Columbia Pictures Research

Columbia Pictures

• Founded on June 19, 1918 by Harry Cohn, his brother Jack Cohn, and Joe Brandt.
• It adopted the Columbia Pictures name in 1924, went public two years later, and eventually began to use the image of Columbia, the female personification of the United States, as its logo. It was originally known as Cohn-Brandt-Cohn (CBC) Film Sales.
• In its early years, Columbia was a minor player in Hollywood, but began to grow in the late 1920s, spurred by a successful association with director Frank Capra. With Capra and others, Columbia became one of the primary homes of the screwball comedy.
• Columbia's product line consisted mostly of moderately budgeted features and short subjects including comedies, sports films, various serials, and cartoons. Columbia gradually moved into the production of higher-budget fare, eventually joining the second tier of Hollywood studios along with United Artists and Universal. Like United Artists and Universal, Columbia was a horizontally integrated company. It controlled production and distribution; it did not own any theaters.
• Helping Columbia's climb was the arrival of an ambitious director, Frank Capra. Between 1927 and 1939, Capra constantly pushed Cohn for better material and bigger budgets. A string of hits he directed in the early and mid 1930s solidified Columbia's status as a major studio. In particular, It Happened One Night, which nearly swept the 1934 Oscars, put Columbia on the map. Until then, Columbia's existence had depended on theater owners willing to take its films, since it didn't have a theater network of its own.
• Many theaters relied on westerns to attract big weekend audiences, and Columbia always recognized this market. 
• Employed many comedians.
• In the early 1930s, Columbia distributed Walt Disney's famous Mickey Mouse cartoons and In 1933, the studio established its own animation house. In 1949, Columbia agreed to release animated shorts from United Productions of America; these new shorts were more sophisticated than Columbia's older cartoons, and many won critical praise and industry awards.
• Cohn always placed a high priority on serials. Beginning in 1937, Columbia entered the lucrative serial market, and kept making these episodic adventures until 1956, after other studios had discontinued them. The most famous Columbia serials are based on comic-strip or radio characters: Mandrake the Magician, The Shadow, Terry and the Pirates, Captain Midnight, The Phantom, Batman, and Superman, among many others.
• Columbia also produced musical shorts, sports reels (usually narrated by sportscaster Bill Stern), and travelogues. Its "Screen Snapshots" series, showing behind-the-scenes footage of Hollywood stars, was a Columbia perennial; producer-director Ralph Staub kept this series going through 1958.
• In 1948, the United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc. anti-trust decision forced Hollywood motion picture companies to divest themselves of the theatre chains that they owned. Since Columbia did not own any theaters, it was now on equal terms with the largest studios, and soon replaced RKO on the list of the "Big Five" studios.