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Adolph Zukor
Born	(1873-01-07)January 7, 1873 Ricse, Austria-Hungary
Died	June 10, 1976(1976-06-10) (aged 103) Los Angeles, California, U.S.
Occupation	Film producer
Years active	1903–1959
Known for	founder of Paramount Pictures
Spouse(s)	Lottie Kaufman (1897–1956)
Children	2

Adolph Zukor (January 7, 1873 – June 10, 1976)^[1] was an Austro-Hungarian-born American film producer best known as founder of Paramount Pictures.^[2]

Early life

Zukor was born to a Jewish family in Ricse, Hungary, which was then a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. At a young age he became an orphan so he decided to immigrate to the USA. He sailed from Hamburg on the s/s Rugia on March 1^[3] and arrived in New York City under the name Adolf Zuckery on March 16, 1891.^[4] Like most immigrants, he began modestly. After having landed in New York City, he started working in an upholstery shop. A friend then got him a job as an apprentice at a furrier.

Zukor stayed in New York City for two years. When he left to become a "contract" worker, sewing fur pieces and selling them himself, he was twenty years old and an accomplished designer. He was young and adventuresome, and the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago drew him to the Midwest. There he started a fur business. In the second season of operation, Zukor's Novelty Fur Company expanded to 25 men and opened a branch.^[5]

Historian Neal Gabler wrote, "one of the stubborn fallacies of movie history is that the men who created the film industry were all impoverished young vulgarians..." Zukor clearly didn't fit this profile. By 1903, he already looked and lived like a wealthy young burgher, and he certainly earned the income of one. He had a commodious apartment at 111th Street and Seventh Avenue in New York City's wealthy German-Jewish section".^[5]

In 1918, he moved to New City, Rockland County, New York, where he purchased 300 acres of land from Lawrence Abraham, heir to the A&S Department Stores. Abraham had already built a sizable house, a nine-hole golf course and a swimming pool on this property. Two years later, Zukor bought an additional 500 acres, built a night house, guest house, movie theater, locker room, greenhouses, garages, staff quarters and hired golf architect A.W. Tillinghast to build an 18-hole championship golf course. Today, Zukor's estate is the private Paramount Country Club.^[6]

Early movie career

In 1903, he became involved in the motion picture industry when his cousin, Max Goldstein, approached him for a loan to invest in a chain of theaters. These theaters were started by Mitchell Mark in Buffalo, New York and hosted Edisonia Hall. Mark needed investors to expand his chain of theaters. Zukor gave Goldstein the loan and formed a partnership with Mark and Morris Kohn, a friend of Zukor's who also invested in the theaters. Zukor, Mark, and Kohn opened a penny arcade operating as The Automatic Vaudeville Company on 14th Street in New York City. They soon opened branches in Boston, Philadelphia, and Newark, with funding by Marcus Loew.^[7][8]

Famous Players

Zukor is honored with a dinner marking his 25 years in the film industry in 1936. From left: Frank Lloyd, Joseph M. Schenck, George Jessel, Zukor, Darryl F. Zanuck, Louis B. Mayer, and Jesse L. Lasky.

In 1912, Adolph Zukor established Famous Players Film Company—advertising "Famous Players in Famous Plays"—as the American distribution company for the French film production Les Amours de la reine Élisabeth starring Sarah Bernhardt.^[9] The following year he obtained the financial backing of the Frohman brothers, the powerful New York City theatre impresarios. Their primary goal was to bring noted stage actors to the screen and Zukor went on to produce The Prisoner of Zenda (1913). He purchased an armory on 26th Street in Manhattan and converted it into Chelsea Studios, a movie studio that is still used today.^[10]

In 1916, the company merged with Jesse L. Lasky's company to form Famous Players-Lasky.

Paramount Pictures

The Paramount Pictures Corporation was formed to distribute films made by Famous Players-Lasky, and a dozen smaller companies pulled into Zukor's corporate giant. The consolidations led to the formation of a nationwide film distribution system.

In 1917, Zukor acquired 50% of Lewis J. Selznick's Select Pictures which led Selznick's publicity to wane. Later, however, Selznick bought out Zukor's share of Select Pictures.^[11]

Zukor shed most of his early partners; the Frohman brothers, Hodkinson and Goldwyn were out by 1917.

In 1919, the company bought 135 theaters in the Southern states, making the producing concern the first that guaranteed exhibition of its own product in its own theaters.^[12] He revolutionized the film industry by organizing production, distribution, and exhibition within a single company.

Zukor believed in stars. He signed many of the leading early stars, including Mary Pickford, Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle, Marguerite Clark, Pauline Frederick, Douglas Fairbanks, Gloria Swanson, Rudolph Valentino, and Wallace Reid. With so many important players, Zukor also pioneered "Block Booking" for Paramount Pictures, which meant that an exhibitor who wanted a particular star's films had to buy a year's worth of other Paramount productions. It was this system that gave Paramount a leading position in the 1920s and 1930s, but which led the government to pursue it on antitrust grounds for more than twenty years.

Zukor was the driving force behind Paramount's success. Through the teens and twenties, he also built the Publix Theatres Corporation, a chain of nearly 2,000 screens. He also ran two production studios, one in Astoria, New York (now the Kaufman Astoria Studios) and the other in Hollywood, California.

In 1926, Zukor hired independent producer B. P. Schulberg, who had an unerring eye for new talent, to run the new West Coast operations. They purchased the Robert Brunton Studios, a 26-acre facility at 5451 Marathon Street for US$1 million.^[12] In 1927, Famous Players-Lasky took the name Paramount Famous Lasky Corporation. Three years later, because of the importance of the Publix Theatres, it became Paramount Publix Corporation.

Zukor was now turning out 60 features a year. He made deals to show them all in theaters controlled by Loew's Enterprises, and also continued to add more theaters to his own chain. By 1920 he was in a position to charge what he wished for film rentals. Thus he pioneered the concept, now the accepted practice in the film industry, by which the distributor charges the exhibitor a percentage of box-office receipts.

Zukor, ever the impresario, bought a huge plot of ground at Broadway and 43d Street, over objections of his board of directors, to build the Paramount Theater and office building, a 39-story building that had its grand opening in 1926. He managed to keep stars like Pola Negri, Gloria Swanson, and most important of all, Mary Pickford, under contract and happy to stay at Paramount. At one point Miss Pickford told Zukor: "You know, for years I've dreamed of making $20,000 a year before I was 20, and I'll be 20 very soon."

"I could take a hint," Zukor recalled wryly. "She got the $20,000, and before long I was paying her $100,000 a year. Mary was a terrific businessman."^[12]

Zukor was, primarily, also a businessman. "He did not take the same personal, down-to-the-last-detail interest in the making of his movies that producer-executives such as Samuel Goldwyn and Louis B. Mayer did," wrote The New York Times in Zukor's obit at the age of 103. He became an early investor in radio, taking a 50% interest in the new Columbia Broadcasting System in 1928, but selling it within a few years.

Partner Lasky hung on until 1932, when Paramount nearly collapsed in the Depression years, and he was blamed for this and tossed out. The following year, Paramount went into receivership. Zukor's over-expansion and use of overvalued Paramount stock for purchases were ultimately at fault. A bank-mandated reorganization team kept the company intact, and, miraculously, Zukor was kept on. In 1935, Paramount-Publix theater chain went bankrupt. In 1936, Barney Balaban became president, and Zukor was bumped up to chairman of the board. In this role, Zukor reorganized the company as Paramount Pictures, Inc. and was able to successfully bring the studio out of bankruptcy.

He eventually spent most of his time in New York, but spent the winter months in Hollywood to check on his studio. He served as president until 1936 when he was elevated to chairman of the board. He retired from Paramount Pictures in 1959 and in 1964 stepped down as chairman and assumed Chairman Emeritus status,^[13] a position he held up until his death at the age of 103 in Los Angeles.

Personal life

In 1897, he married Lottie Kaufman;^[14] they had two children, Eugene J. Zukor, who became a Paramount executive in 1916, and Mildred Zukor Loew who married Arthur Loew, son of Marcus Loew.^[15]

Zukor died by natural causes at his Los Angeles residence at age 103.

Further reading

The composition at Juhász-kút (Sheperd Well) is one of the sights of Ricse. The well and its composition was given to the village by Adolph Zukor, who was born here.

• Adolph Zukor, The Public Is Never Wrong: My 50 Years in the Picture Industry (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1953)


• David Balaban, The Chicago Movie Palaces of Balaban and Katz (Arcadia Publishing, 2006)


• 
  Neal Gabler, An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood (New York: Anchor Books, 1989)


• 
  Will Irwin, The House That Shadows Built (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1928)

See also

• Centenarian

References

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Adolph Zukor.

• 
  "Obituary: Adolph Zukor Is Dead at 103; Built Paramount Movie Empire". The New York Times. June 11, 1976.
  


• 
  Adolph Zukor on IMDb


• 
  Adolph Zukor at Find a Grave