Columbia Pictures began as a Poverty Row outfit mocked as Corned Beef and Cabbage
Hollywood insiders once joked that CBC, the initials of a tiny studio on low-rent Gower Street, stood for Corned Beef and Cabbage. That outfit became Columbia Pictures, home of Frank Capra's hits, Rita Hayworth and the Three Stooges, and eventually the flagship studio of Sony.
Brothers Jack and Harry Cohn and their friend Joe Brandt founded CBC Film Sales on June 19, 1918. Its first feature, released in 1922, cost $20,000 and earned $130,000, but most early output was cheap short films. Brandt and Jack Cohn handled sales from New York while Harry ran production in Hollywood. In January 1924 the company became Columbia Pictures, and in 1932 Brandt, weary of the brothers, sold them his third.
Harry Cohn then held the titles of president and production chief together, running the studio for 34 years in all, one of Hollywood's longest reigns, with plenty of relatives on the payroll. Columbia made films and distributed them but owned no cinemas, so it depended on theatre owners booking its pictures. Frank Capra changed that position. From 1927 he kept pressing for bigger budgets, and It Happened One Night nearly swept the Oscars for 1934, putting the studio on the map.
Short of money for a large stable of stars, Columbia often borrowed talent. At MGM a loan to Columbia was nicknamed Siberia, a punishment Louis B. Mayer handed to difficult actors. Even so, Jean Arthur and Cary Grant became its big names in the 1930s, and Rita Hayworth carried it from the 1940s into the late 1950s. Westerns kept weekend audiences coming, with Charles Starrett starring in 131 of them. The Three Stooges, dropped by MGM, made 190 shorts for Columbia between 1934 and 1957.
Ownership later passed to Coca-Cola in 1982 and then to Sony in 1989, and since 1990 the studio has been based in Culver City on the former MGM lot. It now leads Sony's live-action labels alongside TriStar and Screen Gems.
Source: Columbia Pictures
