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

[January 10^th marks the 100^th anniversary of the renaming, rebranding, and relaunch of Columbia Pictures, one of the foundational and most iconic American film studios. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of Columbia’s many film innovations over its first few decades, leading up to a special weekend tribute to one of our preeminent 21^st century FilmStudiers!]

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

1)      Screen Snapshots (1920+): A Hollywood film studio is an interesting entity—obviously its primary purpose is to help produce films, and I’ll highlight a couple early examples for this studio in a moment; but at the same time, it exists as part of the amorphous and ambiguous yet hugely influential (even in its earlier moments) community that is “Hollywood.” As last year’s 1923 anniversary post on the Hollywood Sign reflects, that community was really being created in this early 1920s period, and the studio that became Columbia played a role in that creation through Screen Snapshots: a series of documentary shorts, launched in 1920 and continued until the late 1950s, that sought to portray the realities of Hollywood stars, parties, and life behind the film curtain. Hollywood was always as much about image as any concrete institutions or texts, and nothing contributed more to the 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 artists under contract with the studio), of course, and in its early days this studio focused, as many did in the 1910s and 20s, on translating Vaudeville comedy and acts onto the silver screen. The most famous such translation involved a trio of violent brothers about whom I’ll write in tomorrow’s post, but the first Vaudeville artists under contract to this studio were the Hallroom Boys, the act founded by performers Edward Flanagan and Neely Edwards. In recent years, spurred by specific topics like Blackface entertainment, I’ve started to think about just how influential Vaudeville was on 20^th century American culture, and the central role of Vaudeville acts in early film is another example worth further thought for sure.

3)      More to Be Pitied Than Scorned (1922): If Screen Snapshots and the Hallroom Boys helped put this new studio on the map, it certainly needed actual feature film productions to be recognized as a serious Hollywood player (and perhaps to get to the level of success necessary for the 1924 rebranding and relaunch). The first such feature film produced by CBC Film Sales Corporation (named in that earlier iteration for its co-founders Harry and Jack Cohn and Joe Brandt) was 1922’s melodrama More to Be Pitied Than Scorned, a sadly lost silent film that starred Alice Lake (frequent screen costar of another Vaudeville legend, Fatty Arbuckle). I obviously can’t say much about this lost film, but it’s interesting to think about casting another famous comic performer in a serious film seeking to launch a new side to the emerging studio. That balance would endure into the next decades, as we’ll see all week.

Next Columbia context tomorrow,

Ben