20 Old Hollywood Moguls Who Built Fortunes Running Studios

Walt Disney’s risk-taking began when he moved to Los Angeles and partnered with his elder brother, Roy, to form Disney Brothers Studio in 1923. In 1928, he introduced synchronized sound to cartoons with Mickey Mouse in Steamboat Willie. Next, he put all of his chips on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), the first feature-length American cartoon, which gave him the means to open a studio in Burbank. Then he took the leap into TV and, in 1955, created Disneyland. While those creative risks were his, the financial ones weren’t.

Although Charlie Chaplin was the biggest star of the silent era, he had already become a studio owner by 1917, building the Charlie Chaplin Studios on La Brea Avenue in Hollywood, and two years later co-founded United Artists with Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, and D.W. Griffith, giving himself complete control of distribution. Chaplin personally financed, wrote, directed, and starred in The Gold Rush and Modern Times, retaining ownership of the negatives and international rights.

In 1924, Russian-born Louis B. Mayer was hired by theater boss Marcus Loew to manage production at the fledgling studio Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Mayer established a system of long-term contracts for stars, including Clark Gable, Greta Garbo, and Judy Garland. The studio continued to distribute profits even during the Great Depression. In 1937, the US Treasury Department recorded that Mayer was receiving more than $1.3 million in annual income, making him the highest-paid executive in America.

Hungarian-born Jewish immigrant William Fox grew up on the Lower East Side of New York City, where, in 1904, he found his way into the movie business. In 1915, he established Fox Film Corporation, and in 1929 he tried to buy his rival Loew’s. After a car accident and a federal antitrust suit, not to mention the stock market crash, he was forced into bankruptcy and ousted from the company in 1930. But Fox Film Corporation survived.

Born Gladys Louise Smith in Canada, Mary Pickford was the silent era’s most popular woman, and she leveraged that popularity into actual ownership. In 1916, her contract with the producer Adolph Zukor paid her $10,000 per week and half the profits. In 1919, she helped form United Artists with Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, and D.W. Griffith to free herself from studio control. She made her own films, owned the negatives, and even held title to property on the Pickford-Fairbanks studio lot.

In 1889, a penniless Hungarian Jewish immigrant named Adolph Zukor stepped off a boat in New York with $40 sewn into his coat. He soon became involved in the fur trade and, later, penny arcades. Zukor formed Famous Players Film Company in 1912, and by 1916 he was running a successful movie business, having merged with producer Jesse Lasky and acquired W.W. Hodkinson’s existing distribution network, Paramount. Zukor then integrated production, distribution, and hundreds of theaters into one business, a system called vertical integration that all major studios would adopt.

Carl Laemmle, a German immigrant who purchased a Chicago nickelodeon in 1906, spent years battling Thomas Edison’s Motion Picture Patents Company, a cartel that collected licensing fees on every camera and projector in the nation. He fought back through hundreds of federal lawsuits. In 1912, he helped create Universal Pictures and in 1915 opened Universal City, a 230-acre studio complex in the San Fernando Valley complete with its own town government and grandstands for onlookers. Under his direction, hundreds of inexpensive silent films would be made.

Jack L. Warner, who was running the West Coast operations at Warner Bros., which he had founded with his three brothers in 1923, made a bold decision in 1927. When Warner insisted that the studio gamble on the newly developed Vitaphone sound-on-disc system and release The Jazz Singer, the silent film died within a year. In short order, Warner Bros. became one of the Big Five studios in Hollywood. Jack Warner built the house around gangster films and gritty action and drama with stars like James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart, and Bette Davis.

David O. Selznick previously worked as a studio executive for both Paramount and MGM before founding his own independent production company, Selznick International Pictures, in 1935. He bought the rights to the Margaret Mitchell novel “Gone With the Wind” and produced the film himself, arranging for MGM and United Artists to distribute the film but not giving up creative control. The film was released in 1939 and won eight Oscars, becoming one of the highest-grossing films of all time.

Harry Cohn and his older brother, Jack Cohn, along with a partner, created a small film company in New York in 1918. In 1924, they renamed the company Columbia Pictures. Oddly, he was at once corporate president and head of production, and thus had complete control over all pictures made at Columbia. By borrowing stars from other studios and keeping the budgets low, Cohn achieved great success. In 1934, Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night won five Academy Awards, making Columbia a bona fide major studio. Cohn ran Columbia until he died in 1958.

Joseph M. Schenck, a Russian-born film producer and president of United Artists, financed Buster Keaton’s silent comedies before partnering with screenwriter-producer Darryl F. Zanuck to form 20th Century Pictures in 1933. He orchestrated its merger with Fox Film Corporation in 1935 and was named chairman of the newly formed 20th Century-Fox. Sentenced to four months in prison for a conviction on a charge of tax fraud involving a payoff to a labor-union boss, he received a presidential pardon and returned to Fox, where he was given an honorary Oscar.

Mack Sennett (born Michael Sinnott in Canada) worked for the great director D.W. Griffith before establishing his own studio, Keystone Studios, in 1912. Known as the “King of Comedy,” he churned out comedy shorts almost as if they were on an assembly line. He created the Keystone Cops and the Sennett Bathing Beauties. It was Sennett who discovered the likes of Charlie Chaplin, Gloria Swanson, and Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, not to mention co-founding the Triangle Motion Picture Company with Griffith and fellow producer Thomas Ince in 1915. But his considerable fortune belonged to the silent movie era.

W.W. Hodkinson launched his career as an exhibitor when he opened his first movie theater in Ogden, Utah, in 1907. In May 1914, Hodkinson founded Paramount Pictures Corporation, America’s first national film distribution company, signing exclusive contracts with Zukor and Lasky to distribute their productions and taking a 35% commission on their films. Hodkinson chose the name Paramount and created the company’s mountain logo. Two years later, Zukor orchestrated a hostile takeover of the corporation Hodkinson had built.

Thomas Ince was a stage actor-turned-director who had relocated to California in 1911 and erected a mammoth studio in the Santa Monica Mountains named Inceville. He pioneered the use of detailed shooting scripts, unit production managers, strict budgets, and centralized editing, all devices every studio would soon emulate, and he also helped found Triangle Film Corporation shortly thereafter. Ince died at the age of 44 from heart failure after contracting a gastrointestinal ailment, shortly after leaving a yacht belonging to publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst. Despite persistent rumors that he was shot aboard the yacht, contemporary records confirmed the cause was heart failure.

Warner Bros. was built on the backs of its brothers, who got their start in the nickelodeon era. Harry Warner, who was born in Poland, served as the studio’s president and financial head, managing the business end from New York while his brother Jack ran production from Burbank. After pooling the family’s finances from the brothers’ nickelodeon ventures, he co-founded Warner Bros. Pictures in 1923. He then obtained loans from Wall Street banks in the late 1920s to purchase the Vitaphone sound-on-disc system and the Stanley Theater chain. In other words, Harry’s financing, not just Jack’s audacious bet on sound, kept Warner Bros. solvent through the Great Depression.

Herbert J. Yates, owner of Consolidated Film Industries, a film-processing lab, was in a pickle when a few independent producers failed to pay for the film processing work they’d received from his lab in 1935. Rather than write off the bad debt, he merged Mascot Pictures, Monogram Pictures, and several other small studios into Republic Pictures. Republic churned out B-Westerns and serials with such stars as Roy Rogers and Gene Autry, turning out nearly 1,000 features and serials by 1958. The low production costs generated enough profit to finance more prestigious projects such as John Ford’s “The Quiet Man.”

Darryl Zanuck became head of production at Warner Bros. in his mid-20s, and shortly after left to join Joseph M. Schenck in founding 20th Century Pictures. He served as production chief at the newly combined studio, 20th Century-Fox, for over two decades, where he produced such Academy Award-winning films as The Grapes of Wrath and Gentleman’s Agreement. As TV began to lure audiences away from cinema, Zanuck responded by bringing the CinemaScope widescreen format to filmgoers in 1953’s The Robe.

Marcus Loew was born poor in New York, but he built Loew’s Incorporated into the most profitable theater chain in the nation. He had no intention of making prestige pictures; he simply purchased Metro Pictures, then Goldwyn Pictures, to ensure a constant flow of pictures to fill his screens. He combined them with Louis B. Mayer’s company to create Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, operating as president from New York until his death in 1927.

Polish-born Schmuel Gelbfisz (Samuel Goldwyn) co-founded the Jesse L. Lasky Feature Play Company (1913) and Goldwyn Pictures (1916). He was pushed out of his own company before it merged with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (1924), and he never worked for MGM even though the company name was almost identical to his. He went on to found Samuel Goldwyn Productions as a single-man independent production company, funding many quality films, including The Best Years of Our Lives (1946).

Roy and his younger brother Walt established Disney Brothers Studio in 1923. Roy served as chief executive officer and financial chief from 1929 to his death. Roy negotiated the bank financing for Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs while the country was in a depression, and he launched the licensing business. In 1953, he formed Buena Vista Distribution so Disney would not have to pay a distributor a share of the box office take. Walt dreamed up the ideas; Roy built the organization.

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