Carl laemmle biography
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Carl Laemmle
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This is the extraordinary story of the German-Jewish immigrant who practically invented the modern motion picture business. Investing in nickelodeons, Carl Laemmle fought and ultimately overcame Thomas Edison's attempts to monopolize the film industry. Creating Universal Pictures in , Laemmle hired many talents who would go on to become Hollywood legends, including Walt Disney, John Ford, William Wyler and Irving Thalberg. He also hired many women directors and made Lois Weber the highest paid director on his lot. Under Laemmle's leadership, Universal became known for such classic monster movies as The Phantom of the Opera, Frankenstein, Dracula and The Hunchback of Notre Dame. He won the studio its first Oscar with the film version of Erich Maria Remarque's anti-war novel All Quiet on the Western Front. Even though the film told the story of World War I from Germany's point of view, Adolf Hitler banned th
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The roots of Universal Pictures can rightfully be traced back to when Carl Laemmle returned home to Chicago after a stint as a bookkeeper in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, and opened up a chain of nickelodeons. This in vända led to the ambitious year-old organizing a spelfilm exchange network he boldly called the Laemmle bio Service, which expanded west and north into Canada. Although he was an original member of the Edison Patents Company, he bristled at the idea of paying royalties to move to the next level: rulle production. Laemmle founded IMP (Independent Motion Picture Company) in New York in and for the next three years produced a number of economical multi-reel films while Edison's agents did their best to shut him down. Thomas Edison's General Film Company (known as "The Trust") filed incessant claims of patent infringement on those companies that refused to pay. Many of these independents (which included such future spelfilm moguls as Adolph Zukor and Jesse L. Lasky) pu
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Carl Laemmle was the founder of Universal Pictures Company and one of the founding fathers of Hollywood and the studio system
“There probably isn’t a theatre in the city today that is as bad as my first theatre. But I loved it. Everything I had in the world was tied up to that little theatre. My friends told me that I was crazy, that I would fail, that people would soon be fed up with movies and not want to see them anymore. They told me that movies would never be a big business. (…) But in spite of all they said, I had faith in this new thing that we called the nickelodeon. I’m not a prophet and I never was one, but I’m going to tell you why I believed in the movies. You see, I was a salesman.”[1]
Introduction
With these words, Carl Laemmle (born January 17, in Laupheim, Germany; died: September 24, in Los Angeles, CA), the moving pictures mogul and founding father of Hollywood summed up his success on the eve of his twentieth annivers