Movie Moguls and Studio Sharks

In the early days of Hollywood, getting a movie studio up and running was challenging.

- Gina DeAngelis

The filmmaking industry was cutthroat. The men who succeeded were tough. Many of them were immigrants, who were willing to work hard and to take risks. They also made the geographic shift from starting out in cities on the East Coast to building major studios in California.

Driving Ambition

Carl Laemmle immigrated to the United States from Germany as a teenager. In 1906, he started a company that rented films to theater owners. Later, he began creating his own movies. In 1912, his filmmaking company merged with several others to form Universal Pictures. Ambitious and driven, Laemmle forced out Universal's other partners until he had sole control. In 1913, he built a stateof-the-art studio in Southern California. He called it Universal City. In the 1920s and 1930s, Universal made low-cost genre pictures, such as horror films, westerns, and musicals.

The Shark

Adolph Zukor was a 16-year-old orphan when he arrived in the United States from Hungary in 1889. He worked as a furrier until he purchased a nickelodeon parlor. Zukor saw the excitement that surrounded nickelodeons among America's growing immigrant population. In 1912, he bought the U.S. distribution rights to Queen Elizabeth, a four-reel French film. It starred the famous stage actress Sarah Bernhardt. The film's success proved there was a market for feature-length films.

To produce and distribute his own films, Zukor established the Famous Players Film Company. It later became a distribution company called Paramount. Zukor's business tactics earned him the nicknames "Shark" and "Killer." One of the people he forced out of business was Sam Goldfish, who later partnered with Edgar