Paramount Pictures Essay Research Paper The history

Paramount Pictures Essay, Research Paper

The history of Paramount Pictures begins in Hungary in 1873, with the birth of Adolf Zukor. He immigrated to the United States as a teenager in 1888, and by the turn of the century was a successful Chicago furrier. Recognizing a new market, he entered the business of penny arcades at the age of 30; in 1905, he became business partners with Marcus Loew, who acquired a chain of nickelodeons across the country. Together they made the transition to motion-picture theaters, with Zukor serving as treasurer while Loew bought up hundreds of movie houses. Zukor distributed the French four-reeler La Reine Elisabeth (1912, Queen Elizabeth), starring Sarah Bernhart, and used the profits to launch his own production company in 1912: Famous Players. The motto was "famous players in famous plays," and Zukor began filming just that with The Count Of Monte Cristo (1913), starring James O'Neill (father of playwright Eugene O'Neill). Zukor's greatest success came with the stars produced by cinema, and in 1912 he signed one of the first and biggest, Mary Pickford. Already a popular actress, her career soared at Famous Players with such heartwarmers as Tess Of The Storm Country (1914) and Poor Little Peppina (1916). Zukor's distributor, the fledgling Paramount Pictures Corporation, was also handling the films of the Jesse L. Lasky Feature Play Company in 1914. Lasky, a vaudeville impresario, had two partners: his Polish-born brother-in-law, a successful glove salesman who called himself Samuel Goldfish, and writer/director Cecil B. De Mille. They'd hit big with their first film, which was also the first six-reel feature made in Hollywood: the The Squaw Man (1914), co-directed by De Mille and Oscar Apfel. Famous Players merged with Lasky in 1916, becoming the Famous Players-Lasky Corporation, with Zukor as president and Lasky as vice-president in charge of production. (They bought out Goldfish, who then joined Edgar Selwyn to form the Goldwyn company — and later took the name for his own, becoming Samuel Goldwyn.) Another dozen film-production companies joined Famous Players-Lasky over the following year, and soon the company absorbed its distributors Paramount and Artcraft. De Mille made hit after hit for the company in the late teens, most notably the historical drama Joan The Woman (1916) with opera star Geraldine Farrar; the World War One agitprop film The Little American (1917) with Mary Pickford; and the romantic farces Don't Change Your Husband (1918) and Why Change Your Wife. (1918), both starring Gloria Swanson. Pickford, by now a superstar, signed with First National in 1917, but the studio had other star players in the late teens. The two important replacements for Pickford in teenage romantic leads were Mary Miles Minter (Anne Of Green Gables, 1919) and the older but equally innocent Marguerite Clark (Uncle Tom's Cabin, 1918). All-American leading man Wallace Reid (The Roaring Road, 1919) was also a hit with audiences. Artcraft was releasing important works by some of the era's best filmmakers: the westerns of William S. Hart, most notably The Narrow Trail (1917) and The Toll Gate (1920); the energetic satires of producer/star Douglas Fairbanks, such as A Modern Musketeer (1917) and Bound In Morocco (1918), both written and directed by Allan Dwan; and a series of films by writer/director D.W. Griffith, including the World War One drama Hearts Of The World (1918) and the rural romance True Heart Susie (1919), both starring Lillian Gish. Fairbanks and Griffith left to co-found United Artists in 1919, and the hemorrhaging at Famous Players-Lasky continued into the early '20s: Clark retired in 1921; Reid stopped making films in 1922 when he entered a sanitarium to be treated for his tragic addiction to morphine, only to die not long afterward a age 32; Hart, his vogue having peaked, was let go in 1922; and Minter's career ended in 1923, with her ambiguous role in the still-unsolved murder of director William Desmond Taylor.Despite these setbacks, Famous Players-Lasky went on to even greater success in the '20s, a decade during which the studio bought up hundreds of movie theaters acoss the country. By managing their own theater chains, the studio dominated the market for first-run features — and by the start of the next decade, it was one of the great five "integrated major" studios, along with MGM, Fox, RKO, and Warner Bros. Gloria Swanson was a huge star by the mid 1920s, and made a notable series of films with producer/director Allan Dwan, including the romantic dramas Zaza (1923) and Wages Of Virtue (1924) and the comedies Manhandled (1924) and Stage Struck (1925). In 1923 the studio released two of the biggest moneymakers American cinema had yet produced: the landmark western The Covered Wagon, directed by James Cruze, and De Mille's The Ten Commandments. Pola Negri, the Polish-born star of German films, began acting for Famous Players-Lasky in 1923, and appeared in such hits as director Ernst Lubitsch's satire Forbidden Paradise (1924). By then, the studio had also struck gold with Italian-born actor Rudolph Valentino, who became a superstar in the romantic dramas The Sheik (1921), Blood And Sand (1922), and Monsieur Beaucaire (1924). Valentino switched to United Artists the following year, not long after De Mille had struck out on his own as an independent; but 1925 also marked the company's hiring of producer B.P. Schulberg and hi