Columbia Pictures

Columbia Pictures, American film production company, based in Hollywood, California. It was founded in 1924, by three ex-employees of Carl Laemmle at Universal: Joe Brandt and brothers Harry and Jack Cohn. Harry Cohn, renowned for his domineering personality, supervised all of the studio’s productions and, by judiciously sprinkling the company’s schedule of low-budget Westerns and comedies with grander enterprises, developed it into a major Hollywood studio. In the late 1920s he signed Frank Capra, the most important of American populist directors, and also drew on the directing skills of Howard Hawks, Gregory La Carva, and Leo McCarey. He contracted Rita Hayworth, Kim Novak, William Holden, Judy Holliday, and Glenn Ford.

The studio’s many successes included Platinum Blonde (1931, directed by Capra), Lady for a Day (1933; Capra), Twentieth Century (1934; Hawks), It Happened One Night (1934; Capra), Mr Deeds Goes to Town (1936; Capra), The Awful Truth (1937; McCarey), Lost Horizon (1937; Capra), Mr Smith Goes to Washington (1939; Capra), His Girl Friday (1939; Hawks), Gilda (1946; Charles Vidor), The Jolson Story (1946; Alfred Green), The Lady from Shanghai (1948; Orson Welles), Born Yesterday (1950; George Cukor), From Here to Eternity (1953; Fred Zinnemann), On the Waterfront (1955; Elia Kazan), and The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957; David Lean). Ironically, the structural weakness of Columbia in the 1930s—that it was not a vertically integrated business including distribution and exhibition arms as well as production studios—cushioned it in the late 1940s when other production companies were compelled to divest themselves of their cinema chains under antitrust legislation.

By the time of Harry Cohn’s death in 1958, Columbia, unlike other production companies, was not resisting the advance of television but producing programmes for it; the profits from the transmission of its back-catalogue were being invested in new productions, such as A Man for All Seasons (1966; Zinnemann), Oliver! (1968; Carol Reed), and Easy Rider (1969; Dennis Hopper). Columbia, nevertheless, had its financial setbacks. It restructured itself and moved from Sunset Boulevard to the Burbank Studios in 1972, survived an embezzlement scandal, was taken over by the Coca-Cola Company in 1978, went through a brief and difficult period with David Puttnam as head of production from 1986 to 1987, and was sold on to the Sony Corporation in 1989. Throughout, it produced some of the most adult of Hollywood cinema, with such films as Tootsie (1982; Sydney Pollack) and Gandhi (1982; Richard Attenborough), although later productions, such as Hook (1991; Steven Spielberg), and Men in Black (1997; Barry Sonnenfeld) and Spider-Man (2002; Sam Raimi) and their sequels, suggested a closer integration with Sony’s global entertainment policies and an exploitation of the younger market.