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Men and Money Behind Pictures 465
The Goldwyn company was formed in 1916, and became equally as powerful as Metro, with its own chain of theatres. It was consolidated with Metro in 1924. The third of the companies, the Mayer company, was organized in 1920, and soon became an important producing unit, with such stars as Ramon Novarro and Norma Shearer. This company joined up with the two others also in 1924, and since that date the firm has been known as Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.
Loew's Incorporated itself is still at the head of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, although the Loew Theatre circuit is a separate subsidiary. This large organization grew out of a penny arcade, which was opened in 1905 by Marcus Loew and David Warfield.
It was in 1913 that the Paramount company first saw the light of day, though it was not known under that name then. In the middle of December, 1913, Jesse L. Lasky bought a barn in Hollj-'wood and transformed it into a film studio. The company was known as the Jesse L. Lasky Feature Play Company.
Earlier in the year Adolphe Zukor had organized the Famous Players Film Company, and soon these two companies joined forces and became known as the Famous-Players-Lasky.
With other interests, this company has acquired large theatre chains in many countries. It has production interests in New York, Great Britain, and Paris as well as in Hollywood. It has renting organizations all over the world. It changed its name some years ago, after an amalgamation, and though to-day Lasky is not connected with the firm, Adolphe Zukor is still its president.
The other companies have spread in similar fashion, as can be traced by the stories of some of the magnates of whom I have already written — WiUiam Fox and Carl Laemmle, for example. With the single exception of Carl Laemmle's Universal company, every picture organization in America has gone through numerous changes and affiliations before reaching the position it is in to-day.
Only in rare instances does one man possess a complete holding in any one company. In this country one of the mrist powerful film magnates is Isidore Ostrer, President of Gaumont-British, who owns a very large number of his company's shares. He entered the film trade through the financial world.
This company has its subsidiary film interests in England, to which I shall refer in a moment ; it has important links with the powerful German U.F.A. company ; and you can also trace strong financial interests in newspapers and radio.
I will now revert to the financial side of films themselves. By the time a picture is shown to the public, it has passed through other hands besides those at the studio. A film must be distributed — that is to say, sold to the cinemas. It requires a large organization to do this, an organization which concerns itself with the renting side of the business.
The producing company generally has a distributing company of its own (a subsidiary of the parent company), which receives the pictures, and sells them to the cinemas. It takes a certain percentage of the receipts for this work. Thus, in Britain, there is the Gaumont-British parent company, which has under it three separate renting organizations : Gaumont,