The area would later become the site of the theme park Universal Studios Hollywood in 1964 (a bit more on that later). In 1915, Universal City Studios in Los Angeles was the largest motion picture studio lot in the world and Laemmle was the first movie mogul to open his studio to tourists. Like all the biggest film studios in this era, Universal would be in charge of the production, distribution and exhibition of its film output, eventually following the trend of producing most of its films in Hollywood. The men who founded these studios would all be the founders of what became the Universal Film Manufacturing Company in 1912, with Carl Laemmle serving as president. While Carl Laemmle is often credited for being the founder of Universal, Universal Pictures would not come into being until Laemmle decided to merge IMP with five other film studios: Powers Motion Picture Company (founded by Pat Powers), Champion Film Company (Mark Dintenfass), Rex Motion Picture Company (William Swanson), Nestor Film Company (David Horsley) and the New York Motion Picture Company (Charles Baumann and Adam Kessel). Laemmle moved to New York to produce his own movies, founding what would start out as the Yankee Film Company but changed to Independent Motion Pictures (IMP) in 1909. In fact, Laemmle’s promotion of the actors Florence Laurence and King Baggot in 1910 may be the first instance of stars being used to market a film. Laemmle was successful because he stood out, emphasizing the star power of actors like Mary Pickford to sell his films. By the turn of the century he was a successful bookkeeper with a keen sense for advertisement, but in 1906 he left the world of books for the new and exciting world of film, starting one of the first motion picture theaters in Chicago and challenging Thomas Edison’s monopoly on the film industry.
The story of Universal begins with a young German-born Jewish man named Carl Laemmle (pronounced “LEM-lee”) who immigrated to the United States in 1884 and settled in Chicago where he worked a number of jobs. Despite its current status as one of the most recognized studios in the world, it had a rocky history of poor management and unpredictable box office returns which makes its rise to power somewhat of an underdog story. Of the five major film studios (Disney, Warner Bros., Universal, Paramount, Columbia), the oldest and in fact the oldest surviving film studio in the United States is Universal, which was founded in 1912.
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