Columbia Pictures

History

Early years as CBC Film Sales (1918–1924)

The studio was founded on June 19, 1918, as Cohn-Brandt-Cohn (CBC) Film Sales by brothers Jack and Harry Cohn and Jack's best friend Joe Brandt, and released its first feature film More to Be Pitied Than Scorned on August 20, 1922. The film, with a budget of $20,000, was a success, bringing in $130,000 in revenue for the company. Brandt was president of CBC Film Sales, handling sales, marketing and distribution from New York along with Jack Cohn, while Harry Cohn ran production in Hollywood. The studio's early productions were low-budget short subjects: Screen Snapshots, the Hallroom Boys (the vaudeville duo of Edward Flanagan and Neely Edwards), and the former Charlie Chaplin imitator Billy West. The start-up CBC leased space in a Poverty Row studio on Hollywood's famously low-rent Gower Street. Among Hollywood's elite, the studio's small-time reputation led some to joke that "CBC" stood for "Corned Beef and Cabbage".

Reorganization and new name

CBC was reorganized as Columbia Pictures Corporation by Harry Cohn, Jack Cohn, and Joe Brandt on January 10, 1924. Harry Cohn became president in 1932 and remained head of production as well, thus concentrating enormous power in his hands. He would run Columbia for a total of 34 years, one of the longest tenures of any studio chief (Warner Bros.' Jack L. Warner was head of production or CEO longer but did not become CEO until 1956). Even in an industry rife with nepotism, Columbia was particularly notorious for having a number of Harry and Jack's relatives in high positions. Humorist Robert Benchley called it the Pine Tree Studio, "because it has so many Cohns".

Brandt eventually tired of dealing with the Cohn brothers, and in 1932 sold his one-third stake to Jack and Harry Cohn. Harry took over from Brandt as president.

Columbia's product line consisted mostly of low- to moderately budgeted features and short subjects encompassing action subjects, comedies, sports films, serials, and cartoons. Columbia gradually moved into the production of higher-budget fare, eventually joining the second tier of Hollywood studios along with United Artists and Universal. Like United Artists and Universal, Columbia was a horizontally integrated company. It controlled production and distribution; it did not own any theaters.

Helping Columbia's climb was the arrival of an ambitious director, Frank Capra. Between 1927 and 1939, Capra constantly pushed Cohn for better material and bigger budgets. A string of hits he directed in the early and mid 1930s solidified Columbia's status as a major studio. In particular, It Happened One Night, which nearly swept the 1934 Oscars, put Columbia on the map. Until then, Columbia's business had depended on theater owners willing to take its films, since it did not have a theater network of its own. Other Capra-directed hits followed, including the original version of Lost Horizon (1937), with Ronald Colman, and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) with James Stewart.

In 1933, Columbia hired Robert Kalloch to be its chief fashion and women's costume designer. He was the first contract costume designer hired by the studio, and he established the studio's wardrobe department. Kalloch's employment, in turn, convinced leading actresses that Columbia Pictures intended to invest in their careers.

Short subjects

At Harry Cohn's insistence, the studio signed vaudeville comedians The Three Stooges in 1934. Rejected by MGM (which kept straight-man Ted Healy but let the Stooges go), the Stooges made 190 slapstick shorts for Columbia between 1934 and 1957. Columbia's short-subject department employed many famous comedians, including Buster Keaton, Charley Chase, Harry Langdon, Andy Clyde, and Hugh Herbert. Almost 400 of Columbia's 529 two-reel comedies were released to television between 1958 and 1961; to date, all of the Stooges, Keaton, Charley Chase, Shemp Howard, Joe Besser, and Joe DeRita subjects have been released to home video.

Columbia incorporated animation into its studio in 1929, distributing Krazy Kat cartoons, taking over from Paramount. The following year, Columbia served as the distributor for Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse and Silly Symphony series from Pat Powers's Celebrity Productions until 1932. In 1933, The Charles Mintz studio was re-established under the Screen Gems brand; Columbia's leading cartoon series were Krazy Kat, Scrappy, The Fox and the Crow, and (very briefly) Li'l Abner. Screen Gems was the last major cartoon studio to make black-and-white cartoons, producing them until 1946. That same year, Screen Gems shut down but had completed enough cartoons for the studio to release until 1949. In 1948, Columbia agreed to release animated shorts from United Productions of America; these new shorts were more sophisticated than Columbia's older cartoons, and many won critical praise and industry awards. Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera made TV cartoons for Columbia; Columbia asked the team for a theatrical series, and from 1959 to 1965 Columbia distributed cartoons featuring Loopy De Loop. It was Columbia's final theatrical cartoon series. In 1967, the Hanna-Barbera deal expired and was not renewed.

According to the Bob Thomas book King Cohn, studio chief Harry Cohn always placed a high priority on serials. Beginning in 1937, Columbia entered the lucrative serial market and kept making these weekly episodic adventures until 1955, after other studios had discontinued them; then the studio reissued older serials to theaters until 1966. The most famous Columbia serials are based on pulp magazine, comic-strip or radio characters: The Spider's Web (1938), Mandrake the Magician (1939), The Shadow (1940), Terry and the Pirates (1940), Captain Midnight (1942), The Phantom (1943), Batman (1943), and the especially successful Superman (1948), among many others.

Columbia also produced musical shorts, sports reels (usually narrated by sportscaster Bill Stern), and travelogues. Its Screen Snapshots series, showing behind-the-scenes footage of Hollywood stars, was a Columbia perennial the studio had been releasing since 1920; producer-director Ralph Staub kept this series going through 1958. Harry Cohn was especially proud of the longevity of the Snapshots, and only his death curtailed the series.

1940s

In the 1940s, propelled in part by the surge in audiences for their films during World War II, the studio also benefited from the popularity of its biggest star, Rita Hayworth. Columbia maintained a long list of contractees well into the 1950s; Glenn Ford, Penny Singleton, William Holden, Judy Holliday, The Three Stooges, Ann Miller, Evelyn Keyes, Ann Doran, Jack Lemmon, Cleo Moore, Barbara Hale, Adele Jergens, Larry Parks, Arthur Lake, Lucille Ball, Jock Mahoney, Kerwin Mathews, and Kim Novak.

Harry Cohn monitored the budgets of his films, and the studio got the maximum use out of costly sets, costumes, and props by reusing them in other films. Many of Columbia's low-budget "B" pictures and short subjects have an expensive look, thanks to Columbia's efficient recycling policy. Cohn was reluctant to spend lavish sums on even his most important pictures, and it was not until 1943 that he agreed to use three-strip Technicolor in a live-action feature. Columbia was the last major studio to employ the expensive color process. Columbia's first Technicolor feature was the western The Desperadoes, starring Randolph Scott and Glenn Ford. Cohn quickly used Technicolor again for Cover Girl, a Hayworth vehicle that instantly was a smash hit, released in 1944, and for the fanciful biography of Frédéric Chopin, A Song to Remember, with Cornel Wilde, released in 1945. Another biopic, 1946's The Jolson Story with Larry Parks and Evelyn Keyes, was started in black-and-white, but when Cohn saw how well the project was proceeding, he scrapped the footage and insisted on filming in Technicolor.

In 1948, the United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc. anti-trust decision forced Hollywood motion picture companies to divest themselves of the theater chains they owned. Since Columbia did not own any theaters, it was now on equal terms with the largest studios. The studio soon replaced RKO on the list of the "Big Five" studios.

In 1946, Columbia dropped the Screen Gems brand from its cartoon line, but retained the Screen Gems name for various ancillary activities, including a 16 mm film-rental agency and a TV-commercial production company. On November 8, 1948, Columbia adopted the Screen Gems name for its television production subsidiary when the studio acquired Pioneer Telefilms, a television commercial company founded by Jack Cohn's son, Ralph. Pioneer had been founded in 1947, and was later reorganized as Screen Gems. The studio opened its doors for business in New York on April 15, 1949. By 1951, Screen Gems became a full-fledged television studio and became a major producer of situation comedies for TV, beginning with Father Knows Best and followed by Dennis the Menace, The Donna Reed Show, Bewitched, Hazel, I Dream of Jeannie, The Monkees, and The Partridge Family.

1950s

By 1950, Columbia had discontinued most of its popular series films (Boston Blackie, Blondie, The Lone Wolf, The Crime Doctor, Rusty, etc.) Only Jungle Jim, launched by producer Sam Katzman in 1949, kept going through 1955. Katzman contributed greatly to Columbia's success by producing dozens of topical feature films, including crime dramas, science-fiction stories, and rock'n'roll musicals. Columbia kept releasing new serials (produced by Katzman) until 1956 and new two-reel comedies (produced by Jules White) until 1959, after other studios had abandoned these subjects.

As the larger studios declined in the 1950s, Columbia's position improved. This was largely because it did not suffer from the massive loss of income the other major studios sustained from the loss of their theaters (well over 90%, in some cases). Columbia continued to produce 40-plus pictures a year, offering productions that often broke ground and kept audiences coming to theaters. Some of its significant films from this era include the studio's adaptation of the controversial James Jones novel From Here to Eternity (1953), On the Waterfront (1954), and The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) with William Holden and Alec Guinness, all of which won the Best Picture Oscar. Another significant film of the studio was the free adaptation of George Orwell's dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1956).

Columbia also released the productions of the English studio Warwick Films (by producers Irving Allen and Albert R. Broccoli), as well as many films by producer Carl Foreman, who resided in England. Columbia distributed some films made by Hammer, which was also based in England.

In December 1956, Jack Cohn, co-founder and executive vice-president, died. In 1958, Columbia established its own record label, Colpix Records, initially run by Jonie Taps, who headed Columbia's music department, and later Paul Wexler and Lester Sill. Colpix was active until 1966 when Columbia entered into a joint agreement with RCA Victor and discontinued Colpix in favor of its new label, Colgems Records.

1960s: After Harry Cohn's death

Columbia president Harry Cohn died of a heart attack in February 1958. His nephew Ralph Cohn died in 1959, ending almost four decades of family management.

The new management was headed by Abe Schneider, who had joined the company as an office boy out of high school and become a director in 1929, rising through the financial side of the business. In 1963, Columbia acquired music publisher Aldon Music.

By the late 1960s, Columbia had an ambiguous identity, offering old-fashioned fare such as A Man for All Seasons and Oliver! along with the more contemporary Easy Rider and The Monkees. After turning down releasing Albert R. Broccoli's Eon Productions James Bond films, Columbia hired Broccoli's former partner Irving Allen to produce the Matt Helm series with Dean Martin. Columbia also produced a James Bond spoof, Casino Royale (1967), in conjunction with Charles K. Feldman, which held the adaptation rights for that novel.

By 1966, the studio was suffering from box-office failures, and takeover rumors began surfacing. Columbia was surviving solely on the profits made from Screen Gems, whose holdings also included radio and television stations. On December 23, 1968, Screen Gems merged with Columbia Pictures Corporation and became part of the newly formed Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc. for $24.5 million. Schneider was chairman of the holding company and Leo Jaffe president.

Following the merger, in March 1969, CPI purchased Bell Records for $3.5 million (mainly in CPI stock), retaining Larry Uttal as label president.

1970s

Nearly bankrupt by the early 1970s, the studio was saved via a radical overhaul: the Gower Street Studios (now called "Sunset Gower Studios") were sold and a new management team was brought in. In 1972, Columbia and Warner Bros. formed a partnership called The Burbank Studios, in which both companies shared the Warner studio lot in Burbank.

In 1971, Columbia Pictures established sheet music publisher Columbia Pictures Publications, with vice president and general manager Frank J. Hackinson, who later became the president.

In 1973, Allen & Co took a financial stake in Columbia Pictures Industries and Alan Hirschfield was appointed CEO, succeeding Leo Jaffe who became chairman. Stanley Schneider, son of Abe Schneider (who became honorary chairman before leaving the board in 1975) was replaced as head of the Columbia Pictures studio by David Begelman, who reported to Hirschfield. Some years later Begelman was involved in a check-forging scandal that badly hurt the studio's image.

On May 6, 1974, Columbia retired the Screen Gems name from television, renaming its television division Columbia Pictures Television. The name was suggested by David Gerber, who was then president of Columbia's television division. The same year, Columbia Pictures acquired Rastar Pictures, which included Rastar Productions, Rastar Features, and Rastar Television. Ray Stark then founded Rastar Films, the reincarnation of Rastar Pictures, which was acquired by Columbia Pictures in February 1980.

Columbia Pictures also reorganized its music and record divisions. Clive Davis was hired as a record and music consultant by Columbia Pictures in 1974 and later became temporary president of Bell Records. Davis's real goal was to revitalize Columbia Pictures' music division. With a $10 million investment by CPI, and a reorganization of the various Columbia Pictures legacy labels (Colpix, Colgems, and Bell), Davis introduced Columbia Pictures' new record division, Arista Records, in November 1974, with Davis himself owning 20% of the new venture. Columbia maintained control of the label until 1979, when it was sold to Ariola Records. In addition, Columbia sold its music publishing business (Columbia-Screen Gems) to EMI in August 1976 for $15 million. Both would later be reunited with Columbia Pictures under Sony ownership.

1980s: Coca-Cola, Tri-Star, and other acquisitions and ventures

On September 30, 1980, Kerkorian sued Columbia for ignoring shareholders' interest and violating an agreement with him. Columbia later accused him on October 2, of scheming with Nelson Bunker Hunt to gain control of Columbia.

In 1981, Kerkorian sold his 25% stake in Columbia back to CPI. Columbia Pictures later acquired 81% of The Walter Reade Organization, which owned 11 theaters; it purchased the remaining 19% in 1985.

Around this time, Columbia put Steven Spielberg's proposed follow-up to Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Night Skies, into turnaround (halting a production and making it available to outsiders). The project eventually became the highest-grossing film of the time, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. Columbia received a share of the profits for its involvement in the development.

On May 17, 1982, Columbia Pictures acquired Spelling-Goldberg Productions for over $40 million. With a healthier balance-sheet (due in large part to boxoffice hits like Kramer vs. Kramer, Stir Crazy, The Blue Lagoon, and Stripes), Columbia was bought by The Coca-Cola Company on June 22, 1982, for $750 million. Studio head Frank Price mixed big hits like Tootsie, Gandhi, The Karate Kid, The Big Chill, and Ghostbusters with many costly flops. To share the increasing cost of film production, Coke brought in two outside investors whose earlier efforts in Hollywood had come to nothing. In 1982, Columbia, Time Inc.'s HBO and CBS announced, as a joint venture, "Nova Pictures"; this enterprise was to be renamed Tri-Star Pictures. In 1983, Price left Columbia Pictures after a dispute with Coca-Cola and went back to Universal. He was replaced by Guy McElwaine.

In the early 1980s, Columbia and Tri-Star Pictures set up a film partnership with Delphi Film Associates and acquired an interest in various film releases. In 1984, Delphi Film Associates III acquired an interest in the Tri-Star and Columbia film slate of 1984, which would make a $60 million offering in the financing of film production. Also that year, Columbia Pictures had bought out the rights to Hardbodies, which was once premiered on The Playboy Channel.

Columbia Pictures expanded its music publishing operations in the 1980s, acquiring Big 3 Publishing (the former sheet music operations of Robbins, Feist, and Miller) from MGM/UA Communications Co. in 1983, Belwin-Mills Publishing from Simon & Schuster in 1985, and Al Gallico Music in 1987.

Sony era (1989–present)

On September 28, 1989, the Columbia Pictures empire was sold to the electronics giant Sony, one of several Japanese firms then buying American properties, for the amount of $3.4 billion. The sale netted Coca-Cola a profit from its investment in the studio. Sony then hired two producers, Peter Guber and Jon Peters, to serve as coheads of production when Sony also acquired the Guber-Peters Entertainment Company (the former game show production company, Barris Industries) for $200 million on September 29, 1989. Guber and Peters had just signed a long-term contract with Warner Bros. in 1989, having been with the company since 1983. Warner Bros., then a subsidiary of Warner Communications, sued Sony for $1 billion. Sony completed CPE's acquisition on November 8, and the Guber-Peters acquisition was completed on the following day.

On December 1, 1989, Guber and Peters hired a longtime lawyer of GPEC, Alan J. Levine, to the post of president and COO of Columbia's newly formed company Filmed Entertainment Group (FEG). FEG consisted of Columbia Pictures, Tri-Star Pictures, Triumph Releasing, Columbia Pictures Television, Columbia Pictures Television Distribution, Merv Griffin Enterprises, RCA/Columbia Pictures Home Video (internationally known as RCA/Columbia Pictures International Video), Guber-Peters Entertainment Company, and ancillary and distribution companies.

In 1990, Sony ended up paying hundreds of millions of dollars, gave up a half-interest in its Columbia House Records Club mail-order business, and bought from Time Warner the former Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) studio lot in Culver City, which Warner Communications had acquired in its takeover of Lorimar-Telepictures in 1989, thus ending the Burbank Studios partnership. Initially renamed Columbia Studios, Sony spent $100 million to refurbish the rechristened Sony Pictures Studios lot.

Guber and Peters set out to prove they were worth this fortune, but though there were to be some successes, there were also many costly flops. The same year, Frank Price was made the chairman of Columbia Pictures. His company Price Entertainment, Inc., which he founded in 1987, was merged with Columbia in March 1991. Price left Columbia on October 4, 1991, and was replaced by Warner Bros. executive Mark Canton and reactivated Price Entertainment as Price Entertainment Company with a nonexclusive deal with SPE. Peters was fired by his partner Guber in 1991, but Guber later resigned in 1994 to form Mandalay Entertainment the following year. The entire operation was reorganized and renamed Sony Pictures Entertainment (SPE) on August 7, 1991, and at the same time, TriStar (which had officially lost its hyphen) relaunched its television division in October. In December 1991, SPE created Sony Pictures Classics for arthouse fare and was headed by Michael Barker, Tom Bernard, and Marcie Bloom, who previously operated United Artists Classics and Orion Classics. Publicly humiliated, Sony suffered an enormous loss on its investment in Columbia, taking a $2.7 billion write-off in 1994. John Calley took over as SPE president in November 1996, installing Amy Pascal as Columbia Pictures president and Chris Lee as president of production at TriStar. By the next spring, the studios were clearly rebounding, setting a record pace at the box office. On December 7, 1992, Sony Pictures acquired the Barry & Enright game show library.

International film production

In 1998, Columbia Pictures began launching local-language film units to produce local films in Brazil, Germany, Russia (from 2007 to 2021), Asia, India and had short-lived units in Spain and Mexico.

Deutsche Columbia Pictures Filmproduktion produces films for German-speaking territories. The unit's first film was Anatomy, which became the highest-grossing German-language film of 2000. However, after the box office failures of What to Do in Case of Fire?, Viktor Vogel – Commercial Man, Big Girls Don't Cry and Anatomy 2, the unit was closed down in 2003. The unit was later relaunched in 2008, with its first film Friendship! being released in 2010.

Columbia Pictures Film Production Asia produces films for Chinese-language territories and was based in Hong Kong. The unit's notable productions are Not One Less, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Big Shot's Funeral and Kung Fu Hustle. The unit closed after the release of the Hong Kong film Jump in 2009. In 2014, Columbia Pictures began striking partnerships with Chinese production companies to make Chinese-language films starting with Monk Comes Down the Mountain in 2015.

Logo

The Columbia Pictures logo, featuring the Torch Lady, a woman carrying a torch and wearing a drape (representing Columbia, a personification of the United States), has gone through six major changes. It has often been compared to the Statue of Liberty, which was an inspiration to the Columbia Pictures logo.

History

Originally in 1924, Columbia Pictures used a logo featuring a female Roman soldier holding a shield in her left hand and a stick of wheat in her right hand, which was based on actress Doris Doscher (known as the model for the statue on the Pulitzer Fountain) as the Standing Liberty quarter used from 1916 to 1930, though the studio's version was given longer hair. In 1928, Columbia used two logos. The first introduced a new woman wearing a radiate crown and a peplos, and holding a torch in the center of a ribbon-shaped ring similar to the MGM logo, with the slogan "Gems of the Screen", itself a takeoff on the song "Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean". The second had her wearing a draped flag and holding a torch that radiates flickers. The woman wore a headdress, the stola and carried the palla of ancient Rome, and above her are the words "A Columbia Production" ("A Columbia Picture" or "Columbia Pictures Corporation"), written in an arch. The illustration for the latter logo was based upon the actress Evelyn Venable, known for providing the voice of the Blue Fairy in Walt Disney's Pinocchio. The former logo continued to be in use for films intertitles with "The End" until 1933. Its slogan later inspired the renaming of the Charles Mintz Studio into Screen Gems.

In 1936, the logo was changed into the well known look: the Torch Lady now stood on a pedestal, wore no headdress, and the text "Columbia" appeared in chiseled letters behind her. A new form of animation was used on the logo as well, with a torch that radiates light instead of flickers and a cloudy background. Jane Chester Bartholomew, a native of Burgettstown, Pennsylvania (a suburb of Pittsburgh), whom Harry Cohn discovered working as an extra at Columbia, portrayed the Torch Lady in the logo. There were several variations to the logo over the years—significantly, a color version was done in 1943 for The Desperadoes. Two years earlier, the flag became just a drape with no markings. The latter change came after a federal law was passed making it illegal to wear an American flag as clothing. In the 1950s, the woman's robe was redrawn and shaded with a plunging neckline and an exposed slipper-clad foot. The 1976 drama film Taxi Driver was one of the last films released before the "Torch Lady" was revamped. A majestic horn sounder (a la 20th Century Fox) was used as the theme for the 1936 logo and the two 1928 logos. To date, the 1936 version is the studio's longest used logo after forty years.

From 1955 to 1963, Columbia used the Torch Lady from the 1936 logo under the Screen Gems banner, officially billing itself as part of "the Hollywood studios of Columbia Pictures", as spoken at the end of some Screen Gems series.

Filmography

Highest-grossing films

‡ Includes theatrical reissue(s).