Producers Distributing Corporation

Producers Distributing Corporation was, for a few years in the mid-1920s, the vehicle of one of Hollywood's biggest names chasing independence. It grew out of a distribution outfit assembled by the industry pioneer W.W. Hodkinson, sold in late 1924 to Jeremiah Milbank, a wealthy, deeply religious, and politically conservative financier. Milbank partnered with Cecil B. DeMille, who had just walked away from Paramount after clashing with management over budgets and creative control, and the reorganized company took the name Producers Distributing Corporation.

DeMille was its center of gravity. Part of Milbank's money bought the former Thomas Ince studio in Culver City, with its Mount Vernon-replica facade, giving DeMille a home from which to produce as a full-fledged independent, free of the front-office supervision he had come to resent. He directed for the company and shepherded a slate of features meant to fill out its release schedule.

The economics never worked. PDC distributed a stream of pictures, but most of its productions lost money, and the company leaned heavily on a handful of DeMille's own films to survive. The Volga Boatman, his Russian Revolution drama, turned a profit. Above all there was The King of Kings, DeMille's reverent 1927 life of Christ, a reverential spectacle that played for years in churches and theaters around the world and did as much as anything to keep the enterprise solvent.

Spectacle alone could not save a distributor without theaters of its own. In March 1927 the small Pathé Exchange and Producers Distributing Corporation were merged under the control of the Keith-Albee-Orpheum vaudeville circuit, the same combination of theater chains and financiers then consolidating the industry. DeMille's dream of untethered independence dissolved into that larger machine, which within a year helped form RKO. The Producers Distributing name faded quickly, remembered mainly as the banner under which DeMille made one of the most widely seen religious films of the silent age.