ZUKOR, Adolph

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Producer. Nationality: Hungarian-American. Born: Risce, Hungary, 7 January 1873; emigrated to the United States, 1889. Family: Married Lottie Kaufman. Career: Furrier in Chicago; 1903—opened a string of penny arcades with partner Marcus Loew; 1905—treasurer of extensive Loew's theatre chain; 1912—distributor of European productions; formed own production and distribution company, Famous Players; 1916—joined with the Jesse Lasky Feature Play Company; president; the company renamed Paramount; 1936—replaced by Barney Balaban; remained as chairman of the board until his death. Award: Special Academy Award, 1948. Died: In Los Angeles, California, 10 June 1976.

Films as Producer/Executive Producer:

1912

Queen Elizabeth (Desfontaines); The Count of Monte Cristo (Porter)

1913

A Good Little Devil (Porter); The Man from Mexico; Charlie Fadden; The Prisoner of Zenda (Porter)

1914

The Squaw Man (DeMille)

1915

Peer Gynt (Apfel); Zaza (Ford); The Cheat (DeMille); Carmen (DeMille); Madame Butterfly (Olcott)

1916

Miss George Washington (Dawley); Oliver Twist (Twist)

1917

Seventeen; Great Expectations (Vignola); Tom Sawyer (Taylor); A Modern Musketeer (Dwan); The Bluebird (Tourneur); Barbary Sheep (Tourneur)

1918

The Doll's House (Tourneur); Uncle Tom's Cabin (Dawley); Battling Jane (Clifton); Old Wives for New (DeMille); The Greatest Thing in Life (Griffith); Come on In

1919

My Cousin (José); String Beans (Schertzinger); Pettigrew's Girl (Melford); The Knickerbocker Buckaroo (Parker); Valley of the Giants (Cruze); The Miracle Man (Tucker); 231/2 Hours Leave (King); The Admirable Crichton (Male and Female) (DeMille); The Misleading Widow (Robertson)

1920

Remodelling Her Husband; Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Robertson); Humoresque (Borzage); Deception (Anna Boleyn) (Lubitsch); Miss Lulu Bett (W. De Mille); Broadway Jones Der Silberkoenig (The Silver King)

1921

The Gilded Lily (Leonard); The Great Moment (Wood); The Affairs of Anatol (DeMille); Fool's Paradise (DeMille)

1922

The Old Homestead (Cruze); The Sheik (Melford); Three Live Ghosts (Fitzmaurice); The Young Rajah (Rosen); Manslaughter (DeMille); Belladonna

1923

The Covered Wagon (Cruze); Why Worry? (Taylor); Safety Last (Taylor)

1924

Forbidden Paradise (Lubitsch); Peter Pan (Brenon); Monsieur Beaucaire (Olcott); Girl Shy (Newmeyer); Manhandled (Dwan); Wanderer of the Wasteland (Willat); Grass (Schoedsack); The Ten Commandments (DeMille); Hot Water (Newmeyer and Taylor); A Sainted Devil (Henabery)

1925

Madame Sans-Gêne (Perret); The Freshman (Newmeyer); Cobra (Henabery)

1926

Beau Geste (Brenon); The Kid Brother (Wilde); Aloma of the South Seas

1927

For Heaven's Sake (Taylor); Underworld (von Sternberg)

1928

The Last Command (von Sternberg); The Vanishing Race (Seitz); Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (St. Clair); Speedy (Wilde); Way of All Flesh (Fleming); Chang (Cooper); Gentlemen of the Press (Webb); Beau Sabreur (Waters); The Patriot (Lubitsch)

1929

College Days (Wood); The Wedding March (von Stroheim); Innocents of Paris (Wallace); Wings (Wellman); The Cocoanuts (Florey and Santley); The Mysterious Dr. Fu Manchu (Lee); Legion of the Condemned (Wellman)

1930

Welcome Danger (Bruckman); Love Parade (Lubitsch); The Mighty (Cromwell); The Four Feathers (Mendes); The Vagabond King (Berger); The Virginian (Fleming); The Big Pond (Henley); Monte Carlo (Lubitsch); Morocco (von Sternberg); Playboy of Paris (Berger)

1931

The Royal Family of Broadway (Theatre Royal) (Cukor); Sarah and Son (Arzner); Feet First (Bruckman); The Texan (Cromwell); Dishonoured (von Sternberg); Fighting Caravans (Brower and Burton); City Streets (Mamoulian); Skippy (Taurog); Tarnished Lady (Cukor); Paramount on Parade (Arzner, Brower, Goulding, Heerman, Knopf, Lee, Lubitsch, Mendes, Schertzinger, Sutherland, and Tuttle); Anybody's Woman (Arzner); The Smiling Lieutenant (Lubitsch); Grumpy (Cukor and Gardner)

1932

Huckleberry Finn (Taurog); Secrets of a Secretary (Abbott); Tomorrow and Tomorrow (Wallace); Service for Ladies (Reserved for Ladies) (A. Korda); Once a Lady (McClintic); I Take This Woman (Gering and Vorkapitch); Ladies of the Big House (Gering); Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Mamoulian); Ladies' Man (Mendes); Devil and the Deep (Gering); Shanghai Express (von Sternberg); The Miracle Man (McLeod); Merrily We Go to Hell (Arzner); Dancers in the Dark (Burton); The Strange Case of Clara Dean (Gasnier and Marcin);

1933

One Hour with You (Cukor and Lubitsch); Forgotten Commandments (Gasnier and Schoor); Sinners in the Sun (Hall); The Man from Yesterday (Viertel); Blonde Venus (von Sternberg); Horse Feathers (McLeod); The Night of June 13 (Roberts); Love Me Tonight (Mamoulian); Trouble in Paradise (Lubitsch); Night after Night (Mayo); If I Had a Million (Lubitsch, Taurog, Roberts, McLeod, Cruze, Seiter and Humberstone); Madame Butterfly (Gering); Tonight Is Ours (Walker); She Done Him Wrong (Sherman); No Man of Her Own (Ruggles); The Sign of the Cross (DeMille); A Farewell to Arms (Vidor); Jennie Gerhardt (Gering); Alice in Wonderland (McLeod)

1934

Song of Songs (Mamoulian); This Day and Age (DeMille); One Sunday Afternoon (Roberts); The Way to Love (Taurog); Three Cornered Moon (Nugent); I'm No Angel (Ruggles); Tillie and Gus (Martin); White Woman (Walker); Duck Soup (McCarey); Design for Living (Lubitsch); Six of a Kind (McCarey); Four Frightened People (DeMille); Search for Beauty (Kenton); Bolero (Ruggles); The Scarlet Empress (von Sternberg); Death Takes a Holiday (Leisen); Murder at the Vanities (Leisen); Cleopatra (DeMille)

1935

Belle of the Nineties (McCarey); Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch (Taurog); The Old-Fashioned Way (Beaudine); Crime without Passion (Hecht and MacArthur); Now and Forever (Hathaway); Limehouse Blues (East End Chant) (Hall); It's a Gift (McLeod); The Pursuit of Happiness (Hall); Behold My Wife (Leisen); Father Brown—Detective (Hamer); Here Is My Heart (Tuttle); The Lives of a Bengal Lancer (Hathaway); The Gilded Lily (Ruggles); The Milky Way (McCarey); Wings in the Dark (Flood); Rumba (Gering); Ruggles of Red Gap (McCarey); Mississippi (Sutherland); Four Hours to Kill (Leisen); The Devil Is a Woman (von Sternberg); The Scoundrel (Hecht and MacArthur); Goin' to Town (Hall)

Publications

By ZUKOR: book—

The Public Is Never Wrong, 1953.

On ZUKOR: books—

Edmonds, I.D., and Raiko Mimura, Paramount Pictures and the People Who Made Them, New York, 1980.

Eames, John Douglas, The Paramount Story, London, 1985.

On ZUKOR: articles—

Motion Picture Herald, vol. 193, no. 1, 3 October 1953.

French, Philip, in The Movie Moguls, London, 1969.

Sight and Sound (London), vol. 42, no. 1, Winter 1972–73.

Obituary in Hollywood Reporter, vol. 241, no. 44, 11 June 1976.

Films in Review (New York), vol. 38, no. 10, October 1987.

Dyer MacCann, Richard, in The First Tycoons, London, 1987.

Gabler, Neal, in An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood, New York, 1988.

Luft, H. G., "Hommage à Adolph Zukor," in Filmkunst, no. 128, 1990.

Stephens, C., "The Legacy of Adolph Zukor," in Variety's On Production (Los Angeles), no. 3, 1996.

* * *

By 1920 Hollywood had risen to define the cinema in the United States as well as throughout the world. Stars like Charlie Chaplin and Mary Pickford were among the most famous people of their era. The American cinema dominated world filmmaking and distribution as no other popular cultural force had ever done. And no executive was more responsible for the creation of Hollywood than Adolph Zukor.

Hollywood commenced with the failure of the Motion Picture Patents Company Trust. A number of independent production companies rose to challenge the Trust, but quickly Adolph Zukor and his company, "Famous Players in Famous Plays," led the way by transforming basic business practices.

He differentiated his company's products. Gone were the days when film was sold by the foot; for Zukor each "photoplay" became a unique product, heavily advertised by emphasizing popular stories and then developing movie stars to act in them. Zukor had his studio develop a system by which to regularly and efficiently manufacture feature-length films. Soon this method became known as the Hollywood system of production.

This transformation began in 1912 when Zukor and his partners began to produce feature films including The Count of Monte Cristo starring James O'Neill, father of the famous playwright, The Prisoner of Zenda starring James Hackett, Queen Elizabeth starring Sarah Bernhardt, and Tess of the D'Urbervilles starring Minnie Maddern Fiske. These early stars were drawn from the stage, but soon Zukor realized that he would have to create his own stars. He reached the ultimate early on with Mary Pickford, a Canadian-born vaudeville performer. We can best see "Little Mary's" rise to fame through her salary ascendancy: $1000 a week in 1914, $2000 per week in 1915, $10,000 per week in 1916; and a million dollars a year in 1917. Zukor willingly anted up such fabulous amounts because he knew the vast audiences Pickford drew at the box office.

It was Adolph Zukor and his Famous Players' Company which taught the world how to fully exploit the features of Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, Gloria Swanson, Pauline Frederick, Blanche Sweet, and Norma and Constance Talmadge. He accomplished this through merger and acquisitions. In 1916 alone Zukor took over 12 smaller producers and formed Famous Players-Lasky Corporation. Partner Jesse Lasky became his studio boss. By 1921 Zukor had turned Famous Players-Lasky into the largest film production company in the world.

Zukor learned how to squeeze theater owners because he alone could deliver the biggest stars in Hollywood. Zukor's principle means of exploitation became "block booking." That is if a theater owner wanted to show the films of Pickford, he or she had to take motion pictures with less well known, up-and-coming Famous Players-Lasky stars. In turn, Famous Players-Lasky used these guaranteed bookings to test and develop new stars.

Soon enough theater owners caught on, and formed their own "booking cooperatives." In turn Zukor reacted, and in 1919 began to purchase theaters. He could not finance such a large set of takeovers simply with cash on hand and so became the first movie company to approach Wall Street bankers. Famous Players-Lasky borrowed $10 million through Wall Street's Kuhn, Loeb and became the first motion picture company listed on the New York Stock Exchange. Zukor, who had come to the United States penniless 30 years earlier, had hit the big time.

Nothing stopped him. By the mid-point of 1921 he owned 300 theaters. Four years later, he merged his theaters with Balaban & Katz, the most important and innovative theater chain in the United States, and renamed the enterprise Paramount, which up to then had been the name of his distribution arm. By 1931 Paramount's Publix theater circuit had become the largest in the world, double the size of its nearest competitor. Paramount Pictures produced many of the most popular films of the silent film era, from The Covered Wagon to The Ten Commandments, from Beau Geste to Wings. Zukor innovated a third major change in movie industry practice. It was not enough that the Hollywood companies simply control all the movie stars and studios. Their long-run economic security depended on the construction and maintenance of networks for national and international distribution. Once a feature film was made, the majority of its cost had been accumulated. It then cost relatively little to market it throughout the world. If somehow the producer could expand the territory to include greater and greater portions of the planet, the additional revenues overwhelmed any extra costs.

In 1914 Zukor began his assault on national distribution. W. W. Hodkinson had merged eleven regional distributors to create the Paramount distribution network. But Hodkinson had no steady supply of feature films, and thus sold out to Zukor. Quickly Zukor took over other national distributors and soon had a strangle hold on the marketplace for film distribution throughout the United States. Zukor then turned his attentions to world distribution. The First World War had curtailed distribution powers of rival European movie makers, and into that gap stepped Zukor. By the end of hostilities, he had Paramount distributing Famous Players-Lasky films around the world. During the 1920s, prior to the coming of sound, only the Soviet Union, with a Marxist government, Germany with its rise of nationalism and then fascism, and Japan, with a strong nationalist economy and film industry of its own, were able to keep Zukor and his films at bay.

It took something outside Zukor's control to do him in — the Great Depression. Business declined, theaters were sold, and Paramount teetered on the brink of bankruptcy. By 1936 Barney Balaban had replaced Zukor atop the Paramount chain of command, but for 40 more years Zukor offered the company he had created his wise counsel. He was still regularly going into the office until only a few years before his death at age 103.

—Douglas Gomery