Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy d Wilson. Tracy, It's time for a little bit of film history, which I always love. This is one that seems especially engaging to me because of this weird time we're loving through. We can't help but look at everything through that lens um. We know that this pandemic is impacting virtually every industry in a variety of ways, and the film industry is no exception. Studios, of course shut down in the spring when the pandemic was declared, but so did theaters. Some have reopened, some have not. And as we've all seen, films that were already made or in post production have been all over the place in terms of how they've been distributed to consumers. And that, along with some other stuff that we will get to as may me think about film distribution historically, and so initially I wanted to talk about the paramount decrees of That is a case that's been in the news lately, and it's a good example of how things that have happened in the past still offer up some surprises decades later. But as I started working on it, I really found myself wanting to dig a little bit deeper into how things got to the point where that particular court case happened, starting with how the studios developed, because those two things are inextricably intertwined, and because it has roots in very early days of the motion picture industry in the US, So just how the studio system grew led to what happened legally, and this becomes a lot, so we are splitting it into two parts. So in this first episode, we're going to talk about the people and events that led to the establishment of Paramount Pictures as a key player in the movie industry. And then in the second episode, we will talk about the two court cases against Paramount out as well as other defendants in the first half of the twentieth century. And then we're going to touch on recent developments that are related to all of those legal proceedings which went on for years and years and recent means recent, very weeks ago as of when we are recording this. So to really get to the roots of this story, we have to start with Adolph Zuker. Zucker was born on January seventh, eighteen seventy three and richer Hungary, and in Hungarian his last name would be were like Zuker, but he seems to have stuck with a pretty Americanized version. By the time he was seven, he had already lost both of his parents. He never really knew his father, who died when Zucker was one, and although his mother had remarried, instead of staying with his stepfather, he was moved to live with his uncle. And though the family had hoped that Adolph would become a rabbi, his fascination was studying religious history was really all about the stories and much less about the spiritual aspects of Judaism, at least as a personal calling. As a teen, at Off instead became an apprentice to a shopkeeper, and it was through the shopkeeper's daughters that he learned about pulp fiction from the United States. The prospect of being a shopkeeper was really not any more appealing to add Off than becoming a rabbi had been. He eventually convinced his family to let him sail to the United States with a tiny sum of money it's estimated at forty dollars. Who's gonna try to start a new life Yeah, that probably didn't seem like a tiny sum at the time, but when you think about starting a brand new life somewhere else, it doesn't go very far. This whole thing was a really arduous undertaking. So first of all, he had to book the lowest class of passage for the journey UH that came with no amenities. There was a degree of peril. Their stories about how he sowed his forty dollars into the lining of his clothes so that no one would rob him when he slept on the boat. And then once he arrived in New York, he didn't know anybody and he had to start entirely from scratch to try to find work. He eventually settled into a position as a furrier's apprentice. He first, according to most stories, started out just sweeping the floor and then kind of became an apprentice, but he was also taking classes at night to improve his English, and some stories say he also took classes uh in business as well. With then just a couple of years, he had become a skilled designer and started working as an independent furrier by the age of nineteen. He moved to Chicago a year later in eighteen ninety three, when the World's Colombian Exposition was there. He wound up staying in the city and becoming a partner in the novelty for company with a fifty percent share. The business made a lot of money, but after a misstep and predicting trends, Zucker really found his fashion career on a downslide. And while he moved back to New York and got back on his feet thanks to his connections in the fur industry, Zucker was already starting to think about film. He also got married during this time in eight nine seven to a young woman named Lottie Kaufman. They stayed married for the rest of their lives. One of the four years that Zucker became friends with during this time was Marcus Low. That name is familiar to you because of Low cinemas. There's a reason Zooker even took an apartment across the street from Low, and their families remained friends for life. So he had previously mispredicted a trend, the opposite happened in nineteen o two. He made a small fortune after correctly predicting a trend for Red Fox that year, and Zucker wanted to invest all this money that he made it was somewhere between a hundred thousand and two hundred thousand dollars. His choice for this was investing into the entertainment industry at often. Several of his friends in the fur industry invested in a penny arcade that was opened by Mitchell Mark in nineteen o three. It was on Fourteenth Street near Broadway. This arcade, nicknamed Automatic Vaudeville, made a hundred thousand dollars in its first year. Zucker left the fur business completely soon after that to expand his penny arcades into other locations, and the next evolution of his entertainment business was to set up an arcade with a theater to show motion pictures. So the top floor of Zooker's Automatic Vaudeville was outfitted with two hundred seats, and for a nickel, customers could watch a fifteen minutes show. This shift to showing motion pictures required some enticement. Zucker described this change in the offerings of the arcade later in his life quote, we had this empty floor over the arcade, about forty ft by two hundred fifty feet. We put in two hundred seats and then began to worry because it seemed like an awful lot, especially as most of our customers didn't know what moving pictures were and we're used to paying one cent, not five. So we put in a wonderful glass staircase. Under the glass was a metal trough of running water like a waterfall, with red, green, and blue lights shining through. We called it Crystal Hall. And he well paid their five cents, mainly on account of the staircase, not the movies. It was a big success. This is like such great packaging, right That staircase sounds pretty cool? It does. Zoocker routinely sat in the sixth row of the Crystal Hall theater while movies ran, and he would turn around and watch the faces of the audience in the rooms behind him as they reacted to the movies that were being shown. And he noticed the patterns in what worked for audiences and what didn't, and he used that information to make decisions about what films to offer. In nineteen o four, the St. Louis World's Fair featured a novelty movie experience called Hale's Tours of the World, was named for their inventor, George C. Hale. The attraction was basically a decommissioned train car that had been set up as a theater. The theater attendants dressed as train conductors, and once they were inside, customers were shown travel films while the car rocked and shook and the bell clanged as though the whole thing we're traveling through a u a Pean town our countryside. Zooker loved this thing. Uh. He bought the rights to offer Hales Tours in New York, and then he opened Hales Tours in Coney Island, Newark and Pittsburgh after that. And initially they were really huge draws. But two things ultimately doomed the Hales Tour to a short life. One, once an audience had experienced this, the novelty kind of wore off. There were a lot of people that wanted to keep going back on the same tour. Two new films were not being made, even though Zooker is said to have asked the team at the newly formed motion picture Patents company that is also known as the Edison Trust and will reference that name a bunch coming up to make more of them, but they were not really interested in going in filming the European Countryside anymore. Despite its initial success. Hales Tours ultimately landed Zooker's company and six figure debt. While his business partners wanted to consider declaring bankruptcy, Zucker would not hear of it. He had another idea. Over the next two years, Zucker let a project that turned all of the Hales Tour locations into regular movie theaters. At the end of those two years, the company was out of debt and turning a profit, but he still had the problem of not having enough new films to satisfy him. In nine, Zooker's company combined with that of his friend Marcus Low. Low had also been opening successful theaters of his own, and once the companies combined under the Low Enterprises name at alf Zookers work shifted completely. He focused on movies entirely, not so much on the marketing or the locations or building out theaters, but just the movies first, by traveling both the US in Europe and simply going to the movies and watching the audience and kind of tracking their reactions. We're going to talk in a moment about how the information that Zooker collected led him to develop bigger projects, but first we will pause for a quick sponsor break. Adolph Zucker wanted to explore the idea of longer form content instead of the short films that were being produced in the early nineteen hundreds. He had a vision that was for a movie that was not just something for casual foot traffic crowds of a busy city, but a level of entertainment that would draw a crowd the same way as theatrical play mind and that is how he came to found the Famous Players Company, which was named for his motto of famous players and famous plays. As that motto suggests, Zucker wanted to get talent with established name recognition from theater to star in films that were based on well known plays. Yeah, in a lot of cases it was, Hey, you got famous doing this play on Broadway. Can we film that play and make it a movie. Famous Players Company was actually set up more as the distributor to release Zooker's first movie after production was already completed. That movie was Queen Elizabeth, which starred Sarah Bernhardt. The film had been shot in France and it was a British French production with the title les a mur de la Elizabet or simply La Elizabeth, and Zooker secured the U S distribution rights for either thirty five thousand dollars or forty thou dollars, depending on who you listen to. That was considered an absurdly high amount of money, but Zooker paid it, and then he had the film premiere at Broadways Lyceum Theater on July twelfth, n twelve as a huge event. The ticket price was massive for the time, it was a dollar. Remember, he had been charging five cents for his theaters in the automated vaudeville. But Zooker's effort to market this longer length film, trading on Bernhard's fame and the fresh concept of a longer form it ran more than forty minutes, was ultimately very successful. So from there things moved really quickly for Zooker. He got more Broadway actors to make films based on plays that they were already famous for this time with his company actually making the films. He made versions of The Prisoner of Zenda and The Count of Money Christo and several other films, and less than a year he also left low enterprises to focus on famous players company full time. He transitioned Mary Pickford to film, initially paying her five hundred dollars a week, which was more than two and a half times when she was making on Broadway. And then Pickford was of course catapulted to stardom, and well, she probably could never have anticipated eventually getting paid ten thousand dollars a week just a few years later. That is not adjusted. That's ten thousand dollars in nineteen teens money. In nineteen sixteen, Adolph Sucker merged his company with another film company run independently by Jesse Laski. They created famous players Laski. While Zucker was establishing himself in film, he had also gotten into business with a man named W. W. Hodginson, who was working on his own venture in the entertainment world. So we're gonna talk about Hodginson for a minute. William Hodginson was born in eighteen eighty one in Pueblo, Colorado. His middle name was either Wallace or Wadsworth, depending on what source you look at. Some sources include both of them. The Online Archive of California, for example, which has a collection of his papers, even lists him both ways in the finding aid that accompanies that collection. There's not a whole lot of information about Hodginson's early life. He worked on a railroad, telegraph and as a salesman for a correspondence school before moving into the entertainment business. In nineteen oh seven, he opened one of the first movie theaters in the United States. That was in Utah. Uh Yeah. He originally started out in Ogden and eventually spread to other places. He has some Salt Lake footprints. But Hodkinson founded Paramount Pictures in nineteen fourteen. That Paramount Pictures not what we think of today. It was strictly a distribution company, but Hodginson was completely changing the way films were distributed. Up to that point, distribution had to primary models. First, there were regional rights, also called states rights. In this model, the movie producer would sell their films to a salesperson who had a regional distribution network, and then that person, who then owned a copy of the film, would take that copy to theaters to be played for audiences. The salesperson would be paid by the theater owner. This usually meant that the same film would be played basically until it was unwatchably damaged. Because the regional person wanted to make as much money off their investment in purchasing that copy of the film as they possibly could. This meant money up front for the producer, but then the regional salesman made all the money after that. It also meant that the producer had no control over the quality of their film that the audiences might see. If you were seeing it late in the run, it might look terrible. We have all been to second run theaters and you know how it is a different experience, so imagine that getting worse and worse and worse. The second distribution model at this time was called the road show, and in this scenario, the producer would enter into a contract with a popular first run movie theater to run their movie as a limited run special engagement. So this was treated sort of like a special event. Think of it like a touring production of a play. And ticket prices reflected that the road show approach made a lot of money for producers upfront because of the higher cost to the consumer, but that also only lasted for a short period of time. These two approaches were often used in combination, so the producer would have the limited run road show and then would sell States rights copies. The road show screenings would serve as part of the advertising model to drum up interest as the film made its way into other markets through this regional rights distribution. But Paramount Pictures was designed to get out of that regional approach. Hodkinson thought that it would be better to arrange nationwide distribution plans with producers getting a cut of the profits from the box office. Instead of doing this weird we sell you the movie and you sell the movie to theaters. It was we arranged for the theaters to do this and we'll all make money together. This was so that there would be a motivation for production companies to focus on quality. Better films would draw more audience and make more money for everybody. Typically, Hodkinson took thirty five percent of the profit and the producers got and that went on as long as the picture played, so a big change from producers giving up all rights to profit once they had sold a print to a regional distributor. Also, Paramount was providing money to filmmakers as part of their deals, so while the company wasn't making movies, it was financing them. Hodkinson, with a much bigger stake in films, got exclusive distribution rights, so he got control over how and where they were shown. He would determine what markets and what specific theaters were the best match for a given film. He negotiated deals with UMAs that he arranged for marketing. This cut out the sale of Prince to regional salespeople entirely. Another interesting aspect of Paramount was that it wasn't exclusively Hodginson's company. The producers who were part of his distribution model all owned a piece of the business. They were kind of like foundational members. Hodkinson started working on this idea when he was working for the General Film Company in nineteen eleven. The General Film Company was the distribution company that was created by the Motion Picture Patents Company that is, once again the Edison Trust. But while Hodginson's test efforts in this model did really well, things did not go over so well with the Edison Trust. And we're going to talk more about the Edison Trust and its practices, but first we will take another quick sponsor break. Now. The Motion Picture Patents Company had formed in nineteen o eight in an effort to get the film industry, which was kind of all over the place in terms of technology and stability, to homogenize and settle on one standard. We've talked about this a little bit on previous shows, like when we talked about the Lumire brothers and and some others and how everybody was developing like their own films, their own cameras, etcetera. But this trust involved a lot of companies, some of which you have also heard of on the show before. So obviously Edison, Vitograph, Biograph S and a Sellig Lubin, Callum path A, Melliaise, and Gaumont. All of these different players had been involved to some degree in the patent wars around the various technologies that had been developed in this new industry. But by assembling as a trust, they had almost all of the industry's patents and they were in a position to demand that anyone showing a motion picture had to pay the Trust a licensing fee for the technology that was involved. Eastman Kodak was under contract to only sell film to licensees of the Trust. Film length was limited by the Trust to ten to twenty minutes, and actors were not credited per their rules. Yeah, the Edison Trust was like, don't credit actors because famous actors will start asking for more money. We're going to create a financial problem. Also, like they just wanted to control everything. Rolled my eyes really hard. As you can imagine, independent filmmakers and small theater owners were not big fans of the Trust. And we mentioned before that you know, there was a desire for longer films, but if they weren't letting enough film be sold to make longer films, that couldn't happen either. Some of these creators opted to import film and equipment from Europe to try to get around the trust's monopoly, and the Trust was really not keen on Hodkinson's ideas, which shifted things around in a way that would change their model of extracting licensing fees for everyone along the line in a film's production and distribution and ultimately mean that they made less money. The us In Trust was eventually undone through lost legal battles and legislation. In nineteen thirteen, the U. S. Supreme Court ruled in Bower and Ce versus O'Donnell that a patent holder couldn't fix pricing related to use of that patent. The following year, Congress passed the Clayton Antitrust Act, which was designed to regulate businesses and prevent monopolies, and its regulations meant some of the trust's practices were illegal. There was also a nineteen seventeen case of mp PC versus Universal Film Manufacturing Company, in which the court ruled in Universal's favor that once a patent was licensed, the licensey was not legally bound to the licenser for any other reason. By the time all of these paddles played out, most film producers had migrated to Hollywood to get away from the Edison Trust and do things their own way. Anyway, back to Hodginson, he approached this issue of wanting to convince his bosses that he was onto something important really methodically. At the end of nineteen twelve, he made two charts that compared the projected future of the film industry with this method in place, versus the continuation of the States rights and road show approach. He took these charts and all of this data to New York to meet with General Film Company leadership, but he was ultimately unsuccessful. Hodginson had already implemented his distribution model in northern California as part of his nineteen eleven testing, and his bosses told him to change it back to the old way. He refused and was fired in May of nineteen thirteen. Yeah, for the record, like The theater owners in in the San Francisco area loved this model. They were completely good with it. But Hodginson did not leave the industry. He believed in his new approach, and so he formed a company to distribute films for independent producers. That company, the Progressive Company, got distribution deals with Famous Players Company and Lasky Feature Play Company, which became founding members of Paramount. Before those two companies merged together. Hodginson and Zooker had actually meant when Hodginson had gone to New York to plead his case with the heads of General Film. The story behind the switch to Paramount from Progressive is that Hodginson discovered on a visit back to New York there was already a Progressive Pictures. It was in the New York phone Book. This is also when he has said to a first doodle the sketch of a mountain and stars that has been the basis of the Paramount Pictures logo ever since. Yep, they're still using it. Uh. In July, Paramount took out a two page ad in the periodical Moving Picture World touting the distributor partners throughout the US that they had arranged with a map of the United States showing how almost every part of the country could be reached through Paramount, with the call to action to local exhibitors quote, get in touch with our distributor in your territory and procure the finest motion pictures the world has ever seen. Famous Players Film Company, Jesse Alaski, Feature Play Company, and bos Were Incorporated are all called out as producers of Paramount distributed films in the ad, and to ensure that potential customers knew that foreign pictures could be obtained through Paramount as well. Along the bottom of the spread was the phrase quote and the cream of the world's market. In addition to the above manufacturers. Once the Famous Players Last Ki Corporation was formed from the two existing companies, it became the primary supplier of films to Paramount as a distributor, making up an estimated seventy of their distribution titles. There had been a bump in the road early on in the relationship among these businesses. Zooker, Laski and other producers had all signed five year contracts with Paramount, but because of the entirely new nature of the distribution model they were agreeing to, they didn't really grasp how much power it gave Hodginson until later, and that was problematic, even though producers were then making more money than ever thanks to his changes to the business. Zucker try to get out of his deal because of it, and Hodkinson would not have it and his anger, Zooker saw a bigger opportunity and made a move. On March first, nineteen fifteen, Zucker renegotiated his deal with Paramount, and this was not as you might expect a situation to get out of his existing deal early. No, it was instead to extend the contract to twenty five years. That sounds kooky, but man was he thinking eighteen steps ahead of everyone else, because over the next two months, Zooker and his friend Jesse Laski sold of their companies to Paramount. This also sounds a little crazy, but it was part of a multi layered plan to gain power for themselves. They used the money from the sales as well as alone to start buying Paramount stock on the down low until they had accumulated a combined controlling share of Paramount. On June nineteen sixteen, W. W. Hodkinson was forced to resign, as well as the Paramount treasurer, who was loyal to him. That was Raymond Pauli. Zoocker was in charge of the reorganized company and Famous Players last Kie Corporation merged with Paramount Pictures. The Paramount name was still used for distribution, while Famous Players Laskie was still the production entity. Yeah, this is one of those things that's always a little confusing whenever you're reading like business histories. It still goes on today. Right a business will get purchased by another, or they'll merge, but they'll still keep using the separate names, and that can get a little confusing. That's kind of what was going on here. We have been part of deals like that before, and we've tried to sort it out. I was gonna sarcastically say, we've never had that happen to us. Yeah, we know exactly what that's about. As for Hodkinson, who was adamantly against the vertical integration of production, distribution and exhibition that Paramount was now working with, he went on to work in a number of new distribution companies, some of which he founded for about a decade after he was ousted by Zooker, and he moved into the Dasian industry and out of entertainment in and that is where we are going to pause for this episode. Next time around will cover how Zookers newly combined entertainment Powerhouse started using this massive footprint to push competitors to the side. Are you ready for a little listener mail? I sure am. This is from our listener, Dan, who wrote, Dear Holly and Tracy, I'm very behind in my podcast listening. Dan, me too, three he said, I have only reached late May in my playlist, and I consequently missed your June twelve deadline. I'm writing because you said that you missed hearing from fans during your tours. While we might never have met, I am a total fan of you both. I love your episodes. I've been a long time listener of the podcast, going back to the days of Candice and Josh. I should know what happened to Candice. But I'm also a longtime listener stuff you should know with Josh and Chuck. I'm a Massachusetts resident and enjoy hearing about Tracy's Boston adventures during COVID nineteen. I especially missed the street festivals in the North End and getting a Java Barry at Dairy Joy in Weston. Holly, I feel a special connection to you. My family are big Disney and Star Wars fans. My wife is a runner, ran the Kessel Run at Run Disney in TV and her first marathon at Walt Disney World in eighteen. I admit to checking for your bib at that later race. If you had entered, I would have asked you to meet. She's also a stitcher and used to craft costumes for Halloween adventures for our nieces and nephews. My favorite was a toy story takeoff when she made an Emperor's or costume for my son and he got to deliver the line buzz I am your cousin when he was unmasked. I enjoyed listening to your drawing, the story of animation podcasts, his avatar work as Phineas Jay whoopee again. Best wishes do you both stay safe and thank you for all the joy you bring. I won't suggest a topic for an episode because I have always been delighted with whatever you present. Dan, Dan, that's so sweet. That is so sweet. I love it. I just wanted to read it because it's such a delightful and nice email, and I like knowing that there are people who have very overlapping universes of fandom with mine. Yeah, I have not run a marathon's it's the one I ran in because that was a lot and I didn't want to do it again. I ran a lot of halves after that still, but I haven't run in a while. But uh yeah, it's a super fun. It's one of those things. I don't I don't know how these things are going to work going for at all. So I hope that your wife, you know, finds a way through uh and and is able to do events that are interesting to her in the future, because I have no idea what running events will look like in another five years. Even I don't. I don't have any idea. But thank you, thank you, thank you for sharing this with us. It makes me so happy. And I'm always delighted when anyone listens to drawing because I really loved doing that show. Um yeah, thanks, thanks, thanks Dan for all the things. And also because I know that some people did miss that June twelve deadline to post questions and because they like me and you are I can't keep up with everything that they have to listen to. And there is no shame in that. All the things that I used to listen to podcasts during are not are not happening? Don't happen anymore? Yeah, not so much. Also just so much going on. Uh. If you would like to write to us about all the things going on them may or may not be keeping you from keeping up with your usual podcast listening, you can do that at History Podcast at iHeart radio dot com. You can also find us on social media as Missed in History, and you can subscribe to the podcast on the I heart Radio app, at Apple podcast or wherever it is you listen. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy d Wilson. Tracy, It's time for a little bit of film history, which I always love. This is one that seems especially engaging to me because of this weird time we're loving through. We can't help but look at everything through that lens um. We know that this pandemic is impacting virtually every industry in a variety of ways, and the film industry is no exception. Studios, of course shut down in the spring when the pandemic was declared, but so did theaters. Some have reopened, some have not. And as we've all seen, films that were already made or in post production have been all over the place in terms of how they've been distributed to consumers. And that, along with some other stuff that we will get to as may me think about film distribution historically, and so initially I wanted to talk about the paramount decrees of That is a case that's been in the news lately, and it's a good example of how things that have happened in the past still offer up some surprises decades later. But as I started working on it, I really found myself wanting to dig a little bit deeper into how things got to the point where that particular court case happened, starting with how the studios developed, because those two things are inextricably intertwined, and because it has roots in very early days of the motion picture industry in the US, So just how the studio system grew led to what happened legally, and this becomes a lot, so we are splitting it into two parts. So in this first episode, we're going to talk about the people and events that led to the establishment of Paramount Pictures as a key player in the movie industry. And then in the second episode, we will talk about the two court cases against Paramount out as well as other defendants in the first half of the twentieth century. And then we're going to touch on recent developments that are related to all of those legal proceedings which went on for years and years and recent means recent, very weeks ago as of when we are recording this. So to really get to the roots of this story, we have to start with Adolph Zuker. Zucker was born on January seventh, eighteen seventy three and richer Hungary, and in Hungarian his last name would be were like Zuker, but he seems to have stuck with a pretty Americanized version. By the time he was seven, he had already lost both of his parents. He never really knew his father, who died when Zucker was one, and although his mother had remarried, instead of staying with his stepfather, he was moved to live with his uncle. And though the family had hoped that Adolph would become a rabbi, his fascination was studying religious history was really all about the stories and much less about the spiritual aspects of Judaism, at least as a personal calling. As a teen, at Off instead became an apprentice to a shopkeeper, and it was through the shopkeeper's daughters that he learned about pulp fiction from the United States. The prospect of being a shopkeeper was really not any more appealing to add Off than becoming a rabbi had been. He eventually convinced his family to let him sail to the United States with a tiny sum of money it's estimated at forty dollars. Who's gonna try to start a new life Yeah, that probably didn't seem like a tiny sum at the time, but when you think about starting a brand new life somewhere else, it doesn't go very far. This whole thing was a really arduous undertaking. So first of all, he had to book the lowest class of passage for the journey UH that came with no amenities. There was a degree of peril. Their stories about how he sowed his forty dollars into the lining of his clothes so that no one would rob him when he slept on the boat. And then once he arrived in New York, he didn't know anybody and he had to start entirely from scratch to try to find work. He eventually settled into a position as a furrier's apprentice. He first, according to most stories, started out just sweeping the floor and then kind of became an apprentice, but he was also taking classes at night to improve his English, and some stories say he also took classes uh in business as well. With then just a couple of years, he had become a skilled designer and started working as an independent furrier by the age of nineteen. He moved to Chicago a year later in eighteen ninety three, when the World's Colombian Exposition was there. He wound up staying in the city and becoming a partner in the novelty for company with a fifty percent share. The business made a lot of money, but after a misstep and predicting trends, Zucker really found his fashion career on a downslide. And while he moved back to New York and got back on his feet thanks to his connections in the fur industry, Zucker was already starting to think about film. He also got married during this time in eight nine seven to a young woman named Lottie Kaufman. They stayed married for the rest of their lives. One of the four years that Zucker became friends with during this time was Marcus Low. That name is familiar to you because of Low cinemas. There's a reason Zooker even took an apartment across the street from Low, and their families remained friends for life. So he had previously mispredicted a trend, the opposite happened in nineteen o two. He made a small fortune after correctly predicting a trend for Red Fox that year, and Zucker wanted to invest all this money that he made it was somewhere between a hundred thousand and two hundred thousand dollars. His choice for this was investing into the entertainment industry at often. Several of his friends in the fur industry invested in a penny arcade that was opened by Mitchell Mark in nineteen o three. It was on Fourteenth Street near Broadway. This arcade, nicknamed Automatic Vaudeville, made a hundred thousand dollars in its first year. Zucker left the fur business completely soon after that to expand his penny arcades into other locations, and the next evolution of his entertainment business was to set up an arcade with a theater to show motion pictures. So the top floor of Zooker's Automatic Vaudeville was outfitted with two hundred seats, and for a nickel, customers could watch a fifteen minutes show. This shift to showing motion pictures required some enticement. Zucker described this change in the offerings of the arcade later in his life quote, we had this empty floor over the arcade, about forty ft by two hundred fifty feet. We put in two hundred seats and then began to worry because it seemed like an awful lot, especially as most of our customers didn't know what moving pictures were and we're used to paying one cent, not five. So we put in a wonderful glass staircase. Under the glass was a metal trough of running water like a waterfall, with red, green, and blue lights shining through. We called it Crystal Hall. And he well paid their five cents, mainly on account of the staircase, not the movies. It was a big success. This is like such great packaging, right That staircase sounds pretty cool? It does. Zoocker routinely sat in the sixth row of the Crystal Hall theater while movies ran, and he would turn around and watch the faces of the audience in the rooms behind him as they reacted to the movies that were being shown. And he noticed the patterns in what worked for audiences and what didn't, and he used that information to make decisions about what films to offer. In nineteen o four, the St. Louis World's Fair featured a novelty movie experience called Hale's Tours of the World, was named for their inventor, George C. Hale. The attraction was basically a decommissioned train car that had been set up as a theater. The theater attendants dressed as train conductors, and once they were inside, customers were shown travel films while the car rocked and shook and the bell clanged as though the whole thing we're traveling through a u a Pean town our countryside. Zooker loved this thing. Uh. He bought the rights to offer Hales Tours in New York, and then he opened Hales Tours in Coney Island, Newark and Pittsburgh after that. And initially they were really huge draws. But two things ultimately doomed the Hales Tour to a short life. One, once an audience had experienced this, the novelty kind of wore off. There were a lot of people that wanted to keep going back on the same tour. Two new films were not being made, even though Zooker is said to have asked the team at the newly formed motion picture Patents company that is also known as the Edison Trust and will reference that name a bunch coming up to make more of them, but they were not really interested in going in filming the European Countryside anymore. Despite its initial success. Hales Tours ultimately landed Zooker's company and six figure debt. While his business partners wanted to consider declaring bankruptcy, Zucker would not hear of it. He had another idea. Over the next two years, Zucker let a project that turned all of the Hales Tour locations into regular movie theaters. At the end of those two years, the company was out of debt and turning a profit, but he still had the problem of not having enough new films to satisfy him. In nine, Zooker's company combined with that of his friend Marcus Low. Low had also been opening successful theaters of his own, and once the companies combined under the Low Enterprises name at alf Zookers work shifted completely. He focused on movies entirely, not so much on the marketing or the locations or building out theaters, but just the movies first, by traveling both the US in Europe and simply going to the movies and watching the audience and kind of tracking their reactions. We're going to talk in a moment about how the information that Zooker collected led him to develop bigger projects, but first we will pause for a quick sponsor break. Adolph Zucker wanted to explore the idea of longer form content instead of the short films that were being produced in the early nineteen hundreds. He had a vision that was for a movie that was not just something for casual foot traffic crowds of a busy city, but a level of entertainment that would draw a crowd the same way as theatrical play mind and that is how he came to found the Famous Players Company, which was named for his motto of famous players and famous plays. As that motto suggests, Zucker wanted to get talent with established name recognition from theater to star in films that were based on well known plays. Yeah, in a lot of cases it was, Hey, you got famous doing this play on Broadway. Can we film that play and make it a movie. Famous Players Company was actually set up more as the distributor to release Zooker's first movie after production was already completed. That movie was Queen Elizabeth, which starred Sarah Bernhardt. The film had been shot in France and it was a British French production with the title les a mur de la Elizabet or simply La Elizabeth, and Zooker secured the U S distribution rights for either thirty five thousand dollars or forty thou dollars, depending on who you listen to. That was considered an absurdly high amount of money, but Zooker paid it, and then he had the film premiere at Broadways Lyceum Theater on July twelfth, n twelve as a huge event. The ticket price was massive for the time, it was a dollar. Remember, he had been charging five cents for his theaters in the automated vaudeville. But Zooker's effort to market this longer length film, trading on Bernhard's fame and the fresh concept of a longer form it ran more than forty minutes, was ultimately very successful. So from there things moved really quickly for Zooker. He got more Broadway actors to make films based on plays that they were already famous for this time with his company actually making the films. He made versions of The Prisoner of Zenda and The Count of Money Christo and several other films, and less than a year he also left low enterprises to focus on famous players company full time. He transitioned Mary Pickford to film, initially paying her five hundred dollars a week, which was more than two and a half times when she was making on Broadway. And then Pickford was of course catapulted to stardom, and well, she probably could never have anticipated eventually getting paid ten thousand dollars a week just a few years later. That is not adjusted. That's ten thousand dollars in nineteen teens money. In nineteen sixteen, Adolph Sucker merged his company with another film company run independently by Jesse Laski. They created famous players Laski. While Zucker was establishing himself in film, he had also gotten into business with a man named W. W. Hodginson, who was working on his own venture in the entertainment world. So we're gonna talk about Hodginson for a minute. William Hodginson was born in eighteen eighty one in Pueblo, Colorado. His middle name was either Wallace or Wadsworth, depending on what source you look at. Some sources include both of them. The Online Archive of California, for example, which has a collection of his papers, even lists him both ways in the finding aid that accompanies that collection. There's not a whole lot of information about Hodginson's early life. He worked on a railroad, telegraph and as a salesman for a correspondence school before moving into the entertainment business. In nineteen oh seven, he opened one of the first movie theaters in the United States. That was in Utah. Uh Yeah. He originally started out in Ogden and eventually spread to other places. He has some Salt Lake footprints. But Hodkinson founded Paramount Pictures in nineteen fourteen. That Paramount Pictures not what we think of today. It was strictly a distribution company, but Hodginson was completely changing the way films were distributed. Up to that point, distribution had to primary models. First, there were regional rights, also called states rights. In this model, the movie producer would sell their films to a salesperson who had a regional distribution network, and then that person, who then owned a copy of the film, would take that copy to theaters to be played for audiences. The salesperson would be paid by the theater owner. This usually meant that the same film would be played basically until it was unwatchably damaged. Because the regional person wanted to make as much money off their investment in purchasing that copy of the film as they possibly could. This meant money up front for the producer, but then the regional salesman made all the money after that. It also meant that the producer had no control over the quality of their film that the audiences might see. If you were seeing it late in the run, it might look terrible. We have all been to second run theaters and you know how it is a different experience, so imagine that getting worse and worse and worse. The second distribution model at this time was called the road show, and in this scenario, the producer would enter into a contract with a popular first run movie theater to run their movie as a limited run special engagement. So this was treated sort of like a special event. Think of it like a touring production of a play. And ticket prices reflected that the road show approach made a lot of money for producers upfront because of the higher cost to the consumer, but that also only lasted for a short period of time. These two approaches were often used in combination, so the producer would have the limited run road show and then would sell States rights copies. The road show screenings would serve as part of the advertising model to drum up interest as the film made its way into other markets through this regional rights distribution. But Paramount Pictures was designed to get out of that regional approach. Hodkinson thought that it would be better to arrange nationwide distribution plans with producers getting a cut of the profits from the box office. Instead of doing this weird we sell you the movie and you sell the movie to theaters. It was we arranged for the theaters to do this and we'll all make money together. This was so that there would be a motivation for production companies to focus on quality. Better films would draw more audience and make more money for everybody. Typically, Hodkinson took thirty five percent of the profit and the producers got and that went on as long as the picture played, so a big change from producers giving up all rights to profit once they had sold a print to a regional distributor. Also, Paramount was providing money to filmmakers as part of their deals, so while the company wasn't making movies, it was financing them. Hodkinson, with a much bigger stake in films, got exclusive distribution rights, so he got control over how and where they were shown. He would determine what markets and what specific theaters were the best match for a given film. He negotiated deals with UMAs that he arranged for marketing. This cut out the sale of Prince to regional salespeople entirely. Another interesting aspect of Paramount was that it wasn't exclusively Hodginson's company. The producers who were part of his distribution model all owned a piece of the business. They were kind of like foundational members. Hodkinson started working on this idea when he was working for the General Film Company in nineteen eleven. The General Film Company was the distribution company that was created by the Motion Picture Patents Company that is, once again the Edison Trust. But while Hodginson's test efforts in this model did really well, things did not go over so well with the Edison Trust. And we're going to talk more about the Edison Trust and its practices, but first we will take another quick sponsor break. Now. The Motion Picture Patents Company had formed in nineteen o eight in an effort to get the film industry, which was kind of all over the place in terms of technology and stability, to homogenize and settle on one standard. We've talked about this a little bit on previous shows, like when we talked about the Lumire brothers and and some others and how everybody was developing like their own films, their own cameras, etcetera. But this trust involved a lot of companies, some of which you have also heard of on the show before. So obviously Edison, Vitograph, Biograph S and a Sellig Lubin, Callum path A, Melliaise, and Gaumont. All of these different players had been involved to some degree in the patent wars around the various technologies that had been developed in this new industry. But by assembling as a trust, they had almost all of the industry's patents and they were in a position to demand that anyone showing a motion picture had to pay the Trust a licensing fee for the technology that was involved. Eastman Kodak was under contract to only sell film to licensees of the Trust. Film length was limited by the Trust to ten to twenty minutes, and actors were not credited per their rules. Yeah, the Edison Trust was like, don't credit actors because famous actors will start asking for more money. We're going to create a financial problem. Also, like they just wanted to control everything. Rolled my eyes really hard. As you can imagine, independent filmmakers and small theater owners were not big fans of the Trust. And we mentioned before that you know, there was a desire for longer films, but if they weren't letting enough film be sold to make longer films, that couldn't happen either. Some of these creators opted to import film and equipment from Europe to try to get around the trust's monopoly, and the Trust was really not keen on Hodkinson's ideas, which shifted things around in a way that would change their model of extracting licensing fees for everyone along the line in a film's production and distribution and ultimately mean that they made less money. The us In Trust was eventually undone through lost legal battles and legislation. In nineteen thirteen, the U. S. Supreme Court ruled in Bower and Ce versus O'Donnell that a patent holder couldn't fix pricing related to use of that patent. The following year, Congress passed the Clayton Antitrust Act, which was designed to regulate businesses and prevent monopolies, and its regulations meant some of the trust's practices were illegal. There was also a nineteen seventeen case of mp PC versus Universal Film Manufacturing Company, in which the court ruled in Universal's favor that once a patent was licensed, the licensey was not legally bound to the licenser for any other reason. By the time all of these paddles played out, most film producers had migrated to Hollywood to get away from the Edison Trust and do things their own way. Anyway, back to Hodginson, he approached this issue of wanting to convince his bosses that he was onto something important really methodically. At the end of nineteen twelve, he made two charts that compared the projected future of the film industry with this method in place, versus the continuation of the States rights and road show approach. He took these charts and all of this data to New York to meet with General Film Company leadership, but he was ultimately unsuccessful. Hodginson had already implemented his distribution model in northern California as part of his nineteen eleven testing, and his bosses told him to change it back to the old way. He refused and was fired in May of nineteen thirteen. Yeah, for the record, like The theater owners in in the San Francisco area loved this model. They were completely good with it. But Hodginson did not leave the industry. He believed in his new approach, and so he formed a company to distribute films for independent producers. That company, the Progressive Company, got distribution deals with Famous Players Company and Lasky Feature Play Company, which became founding members of Paramount. Before those two companies merged together. Hodginson and Zooker had actually meant when Hodginson had gone to New York to plead his case with the heads of General Film. The story behind the switch to Paramount from Progressive is that Hodginson discovered on a visit back to New York there was already a Progressive Pictures. It was in the New York phone Book. This is also when he has said to a first doodle the sketch of a mountain and stars that has been the basis of the Paramount Pictures logo ever since. Yep, they're still using it. Uh. In July, Paramount took out a two page ad in the periodical Moving Picture World touting the distributor partners throughout the US that they had arranged with a map of the United States showing how almost every part of the country could be reached through Paramount, with the call to action to local exhibitors quote, get in touch with our distributor in your territory and procure the finest motion pictures the world has ever seen. Famous Players Film Company, Jesse Alaski, Feature Play Company, and bos Were Incorporated are all called out as producers of Paramount distributed films in the ad, and to ensure that potential customers knew that foreign pictures could be obtained through Paramount as well. Along the bottom of the spread was the phrase quote and the cream of the world's market. In addition to the above manufacturers. Once the Famous Players Last Ki Corporation was formed from the two existing companies, it became the primary supplier of films to Paramount as a distributor, making up an estimated seventy of their distribution titles. There had been a bump in the road early on in the relationship among these businesses. Zooker, Laski and other producers had all signed five year contracts with Paramount, but because of the entirely new nature of the distribution model they were agreeing to, they didn't really grasp how much power it gave Hodginson until later, and that was problematic, even though producers were then making more money than ever thanks to his changes to the business. Zucker try to get out of his deal because of it, and Hodkinson would not have it and his anger, Zooker saw a bigger opportunity and made a move. On March first, nineteen fifteen, Zucker renegotiated his deal with Paramount, and this was not as you might expect a situation to get out of his existing deal early. No, it was instead to extend the contract to twenty five years. That sounds kooky, but man was he thinking eighteen steps ahead of everyone else, because over the next two months, Zooker and his friend Jesse Laski sold of their companies to Paramount. This also sounds a little crazy, but it was part of a multi layered plan to gain power for themselves. They used the money from the sales as well as alone to start buying Paramount stock on the down low until they had accumulated a combined controlling share of Paramount. On June nineteen sixteen, W. W. Hodkinson was forced to resign, as well as the Paramount treasurer, who was loyal to him. That was Raymond Pauli. Zoocker was in charge of the reorganized company and Famous Players last Kie Corporation merged with Paramount Pictures. The Paramount name was still used for distribution, while Famous Players Laskie was still the production entity. Yeah, this is one of those things that's always a little confusing whenever you're reading like business histories. It still goes on today. Right a business will get purchased by another, or they'll merge, but they'll still keep using the separate names, and that can get a little confusing. That's kind of what was going on here. We have been part of deals like that before, and we've tried to sort it out. I was gonna sarcastically say, we've never had that happen to us. Yeah, we know exactly what that's about. As for Hodkinson, who was adamantly against the vertical integration of production, distribution and exhibition that Paramount was now working with, he went on to work in a number of new distribution companies, some of which he founded for about a decade after he was ousted by Zooker, and he moved into the Dasian industry and out of entertainment in and that is where we are going to pause for this episode. Next time around will cover how Zookers newly combined entertainment Powerhouse started using this massive footprint to push competitors to the side. Are you ready for a little listener mail? I sure am. This is from our listener, Dan, who wrote, Dear Holly and Tracy, I'm very behind in my podcast listening. Dan, me too, three he said, I have only reached late May in my playlist, and I consequently missed your June twelve deadline. I'm writing because you said that you missed hearing from fans during your tours. While we might never have met, I am a total fan of you both. I love your episodes. I've been a long time listener of the podcast, going back to the days of Candice and Josh. I should know what happened to Candice. But I'm also a longtime listener stuff you should know with Josh and Chuck. I'm a Massachusetts resident and enjoy hearing about Tracy's Boston adventures during COVID nineteen. I especially missed the street festivals in the North End and getting a Java Barry at Dairy Joy in Weston. Holly, I feel a special connection to you. My family are big Disney and Star Wars fans. My wife is a runner, ran the Kessel Run at Run Disney in TV and her first marathon at Walt Disney World in eighteen. I admit to checking for your bib at that later race. If you had entered, I would have asked you to meet. She's also a stitcher and used to craft costumes for Halloween adventures for our nieces and nephews. My favorite was a toy story takeoff when she made an Emperor's or costume for my son and he got to deliver the line buzz I am your cousin when he was unmasked. I enjoyed listening to your drawing, the story of animation podcasts, his avatar work as Phineas Jay whoopee again. Best wishes do you both stay safe and thank you for all the joy you bring. I won't suggest a topic for an episode because I have always been delighted with whatever you present. Dan, Dan, that's so sweet. That is so sweet. I love it. I just wanted to read it because it's such a delightful and nice email, and I like knowing that there are people who have very overlapping universes of fandom with mine. Yeah, I have not run a marathon's it's the one I ran in because that was a lot and I didn't want to do it again. I ran a lot of halves after that still, but I haven't run in a while. But uh yeah, it's a super fun. It's one of those things. I don't I don't know how these things are going to work going for at all. So I hope that your wife, you know, finds a way through uh and and is able to do events that are interesting to her in the future, because I have no idea what running events will look like in another five years. Even I don't. I don't have any idea. But thank you, thank you, thank you for sharing this with us. It makes me so happy. And I'm always delighted when anyone listens to drawing because I really loved doing that show. Um yeah, thanks, thanks, thanks Dan for all the things. And also because I know that some people did miss that June twelve deadline to post questions and because they like me and you are I can't keep up with everything that they have to listen to. And there is no shame in that. All the things that I used to listen to podcasts during are not are not happening? Don't happen anymore? Yeah, not so much. Also just so much going on. Uh. If you would like to write to us about all the things going on them may or may not be keeping you from keeping up with your usual podcast listening, you can do that at History Podcast at iHeart radio dot com. You can also find us on social media as Missed in History, and you can subscribe to the podcast on the I heart Radio app, at Apple podcast or wherever it is you listen. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.