Image via University Press of Kentucky
Engulfed
W.W. Hodkinson isn’t a name recalled often by film historians. And yet, it was Hodkinson who picked the Paramount name out of a New York phone directory because he liked its sound. With the name conjuring an image of Pike’s Peak in his mind, he sketched a logo of a mountain and crowned it with a circlet of star. The name and logo, and not much else, have survived for 110 years.
With Engulfed, Bernard F. Dick focuses as much on the business of movies as the motion pictures themselves. Born as a film distributing company, Paramount was wrested from Hodkinson by Hollywood pioneer Adolph Zukor. Like the corporate logo, Zukor attracted stars and great directors from Rudolf Valentino and Mae West through Cecil B. DeMille and Ernst Lubitsch. He also purchased chains of cinemas and established an industrial empire whose assembly line stretched from storyboard to neighborhood movie screen. And the empire continued to expand when Zukor took half interest in an emerging radio giant, CBS. The precedent for entertainment corporations playing on multiple platforms was set early on.
Although bankrupted by the Great Depression, Paramount was bailed out by Wall Street investors who retained Zukor as chairman of the new board they installed. Engulfed’s author, professor emeritus of communications and English at Farleigh Dickinson University, chronicles the changing production heads and summarizes their calculations. He nails Paramount’s strategy during the golden age of the studio system: they assembled a repertory company of talent with “graduation from the ranks.” Starlets sometimes became stars and a successful screenwriter could rise to become a director.
Because Paramount owned more theaters than any of the Hollywood studios, the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1948 anti-trust ruling that divested cinemas from cinema-makers was popularly called the Paramount decision. The victory over monopolies proved short lived as the corporate world became—more than ever—a hostile boardgame of moving parts.
The board room and stockholder machinations continue through the end of Engulfed. Gulf + Western took over Paramount in 1966 and the studio eventually became a component of Viacom-CBS. The new paperback edition of Engulfed brings the story up to date, but the situation is essentially unchanged. The classic Hollywood studios are merely nodes of larger entities spanning the entertainment industry (and beyond). Only the names and logos remain.
Engulfed: The Death of Paramount Pictures and the Birth of Corporate Hollywood is published by University Press of Kentucky.
