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Columbia Pictures

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"Torch Lady" redirects here. For the torch lady in New York City, see Statue of Liberty.
File:Columbia Pictures.png
The Columbia Pictures logo from 1993 to the present

Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc. is an American film and television production company, part of the Columbia TriStar Motion Picture Group, which is owned by Sony Pictures Entertainment, a subsidiary of Japanese electronics corporation Sony.

History

The early years

Original CBC Film Sales Corporation logo

The predecessor of Columbia Pictures, CBC Film Sales Corporation (not to be confused with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation), was founded in 1919 by Harry Cohn, his brother Jack Cohn, and Joe Brandt. The company's reputation was so low that some joked that "CBC" stood for "Corned Beef and Cabbage." Many of the studio's early productions were low-budget affairs; the start-up CBC leased space in a poverty row studio on Hollywood's Gower Street. Brandt was company president and handled sales, marketing and distribution from New York along with Jack Cohn, while Harry Cohn ran production in Hollywood.

The new name for the studio

Following a reorganization, partner Brandt was bought out, and for the next thirty years the Cohn brothers would take on the world (and sometimes each other) in running their company. Harry Cohn took over as president; until Jack Warner bought full control of Warner Bros. in 1956, Cohn was the only studio chief that did not have to look to corporate overseers in the east for budgeting or policy decisions. In an effort to improve its image, the studio renamed itself Columbia Pictures Corporation in 1924. Though the product was mostly low-cost westerns, serials and action pictures, Columbia gradually moved into the production of higher-budget fare, building a reputation as one of Hollywood's more important studios.

Helping Columbia's climb was the arrival of an ambitious director named Frank Capra. Between 1927 and 1939, Capra became Columbia's biggest asset, gaining in confidence and constantly pushing Cohn for better material and bigger budgets. Following a string of hits in the early 1930s, such as Lady for a Day (1933), the success of Capra's 1934 film It Happened One Night (the first film to win all five major Oscars, including Best Picture, Director, Actor, Actress, and Screenplay) solidified Columbia's status as a major studio. Capra's other films at Columbia included Broadway Bill (1934), the original Lost Horizon (1937), You Can't Take It With You (1938), and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939). Harry Cohn also had popular stars Jean Arthur and Grace Moore under contract, and was able to attract visiting stars such as Carole Lombard, Cary Grant, Irene Dunne, Katharine Hepburn, Clark Gable, Jean Harlow, Claudette Colbert, Loretta Young, and James Stewart to his studio for major productions.

Rejection by one studio

Harry Cohn never lost a taste for low comedy, and at his insistence the studio signed The Three Stooges in 1934. Rejected by MGM (which kept straight-man Ted Healy but let the Stooges go), the Howard brothers and Larry Fine made more than 180 shorts for Columbia between 1934 and 1958. Also that year Columbia began producing a series of cartoons under the Screen Gems brand. Columbia would use the brand in various ways: In the late 1940s, it was revived for a television-commercial production unit. This expanded over the next few years into a full-fledged television-series production house, offering Father Knows Best, The Donna Reed Show, Bewitched, I Dream of Jeannie and The Monkees. In the late 1990s, the Screen Gems name was revived again as a label for low-budget horror and suspense films.

The maturity begins

By the time of World War II, Columbia had reached maturity. Propelled in part by the attendance surge during the war, the studio also benefited from the popularity of its discovery and biggest star, Rita Hayworth. Other Columbia contractees of this period included Glenn Ford, Penny Singleton, William Holden, Judy Holliday, The Three Stooges, Ann Miller, Evelyn Keyes, Jack Lemmon, Cleo Moore, Barbara Hale, Adele Jergens, Larry Parks, Arthur Lake, Lucille Ball, Kerwin Mathews, and Kim Novak.

Typical of Cohn's tendency to cut costs, Columbia was the last major studio to use three-strip Technicolor. Cohn finally agreed to use the costly, lavish color process for Cover Girl in 1944, starring the vibrant red-haired Rita Hayworth. Cohn quickly used Technicolor again for the fanciful biography of Frederic Chopin, A Song to Remember, with Cornel Wilde, released in 1945. Color was also used for another biopic, 1946's The Jolson Story with Larry Parks and Evelyn Keyes.

The United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc decision of 1948 that forced Hollywood motion picture companies to divest themselves of the theatre chains that they owned made a level playing ground for Columbia that soon joined the ranks of the "Big Five" studios.

As the larger studios declined in the 1950s, Columbia took the lead, continuing to produce forty-plus pictures a year, offering adult fare that often broke ground and kept audiences coming to theaters. A good example of a ground-breaking Columbia film was its adaptation of the controversial James Jones novel, From Here To Eternity, released in 1953, which won the Best Picture Oscar. Columbia also won the next year (1954) with another hard-hitting story, On The Waterfront. The studio won Best Picture again in 1957, when it released The Bridge on the River Kwai with William Holden.

Columbia also released the made-in- England Warwick Films by producers Irving Allen and Albert R. Broccoli as well as many films by producer Carl Foreman who also resided in England.

Columbia was the last studio to make short subjects and serials, the units not closing down until after Harry Cohn's death.

While Harry Cohn was widely disliked, even feared, few would argue that Cohn had not done a superb job in building Columbia Pictures. Following his death in 1958, Columbia went through a period of drifting; though there were still important films, the momentum, as well as the mass audience, was gone.

By the late 1960s, Columbia had an ambiguous identity, offering old-fashioned fare like A Man for All Seasons and Oliver! along with the more contemporary Easy Rider and The Monkees. After turning down releaseing Albert R. Broccoli's Eon Productions James Bond films, Columbia hired Broccoli's former partner Irving Allen to produce the Matt Helm series with Dean Martin.

Columbia Pictures Corporation was renamed Columbia Pictures Industries Inc. in 1968. Nearly bankrupt by the early 1970s, the studio was saved via a radical overhaul: the Gower Street studios were sold and a new management team was brought in. While fiscal health was restored through a careful choice of star-driven vehicles, the studio's image was badly marred by the David Begelman check-forging scandal. Begelman eventually resigned (later ending up at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer), and the studio's fortunes gradually recovered.

From 1971 until the end of 1987, Columbia's international distribution operations were a joint venture with Warner Bros., and in some countries, this joint venture also distributed films from other companies (like EMI Films and Cannon Films in the UK). Warners pulled out of the venture in 1988 to join up with Walt Disney Pictures.

The Coca-Cola Years and Tri-Star

With a healthier balance-sheet, Columbia was bought by Coca-Cola in 1982 (they had also considered buying the struggling Walt Disney Productions).[citation needed] Coca-Cola management announced there would be no X-rated films from Columbia, yet in 1984 the studio released Body Double, which came close to receiving the rating. Studio head Frank Price mixed big hits like Tootsie and Ghostbusters with many costly flops. Under Coke, Columbia acquired Norman Lear and Jerry Perenchio's Embassy Pictures division Embassy Television (included Tandem Productions) in 1985, mostly for its library of highly successful television series. Expanding its television franchise, Columbia also bought Merv Griffin's game show empire the following year, including the rights to Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy!.

To share the increasing cost of film production, Coke brought in two outside investors whose earlier efforts in Hollywood had come to nothing. In 1982, Columbia, Time Inc.'s HBO and CBS announced, as a joint venture, Nova Pictures; this enterprise was to be renamed Tri-Star Pictures. CBS dropped out of the venture in 1984, and in 1987, HBO did as well. That same year, Tri-Star entered into the television business as Tri-Star Television. In December 1987, Columbia Pictures bought their venture shares and merged Columbia and Tri-Star into Columbia Pictures Entertainment. (The Tri-Star name would soon be revised as TriStar.) Other small-scale, "boutique" entities were created: Nelson Entertainment, a joint venture with British and Canadian partners; Triumph Films, jointly owned with French studio Gaumont; and Castle Rock Entertainment. Recognizing the importance of the overseas market, in 1986, Columbia recruited British producer David Puttnam to head the studio. He alienated the film-production community upon his arrival by denouncing Hollywood's taste for froth. With few friends and fewer hits, his stay at Columbia was Hobbesian: nasty, brutish, and short. The volatile film business made Coke shareholders nervous, and following the box-office failure of Ishtar, Coke spun off its entertainment holdings in 1987, creating a stand-alone company called Columbia Pictures Entertainment Inc.

The Sony years to present

Puttnam was succeeded by his aesthetic opposite, Dawn Steel. The first woman to run a Hollywood motion picture studio, she pushed Columbia back into the forefront of popular films. The Columbia Pictures empire was sold in 1989 to electronics giant Sony, one of several Japanese firms then buying American properties. Sony then made a management decision that surprised many, hiring two producers, Peter Guber and Jon Peters to serve as co-heads of production. To some observers Guber and Peters appeared to be unlikely choices; further, they had just signed a long-term contract with Warner Bros. To extricate them from this contract, Sony finally paid hundreds of millions in cash, gave up a half-interest in its Columbia House Records Club mail-order business, and bought from Warner the decrepit Culver City studio (once home of studio MGM) which Warners had acquired in its takeover of Lorimar. Sony spent $100 million to refurbish the rechristened Sony Pictures Studios. Putting on a brave face, Guber and Peters set out to prove they were worth this fortune, and though there were to be some successes, there were also many costly flops. Peters resigned, to be followed soon after by Guber.

Publicly humiliated, Sony took an enormous loss on its investment in Columbia, writing off its costs, and in effect starting over. TriStar was consolidated into the main studio; the entire operation was reorganized under Howard Stringer and renamed Sony Pictures Entertainment; with this came a new effort to focus on mainstream film-making. Sony has broadened its release schedule by creating Sony Pictures Classics for arthouse fare, and by backing Revolution Studios, a production company headed by Joe Roth.

Columbia's logo originally appeared in 1924. The first model for the logo is unknown, although Bette Davis claimed that Claudia Dell was used.[1]

Beginning in 1936, the Columbia "Torch Lady" appeared with shimmering light behind her. This logo was used for a total of 40 years. 1976's Taxi Driver was one of the last films to use the "Torch Lady" in her classic appearance.

In 1976, Columbia (like other studios) experimented with a new logo. It began with the familiar lady with a torch, but the torch-light rays then formed an abstract blue semi-circle depicting the top half of the rays of light, with the name of the studio appearing under it. The television counterpart used only the latter part of the logo, and the semi-circle was either orange or red.

This logo was replaced with a modernized version of the "Torch Lady" in 1981. After Columbia's purchase by Coca-Cola, radio talk-show host Michael Jackson of KABC-AM joked that the Torch Lady should be holding a Coke bottle instead.[citation needed]

In 1993, the logo was repainted digitally by New Orleans artist Michael Deas. It has been rumored that Annette Bening was the model, but in fact Deas used a model named Jenny Joseph.[2]

Selected filmography

Main article: List of Columbia Pictures films

References

  1. ^ The History of a Logo: The Lady with the Torch, reelclassics.com, March 24 2001.
  2. ^ Hail, Columbia! Mystery solved, Roger Ebert, October 31 2004.

See also

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