January 8, 2024: AmericanStudying Columbia Pictures: Three Origin Points

[January10th marks the 100th anniversary of the renaming, rebranding,and relaunchof Columbia Pictures, one of the foundational and most iconicAmerican film studios. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful ofColumbia’s many film innovations over its first few decades, leading up to aspecial weekend tribute to one of our preeminent 21st centuryFilmStudiers!]

On three pre-1924efforts where we can see the studio’s humbler but unmistakable origins.

1)     Screen Snapshots (1920+): AHollywood film studio is an interesting entity—obviously its primary purpose isto help produce films, and I’ll highlight a couple early examples for thisstudio in a moment; but at the same time, it exists as part of the amorphousand ambiguous yet hugely influential (even in its earlier moments) communitythat is “Hollywood.” As last year’s 1923 anniversarypost on the Hollywood Sign reflects, that community was really beingcreated in this early 1920s period, and the studio that became Columbia playeda role in that creation through ScreenSnapshots: a series of documentary shorts, launched in 1920 and continueduntil the late 1950s, that sought to portray the realities of Hollywood stars,parties, and life behind the film curtain. Hollywood was always as much aboutimage as any concrete institutions or texts, and nothing contributed more tothe creation of that image in its early days than did Screen Snapshots.

2)     Hallroom Boys (early 1920s):No film studio could survive without actual films to put out (and thus artistsunder contract with the studio), of course, and in its early days this studiofocused, as many did in the 1910s and 20s, on translating Vaudevillecomedy and acts onto the silver screen. The most famous such translationinvolved a trio of violent brothers about whom I’ll write in tomorrow’s post, butthe first Vaudeville artists under contract to this studio were the Hallroom Boys,the act founded by performers EdwardFlanagan and Neely Edwards. In recent years, spurred by specific topicslike Blackface entertainment, I’ve started to think about just howinfluential Vaudeville was on 20th century American culture, and thecentral role of Vaudeville acts in early film is another example worth further thoughtfor sure.

3)     Moreto Be Pitied Than Scorned (1922): If Screen Snapshots and the HallroomBoys helped put this new studio on the map, it certainly needed actualfeature film productions to be recognized as a serious Hollywood player (andperhaps to get to the level of success necessary for the 1924 rebranding andrelaunch). The first such feature film produced by CBCFilm Sales Corporation (named in that earlier iteration for its co-foundersHarry and Jack Cohn and Joe Brandt) was 1922’s melodrama More to Be Pitied Than Scorned, a sadly lost silent film thatstarred (frequentscreen costar of another Vaudeville legend, Fatty Arbuckle). I obviously can’tsay much about this lost film, but it’s interesting to think about casting anotherfamous comic performer in a serious film seeking to launch a new side to theemerging studio. That balance would endure into the next decades, as we’ll seeall week.

NextColumbia context tomorrow,

Ben