Games - Columbia Pictures

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Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc. is an American film and television production company that is part of the Columbia TriStar Motion Picture Group owned by Sony Pictures Entertainment, which in turn is part of Japanese electronics giant Sony.

History

The predecessor of Columbia Pictures, CBC Film Sales Corporation, was founded in 1919 by Harry Cohn, his brother Jack Cohn, and Joe Brandt. The company's reputation was so low that some joked that "CBC" stood for "Corned Beef and Cabbage." Many of the studio's early productions were low-budget affairs; the start-up CBC leased space in a poverty row studio on Hollywood's Gower Street.

Following a reorganization, partner Brandt was bought out, and for the next thirty years the Cohn brothers would take on the world (and sometimes each other) in running their company. Harry Cohn, based in California, oversaw production, while brother Jack ran sales, marketing and distribution from New York. Columbia was unique in that Harry, in charge of production, was also president of the company; his was the only studio that did not have to look to corporate overseers in the east for budgeting or policy decisions. In an effort to improve its image, the studio renamed itself Columbia Pictures Corporation in 1924. Though the product was mostly low-cost westerns, serials and action pictures, Columbia gradually built a reputation by attempting higher-budget fare.

Helping Columbia's climb was the arrival of an ambitious director named Frank Capra. Between 1927 and 1939, Capra became Columbia's biggest asset, gaining in confidence and constantly pushing Cohn for better material and bigger budgets. Following a string of hits in the early 1930s, the success of Capra's 1934 picture It Happened One Night (the first film to win all five major Oscars, including Best Picture, Director, Actor, Actress, and Screenplay) solidified Columbia's status as a major studio. Capra's other films at Columbia included Lady for a Day. Broadway Bill, You Can't Take It With You, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, and the original 1937 Lost Horizon. Harry Cohn also had popular stars Jean Arthur and Grace Moore under contract, and was able to attract visiting stars such as Carole Lombard, Cary Grant, Irene Dunne, Katharine Hepburn, Clark Gable, Jean Harlow, Claudette Colbert, and James Stewart to his studio for major productions.

Harry Cohn never lost a taste for low comedy, and at his insistence the studio signed The Three Stooges in 1934. Rejected by MGM (which kept straight-man Ted Healy but let the Stooges go), the Howard brothers and Larry Fine made more than 180 shorts for Columbia between 1934 and 1958. Also that year Columbia began producing a series of cartoons under the Screen Gems name. The Screen Gems name would be used often; in the late forties it was revived for a television-commercial production unit; this expanded over the next few years into a full-fledged television-series production house, offering Father Knows Best
, The Donna Reed Show
, Bewitched
, I Dream of Jeannie
and The Monkees
. In the late 1990s, the Screen Gems name was revived again as a label for low-budget horror and suspense films.

By the time of World War II, Columbia had reached maturity. Propelled in part by the attendance surge during the war, the studio also benefited from the popularity of its discovery and biggest star, Rita Hayworth.

As the larger studios declined in the 1950s, Columbia took the lead, continuing to produce forty-plus pictures a year, offering adult fare that often broke ground and kept audiences coming to theaters. While he was widely disliked, even feared, few would argue that Harry Cohn had not done a superb job in building Columbia Pictures. Following his death in 1958, Columbia went through a period of drift; though there were still important films, the momentum, as well as the mass audience, was gone.

By the late 1960s, Columbia was a schizophrenic place, offering old-fashioned fare like A Man for All Seasons and Oliver! while also backing the more contemporary Easy Rider and The Monkees. Nearly bankrupt by the early 1970s, the studio was saved only by the direst methods; the Gower Street studios were sold, and a new management team brought in. While fiscal health was restored through a careful choice of star-driven vehicles, the studio's image was badly marred by the David Begelman check-forging scandal. Begelman eventually resigned (later ending up at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer), and the studio's fortunes gradually recovered.

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