HOLLYWOODIndustry Research

By Nile ZafarAS-F

POINTS OF DISCUSSION History The Big Three The Top Six

› 20th Century Fox› Paramount Pictures› Columbia› Warner Bros

History Of Hollywood Although Hollywood is a neighborhood in Los Angeles, for some it's

more a state-of-mind. "I'm going to Hollywood," say young hopefuls who dream of acting in movies or on television.

Indeed, they're going to Los Angeles but probably not to Hollywood itself.

Though Hollywood has long represented the glitz and glamour of the film, television, and music industries, being home to many of the largest studios to date, this all did not just develop in a blink of a few years.

Nevertheless, Hollywood still attracts millions of visitors each year who travel there to pay homage to their favorite stars and perhaps even catch a glimpse of a few famous personalities. Sometimes they're lucky!

1800’s The origin of movies and motion pictures began in the

late 1800’s, with the invention of “motion toys” designed to trick the eye into seeing an illusion of motion from a display of still frames in quick succession.

In 1872, Edward Muybridge created the first true “motion picture” by placing twelve cameras on a racetrack and rigging the cameras to capture shots in quick sequence as a horse crossed in front of their lenses.

1900’s The 1900’s were a time of great advancement for film and motion

picture technology. Exploration into editing, backdrops, and visual flow motivated aspiring filmmakers to push into new creative territory. One of the earliest and most famous movies created during this time was The Great Train Robbery, created in 1903 by Edwin S. Porter

The 1920’s were when the movie industry began to truly flourish, along with the birth of the “movie star”. With hundreds of movies being made each year, Hollywood was the rise of an American force. Hollywood alone was considered a cultural icon set apart from the rest of Los Angeles, emphasizing leisure, luxury, and a growing “party scene”.

“The Big Three”

The "Big Three" majors, whose operations are based in or around the Los Angeles neighborhood of Hollywood, are all centered in film studios active during Hollywood's Golden Age of the 1930s and 1940s.

THE TOP SIX TODAY!

FUN FACT Today, Disney is the only member of the Big Six whose parent entity (conglomerate) is still located near Los Angeles (actually, on Disney's studio lot and in the same building).

20th Century Fox

20th Century Fox’s story begins in a tiny theater on New York’s Lower East Side.

In 1904, fresh from Hungary, 25-year-old William Fox amazed audiences with his magical hand-cranked films.

The beginnings were humble – folding chairs, a painted wall for a screen -- but the desire to entertain and move people has been at the core of what 20th Century Fox has been doing ever since.  

By 1915, Fox’s five-cent movie shows were wildly popular and his single screen grew first into a chain of 25 theaters around New York City and then into a movie making business. 

William Fox starts the Fox Film Foundation with studios built in New Jersey and Hollywood.

Further in 1915, D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation is released. Hailed as the most important film of all time for American movie history for introducing story flashbacks, dramatic close-ups, cross-cutting.

From the first Cinemascope production The Robe in 1953, which electrified audiences and changed the way movies were shot and shown, to Avatar, the highest-grossing picture of all time, whose use of motion capture and re-imagined 3-D are regarded as modern breakthroughs in cinematic technology, Fox has never stopped exploring what movies could be.

FUN FACT Avatar (2009) is the

first movie to ever cross the US$

2,000,000,000 (2 billion) mark

worldwide (and later the US$ 2.5 billion

mark), making it the highest grossing film

in history.

When the world wanted to bury the movie musical, Fox gave it the Academy Award winning Sound of Music, considered by many to be the best musical of all time.

Fox showed the world a new vision of Science Fiction with Star Wars and ushered in the modern action hero with the Die Hard series.

Comedies like Home Alone and Mrs. Doubtfire became instant classics and brought whole families back to the theater to enjoy watching movies together.

Drawing inspiration from real life, 20th Century Fox re-imagined the biopic with films like Patton and Braveheart and captured the epic romance and tragedy of Titanic.

From the gritty streets of 1970s New York in The French Connection to the candy-colored streets of Mumbai in Slumdog Millionaire, 20th Century Fox never shied away from exploring the human condition -- or the mutant condition, as the X-Men series continues to show.  

Apart from drawing inspiration from real life, they brought to the screen beloved works of literature, like Life of Pi and The Fault In Our Stars.

BOTTOM LINE As the digital revolution reshapes all aspects of the

entertainment industry, 20th Century Fox remains on the forefront, embracing new technologies that take their audience deeper into our films.

From thrilling animated features to visual effects that make our superheroes leap and fly of the screen, our mission is the same as it was over a century ago, give people the simple pleasure of being transported by a story on a screen.

PARAMOUNT PICTURES

Paramount Pictures is consistently ranked as one of the top six film studios of Hollywood.

It is a subsidiary of U.S. media conglomerate Viacom. Paramount Pictures dates its existence from the 1912 founding date of the

Famous Players Film Company when Hungarian-born founder, Adolph Zukor, who had been an early investor in nickelodeons, saw that movies appealed mainly to working-class immigrants.

The visionary Zukor laid the foundation for the company by acquiring the U.S. distribution rights to the silent French film Queen Elizabeth, a groundbreaking four-reel feature in a time when two reels was the norm.

By the 1960s however, Paramount once again faced difficult times. Charles Bluhdorn's Gulf + Western, which purchased Paramount in 1966, looked to actor-turned-studio-boss Robert Evans to pull off a turnaround.

His biggest feature was a modestly budgeted drama based on a bestselling book called Love Story, and its word-of-mouth success and against-the-grain sentimentality gave the studio the crowd-pleaser it desperately needed

The film, which starred Ryan O'Neal and Ali MacGraw, grossed more than $100 million worldwide (smashing all previous box office records for the studio) and received seven Oscar nominations.

After this turning point, the studio would go on to produce some of the most successful and iconic films in cinematic history.

These 'New Hollywood' classics include The Godfather, The Godfather Part II, Harold and Maude, The Conversation and Chinatown.

Paramount Famous Lasky Corporation became the first successful nationwide film distribution company, releasing two to three new pictures a week from 1916 to 1921.

It became a fully integrated company that controlled every aspect of filmmaking - production, distribution, and exhibition - until the Supreme Court ultimately ruled that it constituted a monopoly for motion picture studios to also own theatre chains.

The obsession of making quality films (besides the hardships they faced) was evident from the very beginning when they won the very first Academy Award for Best Picture in 1927 - only a year after moving into their current studio lot.

FUN FACT Since the economic

difficulties of Paramount Pictures in the 1960s, the film company has produced some of the best films, including Titanic (1997) and the Transformers series.

Buttressed by these triumphs, the remainder of the '70s and '80s was a steady ride for the studio.

The year 1986 was particularly notable as Paramount captured a 22 percent share of total domestic box office revenue, twice that of its closest competitor, and boasted five of the year's top 10 highest grossing films, including Top Gun and Crocodile Dundee.

Stars such as Rudolf Valentino, Mae West, Bing Crosby, the Marx Brothers, Bob Hope, Elvis Presley and Audrey Hepburn graced a lot of success to the studio in earlier years.

In more recent times, the star power has only grown brighter as they’ve worked with Steven Spielberg, Harrison Ford, Meryl Streep, Tom Cruise, Angelina Jolie and many more.

Top grossing Paramount film includes Titanic, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, Transformers: Dark of the Moon, Forrest Gump, Shrek the Third.

BOTTOM LINE As the longest operating major studio in Hollywood,

The Studios at Paramount has almost a century of experience providing the finest production services from development through post production.

Today, Paramount Pictures celebrates its 100th year making it the longest operating major studio in Hollywood.

COLUMBIA PICTURES

The predecessor of Columbia Pictures, CBC Film Sales Corporation, was founded in 1918 by Harry Cohn, his brother Jack Cohn, and Joe Brandt.

Brandt eventually tired of dealing with the Cohn brothers, and sold his one-third stake to Harry Cohn, who took over as president. In an effort to improve its image, the Cohn brothers renamed the company Columbia Pictures Corporation on January 10, 1924.

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 that only controlled production and distribution.

Backed by the success of their modest productions, CBC produced their first feature-length film in 1922 on a $20,000 budget, More To Be Pitied Than Scorned, with resounding success, taking in $130,000 in profit.

CBC saw that the company’s future lay in film production and, with it, a grander vision.

Columbia Pictures now forms part of the Columbia TriStar Motion Picture Group, owned by Sony Pictures Entertainment, a subsidiary of the Japanese conglomerate Sony.

FUN FACT In 1997,

Columbia Pictures ranked as the highest grossing movie studio in the United States with a gross of $1.256 billion.

Sony Pictures Classics (SPC) was established to specialize in the acquisition, production, marketing and distribution of prestigious foreign and American independent films.

Nominated for numerous Academy Awards®, the SPC library includes such notable titles as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, All About My Mother, Capote, Blue Jasmine, Midnight in Paris, Still Alice and Whiplash

BOTTOM LINE Today, the motion picture and television library is one

of the company’s most valuable assets with more than 3,500 film titles and more than 275 television series.

With a rich history that dates back to the birth of the motion picture industry, SPE is known throughout the world not only for its leading motion picture and television programming, but also its breakthrough digital innovations that bridge the gap between entertainment content and consumer delivery systems.

WARNER BROS

A subsidiary of Time Warner Company founded in 1923, owning further subsidiary companies including Warner Bros. Pictures, Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment, Warner Bros. Television etc.

The company's name originates from the four founding Warner brothers, namely Harry, Albert, Sam and Jack Warner.

In the beginning, Sam and Albert Warner invested $150 to present Life of an American Fireman and The Great Train Robbery.

They opened their first theater, the Cascade, in New Castle, Pennsylvania in 1903.

Their first full-scale picture, My Four Years in Germany, based on the best-selling book by America's ambassador to the court of Kaiser Wilhelm, premiered in 1918 and grossed an amazing (for that time) $1.5 million.

Their projects included The Beautiful and Damned, Beau Brummel, The Marriage Circle, Kiss Me Again brought the studio much critical acclaim.

At the box office in the 1990s, Warner Bros. Pictures continued to break records and earn critical raves around the world with movies like Driving Miss Daisy GoodFellas (1990), Unforgiven (1992).

These critically acclaimed movies bagged many Academy Awards and nominations.

Warner Bros. Entertainment today, is a global leader in all forms of entertainment and their related businesses across all current and emerging media and platforms.

In 2009, Warner Bros. became the first studio in history to gross more than $2 billion domestically in a single year.

Warner Bros top grossing films to date are The Dark Knight, The Dark Knight Rises, Harry Potter and The Deathly Hollows Part 2, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s stone, and The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey.

FUN FACT Warner Bros. Harry Potter

film series was the worldwide highest grossing film series of all time without inflation adjustment.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 2 was Warner Bros.' highest grossing movie ever (surpassing The Dark Knight)

BOTTOM LINE One of the most respected, diversified and successful

motion picture and television studios in the world, Warner Bros.

The fully integrated, broad-based company stands at the forefront of every aspect of the entertainment industry from feature film, television and home entertainment production and worldwide distribution to DVD and Blu-ray, digital distribution, animation, comic books, product and brand licensing and broadcasting.