Paramount

Paramount, American film production company, based in Hollywood, California, founded by W. W. Hodkinson in 1914 as the distribution arm for Adolph Zukor’s Famous Players Film Company, among others. Mergers and the acquisition of cinemas enabled it, in 1930, to become fully vertically integrated (that is, involved in film production, distribution, and exhibition). The introduction of sound in the late 1920s, however, overstretched its resources and it ran into financial difficulties. After being declared bankrupt, a major reorganization in 1935 led to a change of name, to Paramount Pictures Inc. The post-war anti-trust legislation compelled Paramount, like the other Hollywood studios, to sell off its cinema holdings. The impact of television again affected it and, although there were some outstanding financial successes, there were many failures. In 1966 it was taken over by Gulf and Western, which changed its name again, this time to Paramount Communications; ownership then passed to Viacom in 1994. In 2005 Paramount bought rival studio DreamWorks SKG. In 2006 the studio parted company with one of its biggest stars, Tom Cruise. Later that year Paramount signed a four-year deal with director Martin Scorsese.

Paramount’s stars included some of the most famous of the silent period: Gloria Swanson, Pola Negri, Mae Murray, Clara Bow, Rudolph Valentino, Douglas Fairbanks, and John Barrymore. Outstanding among its films were The Sheik (1921, directed by George Melford), Blood and Sand (1922, Fred Niblo), The Covered Wagon (1923, James Cruze), The Ten Commandments (1923, Cecil B. DeMille), and Wings (1927, William Wellman). Its directors also included Ernst Lubitsch, Josef von Sternberg, and Rouben Mamoulian. In the 1930s and 1940s a new range of stars, many of whom had started in vaudeville, including Mae West, W. C. Fields, Sylvia Sidney, Bing Crosby, Dorothy Lamour, Gary Cooper, Claudette Colbert, Frederic March, Jean Arthur, Allan Ladd, Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas, and Veronica Lake, were among the most popular in Hollywood. Later, Dean Martin, Jerry Lewis, Audrey Hepburn, and Anthony Perkins were added. Preston Sturges and Billy Wilder were among the first writer-directors. Their films, such as The Lady Eve (1941, Sturges) and Double Indemnity (1944, Wilder), remain among the most admired Hollywood films of the period. Among its most financially successful offerings were Going My Way (Leo McCarey, 1944), The Lost Weekend (1945, Wilder), and Welcome Stranger (1947, Elliot Nugent).

In the 1950s the studio responded to the threat from television and CinemaScope with Vistavision, a superior wide-screen process that did not ultimately survive. Its two financially most successful films, White Christmas (1954, Michael Curtiz) and DeMille’s own remake of The Ten Commandments (1956), were both filmed in Vistavision. Other films were among the most important that emerged from any studio: Detective Story (1951, William Wyler), Shane (1953, George Stevens), Stalag 17 (1953, Wilder), and three of the finest Alfred Hitchcock films, Rear Window (1954), Vertigo (1958), and Psycho (1960). Later prestige productions have included Love Story (1970, Arthur Hiller), The Godfather and The Godfather, Part II (1972 and 1974, Francis Ford Coppola), Saturday Night Fever (1977, John Badham), Grease (1978, Randal Kleiser), Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981, Steven Spielberg), the Star Trek series, including Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986, Leonard Nimoy), Crocodile Dundee (1986, Peter Falman), The Addams Family (1991, Barry Sonnenfeld), Mission: Impossible (1996, Brian De Palma),Titanic (1997, James Cameron; a co-production with 20th Century-Fox), Saving Private Ryan (1998, Spielberg), The Truman Show (1998, Peter Weir), The Hours (2002, Stephen Daldry), and World Trade Center (2006, Oliver Stone).