, George Lucas was honored with the Irving G. Thalberg Award by the Board of Governors of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for his lifetime achievement.
He reentered the directing chair with the production of the highly-anticipated Star Wars prequel trilogy beginning with Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace (1999) . The films have been polarizing for fans and critics alike, but were commercially successful and have become a part of culture. The animated spin-off series Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) was supervised by Lucas. He sold Lucasfilm to Disney in 2012, making co-chair Kathleen Kennedy president. He has attended the premieres of new Star Wars films and been generally supportive of them.- Producer
- Music Department
- Executive
David Puttnam was born on 25 February 1941 in London, England, UK. He is a producer and executive, known for The Mission (1986), Chariots of Fire (1981) and The Killing Fields (1984). He has been married to Patricia Mary Jones since 1961. They have two children.- Producer
- Writer
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.- 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.- Producer
- Additional Crew
- Production Manager
Dino De Laurentiis left home at age 17 to enrol in film school, supporting himself as an actor, extra, propman, or any other job he could get in the film industry. His persistence paid off, and by the time he reached his 20th birthday he already had one produced film under his belt. After serving in the Italian army during World War II, De Laurentiis went back into film production, and in 1946 scored a critical and commercial international hit with Bitter Rice (1949) ("Bitter Rice"). He later married its star, Silvana Mangano. De Laurentiis eventually formed a partnership with producer Carlo Ponti, and the team had a string of hits, including several by director Federico Fellini. After the partnership dissolved, De Laurentiis embarked on a plan to build his own studio facilities, which would enable him to make the kind of massive spectacles he wanted to make. The studio complex, called Dinocitta', eventually was forced to close down due to a combination of hard times in the Italian film industry and a string of flops by De Laurentiis himself. De Laurentiis eventually sold the property to the Italian government and moved his base of production to the United States. He again opened up a film production complex in Wilmington, North Carolina, called DEG Studios, but was eventually forced by economic conditions to sell that, too. De Laurentiis has had some critical successes since his move to the U.S. (Ragtime (1981)), but most of his U.S. productions have been critically lambasted, although several have been commercial successes.- Producer
- Additional Crew
- Production Manager
Carlo Ponti was born on 11 December 1912 in Magenta, Lombardy, Italy. He was a producer and production manager, known for Doctor Zhivago (1965), The Road (1954) and Marriage Italian Style (1964). He was married to Sophia Loren and Giuliana Fiastri. He died on 10 January 2007 in Geneva, Switzerland.- Producer
- Additional Crew
- Actor
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.- Producer
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On November 1, 1895, the first public motion picture film presentation was projected at Berlin's Wintergarten with the "Bioscop" apparatus invented by Max Skladanowsky and Emil Skladanowsky. In December 1895, Auguste Lumière and Louis Lumière began exhibiting projected films to the paying public in Paris with their "Cinematographe," a portable camera, printer and projector. Thomas A. Edison's company meanwhile had developed the "Vitascope" for motion picture projection. In 1896, the Gaumont Film Company became the first film company in the world, founded before any other studios. Within a few years, the 35-mm wide Edison film and the 16-frames-per-second projection speed of the Lumière Cinématographe had become the industry standard.
On July 20, 1889, Erich Pommer was born at Altpetristrasse 496, Hildesheim, Germany. As a boy going to school in Göttingen, he neglected some classes in preference to reading stories and books by famous writers of all ages, in English and French as well as German. After he and his brothers had finished sufficient schooling to require only one year of military service, the family moved to Berlin.
In 1906, Pommer went to work at Machol & Lewin's Men's Furnishings shop. There he met his future wife, Gertrud (Gerdy) Levy, who was the company's accountant and whom he married in 1913 in a civil ceremony.
In 1907, Pommer's younger sister Grete, who was working at the Berlin office of the Gaumont Film Company, told him that they needed another salesman. Pommer applied and got the job to make bookings for Gaumont films at movie theaters.
There he met a young projectionist who aspired to become a film cameraman; Karl Freund and Pommer become lifelong friends.
By 1909, Pommer was so successful that he wrote in his letters about "chasing all over Germany and beyond, almost to the border of Turkey". Soon thereafter, Gaumont placed him in charge of film distribution for the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Through his job, he met many film executives, including Marcel Vandal, the director-general of the Éclair Company, with whom he became close friends.
In 1911, Pommer served his mandatory year in the German Army. During his first leave that year, Vandal invited him to Paris, where Pommer was well impressed by the equipment at the Éclair studios (they started manufacturing cameras in 1912).
Pommer did not return to Gaumont because their Berlin office wanted to keep control over Pommer's Vienna branch, while he wanted to report to the Paris corporate headquarters. Instead, he joined Éclair where he would report directly to its Paris headquarters.
Pommer started Éclair's newsreel division. Éclair News photographed a balloon flight in Vienna, with Pommer scheduled to shoot the aerial shots while his cameraman photographed from the ground. Just as Pommer was about to enter the gondola, a gust of wind blew the balloon into the air with him hanging on the outside. He was pulled into the gondola and covered the flight as he had intended. After landing, Pommer found out that his cameraman on the ground was so worried about Pommer that he forgot to crank the camera and got no shots of Pommer hanging outside the balloon and being pulled in. Pommer fired the cameraman for not photographing his assignment regardless of circumstances.
After film, flying and the development of aviation was perhaps Pommer's greatest fascination. The Wright brothers' first flight in 1903 may not have had any impact on him, but in August 1908 a demonstration in LeMans, France, made the Wright brothers world-famous. By 1912, Pommer had made the acquaintance of and flew with Louis Blériot, the first man to fly across the English Channel. Pommer had started to produce feature films, and one of his first two productions Das Geheimnis der Lüfte (1913) (Mystery of the Air) had an aviation theme. In 1933, his last pre-Hitler German production was F. P. 1 Doesn't Answer (1933), a science-fiction film with an aviation background.
At that time and throughout the first half of the 20th century, a creative producer could initiate, coordinate, supervise and control all aspects of a motion picture from inception through completion, including release. Pommer became an exemplar of the "creative producer" and remained so throughout his career.
At the outbreak of World War I in 1914, Pommer was immediately called into service by the German army. He arranged to place the assets of his French employer, Éclair, into a German company called Decla (Deutsche Éclair), while he served on both the Western and the Eastern fronts. He was seriously wounded twice and was awarded the Iron Cross.
In 1916, the Pommer's son Hans (later changed to John) was born. That same year the German Government founded the Bild-und-Filmamt (Bufa). Still a non-commissioned officer, Pommer was placed in charge of its Bucharest, Romania office where he supervised all stage and film showings until the end of the war.
During one of his trips for Bufa, going between Berlin and Bucharest, Pommer stopped over in Vienna where he was introduced to a young actor with training in art and architecture, who was interested in films. Pommer initially engaged in conversation only to be polite. However, he ended up talking with Fritz Lang the entire night, finally inviting Lang to come work for Decla after the war.
Since the early 1900s, Max Reinhardt had been giving the German theater a new dimension to old plays through powerful performances and a targeted combination of stage design, language, music and dance. Film was the new medium that could bring those dimensions to the entire public. A number of Reinhardt-trained directors and actors transitioned to film, including to Decla.
After the war, Pommer assumed hands-on management of Decla. Before the war, France dominated the European film market. Soon after the war concluded, Germany's film companies faced a new competitor - Hollywood. Pommer, however, was by then an experienced film businessman with insight into the international implications of the film industry. Post-war competition between international film companies was sometimes hostile. The Berlin trade press saw Decla as the emerging leader in the industry, crediting Pommer's "very skillful and goal-oriented leadership."
Decla acquired large movie theaters through the Decla-Lichtspiel-GmbH as well as more theaters, studios and distribution channels through mergers with other companies. In 1919, Decla merged with Meinert Film and Oliver-Film. In February 1920, Decla released the first of several international hits, including Fritz Lang's spy thriller Die Spinnen (Spiders) and Robert Wiene's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920).
In 1921, Decla merged with Deutsche Bioscop, which owned the large Babelsberg Studios. In 1922, Universum Film (Ufa) bought Decla-Bioscop and placed Pommer in direct charge of most of its product. Pommer was also able to improve Babelsberg and made it into the largest film studio in Europe.
Ufa had grown out of the wartime Bufa through a series of forced mergers. As Prof. Thomas Elsaesser has pointed out, with the acquisition of Decla-Bioscop, Ufa had became a modern multi-national company and media conglomerate. Very aware of Hollywood, Ufa tried to emulate it, rival with it, or differentiate itself from it. Focused on principles of product differentiation and niche marketing, Ufa deliberately created an art cinema and super-productions for export (the latter specifically designed and budgeted to break into the American market), while it looked to domestic cinema based on popular genres and stars for its economic foundation.
Pommer's and Ufa's international successes during this time included Fritz Lang's two-part Nibelungen (Die Nibelungen: Siegfried (1924) and Die Nibelungen: Kriemhild's Revenge (1924)) and F.W. Murnau's The Last Laugh (1922) where the camera was "unchained" for the first moving shots taking place by strapping the camera to Karl Freund's chest and allowing him to walk forward and backward. When Pommer and Lang attended the U.S. Premiere of Nibelungen, they saw the skyline of New York as their ship came into harbor. The view inspired the look for Metropolis (1927), probably Ufa's most ambitious project thus far. Typical for Pommer productions, Metropolis implemented new film techniques, including the first zoom shot where Karl Freund sat on a swing with the camera on his lap, pulling focus as he was swung forward and back.
By 1926, disagreements arose between Pommer and Ufa's new CEO and its Board of Directors appointed by Deutsche Bank, including whether the studio should invest in developing sound technology and over the terms of the Parufamet agreement (which later proved disastrous for Ufa, as Pommer had predicted). Pommer therefore left Ufa, even before Metropolis was finished shooting. Under financial pressure, Ufa management also did not allow Fritz Lang to participate in post-production, so the film was never shown as intended. Nonetheless, images of Metropolis have influenced many science-fiction films. The most complete version of the film since its Berlin premiere in 1927 was released in 2010, after discovery of 16mm footage in South America and restoration by the Murnau Foundation and the Deutsche Kinemathek.
Having left Ufa, Pommer brought his family to Hollywood. After producing Mauritz Stiller's Hotel Imperial (1927) and Barbed Wire (1927), both with Pola Negri, for Paramount and several uncredited films for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, including The Demi-Bride (1927) with Norma Shearer and Mockery (1927) with Lon Chaney, Pommer returned to Berlin in 1928 at the request of a new Ufa ownership. He did not resume his old position but produced films as an independent within Ufa.
When sound came, Pommer often made simultaneous multiple language versions of his films with the same international crew, including The Blue Angel (1930) introducing Marlene Dietrich and directed by Josef von Sternberg and Bombs Over Monte Carlo (1931) starring Hans Albers. In addition, Pommer continued to experiment with innovative musicals, such as Wilhelm Thiele's Three from the Filling Station (1930) (The Three Good Friends) with Willy Fritsch and Lilian Harvey.
In February 1933, Pommer, accompanied by his wife Gerdy, traveled to New York for business meetings. They left New York a week or so later to return to Germany. On the last night before reaching Europe, they were guests at the captain's table. In those days, intercontinental communications were strictly by transatlantic cable. Radio had only a limited range. During dinner, the radio officer reported to the captain that European stations had just come into range. After the meal, the captain invited his guests to the radio room. In honor of the Pommers, the captain asked the operator to find a German station. Soon over the loudspeaker came one of Hermann Göring's early, vitriolic anti-Semitic speeches!
The Pommers stopped over in Paris before traveling on to Berlin. Their French and American friends counseled them not to return to Germany as it could be dangerous. With their son still in Berlin, staying in Paris was not a option. They returned to Berlin near the end of March 1933. Ludwig Klitzsch, chairman of the board of Ufa, personally assured Pommer the following day that Ufa would make no distinction between Aryan and non-Aryan employees. However on 28 March 1933, Josef Goebbels assembled the leaders of the motion picture industry at the Hotel Kaiserhof to explain the Nazi concepts of film policy and production. Pommer did not attend this meeting.
The following day, at its Meeting No. 905, the Ufa Board complied fully with the Nazi directions. Regarding the "national question" about continuing the employment of Jewish employees, the Executive Board decided that the contracts with Jewish executives and employees should be terminated. Item (4) of the meeting reads in part: "It was also decided to terminate the contract with Pommer, in view of the impossibility under the present circumstances of exhibiting his films." Pommer sent his wife and son to the safety of Paris.
Josef Goebbels tried to have Pommer run the German motion picture industry for him. During his years as Ufa production chief and president of the Spitzenorganisation of the German film industry, Pommer had been very active in the export of German films. He was in close contact with aides of German Foreign Minister Gustav Stresemann, and Pommer had maintained his connections to the Aussenamt (Foreign Office) through the years. He was approached by some of his contacts in the Foreign Office on behalf of Goebbels in April 1933. Pommer never had the slightest intention of coming to terms with the Nazis. Nevertheless, he entered a series of talks with Stresemann's aides, held at his home. These discussions gave him enough time to arrange for his business affairs and pending commitments.
By early May 1933, Pommer felt that he could not stall Goebbels any longer. In his last meeting with the Foreign Office officials, he showed them a recent notification from John's high school of a meeting to discuss the school's participation in a May Day parade. Pommer also showed them a newspaper article, advising that Jewish pupils would not be allowed to participate with their fellow students in the parade. He asked the Aussenamt officials: "Gentlemen, how can you expect me to work in a country that summons my son to school to tell him in front of his peers that he is not good enough to participate with them in the parade?" The next morning Pommer received his exit visa.
That evening, Pommer boarded the express train to Paris. He knew that the Nazis were arresting passengers at the border. When the train stopped in Hannover, he got off. He had his car and driver waiting. They crossed the border into Belgium, without incident, at a local crossing normally not used for Berlin-Paris traffic. Perhaps the diplomats had been kind enough to delay their report to the Nazis. Pommer was also permitted to export his household belongings to France, although they were later confiscated in Paris by the German Army.
In France, Pommer produced two films for Fox, Fritz Lang's Liliom (1934) (the storyline was later used for the musical Carousel), with Charles Boyer and Madeleine Ozeray, and Max Ophüls' On a volé un homme (1934), with Lili Damita and Charles Fallot On June 5, 1933, the United States went off the gold standard. Later in the year, Fox management came to the conclusion that - due to the new exchange rate of the U.S. dollar against French franc - production activities on the European continent were no longer financially advisable. They directed Pommer to complete the two films that were in production and then move with his family to Hollywood. This was one of several decisions that possibly saved Pommer's immediate family from becoming victims of the Holocaust.
After Pommer produced one more film, Joe May's Music in the Air (1934) with Gloria Swanson, Fox was acquired by 20th Century. Louis B. Mayer tried to bring him to MGM, but Pommer had already made a handshake deal with Alexander Korda to go to London. There he produced two films for Korda's London Film Productions: Fire Over England (1937) with Laurence Olivier and Tim Whelan's Troopship (1937).
During the filming of Fire Over England, Pommer met Charles Laughton who was starring in Korda's Rembrandt (1936). When Laughton's next project,I, Claudius (1937), was canceled, Laughton and Pommer founded Mayflower Pictures. Pommer had previously worked well with reputedly difficult actors, and he worked very well with Laughton. He produced three films with Laughton, including The Beachcomber (1938), where Pommer took over as director, The Sidewalks of London (1938), where Laughton starred with Vivien Leigh, and Alfred Hitchcock's Jamaica Inn (1939) that introduced Maureen O'Hara.
In 1939, Pommer was in New York negotiating with RKO to distribute Mayflower's future productions when World War II broke out in Europe. Pommer still had a German passport and could not risk return to England. He went to RKO where he produced Dorothy Arzner's Dance, Girl, Dance (1940) with Maureen O'Hara and Lucille Ball, and also Garson Kanin's They Knew What They Wanted (1940) with Charles Laughton and Carole Lombard. In 1941, Pommer had five more films in preparation, with scripts completed for three, when his heart attack forced a hiatus.
In 1946, he was hired by the U.S. State Department and later transferred to the War Department - with assimilated rank of Colonel - to reorganize the German motion picture industry in the American Zone as Chief Film Officer, Office of Military Government, United States (OMGUS). Working under strict policies to prevent Nazis and Communists from entering the film industry, he was to reorganize and later to rebuild the German film industry and its private assets as part of the Marshall Plan, the overall plan of reconstruction of the German industrial base destroyed in WWII. He headquartered in war-devastated Berlin and quickly re-instituted his practice of frequent dinner parties, not only to transact business but also to feed film industry colleagues who were starving in the post-war chaos. He would often "rest his eyes" during meetings, surprising colleagues who thought he was sleeping when he would suddenly add insightful comments and offer solutions to the discussion.
Pommer was in charge of new film production in the U.S. Zone, which meant that he was responsible to guide studios and film producers, approve all scripts and major contracts, supervise new productions and studio operations, and supervise the financial arrangements of producers, studios and distributors concerning new films. Production of "Rubble Films" began in West Germany, a neorealist genre characterized by location exteriors in the rubble of bombed-out cities, began, including Harald Braun's Zwischen gestern und morgen (1947) and Josef von Báky's And the Heaven Above us (1947).
In June 1948, in an attempt to wrest control of Berlin from the West, the Soviet Union began a blockade. American and British planners devised an airlift. The pilots and crews of 342 planes made 277,000 flights to deliver millions of tons of food and clothing to Berlin until the blockade was lifted. Denied use of the Babelsberg Studios, which were in the Russian Zone, Pommer had been rebuilding Berlin's Tempelhof Studios. Although the Tempelhof Studios were eventually rebuilt, they were then not yet ready, and the blockade forced the focus of production away from Berlin and Pommer to move his headquarters to Munich and its Geiselgasteig Studios, which had survived the war intact.
During his tour of duty with OMGUS, Pommer was able to abolish government censorship of films in Germany through establishment of a national Freiwillige Selbstkontrolle (Voluntary Self-Control) system, envisioned as an improvement on the U.S. Motion Picture Production Code system. Pommer also built greater flexibility into the process through periodic critical self-review. Initially opposed by the Soviets, the British and the French, all protecting their own economic and political interests, the FSK system was eventually adopted throughout Europe and continues to this day. After three years, having re-established the film industry throughout West Germany and considering his job complete, Pommer returned to California in 1949. He and Dorothy Arzner together planned a new production company, Signature Pictures, but promised financing fell through.
In 1950, Pommer again returned to Munich, as the best location for his next films despite the fact that his work for OMGUS in abolishing state censorship of films had been over the vehement opposition of politicians in the State Government of Bavaria. After Pommer resumed producing films in Munich, Bavarian politicians continued to complicate his professional life.
Pommer's first post-war film, The Mistress (1952) with Hans Albers won the Best Picture Award at the 1951 Berlin Film Festival. His last film, Sons, Mothers and a General (1955) was awarded the Grand Prize of the Belgian Critics as Best Picture of 1955, beating out such remarkable films as Bad Day at Black Rock (1955) and Blackboard Jungle (1955). Pommer's last film was also awarded the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film in the U.S. under the title Sons, Mothers, and a General.
In 1956, Pommer took what was to be a two months' trip to the United States to negotiate for an English-dubbed version of Sons, Mothers, and a General. While he was in California, a foot infection aggravated by diabetes worsened to such a degree as to require amputation of his right leg and a long-term recovery. He could not return to Germany. He canceled all projects and retired. He lived in a modest house in Southern California with Gerdy until she died in 1960. Then he lived with his son's family, including his two grandchildren, until his death in 1966.- 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.- 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.- Producer
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His parents Henry C. DeMille and Beatrice DeMille were playwrights. His father died when he was 12, and his mother supported the family by opening a school for girls and a theatrical company. Too young to enlist in the Spanish-American War, Cecil followed his brother William C. de Mille to the New York Academy of Dramatic Arts, making his stage debut in 1900. For twelve years he was actor/manager of his mother's theatrical company. In 1913, Jesse L. Lasky, Samuel Goldwyn and DeMille formed the Lasky Film Company (which years later evolved into Paramount Pictures), and the next year went west to California and produced the successful six reeler, The Squaw Man (1914), of historical significance as the first feature length film produced in Hollywood. He championed the switch from short to feature-length films and is often credited with making Hollywood the motion picture capital of the world. Rather than putting his money into known stars, he emphasized production values. He also developed stars, notably Gloria Swanson. He produced and directed 70 films and was involved in many more. Many of his films were romantic sexual comedies (he is supposed to have believed that Americans were curious only about money and sex). His best-known were biblical/religious epics: Joan the Woman (1916), The Ten Commandments (1923), The King of Kings (1927), The Sign of the Cross (1932), The Crusades (1935), Samson and Delilah (1949), and The Ten Commandments (1956). From 1936 to 1945 he hosted and directed the hour-long "Lux Radio Theatre", which brought the actors and stories of many movies to the airwaves and further established him as the symbol of Hollywood. He appeared as himself in the classic Sunset Boulevard (1950) with his former star Gloria Swanson as the fictitious disturbed former silent film actress Norma Desmond. His niece Agnes de Mille was the acclaimed choreographer of both the original Broadway production and film version of Oklahoma! (1955).- Producer
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Al Christie began his career in 1909 with the Nestor Company. In 1912 he was put in charge of production for a series of westerns. By 1916 he had set up his own production company that produced comedy two-reelers and occasionally a full-length feature. He was the brother of producer/director Charles Christie. In 1926 Christie, along with Vera Steadman and H. Prevost, Marie Prevost's mother, was in a car accident in Florida that left Mrs. Prevost dead from a broken spine. Steadman and Christie suffered cuts and bruises.- Producer
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Born into a large Bohemian-Polish family in Chicago on March 14, 1864, William N. Selig was one of the true pioneers of the motion picture industry. Though not widely remembered today, his Selig Polyscope Co. was responsible for many landmark events in early cinema. Among these were construction of the first permanent studio in Los Angeles in 1908-1909, production of the first cliff-hanger serial (The Adventures of Kathlyn (1913)) and the first film version of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1910).
After working as an upholsterer, then a vaudeville magician in Chicago, Selig traveled to northern California in 1890 to run a fruit ranch in a small town called Chicago Park. The move was partially necessitated by health problems he was having at the time. By 1893 William had recovered enough to start an African-American minstrel company known as "Selig and Johnson's Colored Minstrels." Performing in the San Francisco area, the most notable member of this troupe was Bert Williams, who would become the greatest African-American comedian of the vaudeville era.
Upon seeing an Edison Kinetescope at the Dallas Fair in 1894, Selig decided to return home to Chicago where he began working on his own camera-projection system. In 1896 he founded one of the world's first motion picture studios. From very modest beginnings, his Selig Polyscope Co. quickly grew to be one of the major players during the pioneer era. With the help of a machinist named Andrew Schustek, Selig designed one of the earliest camera-projectors. Based largely on the Lumiere Cinematographe, his invention would share its name with his fledgling studio.
The first decade of Selig Polyscope's operation was marked by legal turmoil, due largely to the efforts of Thomas A. Edison's lawyers. Finally, in 1909, Selig and several other studio heads formed an uneasy alliance with Edison. The resulting Motion Picture Patents Company and its distribution arm General Films would dominate the film industry until 1915. That year the independent companies won a major victory when the Supreme Court ruled the M.P.P.C. an illegal monopoly.
"Colonel" Selig's ambitions were not strictly confined to cinema. Around 1911 he began acquiring land for what would become the largest private zoo in the world. The Selig Zoo at Eastlake (now Lincoln) Park, in Los Angeles was a logical extension of his movie business. Over the years, William had accumulated a sizable collection of animals for his jungle movies. The 32-acre zoo allowed him to showcase his menagerie while leaving room for studios at the back of the grounds. Many famous animals resided at the zoo, including the original Leo the MGM lion.
Once the zoo/studio was in operation, Selig no longer needed the first L.A. studio that director Francis Boggs had opened for him in Edendale (now Echo Park). An up-and-coming producer named William Fox decided to lease that site for his soon-to-be-famous company. Another giant of the industry benefited from Selig's initial investment in Los Angeles. Louis B. Mayer moved into the studios at the zoo once Selig retired from major production around 1920. The Colonel had no desire to compete against these younger, more aggressive movie moguls.
There were other factors which led William to leave the industry he helped found. With the release of The Spoilers (1914) in 1914, Selig enjoyed his greatest success. At this point Selig Polyscope appeared to have a bright future, but things quickly changed. During this time the industry was evolving from producing the short films Selig specialized in to the modern feature-length productions. While William did make longer films like "The Spoilers," he felt shorts were the way of the future. The onset of World War I also hurt Selig Polyscope, given its extensive European operations. Finally, the dissolution of the Patents Company made the industry more competitive, dooming the pioneer studios.
Selig moved into independent production after closing his studios, working infrequently until the 1930s. The Colonel's glory days were past, though, and he faded into obscurity. The cost of operating a large zoo and the Great Depression had reduced Selig's fortune to nothing. He became a literary agent in his later years, selling off the story rights purchased years before for his films. In 1947 Selig and several other film pioneers were awarded special Oscars. He died the following year on July 15, with his loving wife of many years, Mary, at his side.- Producer
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David Horsley was born on March 11, 1873, in a small coal mine village called West Stanley, County of Durham, England. This village was owned and operated by the West Stanley Coal Co., which operated three coal mines with an average output of 1,500 tons of coal per day. The miners' houses comprising the village were all owned by the coal company. David's paternal grandfather William Horsley was general manager of the company while his father, Robert, was a master mechanic and chief blacksmith for the mines, which used ponies to bring the coal to the surface. His maternal grandfather, John Chaytor, was the company's saddler and harness maker. On January 18, 1884, while on an errand for his mother, young David was struck down by a coal train locomotive as he crossed the tracks and lost three fingers, severed by the train wheels. Ultimately, his arm was amputated two inches below the elbow so as to forestall the onset of gangrene.
His mother, realizing that there was no future in the town for her disabled son, decided the family should emigrate to America. On October 17, 1884, the Horsley family arrived in New York and moved to New Jersey, eventually settling in Bayonne. The young Horsely helped support the family by selling newspapers, later working as a Western Union messenger boy. When he was approximately 16 years old, J.T.R. Proctor, the owner of the Bayonne Times, became his benefactor, paying for David to attend night school, where he studied bookkeeping and shorthand. His education enabled him to be hired by the Tidewater Oil Works as a timekeeper.
When he was 19 Horsley opened up a bicycle shop, hand-making bicycles despite his handicap. In 1903 he bought a piece of land and built a pool hall in Bayonne. Unfortunately, his business was wiped out by the Panic (or recession) of 1907. He and one of his regular customers, Charles Gorman, decided to try their hand in the movie business. Gorman had been a scenic artist at the Biograph Motion Picture Co. in New York, but had lost his job during the recession. Gorman had the know-how about the movie industry, and Horsely had the land for a primitive studio and possessed the mechanical skills to build a movie camera from the parts of an old projector. The rear yard of the pool hall was covered with a wooden platform and muslin was hung overhead to diffuse the light. They decided to call their enterprise the Centaur Film Co., as it was a name that was half "horse" (from Horsely) and half "man" (from Gorman).
The Centaur Film Co. struggled during the first three years of its existence, subsisting on money borrowed from relatives. It faced a monumental crisis at the end of its first year of operation when the Patents Company was created in 1908 to pool motion picture equipment patents, including the Lanham loop that was necessary for film to be fed correctly into a movie camera. The Patents Co. refused to give Centaur a license to operate; it considered Centaur a fly-by-night operation and turned down Horsley's application for a license three times, figuring that denying the company a license would drive it out of business. The Patents Co., which became known as "The Trust," intended to completely control the manufacture, distribution and exhibition of films.
The Trust created the General Film Co. to deal with film exchanges and to rent films to the exhibitors. General collected a weekly licensing fee of $2 on every projector in the US for the use of the Lanham loop, a situation that was deeply resented by exhibitors. Exhibitors who refused to pay the $2 license fee were denied films, and thus were deprived of their livelihood. General Film opened its own film exchanges to rent films, and it cut off the supply of films to other film exchanges. Eastman Kodak Co. refused to sell Horsely raw film stock to make his one-reel pictures, as its contract with the Patents Co. and General Film had them boycott non-Trust filmmakers. Horsley thus had to import his raw film stock from the Austin Edwards Co. in England.
When film exchange executives converged on New York to challenge the monopoly implemented by the Trust, they were directed to meet David Horsley, whose Centaur Film was holding up under the challenge. In order to improve his ability to compete successfully against the Patents Co. and General Film, Horsely decided to help the film exchange people become producers of movies, as he knew he wouldn't be able to survive for long against The Trust without some help.
Carl Laemmle and R.H. Cochrane formed the Independent Motion Picture Co. and opened a studio in New York producing one-reel movies called IMPS, while Edwin S. Porter started up Rex Pictures and Edwin Thanhouser opened a studio at New Rochelle, New York, while Pat Powers created Powers Pictures. Other companies formed by film exchange personnel to ensure that they received product were Bison, Champion and Reliance. By 1910 there were as many independent film companies making pictures as there were companies that were part of The Trust. It was difficult for indies to obtain cameras and film, as domestically-made cameras and film stock were covered by the Patent Co.'s patents and thus would not be sold to filmmakers outside The Trust. Producers were forced to go abroad to get the English Prestwich or Williamson camera, or to France to get a camera from DeBrie, Gaumont, Pathe or Prevost. They could also follow the example of Horsely in the US or Léo-Ernest Ouimet in Canada and create their own equipment.
To fight The Trust legally, the indies banded together as the Sales Co., headquartered at 14th Street in New York City. The Sales Co. operated as a central exchange, with producers delivering their one-reel films to 14th St., from whence its product was shipped C.O.D. to buyers at the cost of $100 per reel. The Sales Co. remitted $95 per reel to the filmmaker and kept a $5-per-reel fee in order to finance the fight against The Trust. Horsely's Centaur Co. was making one western, one drama and one Mutt & Jeff comedy per week, all one-reelers, for an output of 120 prints per week. This meant it was remitting $600 per week to the Sales Co., which had an income of about $5,000 to $7,500 per week from all the independent production companies. With these funds the Sales Co. retained first-rate patent attorneys to sue the Patents Co. and put an end to its attempt at monopolizing the motion picture business. The indies eventually won, and even the $2-per-week royalty on each projector was terminated by the courts.
The Trust, which had concentrated on technology rather than on the quality of films, had failed to keep up with the development of the crowd-pleasing narrative film, continuing to churn out simple-minded pictorial essays that found little favor with the maturing movie-going audience. Eventually all the production companies that had dominated the industry before the rise of the indies went out of business, including Edison, Biograph and Essanay. The last remaining Trust member, Vitagraph, was acquired by Warner Bros.
Due to bad weather conditions in the summer and early fall of 1911, making motion pictures in the New York City area became difficult. In response, Horsely moved Centaur to California, opening the first motion picture studio in Hollywood at the corner of Sunset Boulevard and Gower Street on October 27, 1911. The film was developed after dark and shipped to Centaur's Bayonne office to the laboratory for printing. Al Christie--a Canadian who went on to found his own film company, the Nestor Motion Picture Co.--managed the comedy operation of the studio in both Bayonne and Los Angeles. Westerns were produced by Milton J. Fahrney and dramas were produced by Tom Ricketts. All three producers were responsible for one one-reel picture per week.
On May 20, 1912, the Universal Film Manufacturing Co. was formed and absorbed many independent film companies in exchange for stock, including Horsely's Centaur. For the Hollywood studio, New Jersey laboratory and other assets, Horsely received $175,000 in preferred stock and $204,000 in common stock in Universal shares. He was such a respected member of the film community by that point that he was appointed Universal treasurer at the salary of $200 per week. Soon after the formation of the company, a battle for control of Universal started as Carl Laemmle and his faction took on Pat Powers of Powers Pictures for control. Horsely held the balance of power due to his stake, and in the summer of 1913 he sold his stock to Laemmle for a substantial sum, including a first payment of $197,000 and the balance paid off at a monthly rate of $5,000 in notes. Now rich beyond his dreams, Horsely took his family on a trip back to the United Kingdom, then toured Europe, eventually resigning as treasurer of Universal.
Horsely was in Europe when war broke out in August 1914. The Bostock Animal and Jungle Show was evicted from its London exhibition rooms due to military necessity. The manager of the Jungle Show sold it to Horsely for $40,000, approximately a tenth of his fortune from the sale of his Universal stock. Horsely transported the show's assets to the US by ship. From the docks of Brooklyn, Horsely shipped the menagerie, which included 58 lions and two elephants, to Los Angeles. Altogether it cost him a total of $15,000 to freight the animals from England to L.A. He spent a further $47,500 to create a new park for his show, including grandstands, arenas, cages, and a concrete fence on a property at Washington and Main that rented for $600 per month.
After he opened the show in 1915 he was facing a daily overhead of $225, though the most tickets the show ever sold in a day was $165, while on a bad day the show took in as little as $1.25. To make the show pay, Horsely built a film studio at the site that he called the Bostock Jungle Films Co., which included its own film processing lab. Horsely began turning out movies, many of which used the wild animals as background. His new studio made five-reel dramas with Crane Wilbur, "Stanley in Africa" pictures, and approximately 200 comedies with George Ovey. By the fall of 1918 his movie-making venture was through, and when he filed for bankruptcy in 1919, the once-rich Horsely was $38,000 in debt.
The loss of his company, his exotic animal show and his fortune broke David Horsely. He died on February 23, 1933, a forgotten man, barely remembered as one of the men who saved the film industry from The Trust and pioneered Hollywood as a filmmaking center. Horsely was interred in Hollywood Cemetery, now known as Hollywood Forever Cemetery, reduced to a footnote in American cinema history.- Producer
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Barrie M. Osborne was born on 7 February 1944 in New York City, New York, USA. He is a producer and production manager, known for The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001), The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003) and The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002). He is married to Carol Kim. They have one child.- 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.- Producer
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One of the most influential personalities in the history of cinema, Steven Spielberg is Hollywood's best known director and one of the wealthiest filmmakers in the world. He has an extraordinary number of commercially successful and critically acclaimed credits to his name, either as a director, producer or writer since launching the summer blockbuster with Jaws (1975), and he has done more to define popular film-making since the mid-1970s than anyone else.
Steven Allan Spielberg was born in 1946 in Cincinnati, Ohio, to Leah Frances (Posner), a concert pianist and restaurateur, and Arnold Spielberg, an electrical engineer who worked in computer development. His parents were both born to Russian Jewish immigrant families. Steven spent his younger years in Haddon Township, New Jersey, Phoenix, Arizona, and later Saratoga, California. He went to California State University Long Beach, but dropped out to pursue his entertainment career. Among his early directing efforts were Battle Squad (1961), which combined World War II footage with footage of an airplane on the ground that he makes you believe is moving. He also directed Escape to Nowhere (1961), which featured children as World War Two soldiers, including his sister Anne Spielberg, and The Last Gun (1959), a western. All of these were short films. The next couple of years, Spielberg directed a couple of movies that would portend his future career in movies. In 1964, he directed Firelight (1964), a movie about aliens invading a small town. In 1967, he directed Slipstream (1967), which was unfinished. However, in 1968, he directed Amblin' (1968), which featured the desert prominently, and not the first of his movies in which the desert would feature. Amblin' also became the name of his production company, which turned out such classics as E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982). Spielberg had a unique and classic early directing project, Duel (1971), with Dennis Weaver. In the early 1970s, Spielberg was working on TV, directing among others such series as Rod Serling's Night Gallery (1969), Marcus Welby, M.D. (1969) and Murder by the Book (1971). All of his work in television and short films, as well as his directing projects, were just a hint of the wellspring of talent that would dazzle audiences all over the world.
Spielberg's first major directorial effort was The Sugarland Express (1974), with Goldie Hawn, a film that marked him as a rising star. It was his next effort, however, that made him an international superstar among directors: Jaws (1975). This classic shark attack tale started the tradition of the summer blockbuster or, at least, he was credited with starting the tradition. His next film was the classic Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), a unique and original UFO story that remains a classic. In 1978, Spielberg produced his first film, the forgettable I Wanna Hold Your Hand (1978), and followed that effort with Used Cars (1980), a critically acclaimed, but mostly forgotten, Kurt Russell/Jack Warden comedy about devious used-car dealers. Spielberg hit gold yet one more time with Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), with Harrison Ford taking the part of Indiana Jones. Spielberg produced and directed two films in 1982. The first was Poltergeist (1982), but the highest-grossing movie of all time up to that point was the alien story E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982). Spielberg also helped pioneer the practice of product placement. The concept, while not uncommon, was still relatively low-key when Spielberg raised the practice to almost an art form with his famous (or infamous) placement of Reese's Pieces in "E.T." Spielberg was also one of the pioneers of the big-grossing special-effects movies, like "E.T." and "Close Encounters", where a very strong emphasis on special effects was placed for the first time on such a huge scale. In 1984, Spielberg followed up "Raiders" with Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984), which was a commercial success but did not receive the critical acclaim of its predecessor. As a producer, Spielberg took on many projects in the 1980s, such as The Goonies (1985), and was the brains behind the little monsters in Gremlins (1984). He also produced the cartoon An American Tail (1986), a quaint little animated classic. His biggest effort as producer in 1985, however, was the blockbuster Back to the Future (1985), which made Michael J. Fox an instant superstar. As director, Spielberg took on the book The Color Purple (1985), with Whoopi Goldberg and Oprah Winfrey, with great success. In the latter half of the 1980s, he also directed Empire of the Sun (1987), a mixed success for the occasionally erratic Spielberg. Success would not escape him for long, though.
The late 1980s found Spielberg's projects at the center of pop-culture yet again. In 1988, he produced the landmark animation/live-action film Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988). The next year proved to be another big one for Spielberg, as he produced and directed Always (1989) as well as Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989), and Back to the Future Part II (1989). All three of the films were box-office and critical successes. Also, in 1989, he produced the little known comedy-drama Dad (1989), with Jack Lemmon and Ted Danson, which got mostly mixed results. Spielberg has also had an affinity for animation and has been a strong voice in animation in the 1990s. Aside from producing the landmark "Who Framed Roger Rabbit", he produced the animated series Tiny Toon Adventures (1990), Animaniacs (1993), Pinky and the Brain (1995), Freakazoid! (1995), Pinky, Elmyra & the Brain (1998), Family Dog (1993) and Toonsylvania (1998). Spielberg also produced other cartoons such as The Land Before Time (1988), We're Back! A Dinosaur's Story (1993), Casper (1995) (the live action version) as well as the live-action version of The Flintstones (1994), where he was credited as "Steven Spielrock". Spielberg also produced many Roger Rabbit short cartoons, and many Pinky and the Brain, Animaniacs and Tiny Toons specials. Spielberg was very active in the early 1990s, as he directed Hook (1991) and produced such films as the cute fantasy Joe Versus the Volcano (1990) and An American Tail: Fievel Goes West (1991). He also produced the unusual comedy thriller Arachnophobia (1990), Back to the Future Part III (1990) and Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1990). While these movies were big successes in their own right, they did not quite bring in the kind of box office or critical acclaim as previous efforts. In 1993, Spielberg directed Jurassic Park (1993), which for a short time held the record as the highest grossing movie of all time, but did not have the universal appeal of his previous efforts. Big box-office spectacles were not his only concern, though. He produced and directed Schindler's List (1993), a stirring film about the Holocaust. He won best director at the Oscars, and also got Best Picture. In the mid-90s, he helped found the production company DreamWorks, which was responsible for many box-office successes.
As a producer, he was very active in the late 90s, responsible for such films as The Mask of Zorro (1998), Men in Black (1997) and Deep Impact (1998). However, it was on the directing front that Spielberg was in top form. He directed and produced the epic Amistad (1997), a spectacular film that was shorted at the Oscars and in release due to the fact that its release date was moved around so much in late 1997. The next year, however, produced what many believe was one of the best films of his career: Saving Private Ryan (1998), a film about World War Two that is spectacular in almost every respect. It was stiffed at the Oscars, losing best picture to Shakespeare in Love (1998).
Spielberg produced a series of films, including Evolution (2001), The Haunting (1999) and Shrek (2001). he also produced two sequels to Jurassic Park (1993), which were financially but not particularly critical successes. In 2001, he produced a mini-series about World War Two that definitely *was* a financial and critical success: Band of Brothers (2001), a tale of an infantry company from its parachuting into France during the invasion to the Battle of the Bulge. Also in that year, Spielberg was back in the director's chair for A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001), a movie with a message and a huge budget. It did reasonably at the box office and garnered varied reviews from critics.
Spielberg has been extremely active in films there are many other things he has done as well. He produced the short-lived TV series SeaQuest 2032 (1993), an anthology series entitled Amazing Stories (1985), created the video-game series "Medal of Honor" set during World War Two, and was a starting producer of ER (1994). Spielberg, if you haven't noticed, has a great interest in World War Two. He and Tom Hanks collaborated on Shooting War: World War II Combat Cameramen (2000), a documentary about World War II combat photographers, and he produced a documentary about the Holocaust called Eyes of the Holocaust (2000). With all of this to Spielberg's credit, it's no wonder that he's looked at as one of the greatest ever figures in entertainment.- Producer
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Frank was born in Glendale, California to musician Jack Marshall. He entered the film world when his parents invited him to a birthday party for the daughter of directing legend John Ford in 1966. There, he met Peter Bogdanovich and soon agreed to work on his first film, Targets (1968), later followed by collaborating on The Last Picture Show (1971) and many other films.
Continuing to branch out into the industry, he served as line producer on Martin Scorsese's The Last Waltz (1978) and associate producer on Walter Hill's crime thriller, The Driver (1978). Marshall first worked as executive producer on Hill's cult classic The Warriors (1979). While producing the iconic Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), he met Steven Spielberg and their future wife Kathleen Kennedy, and Frank himself was hired to join the Amblin Productions company in 1980.
He continued producing memorable films with Spielberg including Poltergeist (1982) and Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983) (while Kennedy separately produced E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982)). He worked as executive producer on Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984), Gremlins (1984), The Goonies (1985) and the Back to the Future (1985) trilogy.
He married Kathleen Kennedy in 1987, and after producing numerous films, he made his feature directing debut with Arachnophobia (1990). Reacting to the success of his directorial debut, he left Amblin in 1991. In 1992, The Kennedy/Marshall Company was formed, and the next year they released its first film Alive (1993), directed by Marshall. Both Kennedy and Marshall signed deals with Paramount in 1992, at the same time the company was formed. His productivity has only increased since then, as he took over primary duties of the production company since Kennedy was named president of Lucasfilm in 2012.- Producer
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As flamboyant as any character in his movies, Joel Silver can be credited along with Jerry Bruckheimer as practically reinventing the action film genre in the 1980s. Born in New Jersey, he attended the New York University Film School. After college, he worked at Lawrence Gordon Pictures, earning his first onscreen credit as associate producer of The Warriors (1979). He eventually became president of the motion picture division of Gordon Pictures. Together with Gordon, Silver produced 48 Hrs. (1982) and Streets of Fire (1984). In 1983 he formed Silver Pictures and initially set up shop at Universal Pictures to produce Brewster's Millions (1985) before going to Fox and continued producing hit action films such as Commando (1985), the "Lethal Weapon" franchise, the first two films of the "Die Hard" franchise and the three films of "Matrix" franchise of action films. He had then subsequently joined Warner Bros. in 1987 after leaving Fox. Despite these successes, he has hit some rough spots and has been banned from working on several studio lots. He was unable to produce the "48 Hrs" sequel Another 48 Hrs. (1990), the third "Die Hard" film, Die Hard with a Vengeance (1995) and the fourth "Matrix" installment The Matrix Resurrections (2021) because of past run-ins with studio executives. Because of his habit of wearing sport shirts and talking loudly and quickly, he has been parodied in several films, even spoofing himself in Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988) by playing the frustrated cartoon director in the film's opening sequence. In order to perform in that role, he had to use an alias to get onto the Walt Disney lot, and his onscreen credit was not revealed to Disney executives until the very last minute. He had worked in television, setting up his own television branch with his first project Parker Kane (1990), a project that would eventually never made to series, and then worked at HBO for many years, until he found a home at Warner Bros. Television in 1998, where he had developed two UPN shows The Strip (1999) and Freedom (2000) before finding commercial success with the hit Veronica Mars (2004). In 1999, Silver Pictures had teamed up with film director/producer Robert Zemeckis to set up Dark Castle Entertainment to produce genre and horror films with the first film under Dark Castle being House on Haunted Hill (1999). Joel Silver pioneered the practice of shooting action movies in Australia with the "Matrix" films, and has been credited with either inventing or reinventing the careers of Eddie Murphy, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Steven Seagal. He was mentioned in Halle Berry's Academy Award acceptance speech. Other credits include non-action pictures, ranging from Xanadu (1980), Weird Science (1985) and Fred Claus (2007) to HBO's long-running TV series, Tales from the Crypt (1989). He had resigned from his founding production company in 2019.- Bruce Berman is Chairman and CEO of Village Roadshow Pictures. The company has a successful joint partnership with Warner Bros. Pictures to co-produce a wide range of motion pictures, with all films distributed worldwide by Warner Bros. and in select territories by Village Roadshow Pictures.
Under the Village Roadshow Pictures banner, Berman has executive produced such wide-ranging successes as Clint Eastwood's Oscar® nominated "American Sniper," starring Bradley Cooper; the animated adventure "The Lego Movie," directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller; director Baz Luhrmann's box office hit "The Great Gatsby," starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Carey Mulligan and Tobey Maguire; director Guy Ritchie's hit action-adventure "Sherlock Holmes," starring Robert Downey, Jr., and Jude Law and its sequel "Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows,"; the "Ocean's," series starring Brad Pitt and George Clooney; the acclaimed drama "Gran Torino," directed by and starring Clint Eastwood; the blockbuster "I Am Legend," starring Will Smith; and George Miller's Oscar® winning animated adventure "Happy Feet."
Berman's upcoming credits include George Miller's post-apocalyptic action-adventure "Mad Max: Fury Road," starring Tom Hardy and Charlize Theron; Brad Peyton's action-thriller "San Andreas," and starring Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson; Ron Howard's action-adventure "In the Heart of the Sea," based on the Nathaniel Philbrick's bestseller about the dramatic true journey of the whaling ship Essex starring Chris Hemsworth; and "Concussion," a National Football League sports drama starring Will Smith.
Berman was named Chairman and CEO of VRP in February 1998. Previously, he spent 14 years at Warner Bros., joining the company in 1984 as Production Vice President and then serving as Senior Vice President of Production. In September 1989, he was named President of Theatrical Production and two years later, Worldwide President of Theatrical Production. During his tenure at Warner Bros. he produced and distributed numerous films including "Twister," "A Time to Kill," "Batman Forever," "The Fugitive," "The Client," "Outbreak," "Disclosure," "Dave," "The Bodyguard," "Under Siege," "Malcolm X," "Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves," "Goodfellas," "Presumed Innocent," and the Oscar®-winning Best Picture "Driving Miss Daisy." In May of 1996, Berman started Plan B Entertainment, an independent motion picture company based at Warner Bros.
Berman graduated magna cum laude from UCLA in 1975 with a degree in United States History. He also attended Cal Arts Film School and Bennington College. Berman got his start in the motion picture business working with Jack Valenti at the MPAA while attending Georgetown Law School in Washington, D.C. After earning his law degree, he landed a job at Casablanca Films in 1978. Moving to Universal, he worked his way up to a production vice president in 1982. - 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.- Additional Crew
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Starting at the age 8 he had a series of jobs before starting his own business in 1900, which was sold to buy a Brooklyn nickelodeon in 1904. As the new owner with an empty house, Fox hired a coin manipulator and a barker to attract patrons into the dark 146-seat theatre. Once audiences adequately understood what moving pictures were, live acts were dispensed with. More nickelodeons were opened and he became a successful film exhibitor. He then won a long legal battle against Thomas Edison's Motion Pictures Patent Company, ending the film trust and allowing him to start his own production company in 1913. Operations were consolidated into the Fox Film Corporation in 1915. Theda Bara and Tom Mix starred in successful pictures made at the Fox Hollywood studios and the profits from them, and from the 1000 house Fox theatre chain, paid for "artistic" projects like Sunrise (1926), for awards and critical acclaim. In 1927, Fox acquired the American patent rights to the sound-on-film process developed by a Swiss firm. Fox pioneered the widescreen film with The Big Trail (1930). Poised for the future of talkies, he attempted to buy MGM just in time for 1929s stock market crash. In 1930 Fox was forced out of his company after a federal anti-trust investigation. His version is told in 1933 Upton Sinclair's book, 'Upton Sinclair Presents William Fox.' In 1936, a year after Darryl F. Zanuck's 20th Century Pictures merged with Fox Films, Fox bribed a judge during the liquidation of his holdings in bankruptcy proceedings. His sentence, a year in prison, began in 1941. Paroled in 1943, he was a pariah in Hollywood. Though secure from his many patent holdings, the industry for which he had been so visionary was closed to him. A virtual pariah at the time of his death, no industry representative came to eulogize at his funeral.- Producer
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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.- 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'.- Producer
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Legendary producer Hal B. Wallis was born in Chicago and moved to Los Angeles when he was in his early 20s. He got a job managing a theater owned by Warner Bros., and his success at the job caught the eye of studio head Jack L. Warner, who gave him a job in the studio's publicity department. Within a few months Wallis had worked his way up to head of the department. He was named studio manager in 1928 and production manager shortly thereafter, but was pushed aside by another legendary producer, future 20th Century-Fox studio head Darryl F. Zanuck. In 1933 Zanuck left Warner and Wallis moved back to his old position. He oversaw the production of many of Warners' most famous films, including Little Caesar (1931), I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932), Captain Blood (1935), The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) and Casablanca (1942). In 1944 Wallis left Warner and formed his own production company, and achieved even more success, being responsible for such films as The Rose Tattoo (1955), Becket (1964), and a string of Elvis Presley movies, most of which were economically produced and all of which made a fortune. Wallis' last picture was the John Wayne western Rooster Cogburn (1975).