Paramount Pictures

Based on Wikipedia: Paramount Pictures

The Mountain That Conquered Hollywood

Here's a question that might surprise you: which major film studio is the only one still headquartered in Hollywood itself? Not in Burbank, not in Culver City, not scattered across some anonymous corporate campus. The answer is Paramount Pictures, sitting at 5555 Melrose Avenue since 1926, making movies on the same lot where Cecil B. DeMille once directed silent films in a converted horse barn.

That staying power tells you something about Paramount. While other studios moved, merged, or vanished entirely, this one endured. It's the second-oldest film studio in America, younger only than Universal, and it helped invent nearly everything we now take for granted about how movies get made and sold.

A Hungarian Immigrant's Gamble

The story begins in 1912 with Adolph Zukor, a Hungarian immigrant who had made money investing in nickelodeons—those coin-operated early movie theaters where working-class immigrants paid a nickel to watch short films. Zukor noticed something: movies were considered low entertainment, vulgar amusements for people who couldn't afford theater tickets.

He saw an opportunity.

What if movies could attract the middle class? What if you featured famous stage actors in adaptations of famous plays? Zukor founded the Famous Players Film Company with a slogan that doubled as a mission statement: "Famous Players in Famous Plays." His first film starred Sarah Bernhardt, the most celebrated actress of her era, lending theatrical prestige to this upstart medium.

Meanwhile, another aspiring producer named Jesse Lasky was taking a different approach. He borrowed money from his brother-in-law, a man named Samuel Goldfish who would later change his name to Samuel Goldwyn. Lasky hired a stage director with virtually no film experience—Cecil B. DeMille—and sent him west to find a place to make movies.

DeMille found Hollywood.

Specifically, he found a rented horse barn at the corner of Vine Street and Sunset Boulevard, converted it into a primitive studio, and in 1914 released "The Squaw Man," one of the first feature films shot in Hollywood. That barn still exists, by the way. It's been moved and turned into a museum, but for a brief moment in 1914, it was the entire West Coast film industry.

The Birth of the Distribution System

Here's where things get interesting. Making movies was one thing, but getting them into theaters was another problem entirely. In the early days, films were sold regionally—you might have the rights to show a movie in Ohio, but someone else controlled Pennsylvania. This system was expensive and chaotic for filmmakers.

A Utah theater owner named W. W. Hodkinson solved this in 1914 by founding Paramount Pictures Corporation as a nationwide distribution company. The name came from an apartment building he had admired, and the iconic mountain logo was supposedly sketched on a napkin, inspired by Ben Lomond Mountain in Utah. Paramount became the first successful nationwide film distributor, and Hodkinson signed contracts with Zukor's Famous Players, Lasky's company, and others to get their films into theaters across America.

Two years later, Zukor engineered a merger that would define Hollywood for decades. He combined Famous Players, Lasky's company, and Paramount into a single entity. Then he bought Hodkinson out entirely. The resulting company, Famous Players-Lasky Corporation, was worth twelve and a half million dollars in 1916—equivalent to about two hundred and fifty million today. It was the largest film company in the world.

The Star System and Block Booking

Zukor understood something fundamental about the movie business: audiences don't buy tickets to see movies, they buy tickets to see stars. So he signed everyone he could get. Mary Pickford, "America's Sweetheart." Douglas Fairbanks, the swashbuckling hero. Gloria Swanson. Rudolph Valentino. The list goes on.

But Zukor's real innovation was more controversial. It was called block booking, and it worked like this: if a theater owner wanted to show the new Mary Pickford picture, they had to buy an entire year's worth of Paramount films. The hits came bundled with the flops. Take it or leave it.

This system made Paramount enormously powerful. Theater owners hated it but had no choice—audiences demanded stars, and Paramount had the stars. The practice was so effective that it dominated the film industry for two decades, and so anticompetitive that the federal government would eventually spend twenty years trying to stop it.

To cement their power, Paramount also bought theaters. Lots of them. By the late 1920s, Zukor controlled nearly two thousand screens across America. The company ran production studios on both coasts—one in Hollywood, one in Astoria, Queens, which still operates today as Kaufman Astoria Studios. Zukor even invested in the new Columbia Broadcasting System, buying a fifty percent stake in CBS in 1928, though he sold it within a few years.

Wonder Theaters and the Sound Revolution

In the 1920s, Paramount acquired the Balaban and Katz theater chain, bringing aboard the Balaban brothers and their partner Sam Katz. These men had developed something called the "Wonder Theater" concept—movie palaces so ornate, so luxurious, that going to the movies became an event in itself. These weren't just places to watch films. They were cathedrals of entertainment, with grand lobbies, uniformed ushers, and air conditioning (still a novelty in that era).

But an even bigger revolution was coming. In 1927, Paramount temporarily closed their Astoria studio to install sound equipment. The "talkies" were arriving, and they would change everything.

Paramount released their first musical, "Innocents of Paris," in 1929. It starred Maurice Chevalier singing a song called "Louise" that became a sensation. Suddenly, a whole new category of performers became valuable: actors who could speak clearly, singers who could carry a tune, dancers who could move. Some silent film stars vanished almost overnight. Others thrived in the new medium.

This era also brought animation to Paramount. The studio began distributing cartoons from Fleischer Studios, run by brothers Max and Dave Fleischer, veterans of the animation industry who created some of the most iconic characters of the era. Betty Boop, with her flapper style and suggestive innocence. Popeye the Sailor, who became so popular that by 1935, polls showed he had surpassed Mickey Mouse in popularity. The Fleischers were among the very few animators who could genuinely compete with Walt Disney.

The Depression and the Fall

And then it all collapsed.

The Great Depression hit Hollywood hard, and Paramount hardest of all. The very things that had made the company powerful—all those theaters, all those contracts, all that expansion—now became crushing liabilities. Zukor had financed much of his empire with Paramount stock, and when the stock price crashed, the debts came due.

The company owed twenty-one million dollars it couldn't pay. On January 26, 1933, Paramount went into receivership. Two months later, on March 14, it filed for bankruptcy. Jesse Lasky, who had been with the company since the horse barn days, was blamed for the collapse and forced out. Zukor himself lost control, pushed aside while bankruptcy trustees spent over a year restructuring the debt.

The reorganization took two years. When Paramount finally emerged from bankruptcy in 1935, it was a different company. John Otterson became president briefly, then Barney Balaban took over in 1936. Zukor returned, but only as a symbolic "chairman of the board." The man who had built the studio was now a figurehead in his own creation.

But the company survived. And under Balaban's leadership, it thrived again.

The Golden Age and Its Stars

Through all the corporate turmoil, Paramount kept making movies—and kept making stars. The roster from this era reads like a hall of fame of classic Hollywood: Gary Cooper, Marlene Dietrich, Mae West, Bing Crosby, the Marx Brothers, W.C. Fields, Carole Lombard, Cary Grant.

At its peak, Paramount was a true movie factory, releasing sixty to seventy pictures a year. Some were masterpieces. Many were forgettable. All of them served the same purpose: keeping those two thousand theater screens filled, week after week, year after year.

Mae West deserves special mention. In 1933, her films "She Done Him Wrong" and "I'm No Angel" were enormous hits, helping pull Paramount out of its financial crisis. But West's success came at a cost. Her movies were so sexually suggestive that the Catholic Legion of Decency threatened a nationwide boycott unless Hollywood cleaned up its act. The result was the Production Code, a set of strict moral guidelines that would govern American movies for the next three decades. No on-screen kisses lasting longer than three seconds. No unmarried couples sharing a bed. No villains going unpunished. Mae West helped save Paramount, and in doing so, helped create the censorship system that would constrain Hollywood for a generation.

The End of the Studio System

In 1940, sensing which way the winds were blowing, Paramount agreed to stop block booking and "pre-selling"—the practice of collecting money from theater owners for films that hadn't even been made yet. Production dropped from seventy-one films a year to a more modest nineteen.

World War Two provided a temporary reprieve. Wartime attendance reached astronomical levels—Americans sought escape from the news, and movies provided it. Paramount and the other studios made more money than ever. But the federal government hadn't forgotten about those theater chains.

In 1948, the Supreme Court issued a devastating ruling in United States v. Paramount Pictures. The court held that movie studios could not also own movie theater chains. This broke the vertical integration that Zukor had spent decades building. Paramount was forced to spin off its fifteen hundred theaters into a new company called United Paramount Theaters.

The theater company would have its own interesting future. Led by Leonard Goldenson, United Paramount Theaters had plenty of cash and valuable downtown real estate, but was barred from making films. Goldenson looked for other investments and in 1953 bought the struggling ABC television network. Under his leadership, ABC eventually grew to become the top-rated network in America, before being sold to Capital Cities in 1985 and eventually to Disney in 1996. The theater chain that Zukor built became, through strange corporate evolution, part of the foundation of modern Disney.

As for Paramount Pictures itself, the loss of its theater chain marked the end of an era. The classic Hollywood studio system—where a handful of companies controlled everything from script to screen—was finished. Movies would still be made, stars would still shine, and Paramount would remain one of the most important studios in the world. But the days when one company could dominate the entire industry from production to projection were over.

The Mountain Endures

What's remarkable about Paramount is its persistence. Founded in 1912, it survived the transition from silent films to talkies, from black-and-white to color, from theatrical exclusivity to television competition, from film to digital. In 2014, Paramount became the first major Hollywood studio to distribute all its films digitally, abandoning celluloid entirely.

The franchises that sustain the studio today—Mission: Impossible, Transformers, Star Trek—would be unrecognizable to Adolph Zukor. But the business model would make perfect sense to him. Find something audiences love. Make more of it. Sell it everywhere you can.

That mountain logo, sketched on a napkin in Utah over a century ago, still appears before movies seen by billions of people worldwide. The horse barn is gone. Most of the original players are long forgotten. But Paramount remains at 5555 Melrose Avenue, the last major studio still headquartered in Hollywood itself, making movies on the same lot where Cecil B. DeMille once worked.

The mountain, it turns out, was aptly named. It endured.