Columbia

The rise of Columbia Pictures to Hollywood prominence is as unlikely as the plot of a Frank Capra (1897–1991) film, and in fact it was a run of Capra-directed hits that fueled Columbia's ascent. No other studio relied so heavily in its formative years on the talent and output of a single filmmaker, as Capra's early hits put Columbia on the industry map in the late 1920s, and then his Depression-era comedies like It Happened One Night (1934) and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) defined its house style and secured its stature among the studio powers. Columbia continued to thrive after Capra's departure in 1939, thanks largely to the equally singular talents of Harry Cohn (1891–1958). Reviled by Capra and widely dismissed as a tight-fisted philistine, Cohn in fact was unique among Hollywood's movie moguls in that he served as president of a studio he owned and operated while overseeing production in its decidedly substandard Hollywood plant.

Cohn guided the studio's steady growth and shaped its collective output from its founding until his death in 1958, turning a profit every year—a phenomenal accomplishment in light of Hollywood's Depression-era and postwar travails. In fact, Columbia enjoyed its greatest success in the postwar era, complementing its trademark screwball comedies with superior dramas like All the King's Men (1949), From Here to Eternity (1953), On the Waterfront (1954), and Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)—solid hits that brought Columbia four Best Picture Oscars^® in less than a decade. Columbia's post-war success was due to its quick and canny response to a range of industry challenges—the rise of independent production, freelance talent, and location shooting, for instance, and the concurrent rise of commercial television. That openness to industry change continued after Cohn's death, as Columbia took even greater risks than it had under Cohn and rose to unprecedented heights—and experienced more severe declines as well. Its distinctive house style steadily dissipated with the rise of the New Hollywood, but Columbia did maintain its corporate autonomy longer than most of the other studios, finally succumbing to conglomeration in the 1980s—first in an ill-fated merger with Coca-Cola, and then in a historic "hardware-software" alliance with Sony that stands as a watershed in modern Hollywood history.

THE RISE OF COLUMBIA PICTURES

Columbia Pictures began its corporate life in 1920 as the CBC Film Sales Company, a modest production operation specializing in "short subjects" created by Jack Cohn, Joe Brandt, and Harry Cohn. Before launching CBC, all three had worked for Universal Pictures—Brandt and Jack Cohn in the New York office, and Jack's younger brother Harry on the West Coast at the massive Universal City plant. The three young men created CBC (Cohn-Brandt-Cohn) with seed money of $100,000 from the Bank of Italy, a California-based concern run by A. H. and A. P. Giannini that was vital to Columbia's development. Brandt and Jack Cohn ran CBC and handled sales out of New York, while Harry set up production on Hollywood's legendary Poverty Row, a block-long stretch of low-rent offices and makeshift studios on Beechwood Drive between Sunset Boulevard and Fountain Avenue.

CBC's one- and two-reel productions sold well, and in 1922 the company began producing low-budget feature films that were sold through states-rights distributors. These cut-rate programmers also sold well, convincing Brandt and the Cohns to upgrade their operation. In January 1924 they incorporated CBC as Columbia Pictures, moving into new offices in New York while expanding their Hollywood plant. Brandt and Jack Cohn remained in New York as president and vice president in charge of sales, respectively, with Harry running the studio as vice president in charge of production. Columbia continued to expand in the following years, developing a national distribution setup and steadily absorbing its Poverty Row environs until it encompassed most of the city block bordered by Sunset, Beechwood, Fountain, and Gower Street—thus the appellation "Gower Gulch." Columbia churned out low-grade programmers at an impressive rate during the late silent era, many of them directed by Reeves ("Breezy") Eason (1886–1956) and George B. Seitz (1888–1944), but none was of any real note or suitable for first-run release.

Columbia's fortunes began to change in late 1927 with the arrival of Frank Capra, who was recruited by the studio manager, Sam Briskin (1896–1968), to write and direct a typically modest feature, That Certain Thing (1928). At age thirty (six years younger than Harry Cohn), Capra had considerable experience as a writer and director, notably on several Harry Langdon silent comedies for producer Mack Sennett (1880–1960). Capra quickly caught on at Columbia, directing five pictures in less than a year, and Cohn assigned him to the studio's most ambitious project to date, Submarine (1928), an action drama co-starring Jack Holt (1888–1951) and Ralph Graves (1900–1977). The film involved underwater photography and visual effects and was Columbia's first to utilize sound effects and a musical score. Launched with a Broadway premier, a rarity for Columbia, Submarine was a modest hit and solidified Capra's status as Columbia's top director. He then directed another hit "service picture" with Holt and Graves, Flight (1929), as well as Columbia's first all-talkie, The Donovan Affair (1929). By then Cohn was actively touting his star director to the trade press, announcing that "Capra will make nothing but 'specials' for Columbia from now on."

Columbia also issued its first successful stock offering in 1929, edging closer to the established Hollywood powers—although still a minor-league studio. In 1930, at the height of the talkie boom and one year after its first issue on the New York Stock Exchange, Columbia's assets of $5.8 million were dwarfed by those of integrated majors like Paramount ($306 million), Warner Bros. ($230 million), and MGM ($128 million). Even Universal, which like Columbia did not own a theater chain, had far greater assets of $17 million due to the value of its Universal City plant. Moreover, the quality and quantity of Columbia's productions were scarcely on a par with the other studios' output; they produced from fifty to sixty pictures per year in 1929 and 1930, with at least a dozen budgeted at $500,000 or more. Even Universal, with its relatively meager assets, was producing about forty films per year, including a few prestige pictures like Broadway (1929) and All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), each budgeted at over $1 million. Columbia, meanwhile, produced some two dozen features per year in 1929 and 1930, budgeted between $50,000 and $150,000, with an occasional project in the $200,000 range.

When the Depression hit the industry in 1931, however, Columbia was suddenly in a more favorable position than its competitors for three basic reasons. First, it owned no theaters and thus was not saddled with debilitating mortgage payments. Second, Harry Cohn's autocratic, tight-fisted management style ideally suited the depressed economic climate. And third, the efficient output of B-grade programmers, serials, and shorts, along with the occasional A-class picture and Capra-directed "special," jibed perfectly with the Depression-era penchant for double bills and evening-long programs. Thus, Columbia's production and market strategy paid dividends during the 1930s as the studio turned a profit year after year and saw its assets increase to $15.9 million in 1940—a phenomenal achievement matched only by MGM.

CAPRA, COHN, AND THE
COLUMBIA HOUSE STYLE

The key factor in Columbia Picture's Depression-era climb and its development of a distinctive house style was, without question, its remarkable run of Capra-directed hits—notably Platinum Blonde (1931), Miracle Woman (1931), American Madness (1932), Lady for a Day (1933), It Happened One Night (1934), Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), You Can't Take It with You (1938), and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939). All were huge moneymakers for Columbia Pictures, which finally shed its Poverty Row stigma during the 1930s, and they brought critical recognition as well. Capra's films scored six Academy Award^® nominations for Best Picture and five nominations for Best Director. It Happened One Night and You Can't Take It with You both won the Best Picture Oscar^®, and Capra won Best Director three times in a five-year span (1934, 1936, and 1938), a feat unmatched in industry history.

Equally important to Columbia's surge was Harry Cohn, whose authority over the studio—and Columbia Pictures at large—increased dramatically in 1932, when he prevailed in a struggle with Joe Brandt and his older brother Jack for control of the company, thanks to the unexpected backing by A. H. Giannini of the (renamed) Bank of America. Consequently, Brandt sold his stake in Columbia and Harry Cohn assumed the presidency, appointing Jack Cohn vice president and treasurer. Harry opted to remain in Hollywood, thus becoming the only president of a major motion picture firm to run the company while overseeing production in the Hollywood factory. Cohn was among the least "creative" of Hollywood's studio bosses, but he was among the most heavily involved in day-to-day operations. Moreover, he opted to keep Columbia in the ramshackle

HARRY COHN
b. New York, New York, 23 July 1891, d. 27 February 1958

Harry Cohn, who co-founded Columbia and ran the company until his death in 1958, is among the most distinctive and paradoxical of Hollywood moguls and studio bosses. As both the president of Columbia Pictures and the head of the studio, he was the only individual in classical-era Hollywood to occupy both the "home office" and "front office" of a Big Eight producer-distributor. And despite his well-deserved reputation for being a brutal, vulgar tyrant who ruthlessly abused and exploited his employees, Cohn maintained a production operation that not only turned a profit year after year for over three decades, but also turned out scores of canonized Hollywood classics.

Cohn evinced his tight-fisted, lowbrow temperament early on, as personal secretary to Universal Studios head Carl Laemmle, but his more tyrannical and abusive traits seemed to develop later, along with the studio's rise to power and his own ascent to the presidency in the early 1930s. This may have been fueled by Cohn's naive infatuation with Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, who was the subject of a flattering (and commercially successful) Columbia documentary, Mussolini Speaks (1933), and whose offices in Italy so inspired Cohn that he replicated them at his own studio headquarters. Cohn also prowled the lot incessantly and was notorious for spying on as well as bullying and humiliating his employees. He was scarcely a creative production executive, yet he was more closely involved in day-to-day operations than any other studio boss.

Like his counterpart, Jack Warner, at Hollywood's other family-owned and operated studio, Harry Cohn quarreled with his top talent, overworked and ruthlessly typecast his contract players, and routinely suspended those who failed to cooperate. Cohn also had a tendency to hire left-leaning writers, due in part to Columbia's renegade status as well as the topical, socially conscious nature of its output. In fact, Columbia and Warner Bros. were home to far more blacklisted writers (and members of the infamous Hollywood Ten) than any other studio. The two sets of brothers (both named Jack and Harry, coincidentally) also were fierce rivals professionally. Cohn, like studio boss Jack Warner, constantly battled his brother Jack Cohn in the New York office for larger operating budgets and more authority over sales and marketing. Harry Cohn's status as company president gave him far more leverage over his New York-based brother than Jack Warner enjoyed, however, but it scarcely diminished the frequency or the ferocity of their fraternal battles.

By the 1950s Cohn had won the grudging respect of his peers and even his adversaries as Columbia enjoyed a run of hits that matched its halcyon Capra era and as the studio's pioneering and truly visionary foray into television series production paved the way for the other studios. The death of Jack Cohn in 1956 was a devastating blow, however, and the reviled "White Fang" lost much of his bite during the last two years of his life.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

Lady for a Day (1933), It Happened One Night (1934), Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), The Awful Truth (1937), You Can't Take It with You (1938), Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941), The Talk of the Town (1942), The More the Merrier (1943), All the King's Men (1949), Born Yesterday (1950), From Here to Eternity (1953), On the Waterfront (1954), The Caine Mutiny (1954), Picnic (1955), The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)

FURTHER READING

Schatz, Thomas. "Anatomy of a House Director: Capra, Cohn, and Columbia in the 1930s." In Frank Capra: Authorship and the Studio System, edited by Robert Sklar and Vito Zagarrio, 10–36. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998.

Thomas, Bob. King Cohn: The Life and Times of Harry Cohn. New York: Putnam, 1967.

Zierold, Norman. The Moguls: Hollywood's Merchants of Myth. New York: Coward-McCann, 1969.

Thomas Schatz

Gower Gulch plant not only to cut costs, but also to maintain personal proximity to all phases of production.

One exception to Cohn's hands-on supervisory role was the so-called Capra unit. Here Cohn relied on Sam Briskin, Columbia's vice president and studio manager, whom Capra considered his own "unit manager," the one responsible for "all the production details." Capra's key creative collaborator was writer Robert Riskin (1897–1955), who signed with Columbia in 1931 and, after contributing to both Miracle Woman and Platinum Blonde, was Capra's sole collaborator on American Madness—and on seven of the next eight Capra-directed pictures as well. Theirs was an ideal melding of talents: Riskin's glib, rapid-fire dialogue, Runyonesque characters, tightly constructed plots; and Capra's deft pacing, genius for integrating verbal, visual, and physical humor, and skill with actors. Other key members of the Capra unit were the cinematographer, Joe Walker (1892–1985), who lit and shot all of Capra's 1930s pictures, as well as the editor, Gene Havlick (1894–1959), and the art director, Stephen Goosson (1889–1973).

Casting Capra's films—and all of Columbia's A-class pictures, for that matter—was a more complicated issue, given Columbia's relatively meager star stable. Capra's films generally co-starred a freelance star or loan-out from another studio playing opposite a Columbia semi-regular. From the mid-1930s onward, Capra worked most frequently with the "outside" stars Gary Cooper (1901–1961) or James Stewart (1908–1997) playing opposite either Jean Arthur (1900–1991) or Barbara Stanwyck (1907–1990), who had nonexclusive contracts with Columbia. In whatever pairing, these costars represented what became the essential Capra screen types: the aggressive, fast-talking, quick-witted career woman and the deliberate, low-key, tongue-tied male, out of his element among city slickers but ultimately capable of timely, heroic action. Capra's comedies usually centered on the male hero, whose common sense and homespun values put him at odds with the hustling heroine and with some malevolent political or industrial forces as well. The hero prevails, of course, thus projecting a world in which sexual antagonism and deep-seated ideological conflicts might be resolved.

To ensure an adequate supply of first-run product, Cohn also developed a cycle of operatic romances starring soprano Grace Moore (1898–1947), a former Broadway and Metropolitan Opera star who had a breakthrough hit with One Night of Love (1934). It established a pattern of first-run engagements in the United States and Europe that would be repeated in Love Me Forever (1935), The King Steps Out (1936), and When You're in Love (1937). Even more important to Columbia's Depression-era fortunes was Cohn's decision to increase and upgrade Columbia's overall comedy output as the Capra-directed screwball comedies caught on. This trend coalesced with Twentieth Century (1934), a madcap comedy directed by Howard Hawks (1896–1977) and coscripted by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur. It starred John Barrymore (1882–1942) as an overbearing, over-the-hill Broadway director and Carole Lombard (1908–1942) as his former protégé, who is en route to Hollywood and a movie career despite his ardent protestations. This film hit led to two 1935 comedies—The Whole Town's Talking, directed by John Ford (1894–1973) and co-starring Edward G. Robinson (1893–1973) and Jean Arthur; and She Married Her Boss, directed by Gregory La Cava (1892–1952), with Melvyn Douglas (1901–1981) and Claudette Colbert (1903–1996)—that solidified the trend toward romantic comedies with a top outside director and outside star teamed with a rising Columbia ingénue.

The trend continued with Theodora Goes Wild (1936), The Awful Truth (1937), Holiday (1938), and Only Angels Have Wings (1939), all of which were written, like the Ford and La Cava hits, by one of Columbia's top staff writers—that is, Jo Swerling (1893–1964), Robert Riskin, or Sidney Buchman (1902–1975)—who not only scripted but also informally supervised production. These writer-supervisors proved far more effective than the brutish Harry Cohn in dealing with outside talent, and they also understood how to reformulate the basic ingredients of the "Capra touch"—the distinctive blend of screwball romance and contemporary, socially astute, comedy—for filmmakers like Hawks, George Cukor (1899–1983), and Leo McCarey (1898–1969). These comedies were commercial and critical hits, and in fact The Awful Truth scored more major Oscar^® nominations—five, including Best Picture, Best Director (McCarey), and Best Actress (Irene Dunne)—and did far better at the box office than Lost Horizon (1937), Capra's most ambitious production to date.

In 1939 Capra decided to leave Columbia in the wake of his back-to-back hits, You Can't Take It with You and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, eager to try his luck as an independent producer-director (with Riskin as a partner) and to end his battles with Harry Cohn. Capra signed a lucrative one-picture deal with Warner Bros. for Meet John Doe (1941), which gave him enormous authority and creative control. The film was a disappointment, starting a tailspin that would end Capra's career by the late 1940s and indicating that Capra was a consummate "studio auteur" whose talents ideally suited the resources and constraints afforded by Harry Cohn and Columbia Pictures.

THE WARTIME AND POSTWAR ERAS

Columbia scarcely noticed Capra's departure due to the imminent war boom. Like Universal and UA, Columbia's wartime surge was less dramatic than that of the theater-owning Big Five studios, but Columbia was able to sustain profits on a par with its Capra-era peak and to increase its revenues considerably. That enabled Cohn to increase A-class output and upgrade the production values on top releases (particularly with the use of Technicolor) and to expand his roster of top talent. Columbia continued to produce its signature romantic comedies, punctuating Capra's departure with two Hawks-directed hits, Only Angels Have Wings and His Girl Friday (1940), both of which paired Cary Grant(1904–1986) with a contract star—Jean Arthur and Rosalind Russell (1907–1976), respectively. A supporting role in the former went to Rita Hayworth (1918–1987), who emerged as a top star in a cycle of musical hits, teaming with Fred Astaire (1899–1987) in You'll Never Get Rich (1941) and You Were Never Lovelier (1942) and with Gene Kelly in Cover Girl (1944). Columbia also produced a steady supply of war films—both home-front and combat dramas—including a few A-class films like Sahara (1943), starring Humphrey Bogart (1899–1957) (on loan from Warners), but mainly composed of low-budget fare.

RITA HAYWORTH
b. Margarita Carmen Cansino, New York, New York, 17 October 1918, d. 14 May 1987

Dubbed "the studio's first superstar," Rita Hayworth was without question Columbia's most important contract star and thus the object of studio boss Harry Cohn's obsessive attention during the 1940s. She appeared in a total of seven films in 1941 and 1942 but only six for the remainder of the decade—and none from 1948 until 1952, during her ill-fated escapades with playboy Prince Aly Khan. Her half-dozen films from 1942 to 1947 included several of Columbia's biggest hits, however, and they trace Hayworth's evolution from the wholesome beauty of romantic comedies and upbeat musicals to erotic siren and consummate femme fatale. By decade's end her movie career was in limbo and her movie stardom eclipsed by her international celebrity status.

Hayworth's rise to stardom was circuitous, and it involved a radical transformation of her screen persona. The daughter of Eduardo Cansino, a Spanish-born dancer, and Volga Hayworth, a Ziegfeld Follies performer, she danced professionally before signing with Fox while still in her teens, but her early film career as dark-haired beauty Rita Cansino floundered. She was seemingly washed up before age twenty when the first of her many husbands revived her career and landed her a long-term contract with Columbia. Thus began her transformation into Rita Hayworth, whose second chance at stardom was jump-started by a supporting role in Columbia's Only Angels Have Wings in 1939.

Cohn exploited Hayworth's sudden value via loanouts while casting her in a few near-A comedies, and he then secured her full-fledged stardom by casting her in two musicals opposite Fred Astaire, You'll Never Get Rich (1941) and You Were Never Lovelier (1942), which gave her a chance to display her considerable dancing talents (if not her singing, which was dubbed). Hayworth partnered with Gene Kelly in two musicals, Cover Girl (1944) and Tonight and Every Night (1945), and then her star persona underwent another alteration with her role as sultry, potentially deadly siren in Gilda (1946), in which Hayworth created an instantly memorable moment singing "Put the Blame on Mame" while provocatively removing her long black satin gloves. Next Hayworth played a quintessential black widow in The Lady from Shanghai (1947), a disastrous project for Cohn and Columbia despite its eventual cult status. Written and directed by Hayworth's second husband, Orson Welles, who co-starred, the film was made in 1946 as their marriage was collapsing, then recut and shelved before Columbia finally released it in Europe late the following year and in the United States in mid-1948—just as Hayworth hooked up with playboy Prince Aly Khan, whom she wed in 1949 and divorced in 1953.

Hayworth returned to Columbia in 1951 and begged Cohn to reinstate her contract. He complied and cast her in top productions like Miss Sadie Thompson (1953) and Pal Joey (1957), but her career failed to reignite.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

Only Angels Have Wings (1939), You'll Never Get Rich (1941), You Were Never Lovelier (1942), Gilda (1946), The Lady from Shanghai (1947), Miss Sadie Thompson (1953), Pal Joey (1957)

FURTHER READING

Leaming, Barbara. If This Was Happiness: A Biography of Rita Hayworth. New York: Random House, 1992.

McLean, Adrienne L. Being Rita Hayworth: Labor, Identity, and Hollywood Stardom. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004.

Thomas Schatz

Columbia's B-movie operation flourished during the war, cranking out Lone Wolf, Blondie, and Boston Blackie

series; serials adapted from radio and comic strips including The Shadow, Brenda Starr, and Terry and the Pirates; and comedy shorts featuring the Three Stooges, Buster Keaton, Charlie Chase, and Harry Langdon. Western programmers composed roughly half of the studio's wartime B-movie output—and fully thirty percent of Columbia's total wartime releases (159 of 503 films). Most of these were subpar features that ran from fifty-five to fifty-seven minutes and featured Charles Starrett (1903–1986). He did seven or eight B westerns per year from the mid-1930s to the early 1950s, including some sixty-seven Durango Kid films. Columbia also produced an occasional A-class western—Arizona (1940), with rising star William Holden (1918–1981), for example, and The Desperadoes (1943), a Glenn Ford (b. 1916) vehicle that marked the studio's first Technicolor release.

By the end of the war, Columbia had built up a solid roster of contract talent in all departments, including stars like Hayworth, Russell, Holden, and Glenn Ford; cinematographers Rudolph Maté (1898–1964) and Burnett Guffey (1905–1983); art directors Stephen Goosson, Cary Odell (1910–1988), and Rudolph Sternad; editors Gene Havlick and Viola Lawrence (1894–1973); musical director Morris Stoloff (1898–1980); and writers Sidney Buchman and Virginia Van Upp (1902–1970). Cohn continued to rely heavily on outside directors in A-class productions, with contract directors Charles Vidor (1900–1959), Alfred Green (1889–1960), and Henry Levin (1909–1980) handling top projects as well. Columbia's expanded talent pool meant more A-films and more homegrown hits like Gilda, a noir classic co-starring Hayworth and Glenn Ford, and The Jolson Story, a biopic starring little-known character actor Larry Parks (1914–1975). Those two 1946 releases set the tone for the postwar era's continued success, and after record years in 1946 and 1947, Columbia managed to hold on as Hollywood's fortunes plummeted—thanks largely to two huge 1949 hits, Jolson Sings Again, a sequel to the 1946 biopic and All the King's Men, directed by Robert Rossen (1908–1966), a stunning, hyper-realistic portrait of political corruption, whose myriad awards included Oscars^® for Best Picture and Best Actor (Broderick Crawford).

Columbia's continued success in the 1950s was due in part to Cohn's experience in dealing with freelance talent and independent production, and also to Columbia's ready acceptance of television when the other studios were either dismissing or disparaging the upstart medium. Columbia was the first studio to undertake TV series production, via its Screen Gems division, which under the supervision of Ralph Cohn, Jack's son, produced hit series in multiple genres, from daytime variety (House Party, 1952) and syndicated children's and family programming (Captain Midnight, 1954; Jungle Jim, 1955; Circus Boy, 1956) to network prime-time sitcoms (Father Knows Best, 1954; The Donna Reed Show, 1958), anthology dramas (The Ford Television Theatre, 1952; Playhouse 90, 1956; Goodyear Theatre, 1957), and crime dramas (Naked City, 1958; Tightrope, 1959). TV series production absorbed much of Columbia's B-movie operation, as Cohn reduced feature film output from around sixty per year in 1950 and 1951 to less than forty by the mid-1950s. B-western programmers were phased out altogether, although Columbia still produced occasional A-class westerns like The Man from Laramie (1955), starring James Stewart, and a good many near-A's with contract stars Glenn Ford and Randolph Scott (1898–1987).

In terms of top feature production, Columbia's greatest strength during the 1950s was its dual output of weighty male-dominant dramas and hit romantic comedies. The dramas included film noir classics like In a Lonely Place (1950), directed by Nicholas Ray (1911–1979), and The Big Heat (1953), directed by Fritz Lang (1890–1976), as well as stage adaptations like Death of a Salesman (1951), The Member of the Wedding (1952), The Caine Mutiny (1954), and Picnic (1955). While these films clearly signaled their lineage and thus were of a somewhat derivative quality, Columbia also produced hit dramas in the 1950s that, like All the King's Men, remain inconceivable as anything but films, whatever their medium of origin, and stand among the very best films of that era. The most notable of these wereFrom Here to Eternity (1953), On the Waterfront (1954), and The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), which were solid commercial hits and multiple Academy Award^® winners, taking Oscars^® for Best Picture and Best Director (Fred Zinnemann, Elia Kazan, and David Lean, respectively)—and thus giving Columbia its best Oscar^® run since the Capra era. Columbia also sustained its trademark romantic comedy line, fueled by the talents of the emerging star Judy Holliday (1921–1965) and the director-writer duo of George Cukor and Garson Kanin (1912–1999), who teamed for Born Yesterday (1950), The Marrying Kind (1952), and It Should Happen to You (1954). The latter co-starred the fast-rising Jack Lemmon (1925–2001), who teamed with Holliday and newcomer Kim Novak (b. 1933) in Phffft! (1954), thus adding two more contract stars to Columbia's comedy mix.

POST-COHN COLUMBIA:
INTO THE NEW HOLLYWOOD

Columbia's run of profitable years, which extended back to its founding in 1924, finally ended in 1958, the year of Harry Cohn's death. By then Columbia had sustained its contract system, centralized management, and studio production setup (still at Gower Gulch) longer than most of its competitors, but its recent success had been primarily a function of Cohn's willingness to take risks and embrace change. At the time of Harry Cohn's death, which came two years after the demise of his brother Jack, Columbia's annual revenues exceeded $100 million, putting it on a par with once-indomitable Paramount, Fox, and MGM and well ahead of the other studios. After Cohn's death the penchant for innovation and risk taking actually increased, which was scarcely avoidable given the changes and challenges facing the industry and which steadily dissolved Columbia's on-screen personality, since Columbia's boldest ventures in the 1960s and 1970s involved partnerships with overseas producers and with a new generation of independent auteurs, all of whom required creative control over their pictures. Thus, Columbia was relegated increasingly to the role of a financing and distribution company, and it experienced far wider swings in its economic fortunes than it had under Cohn.

Columbia's Screen Gems operation continued to produce hit TV series in the 1960s, most notably (and profitably) prime-time sitcoms like The Flintstones (1960), Bewitched (1964), I Dream of Jeannie (1965), and The Partridge Family (1970). While these kept the studio machinery running, feature film production declined dramatically. During the 1950s, Columbia released 450 films, with its output steadily falling from about 60 per year in 1950 to less than 40 by decade's end. The decline continued in the 1960s, when Columbia released 252 films and its annual output declined to about 20 per annum—a pace that would continue through the 1970s.

Most of Columbia's releases in the 1960s and 1970s were independent productions or co-productions, many of them packaged and produced overseas without the participation of top studio executives Abe Schneider and Leo Jaffe. Columbia's long-standing relationships with top independent Sam Spiegel (1901–1985) (On the Waterfront, The Bridge on the River Kwai) continued into the 1970s, most notably with the monumental 1962 hit, Lawrence of Arabia. Another important relationship involved Ray Stark, who partnered with Columbia on several Barbra Streisand (b. 1942) hits: Funny Girl (1968), The Owl and the Pussycat (1970), The Way We Were (1973), and Funny Lady (1975). In 1965, as the "British invasion" spread from music to film, Columbia opened offices in London that delivered A Man for All Seasons (1966), Georgy Girl (1966), To Sir, with Love (1967), and Oliver! (1968). An independent company owned by producer-director Stanley Kramer (1913–2001) gave Columbia its biggest commercial hit of the era, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967), a then-daring treatment of interracial romance—but equally an exercise in nostalgia, considering its co-stars Spencer Tracy (1900–1967) and Katharine Hepburn (1907–2003).

Far more daring—and in many cases far more profitable—was Columbia's output of "youth pictures," art films, and auteur projects. In fact, no other studio championed the director-driven Hollywood New Wave to the degree that Columbia did with pictures like Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (Stanley Kubrick, 1964), Mickey One (Arthur Penn, 1965), In Cold Blood (Richard Brooks, 1967), The Swimmer (Frank Perry, 1968), Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (Paul Mazursky, 1969), Easy Rider (Dennis Hopper, 1969), Five Easy Pieces (Bob Rafelson, 1970), Husbands (John Cassavetes, 1970), The Last Picture Show (Peter Bogdanovich, 1971), Images (Robert Altman, 1972), The Last Detail (Hal Ashby, 1974), Shampoo (Ashby, 1975), and Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, 1976). But despite this truly phenomenal output of low-cost, high-quality films, Columbia suffered record losses from 1971 to 1973 due to a run of big-budget flops like McKenna's Gold (1969), Cromwell (1970), Nicholas and Alexandra (1971), and Lost Horizon (1973) as well as a costly relocation. After a half-century on Gower Street, Columbia executed a move between 1970 and 1972 to lavish new facilities in Burbank, north of Hollywood.

Columbia survived this deepening financial crisis with the help of the investment firm Allen and Co., which in 1973 purchased controlling interest in the studio (for a paltry $1.5 million). That put the company under the command of Herbert Allen Jr., the son of Allen and Co.'s co-founder, who installed a new management team of Alan Hirschfield, David Begelman, and Peter Guber. Columbia's finances rebounded, propelled by the 1977 megahit, Close Encounters of the Third Kind directed by Steven Spielberg (b. 1946), but the new team's tenure was cut short by a forgery scandal involving Begelman. The resurgence continued under the new studio head, Frank Price, whose five-year stint (1978–1983) was highlighted by two huge Dustin Hoffman (b. 1937) hits, Kramer vs. Kramer (1979), Columbia's first US-produced multiple Oscar^® winner in twenty-five years, and Tootsie (1982).

The Price regime, while financially successful, marked the end of Columbia Pictures' control of its destiny—or even of its production operations. By then it was releasing only a dozen or so films per year, most of them produced by independents, and many were "packaged" by talent agencies—most notably Mike Ovitz of Creative Artists Agency (CAA), who certainly had more to do with Tootsie, for example, than anyone at Columbia Pictures. Columbia's control of its destiny was further compromised when Price engineered the studio's acquisition by Coca-Cola, which bought the studio in 1982 for roughly $750 million. The new parent company attempted to expand its "filmed entertainment" operations on various fronts, including the buyout of partners HBO and CBS in TriStar Pictures, a new production venture geared to the exploding pay cable and home video markets. The Coca-Cola era brought huge hits like Ghostbusters (1984) and costly flops like Ishtar (1987) as well as considerable turnover in the studio executive ranks after Price's 1983 departure, culminating in the disastrous stint of the British independent producer David Puttnam in 1986 and 1987.

By the late 1980s Columbia Picture's fortunes had again reached a low point; in fact, its share of the motion picture market fell to 4.5 percent in 1988 and, incredibly, to 3 percent in 1989 (versus TriStar's 6 percent share). At that point Coca-Cola decided to sell the studio to Sony, the Japanese electronics manufacturing giant that had purchased CBS Records a year earlier and now was looking for a film "software" company to complement its production of "hardware" (TVs, VCRs, and so on). In a deal brokered by Mike Ovitz, Sony bought Columbia Pictures Industries and all its assets, including TriStar, in late 1989 for $3.4 billion. A year later Sony bought the MGM Studio in Culver City, where it housed the Columbia and TriStar operations. Sony also became embroiled with Time Warner over the hiring of producers Peter Guber and Jon Peters to run Columbia-TriStar, which led to several years of management turmoil and subpar production results.

The Sony-Columbia alliance eventually coalesced under the leadership of studio veteran John Calley, who took over Sony's Motion Picture Group in 1996. In 2002 Columbia was back to the top of the industry, thanks largely to its blockbuster hits of that year, Spider-Man and Men in Black II. Calley handed off the top executive position in 2003 to another veteran studio boss, Amy Pascal, whose portfolio expanded a year later when a Sony-led media consortium acquired MGM (the producer-distributor, not the MGM studio facility, which Sony already owned) for $5 billion. Thus, Sony's Motion Picture Group, which already included Columbia, TriStar, and two indie subdivisions, Sony Pictures Classics and Screen Gems, now owned the largest film and television library in the industry, as well as the lucrative James Bond and Pink Panther franchises.

The acquisition of MGM further diminished the stature and importance of Columbia Pictures within the Sony media empire. In fact, Sony seemed far less interested in sustaining and exploiting Columbia's brand-name value than in promoting its own, and thus the emphasis in recent years has been on Sony Pictures Entertainment (SPE) rather than on Columbia Pictures. And because all of the Hollywood studios have become little more than brand names and libraries, Columbia Pictures seems to be an increasingly endangered studio.

SEE ALSO Academy Awards®;B Movies;MGM (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer);Paramount;RKO Radio Pictures;Star System;Stars;Studio System;Television;Twentieth Century Fox (20th Century Fox);United Artists;Universal

FURTHER READING

Buscombe, Ed. "Notes on Columbia Pictures Corporation, 1926–1941." In Movies and Methods, edited by Bill Nichols, vol. 2, 92–108. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985.

Capra, Frank. Frank Capra: The Name Above the Title, An Autobiography. New York: Macmillan, 1971.

Hirschhorn, Clive. The Columbia Story. London: Hamlyn, 1999.

McBride, Joseph. Frank Capra: The Catastrophe of Success. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992.

McClintick, David. Indecent Exposure: A True Story of Hollywood and Wall Street. New York: Morrow, 1982.

Yule, Andrew. Fast Fade: David Puttnam, Columbia Pictures, and the Battle for Hollywood. New York: Delacorte, 1989.

Thomas Schatz