RKO
In the studio system a major studio hired a stable of stars and production people to do as many films as
they were assigned. These people were under contract and were not allowed to work for any other studio
without permission.
During this period Warner Brothers became best known for its gangster films, MGM for its lavish starstudded musicals, and 20th Century Fox for its historical and adventure films.
In 1928, two titans of their age – David Sarnoff, President of the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) and
Joseph P. Kennedy, father of the future President and owner of the Film Booking Office of America (FBO),
a movie distribution company – met at an oyster bar in Manhattan. By the time the meal was over, they’d
agreed to combine RCA’s Keith-Albee-Orpheum theater chain with Kennedy’s company (as well as the
fledgling Pathe Studios) to form Radio-Keith-Orpheum, or the RKO Corporation. By combining film
production, distribution, and hundreds of theaters under one umbrella, they knew they had an innovative
business model. Little did they know how innovative the company would be.
Over the following two decades, RKO would go on to produce classics in nearly every genre, from dramas:
Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life (starring Jimmy Stewart), comedies: Howard Hawks’ Bringing Up
Baby (starring Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn), horror films: the original King Kong (starring Fay
Wray), thrillers: Hitchcock’s Notorious (starring Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman), and perhaps the most
influential film of all-time, designated by AFI as Number One on their list of the 100 Greatest Movies,
Orson Welles’ masterpiece Citizen Kane. Simultaneously, RKO’s distribution arm worked with Walt
Disney studios and others, bringing beloved classics like Fantasia, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and
Bambi to the big screen.
After a tumultuous period beginning with Howard Hughes’ purchase of the studio in 1948, RKO regained
its bearings with its acquisition by Ted Hartley and Dina Merrill in 1989.
RKO has long been celebrated for its cycle of musicals starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in the midto late 1930s. Actors Katharine Hepburn and, later, Robert Mitchum had their first major successes at the
studio. Cary Grant was a mainstay for years. The work of producer Val Lewton's low-budget horror unit
and RKO's many ventures into the field now known as film noir have been acclaimed, largely after the
fact, by film critics and historians. The studio produced two of the most famous films in motion picture
history: King Kong and Citizen Kane.
Warner Brothers
In the studio system a major studio hired a stable of stars and production people to do as many films as
they were assigned. These people were under contract and were not allowed to work for any other studio
without permission.
During this period Warner Brothers became best known for its gangster films, MGM for its lavish starstudded musicals, and 20th Century Fox for its historical and adventure films.
Thanks to the success of The Jazz Singer, the studio was suddenly flush with cash. Jolson's next film for
the company, The Singing Fool was also a success.[31] With the success of these first talkies (The Jazz
Singer, Lights of New York, The Singing Fool, and The Terror), Warner Bros. became one of the top
studios in Hollywood and the brothers were now able to move out from the Poverty Row section of
Hollywood and acquire a big studio in Burbank, California.[32] They were also able to expand studio
operations by acquiring the Stanley Corporation, a major theater chain.[33] This gave them a share in
rival First National Pictures, of which Stanley owned one-third.[34] In a bidding war with William Fox,
Warner Bros. bought more First National shares on September 13, 1928;[35][35] Jack Warner also
appointed producer Darryl Zanuck as the studio's manager of First National Pictures.[35]
Three years later, the audience had grown so tired of musicals, the studio was forced to cut the musical
numbers of many of the productions and advertise them as straight comedies. The public had begun to
associate musicals with color and thus the movie studios began to abandon its use.
With the collapse of the market for musicals, Warner Bros., under production head Darryl F. Zanuck,
turned to more socially realistic storylines, "torn from the headlines" pictures many in the media said
glorified gangsters;[58] Warner Bros. soon became known as a "gangster studio".[59] The studio's first
gangster film, Little Caesar, was a great box office success[60] and Edward G. Robinson was a star in
many of the subsequent wave of Warner gangster films.[61] The studio's next gangster film, The Public
Enemy,[62] made James Cagney arguably the studio's new top star,[63] and Warner Bros. was now
convinced to make more gangster films.[62]
MGM
In the studio system a major studio hired a stable of stars and production people to do as many films as
they were assigned. These people were under contract and were not allowed to work for any other studio
without permission.
During this period Warner Brothers became best known for its gangster films, MGM for its lavish starstudded musicals, and 20th Century Fox for its historical and adventure films.
The studio's official motto, "Ars Gratia Artis", is a Latin phrase meaning "Art for art's sake"[13][14][15]; it
was chosen by Howard Dietz, the studio's chief publicist.[15][16][17] The studio's logo is a roaring lion
surrounded by a ring of film inscribed with the studio's motto. The logo, which features Leo the Lion, was
created by Dietz in 1916 for Goldwyn Pictures and updated in 1924 for MGM's use.[15][18][19] Dietz
based the logo on his alma mater's mascot—the Columbia University lion.[15][17][20] Loew regarded its
use for the consolidated studio as particularly appropriate, since "Loewe" is German for "lion". Originally
silent, the sound of Leo the Lion's roar was added to films for the first time in August 1928.[14] In the
1930s and 1940s the studio billed itself as having "more stars than there are in heaven", a reference to
the large number of A-list movie stars under contract to the company.[19][21] This second motto was
also coined by Deitz,[22] and was probably first used in 1932.[23]
From the outset, MGM tapped into the audience's need for glamour and sophistication. Having inherited
few big names from their predecessor companies, Mayer and Thalberg began at once to create and
publicize a host of new stars, among them Greta Garbo, John Gilbert, William Haines, Norma Shearer, and
Joan Crawford. Established names like Lon Chaney, William Powell, Buster Keaton, and Wallace Beery
were hired from other studios. They also hired top directors such as King Vidor, Clarence Brown, Erich
von Stroheim, Tod Browning, and Victor Seastrom. The arrival of talking pictures in 1928–29 gave
opportunities to other new stars, many of whom would carry MGM through the 1930s: Clark Gable, Jean
Harlow, Robert Montgomery, Myrna Loy, Jeanette MacDonald, and Nelson Eddy among them.
MGM was one of the first studios to experiment with filming in Technicolor.
From then on, MGM regularly produced several films a year in Technicolor, The Wizard of Oz and
Northwest Passage being two of the most notable. MGM also released the enormously successful
Technicolor film Gone with the Wind, starring Vivien Leigh as Scarlett O'Hara and Clark Gable as Rhett
Butler. (Although Gone With the Wind was produced by Selznick International Pictures, it was released
by MGM as part of a deal for producer David O. Selznick to obtain the services of Clark Gable. However,
the film, being a Selznick International production, begins with that company's logo, rather than the usual
MGM roaring lion.)
Fox
In the studio system a major studio hired a stable of stars and production people to do as many films as
they were assigned. These people were under contract and were not allowed to work for any other studio
without permission.
During this period Warner Brothers became best known for its gangster films, MGM for its lavish starstudded musicals, and 20th Century Fox for its historical and adventure films.
The Fox Film Corporation was formed in 1915 by the theater chain pioneer William Fox, who formed Fox
Film Corporation by merging two companies he had established in 1913: Greater New York Film Rental, a
distribution firm, which was part of the Independents; and Fox (or Box, depending on the source) Office
Attractions Company, a production company. This merging of a distribution company and a production
company was an early example of vertical integration.
With the introduction of sound technologies, Fox moved to acquire the rights to a sound-on-film process.
In the years 1925–26, Fox purchased the rights to the work of Freeman Harrison Owens, the U.S. rights to
the Tri-Ergon system invented by three German inventors, and the work of Theodore Case. This resulted
in the Movietone sound system later known as "Fox Movietone." Later that year, the company began
offering films with a music-and-effects track, and the following year Fox began the weekly Fox Movietone
News feature, which ran until 1963.
20th Century Fox forged the musical and a great deal of prestige biographies, such as Young Mr. Lincoln
(1939). Fox fared quite well with its high-end output in 1940-1941, notably with its energetic modest
musicals, light comedy-drama, sentimental Americana, and what Zanuck himself termed "hokum"—
adventure yarns and quasi-historical biopics. Fox’s star stable was undergoing a transition in the prewar
era as Shirley Temple, Alice Faye, and the skater Sonja Henie, all top stars in the late 1930s, began to fade.
These declines were offset by the fast rise of Tyrone Power to top stardom and the appeal of the secondrank male lead Don Ameche. Zanuck also signed a number of promising new players in 1939-1940,
including Dana Andrews, Betty Grable, Gene Tierney, Carmen Miranda, and Henry Fonda.
Fox signed several directors as well in 1939-1940, including John Ford, Fritz Lang, Henry King, and Henry
Hathaway, which tended to reinforce what Joel Finler has termed the “split personality” that Fox was
developing at the time. 14 Ford and Lang turned out “serious” films (usually literary adaptations or
biopics done in black and white), while Hathaway and King produced commercially successful if critically
suspect pictures—period musicals, quasi-historical action-adventure films, and the like, often done in
Technicolor. Fox, in fact, led the industry in Technicolor production, releasing five of the eleven color
pictures produced in Hollywood in 1940 and continuing to dominate color production throughout the
decade.
Paramount
In the studio system a major studio hired a stable of stars and production people to do as many films as
they were assigned. These people were under contract and were not allowed to work for any other studio
without permission.
During this period Warner Brothers became best known for its gangster films, MGM for its lavish starstudded musicals, and 20th Century Fox for its historical and adventure films.
Paramount is America's oldest existing film studio; it is also the last major film studio still headquartered
in the Hollywood district of Los Angeles. Paramount is consistently ranked as one of the largest topgrossing movie studios.
Paramount Pictures can trace its beginning to the creation in May 1912 of the Famous Players Film
Company. Founder Hungarian-born Adolph Zukor, who had been an early investor in nickelodeons, saw
that movies appealed mainly to working-class immigrants.[2] With partners Daniel Frohman and Charles
Frohman he planned to offer feature-length films that would appeal to the middle class by featuring the
leading theatrical players of the time (leading to the slogan "Famous Players in Famous Plays"). By mid1913, Famous Players had completed five films, and Zukor was on his way to success.
Because Zukor believed in stars, he signed and developed many of the leading early stars, including Mary
Pickford, Marguerite Clark, Pauline Frederick, Douglas Fairbanks, Gloria Swanson, Rudolph Valentino,
and Wallace Reid. With so many important players, Paramount was able to introduce "block booking",
which meant that an exhibitor who wanted a particular star's films had to buy a year's worth of other
Paramount productions. It was this system that gave Paramount a leading position in the 1920s and
1930s, but which led the government to pursue it on antitrust grounds for more than twenty years.
As always, Paramount films continued to emphasize stars; in the 1920s there were Swanson, Valentino,
and Clara Bow. By the 1930s, talkies brought in a range of powerful new draws: Miriam Hopkins, Marlene
Dietrich, Mae West, Gary Cooper, Claudette Colbert, the Marx Brothers, Dorothy Lamour, Carole Lombard,
Bing Crosby, the band leader Shep Fields and the famous Argentine tango singer Carlos Gardel among
them. In this period Paramount can truly be described as a movie factory, turning out sixty to seventy
pictures a year. Such were the benefits of having a huge theater chain to fill, and of block booking to
persuade other chains to go along. In 1933, Mae West would also add greatly to Paramount's success with
her movies She Done Him Wrong and I'm No Angel.[4][5] However, the sex appeal West gave in these
movies would also lead to the enforcement of the Production Code, as the newly formed organization the
Catholic Legion of Decency threatened a boycott if it was not enforced.