The Invention of Paramount Pictures

Nicholas Rombes combs through the Media History Digital Library to look at the beginnings of Paramount Studios – the company that would become synonymous with the the powerful studio system of Hollywood.

1914, – Adolph Zukor’s The Famous Players Film Company and The Lasky Feature Play Company released their films through Paramount, which had been founded by William Wadsworth Hodkinson earlier that year.

Hodkinson hoped to move the fragmented film industry away from the decentralized nickelodeon experience to a national production and distribution model that would give producers more power and profits through strategies such as block-booking, which forced exhibitors to buy multiple films packaged together from the numerous companies that had exclusive agreements with Paramount. We see this in early promotional material (from Moving Picture World, an early trade paper) for the company from January 1915

The old, small, decrepit nickelodeon on the left gives way to the newborn future: a palatial Paramount Pictures bidding farewell to “Cheap Houses, Destructive Competition, and Chaotic Conditions.” (It’s interesting that in 1915 competition could be called “destructive;” in 1948 the Supreme Court would issue an anti-trust ruling that would break up the oligarchy that was Paramount and other studios.)

The ad wishes away (as the old year) the chaos of the nickelodeon as well as its “daily change” (the fact that what was shown often changed from day to day) during the same era that continuity editing emerged as the basic grammar of what was to become the “classical” Hollywood style of narrative. It’s maybe worth considering how the emergence of continuity editing as the standard mode of visual storytelling through editing (pioneered by D. W. Griffith and others) was not simply borne out of a desire to find the most efficient ways to tell a story, but was rather part of a larger cultural drift and business model that, in the interests of consolidation and profit, labeled as “chaos” methods that were not smooth, uniform, and standardized. A promotional page from a few months later (March 1915) also from Moving Picture World stresses efficiency and regularization. Although a future column will explore links between Fordism (described bySteven Tolliday and Jonathan Zeitlin as “a model of economic expansion and technological progress based on mass production: the manufacture of standardized products in huge volumes”) and the emerging movie industry, it’s interesting how these early, inter-industry Paramount advertisements prepared the groundwork for the studio system business model.

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