Early Paramount Studios

Archives.

INTRODUCTION

The audience quiets and the lights dim. The screen fills with a triangular peak towering majestically above the clouds. Standing apart from its siblings, it is quickly encircled by a tiara-like crown of stars, trailing in from off-screen, hitting their marks like skilled actors. The distinctive white cursive font appears against the azure sky above, boldly proclaiming to the audience that this is a Paramount Picture.

Paramount Pictures has been enchanting audiences around the world for over a century. While today it is part of a multinational media conglomerate, Paramount’s origins can be traced to a small cadre of ambitious men. Their collective drive and genius built a Hollywood powerhouse from the ground up during the early decades of the 20th century.

The principal mover was a Hungarian Jew by the name of Adolph Zukor who was born in 1873 and lost both parents by the age of eight. At 15, he boarded a ship to America with only $40 sewn into his coat. He landed in New York, where he secured employment in an upholstery shop, earning $2 a week. Young Zukor was later hired as a furrier’s apprentice, doubling his salary.

Heeding Horace Greeley’s advice to Go west, young man, Zukor headed to Chicago, where he started his own successful furrier business. By 1900, he was married and back in New York, living near his good friend and, for a time, business partner Marcus Loew. Loew, like Zukor, would later build his own motion picture empire.

In 1902, Zukor visited a penny arcade in Manhattan, where, for a penny, a patron could watch a short silent film or listen to a phonograph. He was so impressed by what he saw that he and a group of investors paid $75,000 for an arcade of their own.

The following year, Zukor and his partners expanded their operations by opening arcades in Newark, Philadelphia, and Boston. They proved so successful that Zukor sold off the fur company to concentrate on show business. He then invested in his own nickelodeon, where a customer could watch a one- or two-reel film for a nickel. The forever-fickle audiences soon lost interest in nickelodeons, and many theaters were converted into vaudeville houses. Zukor followed suit but kept faith in film, showing flickers between acts, often with actors reciting lines of dialogue from behind the screen.

Common wisdom at the time said that American audiences would grow bored sitting for a film that was more than a few minutes long. Going against the grain, Zukor purchased a European multi-reel religious film that proved popular with audiences. Next, he paid $40,000 for the American rights to a four-reel French film called Queen Elizabeth, which starred actress Sarah Bernhardt. Queen Elizabeth premiered in 1912 at the regal Lyceum Theatre on Broadway, a strategy that went a long way towards legitimizing films for both audiences and stage actors, who had previously looked down on the new medium.

Zukor began producing his own films, believing that if he could bring what was popular in the theater to the screen, the people would follow. One night on the subway, he came up with the slogan Famous Players in Famous Plays to market his new venture, called the Famous Players Film Company, which he created in June 1912.

Jesse Louis Lasky was born in September 1880 in the San Francisco Bay Area and learned to play the cornet as a child. When he was 18, his father passed away, and young Jesse was forced to support his mother and younger sister Blanche by selling newspapers by day and playing music at night. The arrangement wasn’t providing a sufficient income for the trio, so Lasky persuaded his mother to allow him to hop a ship to the Alaska goldfields. Stumbling home broke several months later, he found that his sister Blanche had become a good cornet player in her own right, and the two began performing together on the vaudeville circuit. By 1905, Lasky began using his salesmanship to book other vaudeville acts, proving successful enough for him to open his own booking office in Chicago four years later.

In 1910, after the failure of his music hall theater in New York, Lasky got an idea to produce a Western-themed operetta after glimpsing an ad for coffee. He pitched it to play broker Beatrice de Mille, who had two sons in show business: William, the writer of several hit plays, and Cecil, a writer and actor. Lasky preferred working with William, the more accomplished son, but he was unavailable, so he partnered on the project with Cecil.

Cecil Blount DeMille (who used a different spelling of his surname professionally than the rest of his family) was born in August 1881 into a family of playwrights. As a young man, DeMille was cast in a play alongside Constance Adams. On New Year’s Eve, 1900, at the stroke of midnight, Cecil proposed, and they were married in 1902. With a wife and only sporadic acting roles available, DeMille decided to follow his family’s lead and try his hand at writing plays.

Meanwhile, Blanche Lasky was growing restless with life on the vaudeville circuit and wanted to get married. Jessie’s wife, Bessie, thought Blanche would be a good match for an old family friend named Samuel Goldfish, who worked as a salesman in a glove factory. The two were married in 1910, but the union proved to be an unhappy one.

In the early part of 1912, Goldfish, who would later achieve Hollywood success after changing his name to Goldwyn, saw the film Broncho Billy’s Adventure and tried to convince his brother-in-law Jesse to make movies. Lasky wasn’t interested at the time but changed his mind over lunch one day in the summer of 1913, when DeMille informed him that he was leaving show business to go to Mexico to report on a revolution. Lasky, unwilling to lose his best friend and partner, blurted out, If you want adventure, I have a better idea . . . let’s make some movies! Before Lasky could retract his statement, DeMille stuck out his hand to shake on it and said, Let’s.

The two men turned over the menu and wrote out plans for the Jesse L. Lasky Feature Play Company with Lasky as president, DeMille as director general, and Goldfish as general manager. Leaving lunch, they chanced upon actor Dustin Farnum, who had recently starred in a revival of the 1905 play The Squaw Man. Farnum agreed to star in a film made from the play if