The stars on Paramount's mountain once stood for 24 actors under contract
In 1916 Adolph Zukor gave each of the 24 performers he had signed a star on the Paramount logo. The studio behind The Godfather and Titanic grew from a nickelodeon investor's hunch, a rented horse barn in Hollywood and a Utah cinema owner's distribution company, and even went bankrupt along the way.
Paramount dates itself to 1912 and Zukor's Famous Players Film Company. The Hungarian-born Zukor, who had put money into nickelodeons, noticed that early films drew mostly working-class immigrants, so he set out to lure the middle class with feature-length pictures starring leading stage actors; the first starred Sarah Bernhardt. In 1913 Jesse L. Lasky started a rival company with money from his brother-in-law Samuel Goldfish, later Goldwyn, and hired a stage director with almost no film experience, Cecil B. DeMille, who turned an old barn near Sunset Boulevard into a studio.
The Paramount name came from W. W. Hodkinson, a theatre owner from Utah, who in 1914 merged five small firms into a distributor and signed up Zukor and Lasky. It became the first successful nationwide film distributor at a time when movies were sold state by state. In 1916 Zukor engineered a three-way merger, pushed Hodkinson out and created the largest film company of its day, valued at $12.5 million. He then built the business on stars such as Mary Pickford and Rudolph Valentino, using them to force block booking, in which cinemas wanting one star's films had to take a year of other releases. That practice put the studio at the top through the 1920s and 1930s and drew antitrust action for more than twenty years.
Expansion was relentless. The studio moved to a 26-acre lot on Marathon Street in 1926, part of today's headquarters, bought the Balaban and Katz cinema chain, built toward nearly 2,000 screens, and took a 50% stake in the young CBS in 1928. That appetite, funded with overvalued stock, left $21 million of debt; Paramount went into receivership in January 1933 and filed for bankruptcy that March. Reorganised as Paramount Pictures Inc. in 1935, it recovered under Barney Balaban, president from 1936.
Today it is the second-oldest studio in the United States after Universal and the last major studio still based in Hollywood itself, at 5555 Melrose Avenue. The logo lost two of its stars and their meaning in 1967, and in 2014 Paramount became the first major studio to release all of its films digitally.
Source: Paramount Pictures
