Adolph Zukor

Adolph Zukor arrived in New York from Ricse, Hungary, in 1889 with a few dollars sewn into his vest, and rose through the fur trade before the flickering novelty of penny arcades caught his eye. With Marcus Loew he ran nickelodeons, but Zukor saw further than the cheap storefront show. He believed the movies could court the middle class if they told important stories at feature length, and in 1912 he imported a filmed play starring Sarah Bernhardt, "Queen Elizabeth," as proof of concept.

That gamble launched his Famous Players Film Company, whose motto, "Famous Players in Famous Plays," announced the ambition plainly. Zukor understood that prestige and control were the same currency. Merging with Jesse Lasky's outfit and absorbing a distribution arm, he assembled the company that became Paramount, then bent the entire industry to his will through block booking, which forced exhibitors to take his whole slate to get his stars, and through buying up theaters until he owned the pipeline from camera to box office.

By the 1920s Zukor's Paramount was the mightiest studio on earth, home to Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, Gloria Swanson, Rudolph Valentino, and the young Cecil B. DeMille. His methods drew federal antitrust scrutiny that would eventually reshape Hollywood, but the vertically integrated model he pioneered defined the studio era.

The Depression nearly destroyed him; Paramount fell into receivership and Zukor was pushed toward the ceremonial margins, retained as a courtly chairman while younger executives ran the shop. He accepted the role with a survivor's grace and simply refused to leave, outlasting nearly every rival he had ever fought. He received an honorary Academy Award in 1949 as "a man who has been called the father of the feature film in America," and lived on as Hollywood's living memory until his death in 1976 at the age of 103.