Hungarian founding father of Hollywood was born 150 years ago
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Adolph Zukor, the Hungarian founding father of Hollywood, was born 150 years ago. He laid the foundations of the celebrity system in the American “dream factory”. The Hungarian man who made cinema popular and profitable was born in a small village in Zemplén on 7 January 1873.
Adolph Zukor’s early years
Adolph Zukor was born in Ricse, Zemplén County. There, his father ran a grocery shop. His mother came from a German-educated, nouveau-riche family. He completed four years of elementary school in Mátészalka and then worked as a valet in a grocery in Abaújszántó. Orphaned at an early age, he arrived in America at the age of fifteen with twenty-five dollars up his sleeve and no language skills to start a new life, kultura.hu writes. Initially working in fur traders’ shops in New York and Chicago, he opened his own furrier’s shop.
First time he saw a film, he immediately realised the business potential
In 1904, while maintaining his own shop, he joined a penny booth, the rudimentary predecessor of the cinema, which screened a few minutes of films. Over time, in partnership with later cinema director Marcus Loew, he built up a network of these.
He went into business on a larger scale in 1912 with the acquisition of the American rights to the French film Queen Elizabeth, starring Sarah Bernhardt. Risking USD 25,000 of his own money, he screened the then unprecedented three-quarter-hour film despite the opposition of his business partners. He made huge profits as an exclusive distributor.
Buoyed by this success, that same year he formed the predecessor of Paramount Pictures, the Famous Players in Famous Plays Company. The company brought together leading Broadway actors to make films based on current stage successes and classic novels, the first being The Count of Monte Cristo in 1912 and The Prisoner of Zenda in 1913.
In 1914, he assembled a group capable of making thirty films a year, and at the same time opened a 3,500-seat movie palace on Broadway called the Standard. He hired well-known names such as Gloria Swanson, Mary Pickford, Pola Negri, John Barrymore and Gary Cooper, but forbade them from working for other companies.
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It merged with Jesse L. Lasky’s feature film company in 1916 and then absorbed Paramount Pictures, the distribution company, to form Paramount Pictures Corporation, chaired by Zukor, which worked with Hollywood’s top directors, notably Cecil B. deMille, and later Billy Wilder and producer David Selznick.
The First World War brought the company’s development to a halt, and by the time work resumed in 1919, rising production costs and rising gas prices forced Zukor to turn to the banks. He was the first to issue bonds and soon had five hundred cinemas under his control. Paramount also began to look to Europe, setting up a subsidiary in Paris, where it produced films in six languages (including Hungarian: A kacagó asszony [The Laughing Woman], Az orvos titka [The Doctor’s Secret]).
