One century ago this week, the July 15, 1922 edition of “Motion Picture News” reported on an optimistic forecast by one of the principals in an up-and-coming production company:
The C.B.C. Film Sales Company had been formed two years earlier by two ambitious entrepreneurs who had previously been employed by Carl Laemmle at Universal – Joe Brandt and Jack Cohn. The August 7, 1920 edition of “Motion Picture News” had reported the news:
The third partner, not mentioned in the article, was Jack’s brother Harry, who also had previously worked for Universal. Harry was the second “C” in “C.B.C.” (Cohn-Brandt-Cohn).
The “Hallroom Boys Comedies” mentioned at the end of the article were, in the end, largely Harry’s project. They were based on a comic strip by that name created by Harold A. MacGill, and upon a vaudeville sketch derived from the comic strip that had been performed by Edward Flanagan and Neely Edwards. Initially these short comedies were produced by National Film Corporation and only distributed by C.B.C., as indicated in this July 18, 1919 ad from “Wid’s Daily”:
But upon the death of Bill Parsons, who held the movie rights, C.B.C. took over production of the series, with Harry supervising. The February 14, 1920 edition of “Exhibitors Herald” noted the change:
But C.B.C. was by no means putting all its eggs in a single basket. The same February 1920 issue of “Exhibitors Herald” carried this additional item:
The April 24, 1920 edition of “Motion Picture News” reported that C.B.C. had initiated a series of short subjects designed to give movie fans a glimpse of their favorite stars out of character in a newsreel format:
In addition, the partners moved into the action-adventure market with the announcement of a series of western short subjects, as noted in the August 21, 1920 edition of “Motion Picture News”:
But by 1920 the gold standard for prestige in the industry was box office success with feature length pictures, not two-reelers. In the Fall of 1920 the C.B.C. partners took the plunge with a feature release, as reported in the September 18, 1920 edition of “Motion Picture News”:
Over the next couple of years, all of this expansion of product lines necessarily led to an expansion of facilities, as reported in “Exhibitors Trade Review” in May of 1922:
What we seem to be seeing here is a rapidly rising studio on track to become a significant player in the industry, possibly even on a par with such powerhouses as Famous Players-Lasky and Fox. But buried in the article above is a hint of the circumstance that would hold them back. “The studio,” the article says, “occupies a block on Hollywood Boulevard and Gower Street.” To industry insiders, this was a giveaway; a geographic mark of Cain.
Gower Street was the locus of a down-at-heel section of town known to the industry as “Poverty Row.” The May 29, 1926 edition of “Exhibitors Herald” featured a column called “I’ll Show You the Town: A Personally Conducted Tour of Hollywood” that briefly described some sightseeing highlights. Its brief mention of the Gower Street area succinctly summarized its reputation:
The April, 1925 issue of “Motion Picture Classic” ran a feature article on the Poverty Row studios, which commented, in part:
Broadly speaking, there were two types of companies to be found on Poverty Row – those who were comfortable with turning out potboilers on tiny budgets, valuing small but steady profits over prestige, and those who saw it as a launching pad, whose sights were set on getting out of there and into the big league as soon as possible. Harry Cohn and his partners were clearly in the second category.
The problem was that, unlike the major players in the industry, C.B.C. did not have funding from Wall Street. They had a $100,000 line of credit with one lender, A.P. Giannini of the Bank of Italy, and they were constantly on the verge of overspending that limit. Like most Poverty Row companies, they operated on a shoestring and with no financial margin to cover contingencies. But Harry Cohn was a driven man, grimly determined to succeed. He quickly mastered the fine art of, to quote a popular song of the day, squeezing a dollar until the eagle grins. Low budget filmmaking requires resourcefulness, cunning, nerve, and ruthlessness. Cohn rose to the challenge. On the production end, he worked crews long hours, grabbed location shots on the fly to avoid paying site licenses, and instituted a strict one-take policy for all scenes. On the financial end, knowing that he was writing checks in California drawing on a New York bank account, he would routinely take advantage of that fact to “kite” the checks. He knew that, in those days, the checks would take four or five days to cross the country. Leveraging that delay, he could meet a payroll in California with funds they didn’t yet have while giving his brother Jack back in New York a few days to make a deposit to cover the amount.
Harry’s penny-pinching, along with his persuasiveness in recruiting a few additional partners, allowed C.B.C. to raise $20,000 in 1922 to produce a feature film on their own hook rather than just releasing a film made by others. The picture, called MORE TO BE PITIED THAN SCORNED, was based on a successful Broadway melodrama.
Knowing that this picture was their best shot at shedding their Poverty Row reputation, the Cohn brothers mounted an aggressive advertising campaign for its release. Jack, who had begun his career at the Hampton Advertising Agency, designed an elaborate press book that would stand out in comparison to the usual compilations of promotional materials, as reported in the August 12, 1922 edition of “Exhibitors Trade Review”:
The gamble paid off. The July 29, 1922 edition of “Exhibitors Trade Review” anointed the release as a “winner.”
Moreover, the feature releases that followed MORE TO BE PITIED THAN SCORNED, all melodramas, continued to do respectably well at the box office, as this ad from October of 1922 boasts:
But C.B.C. was held back by initially remaining locked into what was becoming an outdated distribution system. This early method of getting films out to the retail marketplace, meaning theaters, was based on a system of regional exclusivity known as “state rights.” The producer of a film would make deals with multiple distributors (known in the early days as “exchanges”) around the country, giving them exclusive rights in their particular region to lease prints of the film to theaters.
By the early 1920s, however, the larger studios had increasingly moved away from that business model, and instead had begun to embrace vertical integration. A company like Famous Players-Lasky (later to be known as Paramount) would own its own distribution arm and would also own a chain of theaters, essentially cutting out the middleman by becoming the middleman.
Continuing to embrace the old-fashioned state rights model did nothing to dispel the image of C.B.C. as a small-time operation, despite the breakthrough success of their latest slate of releases. They continued to be seen as a Poverty Row studio, scruffy denizens of “Gower Gulch.” Harry was acutely aware that industry wags routinely referred to C.B.C as “Corned Beef and Cabbage.” It seemed that the next logical step in the company’s image makeover would need to be a name change.
In their advertising, the transition began not with a new company name, but rather with a brand name for their line of feature productions. It was decided that their marquee product would be called “Columbia” pictures, as reported in the March 22, 1924 edition of “Exhibitors Trade Review”:
But in fact a new company name had been incorporated a couple of months earlier, as noted in the January 17, 1924 edition of “Variety” under a listing of new corporate entities:
Soon enough, “Columbia Pictures” would become acknowledged in their promotional materials as the name of the company, and the old C.B.C. name would be retired.
Columbia’s climb out of the disrepute of their humble beginnings would be a slow one at first, but would receive a significant boost when Cohn hired Frank Capra to direct for them. Capra’s work immediately caught on with both the ticket-buying public and the critics, adding new prestige to the Columbia name. With Capra consistently creating high quality product for them, the company’s metaphorical stock rose so quickly within the industry that by March of 1929 a literal stock offering became a reality, as reported in the March 6 edition of “Variety”:
It must have been immensely satisfying to Harry Cohn to see his ramshackle company, a former purveyor of nothing but Poverty Row B-picture fare, listed on the New York Stock Exchange. In time, Columbia would move on from the state rights distribution model to open its own distribution arm, but the company stopped short of buying a chain of theaters as some of their larger competitors had. This rejection of full vertical integration would prevent Columbia from entering the upper echelon of top companies in the industry, but among the second tier their reputation remained solid.
Success, however, did not make life at Columbia a bed of roses. Harry Cohn was a difficult man. Hot tempered and crude when dealing with underlings, he ruled his domain through threats and intimidation. Even his own brother was not exempt from such treatment. Harry and Jack were constantly at each other’s throats – so much so that in 1932 Joe Brandt, tired of being caught in the middle of the crossfire, left the company. In the wake of Brandt’s departure, Harry was able to outmaneuver Jack to acquire Brandt’s shares, leaving him firmly in control of the enterprise, which only served to exacerbate his tyrannical ways.
The Academy Awards ceremony of February, 1935, represented the ultimate vindication of Cohn’s faith in Columbia. That was the year that Frank Capra’s film IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT swept the top five awards: best picture, best director, best screenplay, best actor, and best actress. Cohn celebrated the triumph with a typically in-your-face ad in the trade papers:
The predictable aftermath was reported in the March 2, 1935 edition of “The Film Daily”:
It had been a long, arduous climb from Poverty Row to respectability. And yet, following that golden Oscar night, Harry Cohn would have only a little over two additional decades to enjoy his success. He would die of a heart attack in February of 1958 at age 66. Given the number of enemies he had made over the years with his belligerent management style, there was some question as to how well-attended his funeral service would be. As it turned out, however, the attendance was unusually large, even for a Hollywood memorial service, with a crowd of over 2000. Comedian Red Skelton’s comment on that turnout has acquired legendary status in the annals of Hollywood. “Well,” he said, “It only proves what they always say – give the public something they want to see, and they’ll come out for it.”
