Paramount Pictures: 24 Stars, a Horse Barn and the 1948 Antitrust Breakup

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Paramount grew from three separate ventures. In 1912 Hungarian immigrant Adolph Zukor launched the Famous Players Film Company to sell feature-length films with stage stars to a middle-class audience. Jesse L. Lasky and first-time director Cecil B. DeMille shot The Squaw Man in a rented horse barn in the farming village of Hollywood. In 1914 Utah theater owner W.W. Hodkinson combined regional distributors into the first successful nationwide distribution network and called it Paramount. In 1916 Zukor forced a three-way merger, pushed Hodkinson out, and used stars like Mary Pickford and Rudolph Valentino to impose block booking on theater owners. In 1926 the studio bought the Balaban and Katz chain and built lavish wonder theaters, and that debt sent it into receivership in 1933.

Barney Balaban, an executive from the acquired theater chain, restructured the debt, but the 1948 Supreme Court decision in United States v. Paramount Pictures forced studios to give up their theaters. Paramount's early television bets, including KTLA and a 1938 stake in DuMont Laboratories, backfired when the FCC counted Paramount and DuMont as one owner under its five-station VHF cap. After selling the TV rights to its pre-1950 library and its Times Square building, the studio was bought in 1966 by Charles Bluhdorn's Gulf and Western, a conglomerate of zinc mines, sugar cane and car bumpers. Viacom won a 1994 bidding war for nearly $10 billion, a reunion with CBS created Paramount Global, and a 2025 merger with David Ellison's Skydance Media followed.

• The original logo carried 24 stars for the 24 actors under exclusive contract in 1916, reduced to 22 in 1967.
• Hodkinson is said to have sketched the mountain logo on a napkin, basing it on Ben Lomond in Utah.
• Block booking meant a theater that wanted one Mary Pickford hit had to take a full year of lesser pictures.
• Robert Evans oversaw The Godfather and Chinatown, and Barry Diller's high-concept era produced Saturday Night Fever and Grease.
• Under Jonathan Dolgen and Sherry Lansing, Star Trek, known inside as the franchise, supplied steady profit that backed risks like Titanic.