Universal Pictures

• 1. Introduction

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  Universal Pictures was founded on the 30th of April 1912, making it the oldest surviving film studio in the United States. Nine men put their names to that founding act: Carl Laemmle, Mark Dintenfass, Charles O. Baumann, Adam Kessel, Pat Powers, William Swanson, David Horsley, Robert H. Cochrane, and Jules Brulatour. What drove them together was not a shared artistic vision but a shared enemy: Thomas Edison.

  Edison's Motion Picture Patents Company, formed in 1908, collected fees on every stage of movie production and exhibition. It was built on the Latham Loop patent and a cluster of related claims, and it functioned less like a trade body than a toll road. Laemmle, who had started by counting heads outside a Chicago nickelodeon, understood the math well enough to know the Trust was taking money he could keep. His response was to start making his own films.

  What grew from that defiance would become one of the five most powerful film studios on earth. It would give the world Dracula and Frankenstein, Jaws and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, and the Fast and Furious franchise. It would survive a bank foreclosure, a Japanese electronics conglomerate, a Canadian whisky empire, and a cable company buying everything. How a nickelodeon owner from Chicago built all of that, lost it, and watched it outlast him by a century is the story this documentary traces.

• 2. Laemmle Versus Edison

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  Carl Laemmle's break from Edison began not in a courtroom but in a Chicago box office. He stood there for hours, counting patrons and calculating receipts. Within weeks he had sold his dry goods business and bought his first nickelodeons. When the Edison Trust demanded fees, Laemmle refused to pay them.

  In June 1909, Laemmle started the Yankee Film Company with his brothers-in-law Abe Stern and Julius Stern. That operation quickly became the Independent Moving Pictures Company, known as IMP, with studios in Fort Lee, New Jersey. Fort Lee was then the center of America's young film industry, and IMP planted itself at the middle of it.

  Laemmle also broke with one of Edison's most conservative customs: the refusal to name performers on screen. By giving actors billing and screen credits, Laemmle found he could attract leading players away from competitors. In 1910 he promoted Florence Lawrence, previously billed only as "The Biograph Girl", alongside actor King Baggot, in what may have been the first time a studio used named stars as a marketing tool. The modern concept of the movie star began, in part, with that decision.

  The Universal Film Manufacturing Company was formally incorporated in New York City on the 30th of April 1912, the date now recognized as Universal's founding. It was established through a merger of IMP, the Powers Motion Picture Company, Rex Motion Picture Manufacturing Company, Champion Film Company, Nestor Film Company, and the New York Motion Picture Company. Laemmle emerged as president in July 1912. The new studio was built as a vertically integrated company, connecting production, distribution, and exhibition in one corporate structure. By the end of 1912, the company had followed the industry west and was concentrating its production in the Hollywood area.

• 3. Universal City and the Tourist Studio

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  On the 15th of March 1915, Carl Laemmle opened what he called the world's largest motion picture production facility on a 230-acre converted farm just over the Cahuenga Pass from Hollywood. He named it Universal City Studios. Unlike his rivals, Laemmle opened the gates to tourists from the start. Universal became the largest studio in Hollywood and held that distinction for a decade.

  The studio published a trade magazine, alternating between the names Universal Weekly and Moving Picture Weekly, aimed at exhibitors. Many of Universal's earliest films were later destroyed by fires and nitrate degradation, and the surviving issues of those magazines are now a key resource for film historians who try to reconstruct what was made and when.

  By 1916, Laemmle had created a three-tier branding system for releases. Red Feather Photoplays were low-budget features. Bluebird Photoplays covered mainstream and more ambitious productions. At the top sat Jewel films, prestige pictures with high budgets and prominent actors. Directors who worked on Jewel pictures included John Ford, Rex Ingram, and Lois Weber, one of the few women directing films in Hollywood at that time. Starting in the mid-1920s, the most expensive and heavily promoted releases were branded Super-Jewel productions, a tier that included films directed by Erich von Stroheim and others.

  Despite his innovative impulses, Laemmle was a cautious financier. Unlike rivals Adolph Zukor, William Fox, and Marcus Loew, he chose not to build a theater chain. He financed all productions himself and refused to take on debt. That caution allowed Lon Chaney to become a drawing card through the mid-1910s, but it also meant the studio mostly sought audiences in small towns with inexpensive melodramas, westerns, and serials rather than competing directly for urban prestige.

• 4. Thalberg, Von Stroheim, and the Limits of Control

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  Irving Thalberg had been Laemmle's personal secretary before Laemmle promoted him to studio chief in 1919. Thalberg used the role to raise Universal's production quality and introduce more rigorous cost discipline. The central test of that discipline came from director Erich von Stroheim, whose lavish instincts pushed Blind Husbands in 1919 and Foolish Wives in 1922 far beyond their intended budgets. Universal responded to the Foolish Wives overrun by launching a sensational advertising campaign that turned the excess itself into a selling point, recovering some of the expenditure at the box office.

  When Foolish Wives proved insufficient to reform Von Stroheim, Thalberg fired him on the 6th of October 1922, six weeks into the production of Merry-Go-Round. Rupert Julian replaced him to finish the film. The firing demonstrated a kind of managerial authority that Hollywood studios were still learning to exercise over star directors.

  Louis B. Mayer then lured Thalberg away from Universal in late 1922, hiring him as vice president in charge of production at his own growing studio. When Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer was formed in 1924, Thalberg moved into the same role at the new company. His departure left a visible gap. Without his guidance, Universal settled back into second-tier status and remained there for several decades.

  Actor Lon Chaney, who had become one of Universal's genuine drawing cards, had already left the studio in 1917 over a salary dispute. His two biggest Universal hits, The Hunchback of Notre Dame in 1923 and The Phantom of the Opera in 1925, were made as isolated returns rather than as the product of a sustained studio relationship. These patterns, talent leaving over money, ambitious executives moving on to richer operations, would recur throughout Universal's history.

• 5. Horror, Oswald, and a Birthday Gift Gone Wrong

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  In 1928, Carl Laemmle Sr. made his son Carl Jr. head of Universal Pictures as a 21st birthday present. The studio already had a reputation for nepotism; at one point, reportedly 70 of Carl Sr.'s relatives were on the payroll, many of them nephews. This earned the elder Laemmle the nickname "Uncle Carl" around the studios. Ogden Nash captured the reputation in a well-known rhyme: "Uncle Carl Laemmle / Has a very large faemmle." Among those relatives was William Wyler, a future Academy Award-winning director and producer.

  Carl Jr. pushed the studio to modernize. He bought and built theaters, converted production to sound, and made early forays into high-quality releases, including the part-talkie Show Boat in 1929 and the first all-color musical Universal produced, King of Jazz in 1930. The more serious All Quiet on the Western Front, also from 1930, won the Best Picture Oscar that year.

  Carl Jr.'s most lasting contribution was a cycle of horror films that extended into the 1940s. Dracula and Frankenstein both arrived in 1931, followed by The Mummy in 1932 and The Invisible Man in 1933. These pictures gave the studio an identity that outlasted the Laemmle family's ownership.

  One curious chapter involved Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks created the character, and Disney's studio provided animation under Charles Mintz's Winkler Pictures, which had signed a contract with Universal in March 1927 to produce 26 Oswald cartoons. When Mintz demanded Disney accept a lower fee and Disney refused, Mintz took most of Disney's animators to his own studio. Disney and Iwerks then created Mickey Mouse in secret while finishing their remaining contractual Oswald films. Universal eventually formed its own in-house animation unit headed by Walter Lantz and Bill Nolan, and Lantz would later find success with Woody Woodpecker in 1940. In February 2006, NBCUniversal sold the Disney-animated Oswald cartoons and the character's rights and trademark to The Walt Disney Company. In return, Disney released ABC sportscaster Al Michaels from his contract so he could join NBC's Sunday night NFL football package.

• 6. Foreclosure and the Durbin Rescue

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  Universal's modernization push, undertaken during the depths of the Great Depression, nearly destroyed the company. The theater chain Carl Jr. had assembled was scrapped, but he held on to distribution, studio, and production. The final blow came through a lavish remake of Show Boat in 1936. Unlike the 1929 part-talkie version, the new film was based on the Broadway musical and featured several stars from the stage production. The budget overran by $300,000.

  Standard Capital Corporation had loaned Universal $750,000 for the production, taking the Laemmle family's controlling interest in the studio as collateral. It was the first time in Universal's 26-year history that the company had borrowed money for a production. Standard called in the loan; Universal could not pay. On the 2nd of April 1936, Standard foreclosed and seized control of the studio. The Laemmles were removed from the company their family had founded. Studio advertisements began referring to "the new Universal."

  The 1936 Show Boat was released slightly over a month later and became both a critical and financial success. It was not enough to bring the Laemmles back. J. Cheever Cowdin of Standard Capital took over as president and instituted severe budget cuts. British entrepreneurs C.M. Woolf and J. Arthur Rank bought a significant stake in the studio.

  The financial rescue came from an unlikely source. Producer Joe Pasternak, who had been making light musicals with young sopranos for Universal's German subsidiary, brought his formula to the United States. Teenage singer Deanna Durbin starred in Pasternak's first American film, Three Smart Girls, in 1936. The picture was a box-office hit that reputedly resolved the studio's financial crisis. Durbin's subsequent pictures, produced over the first five years of her contract, were among Universal's most successful of the period.

• 7. MCA, Hitchcock, and the Television Studio

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  By the late 1950s, the combined effects of the studio-theater breakup and the rise of television had thinned cinema audiences considerably. The Music Corporation of America, the world's largest talent agency, had already become a powerful television producer, renting space at Republic Studios for its Revue Productions subsidiary. In 1958, Universal agreed to sell its 360-acre studio lot to MCA for $11 million. MCA renamed it Revue Studios and began upgrading and modernizing the property, signing MCA clients including Doris Day, Lana Turner, Cary Grant, and director Alfred Hitchcock to Universal contracts.

  The full takeover of Universal Pictures by MCA happened in mid-1962, as part of the MCA-Decca Records merger. Decca Records had itself taken full control of Universal in 1952. As a final act before leaving the talent agency business, MCA signed virtually every one of its clients to a Universal contract. In 1963, MCA formed Universal City Studios, Inc., merging the motion pictures and television arms.

  MCA agent Lew Wasserman had already changed the economics of the talent business in 1950. He negotiated a deal for his client James Stewart that gave Stewart a share in the profits of three films in lieu of a large upfront salary. When Winchester '73, released in 1950, proved to be a hit, that profit-participation structure became a template for future productions at Universal and eventually across the industry.

  Television production made up much of the studio's output under MCA, with Universal heavily committed to deals with NBC providing up to half of all prime-time shows for several seasons. Universal also pioneered the made-for-television movie format during this period. The studio tour subsidiary launched in 1964, extending Laemmle's original idea of opening the studio to visitors into a full commercial enterprise. A landmark deal in 1957 had already licensed 600 pre-1948 sound films to Screen Gems, a television subsidiary of Columbia Pictures, for $20 million.

• 8. From Jaws to Comcast

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  Jaws arrived in 1975 and restored the company's financial position after a decade in which Universal was primarily a television operation. It became the highest-grossing film of all time upon its initial release, a distinction later surpassed by E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial in 1982. The studio also recorded hits including The Sting and American Graffiti, both from 1973, and Back to the Future in 1985, but the decade also produced expensive failures. Films like Waterworld in 1995 and Howard the Duck in 1986 were box-office disappointments despite large budgets, though both found later audiences.

  Lew Wasserman, now the longtime MCA head, sought a rich partner to expand the company's broadcast and cable presence. In 1990, Japanese electronics manufacturer Matsushita Electric, now known as Panasonic, agreed to acquire MCA for $6.6 billion. The cultural mismatch proved difficult to manage. Five years later, Matsushita sold an 80% stake to Canadian drinks distributor Seagram for $5.7 billion. Seagram sold its shares in DuPont to fund the purchase, hoping to build an entertainment empire around Universal. It acquired PolyGram from Philips in 1999 but found that Hollywood's fluctuating profits could not substitute for the reliable income DuPont had provided.

  In 2015, Universal became the first studio to release three films that each grossed over one billion dollars in a single year: Furious 7, Jurassic World, and Minions. Jurassic World went on to become the studio's all-time highest-grossing film worldwide.

  A dispute with AMC Theaters in 2020, triggered by Universal's decision to release Trolls World Tour on premium video on demand during the COVID-19 pandemic, was resolved on the 28th of July that year. AMC agreed to a shortened theatrical window of 17 days, or 31 days for films opening to $50 million or more in their first weekend, before Universal could move titles to premium VOD. That agreement remained in force until March 2026, when Universal announced it would extend the minimum theatrical window to 31 days across all Universal-label releases, with plans to move to 45 days in 2027.