Columbia Pictures

Portrait of a Studio

Bernard F. Dick

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780813130194, 9780813117690
• eBook ISBN: 9780813153216
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film Direction & Production

Drawing on previously untapped archival materials including letters, interviews, and more, Bernard F. Dick traces the history of Columbia Pictures, from its beginnings as the CBC Film Sales Company, through the regimes of Harry Cohn and his successors, and ending with a vivid portrait of today's corporate Hollywood. The book offers unique perspectives on the careers of Rita Hayworth and Judy Holliday, a discussion of Columbia's unique brands of screwball comedy and film noir, and analyses of such classics as The Awful Truth, Born Yesterday, and From Here to Eternity. Following the author's highly readable studio chronicle are fourteen original essays by leading film scholars that follow Columbia's emergence from Poverty Row status to world class, and the stars, films, genres, writers, producers, and directors responsible for its transformation. A new essay on Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood rounds out the collection and brings this seminal studio history into the 21st century.

Amply illustrated with film stills and photos of stars and studio heads, Columbia Pictures is the first book to integrate history with criticism of a single studio, and is ideal for film lovers and scholars alike.

I

The History of
Columbia, 1920–2020

FROM THE BROTHERS COHN TO SONY CORP.—AND BEYOND

BERNARD F. DICK

Film historians distinguish between the Big Five (MGM, Warner’s, Paramount, Twentieth Century-Fox, and RKO) and the Little Three (Universal, Columbia, and United Artists), the eight motion picture companies that provided the bulk of the movies made during Hollywood’s heyday—the “studio years,” which ran roughly from the mid-1920’s through the 1950s. Certainly Columbia was not on a par with MGM; it could neither boast, as MGM did, of “more stars than there are in the heavens,” nor lay claim to MGM’s title, “The Tiffany of Studios.” Columbia also had no theatre chain; although the absence of one proved a blessing in the late 1940s, when studios with theatre circuits were ordered to divest themselves of them, it also meant that Columbia had no guaranteed outlet for its films. In this respect, Columbia was like Universal; neither was vertically integrated.

Columbia and Universal are similar in another sense. Although each made its share of classics, each evokes less than classic associations. Universal will always be remembered as the studio that gave the world Abbott and Costello, Frankenstein’s monster, the Mummy, Dracula, and the Wolf Man, rather than All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), My Man Godfrey (1936), and Shadow of a Doubt (1943). Columbia also made films that were as important as those of any studio—Frank Capra’s best movies, His Girl Friday (1940), The Lady from Shanghai (1948), On the Waterfront (1954), to name only a few—yet it will always be identified with two names that have become synonymous with uncouthness: the Three Stooges and Harry Cohn, dubbed “His Crudeness” by none other than Frank Capra.

Columbia was created in the image of Harry Cohn (1891–1958), its cofounder, who was also the studio’s president from 1932 until his death. While Cohn is numbered among the movie czars who “invented” Hollywood,¹ it might be more accurate to say that he invented himself and imposed that self on his studio. The inventor was an anomaly: obscene and well-spoken, anti-intellectual and uncannily perceptive, heartless and compassionate. Columbia is equally bipolar. The other studios of Hollywood’s Golden Age are easy to characterize. Warner’s was the proletarian studio that made viewers socially conscious, whether they were watching films about chain gangs, upwardly mobile gangsters, or gum-chewing hoofers. MGM flattered its audiences by ennobling the bourgeois lifestyle; if Emma Bovary had seen enough MGM movies, she would never have taken her life. While MGM was high gloss, Twentieth Century-Fox was highbrow; its screen versions of The Grapes of Wrath (1940), How Green Was My Valley (1941), and Jane Eyre (1944) were literature tailored for the screen, designed for the discerning—or at least those aspiring to be.

But what was Columbia’s specialty? Three Stooges shorts? Blondie movies? Rita Hayworth musicals? Or perhaps It Happened One Night (1934), Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), All the King’s Men (1949), From Here to Eternity (1953)? Confronted with a studio matching test, film students would have no difficulty pairing MGM with “home of the stars,” Universal with “horror and low comedy,” Republic with “westerns and serials,” and Warner’s with “social consciousness and gangster movies.” But if a student were debating whether to match Monogram with “Poverty Row,” and Columbia with “series films,” or vice versa, and decided Monogram belonged with “series films” and Columbia with “Poverty Row,” only a pedant would mark the student wrong. Monogram was a Poverty Row studio that was known for its series (Charlie Chan, the Bowery Boys). Columbia, which had several popular series (Blondie, Boston Blackie, Crime Doctor, the Whistler), originated on Poverty Row. For almost fifty years (1924–1972), Columbia’s official address was 1438 North Gower St.

Columbia, in fact, was located in the center of Poverty Row, a section of Sunset Boulevard between Beachwood Drive and Gower Street in West Los Angeles. Poverty Row was the home of the storefront studios that ground out the movies shown in the theaters of side-street America or on the lower half of double bills. The corner of Gower and Sunset, “Gower Gulch,” was a favorite meeting place for cowboy actors looking for jobs in Poverty Row productions. Since “Poverty Row” was a label slapped on other studios (for example, Republic) that were not even near Gower Gulch, it really designates a style of moviemaking that ceased with the coming of television when the “B” movie tradition left the screen for the tube, depriving Poverty Row of its raison d’être. Thus, it is unfair to include Columbia under the Poverty Row rubric, yet film historians have done so. Clearly it is a case of guilt by location.

Although Columbia was within walking distance of Marathon Street, where Paramount was (and still is) located, there was a significant difference between the two studios. Paramount may not have had MGM’s heaven of stars, but it did have an impressive constellation. During the 1930s Paramount’s roster included directors such as Josef van Sternberg, Rouben Mamoulian, and Ernst Lubitsch (famed for his touch), and performers on the order of Marlene Dietrich, Ruth Chatterton, Fredric March, Mae West, and W. C. Fields. Columbia had Frank Capra and, at the beginning, three cramped soundstages. While Bette Davis, Spencer Tracy, and Clark Gable each made a movie at Columbia in the 1930s, they eventually became associated with other studios: Davis with Warner’s, Tracy and Gable with MGM. While Columbia had a number of contract players (Rita Hayworth, Glenn Ford, Evelyn Keyes, and Larry Parks, among others), it preferred loan-outs, freelancers, defectors from the majors who were dissatisfied with their material and hoping for a change of image, and onetime “names” whose marquee value had not completely vanished. Columbia may not have had a stock company comparable to Warner’s, but it did score a coup in 1933 that gave the scoffers, who referred to the studio as the “germ of the ocean” and the “gem of commotion,” pause: Columbia’s The Bitter Tea of General Yen, directed by Frank Capra, was the first movie to be shown at Radio City Music Hall.

Columbia did not leave Gower Street until 1972, but before it did, it had produced some of the world’s most honored films; it also, of course, made its share of schlock—but then, so did all the studios, including the Tiffany of Culver City.

The move from Poverty Row to world class was not a direct one; it was circuitous, and the journey lacks a final destination because the trip began with an open ticket. Columbia has lasted while Monogram, Republic, and RKO have not; it could easily have stayed Poverty Row in spirit and product, going the way of Monogram and Republic. That Columbia remained on Poverty Row for half a century but was not “Poverty Row” is a tribute to Jack and Harry Cohn.

While the Cohns knew privation, they did not know poverty. William Fox, whose studio merged with Twentieth Century Pictures to form Twentieth Century-Fox, could point to his useless right arm and attribute it to his parents’ inability to pay for surgery when he broke it. Louis B. Mayer could admit to having been a junk dealer; Sam Goldwyn, to having walked from Warsaw to Hamburg. If the Cohns had at least been born on the Lower East Side, it would have compensated for their not coming from a shtetl. But the Cohns came from Yorkville on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, the home of assimilated Jews and German Jewish barons who spoke German, not Yiddish. The family lived in five-story apartment house on the northwest corner of East 88th Street and First Avenue. Joseph and Bella Cohn had five children: Max, the oldest; Jacob (Jack); Harry, two years younger than Jack; Nathaniel; and Anna. Joseph Cohn was a tailor whose shop was a block away from the apartment building.

Harry’s initiation into moviemaking did not come from an early realization of film’s importance or a magical afternoon at the nickelodeon. He did not buy a theatre, unlike Mayer, whose initial purchase led to a second and eventually from exhibition to production. It was Jack Cohn who introduced his younger brother to the new medium. Jack recognized film’s potential long before Harry. In 1902, when Jack was working for the Hampton Advertising Agency at $4 dollars a week, he met Joe Brandt, later to become one of the trio that brought Columbia into existence. Although Jack tried to persuade Brandt to enter the fledgling movie business with him, Brandt was more interested in pursuing a law degree at New York University, an institution that would provide Columbia with many of its top executives. Jack, who never even completed high school, had less lofty aspirations. In 1908, he left Hampton for Carl Laemmle’s Independent Moving Picture Company (IMP), shortly to be known as Universal, where he started as an assistant to the lab manager, C. A. “Doc” Willat. Around the same time, Brandt became disenchanted with law and also joined IMP as Laemmle’s secretary.

Soon Jack became a cutter and, in 1912, was instrumental in creating Universal’s newsreel, The Animated Weekly. As a cutter, Jack reached a conclusion that all filmmakers eventually reach: while films may not be made in the cutting room, they can be improved there. Jack excelled at editing films, especially in reducing them from ten reels to six, as he did with Traffic in Souls (1913), Universal’s first feature-length movie, which dramatized the fate of female immigrants forced into white slavery. Initially, Harry was uninterested in the “flickers”; show business was more to his taste. His singing voice was good enough to land him a role in The Fatal Wedding (1901); he appeared in the final scene as a member of a boys’ choir. In 1912 Harry teamed up with composer Harry Ruby in an act called “Edwards and Ruby” (Harry being “Edwards”) that played nickelodeons. In his own way Harry was making history, since there is a connection between vaudeville and film.² Between 1896 and 1906, films were shown mainly in vaudeville theaters; movies were considered “chasers,” designed to clear the auditorium between the acts. Soon the opposite occurred; vaudeville waned, and movies captured the public’s fancy. When the demand for movies exceeded the supply, vaudeville acts were added to stretch out the bill. Sing-alongs were common, with song lyrics written on slides projected onto the screen. It was in this type of venue that Edwards and Ruby performed, Ruby playing the piano, and Edwards singing from the slides.

In 1912 the age of the nickelodeon, barely a decade long (1905–1914) was ending, along with Harry Cohn’s contribution to its twilight. Thus, Harry switched from singer to song-plugger, joining the music publishing house of Waterman, Berlin (Irving), and Snyder. In 1912 song-pluggers were expected to ply their trade not just in the usual places—theatres, restaurants, ratskellers—but on the street, at bike races and parades, and in dance halls and five-and-ten-cent stores. Harry’s experience in leading sing-alongs in nickelodeons stood him in good stead; in his new job he was expected to do the same.

Harry’s song-plugging career was almost as brief as his vaudeville stint. Impressed by the success of Traffic i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Part I. The History of Columbia, 1920–2020
• Part II. The Art of Columbia
• Contributors
• Index