Paramount pictures

Paramount pictures is a large film production company that is currently owned as a subsidiary 

of the media conglomerate Viacom and was founded in 1912 as Famous players studios then renamed to paramount pictures in 1914, it is Americas oldest existing film studio and is still consistently ranked one of the top grossing movie studios. Paramount started out as a small production company known as famous players by Adolph zukor, He saw that Films mainly appealed to the working class immigrants so He and his partners Daniel and Charles Frohman planned to make Films that would appeal to the middle class by using the top theatrical players at the time as actors (which lead to the slogan famous players in famous plays) in that same year another budding film director Jesse L Lasky opened his lasky feature show company. Later that year both Zukor and Lasky released their first films through a start up company paramount pictures corporation organized by Utah based theatre owner W. W Hodkinson  who had bought several small firms and merged them together . Paramount was the first company to successfully distribute films nationwide because at the time films were sold state-wide or regionally. Because Zukor believed in stars, he signed and developed many of the leading early stars, including Mary Pickford, Marguerite Clark, Pauline Frederick, Douglas Fairbanks, Gloria Swanson, Rudolph Valentino, and Wallace Reid. With so many important players, Paramount was able to introduce "block booking", 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. The driving force of paramount was Zukor all throughout the teens and twenties, if it wasn’t for him the company wouldn’t be where it is today; he built a chain of nearly 2000 screens, ran 2 production companies and was one of the early investors in radio.  By sucessfully purchasing the balaban & katz chain in 1926 Zukor Gained the services of three people who would later become important in paramounts rise; Barney Balaban Who would later go on to become president of paramount , A. J Balaban who would later supervise all stage productions and Their Partner sam katz who would run the paramount publix theatre chain from new york city . in 1927 Famous players-lasky took on the name Paramount-Famous Lasky and then 3 years later changed to Paramount-publix Corporation because of the importance of the publix theatre chain.

Important Events:

.By 1917 Zukor had gotten rid of many of his partners including the Frohman brothers, hodkinson and Laskys brother in law samuel goldwyn and then eventually lasky in 1932 when he was blamed for the near-collapse of Paramount in the Depression years.

.Paramount-publix went into bankruptcy in 1935

.in 1936 Barney Balaban became president and Zukor became chairman of the board and sucessfully re-organized the company as paramount pictures inc

. in 1948 the U.S Sepreme court decided that movie studios could not own movie theatre chains which broke up Zukors creation and ended the classic hollywood studio system.

.in 1970 paramount pictures teamed with Universal Studios to make Cinema international corporation.

.in 1993 Viacom made a bid to merge with paramount pictures and ended up in a bidding war but won with the winning bid of 10 Billion dollars

. In 1999, Viacom bought out United Television's interests, and handed responsibility for the start-up network to the newly acquired CBS unit
.in 2005 Viacom wrote off over $28 billion from its radio acquisitions and, early that year, announced that it would split itself in two

.On December 11, 2005, The Paramount Motion Pictures Group announced that it had purchased DreamWorks SKG in a deal worth $1.6 billion

.In 2009, CBS stopped using the Paramount name in its series and changed the name of the production arm to CBS Television Studios, eliminating the Paramount name from television