Adolph Zukor — “Zukor Had an Idea” (1922) 🇺🇸
“Adolph Zukor Presents” — Sarah Bernhardt in “Queen Elizabeth”
by Terry Ramsaye
One afternoon, just ten years ago now, an inconspicuous, square-set little body of a man went hurrying along with the crowds in Times Square. He had an abstract look on his face, busy with his thoughts within as he stepped along in automatic haste. He hesitated in the thick of it, paused, and came to a sudden stop.
More than likely some one stumbled over him and muttered things about people that didn’t have “sense enough to get out of the way.” People in crowds are like that.
But this preoccupied man had neither mind nor ear for the crowd just then. He elbowed his way to a quieter eddy in the stream of traffic, and hurried to jot down a note of just two words on a scrap of paper. Then he jammed it into his pocket and plunged into the surging traffic again. An expression of relief took the place of abstraction. Something important was settled.
That evening at home he remarked across the dinner table — “I have got a good name for our new company.”
“What is it?”
He thought a moment, then felt in his pocket and brought forth the crumpled paper with the note on it.
“It’s — it’s — why, I can’t make it out, now, myself!”
The soup got cold while he turned the paper, first this way, then that, trying to decipher those two scrawled words. But in the middle of the coffee it came back.
“Now I remember — ‘Famous Players!’”
The man, of course, was Adolph Zukor.
It was a good name, because it embodied and represented an actual idea. The name and the product it represented are ten years old now and, by way of memorializing this decade of Famous Players history, various pleasant affairs and functions have been announced, chief among them a visit and tour by Sarah Bernhardt, first of the Famous Players.
Because this idea that came to that man in the crowd has survived and grown to vast estate in these years, its history is peculiarly worthy of inquiry.
One may pass lightly over the earlier facts of Adolph Zukor’s arrival, at sixteen years of age, in 1890, an immigrant from Ricse, in Hungary, and his early employment sweeping a fur store in New York. It was a humble beginning, dramatically humble, but that is an essential nature of true beginnings. It is sufficient that he swept well and learned the fur trade, which he came to pursue with profit in Chicago. There is perhaps a glint of significance in the fact that he saw a need for some better device for fastening furs than the old fashioned “frog,” and proceeded to invent and patent a snap fastener. It paid because it was needed.
Doubtless the world lost an excellent furrier when Mr. Zukor returned to New York in 1903 and began to look about for something else, and in 1905 ventured into the penny arcade business, with Marcus Loew. The penny arcade of the day presented phonographic versions of song hits and peep show machines in which were motion pictures of a sort made by the American Mutoscope & Biograph Company.
Mr. Zukor had an arcade at Sixth Avenue and Fourteenth Street and another at Fourteenth Street and Broadway. Motion pictures projected on the screen were gaining a bit of attention and shortly Mr. Zukor decided to try their drawing power by converting the Sixth Avenue arcade into a theater. His Mutoscope friends and others advised him against the move. They assured him he was “crazy.” So he went ahead.
In time this “crazy idea” was applied to his Broadway place and it became the Comedy Theater, presenting motion pictures.
But the time came when the novelty of pictures that merely moved was wearing away. Mr. Zukor had the revolutionary idea that perhaps pictures that said something and meant something beyond the intricacies of “Horse Eating Hay,” a current Lubin [Siegmund Lubin] success, might be valuable.
Something of a demonstration of the merit of the idea was afforded by the Comedy Theater’s presentation of Pathé’s three-reel version of the Passion Play, made in Paris. But the producers generally took that as no precedent.
In this period the Marcus Loew Enterprises was formed and Mr. Zukor became an officer of the concern. He had less to do than formerly, and as he saw vaudeville take the ascendency in the theaters again, he got to turning over his idea. Pictures were reduced to “fillers” and “chasers” on the vaudeville programs.
In 1910, Mr. Zukor took a trip through Europe and noted that in Paris and Vienna the motion picture was being taken somewhat more seriously by the show men and the public. Theaters presenting pictures were in the better neighborhoods and patronized by better people than in the United States. The American admission price was standardized at five cents. In Europe the admissions ran from twenty-five to seventy-five cents. That was evidence in support of his persistent idea.
In the fall of 1911, Mr. Zukor came back to talk about his idea and to receive once more discouraging advice.
The motion picture magnates of the period would not listen.
Then came the determination to do the the thing anyway, independently.
Mr. Zukor brought to the service of his idea the theatrical ability and prestige of Daniel Frohman and the motion picture experience of Edward S. Porter [Edwin S. Porter], formerly of the Edison picture concern. The idea was to make motion pictures which should tell a story long enough to constitute a complete entertainment in a single subject, and to do it in a quality way. It was also proposed to draft for the screen the box office values of the stage by the employment of well known and highly competent actors — in other words, famous players.
In 1912, the Famous Players was incorporated and plans were put into motion. The first move was naturally enough to seek for the initial production the most famous of all famous players in the world.
Louis Mercanton was commissioned to engage Sarah Bernhardt and produce a picture with her in the title role. Famous Players was to finance the picture and to receive, in return, the American rights. In due time and after a deal of negotiation Mme. Bernhardt agreed and the picture was made in Paris, entitled “Queen Elizabeth.”
The cost of the picture, four reels, was $35,000.
It was a success. Then Famous Players started producing.
The next picture was “The Prisoner of Zenda,” with James K. Hackett. The roster of Famous Players since has included most of the great names of the screen. Among the earliest to adopt the Zukor idea was the Jesse L. Lasky Feature Play Company, formed in 1913 and long since absorbed, with others, into the present Famous Players-Lasky Corporation.
“Adolph Zukor presents” is a phrase that has gone around the world on the screen, and the interests built up on the original notion born in the penny arcade are of international scope. Adolph Zukor had an idea.
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Collection: Photoplay Magazine, April 1922