Word: zukor
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Untalkative, small, muscular, shrewd, Zukor got along in the fur business. He and his partner, Morris Kohn, understood fur tradition?when a dealer tried to cheat them, one held him by the throat while the other ran to the bank to cash his check before he could stop payment. In 1897, surrounded by a tribal
...gallery which rocked and swayed to simulate the movement of an observation car?but The Great Train Robbery was a real story that ran for twelve minutes. You saw the bandits riding on their raid, the station agent working in his office. "Hale's Tours" was in debt and Zukor told Brady that moving pictures would make up its losses. Backed by Brady, he started a chain of cinema "palaces" in Newark, Boston, Pittsburgh? empty stores made into theatres with crude stages and chairs bought second-hand from bankrupt undertaking parlors. He had one real theatre with a piano?...
While he had been a furrier Zukor had known another furrier named Marcus Loew and had invested in Loew's subsequent theatre business. The consolidation of Loew's vaudeville houses, solidifying Zukor's investment, had made his fortune, for the time being, secure. He and Loew found that they had common interests. Neither owned enough houses to keep a "feature" busy the whole year. In the new Loew Co. Loew was president and Zukor nominal treasurer. Into it Zukor threw all his cinema theatres except the three he owned with Brady. Zukor said, "I could have cashed in then...
Although now a rich exhibitor, he had nothing to do with making pictures to be exhibited, an industry which had developed from Edison's kinetoscope to a small, tight trust consisting of ten producing companies. Zukor, looking for new attractions for his houses, had been thinking of production when he wrote the slogan that afterward became the name of his company?the Famous Players. Gambling all his money on his belief that there would be profits in advertising cinema actors like "legit" actors, he fought to break the trust. While his wife sold her jewels and friends loaned their savings...
...ambition was to earn $20.000 a year before she was 20, that Samuel Goldwyn's real name is Goldfish, that David Wark Griffith was once a reporter, Cecil B. De Mille a writer of vaudeville sketches, and that Playwright Eugene O'Neill's father, James O'Neill, acted in Zukor's first pictures. You learn how Ben Schulberg and Hiram Abrams. after the latter had been discharged by Zukor, organized United Artists; how Douglas Fairbanks, William S. Hart, David Wark Griffith came to fame, how Zukor bought Paramount and parted from Mary Pickford and how the War, wiping out foreign...