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Universal Studios

Universal Studios

Universal Studios: In The Beginning

Long before Universal Studios became The Entertainment Capital of LA, it was a modestly successful chicken ranch. And before then it was housed in a modest warehouse in Fort Lee, NJ. Why Fort Lee? It was the original “Hollywood,” mainly due to its proximity to Thomas Edison’s Menlo Park headquarters. It would be this proximity and bad wintry weather that would become Fort Lee’s undoing. While we picture a kindly, mad scientist when we think of Thomas Edison, the real life gentleman was a ruthless businessman who abused his patents and demanded huge royalties for his camera equipment. Not content with just selling the equipment to the studios, Edison demanded exorbitant royalties as well. Imagine if Apple required you to pay them a fee every time you posted a picture taken on an iPhone online; that was what Edison wanted to do if you used one of his cameras. Studios who ran afoul of Mr. Edison would be visited by his thugs who would rough up staff and destroy sets until they collected Mr. Edison’s royalty checks. This is not an exaggeration; Edison really ran his company this way.

It didn’t take long for the movie studios to flee out west to evade Edison and his goons. Los Angeles provided a more hospitable year round climate and enough distance from Edison to provide a safer business environment. One of the first to immigrate to Los Angeles was Carl Laemmle’s Universal Pictures. Mr. Laemmle’s ambitions always seemed to be constrained by his lack of funding. While he was more or less successful, his studio always seemed a bit undercapitalized. Upon his arrival in Hollywood, he bought a parcel of land in North Hollywood that he christened “Universal City” but it soon became clear that the property would be too small for his ambitious plans. Mr. Laemmle sold the parcel and bought what was then a chicken ranch north of Hollywood in the San Fernando Valley. This huge ranch was more befitting of the Universal City name.

This time, Carl Laemmle incorporated his property as an actual city, setting up a privately owned government to operate the vast property. At the time, this was more of a publicity stunt than an actual desire to run a city, but the gambit worked, putting Universal Pictures on the map. It was a far cry from today’s massive operation, but the seeds for the current studio and theme park were firmly planted in the sandy Los Angeles soil.

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Hollywood in Transition: Ben-Hur

The rise of television sent Hollywood into a tailspin. With television providing free entertainment in people’s homes, The motion picture industry had to figure out ways to get people to leave their houses and drive to theaters. Hollywood decided to return to its days of historic and religious epics.

Huge epics like Ben-Hur brought out audiences by giving them something they couldn’t get on a small television screen. This proved to be unsustainable since the large budgets made them bigger risks.

James Lipton, 1926 - 2020

The Golden Age of Hollywood: The Rank & File

While the studio system is often derided as giving too much control and wealth to Hollywood’s moguls instead of the actual creative types, the system actually provided a stable source of income for below the fold types.

B-List types and character actors often have to hustle these days for work. “That Guy” and “That Girl” actors often frequently pop up on television and in movies these days because they have to work to put food on the table. During Hollywood’s golden age, however, most everyone in the studio lot was a full time employee of the studio. Everyone from A-List movie stars to utility actors received a weekly paycheck and benefits. A contract player at MGM would sign a seven year contract which guaranteed him or her a steady paycheck regardless of whether they worked that week or not.

Today, most talent is hired on a contingency basis. If an actor wants to get paid, he or she must hustle for work. Back then, they were salaried employees for the studio. The studio didn’t do this out of the kindness of their hearts; during Hollywood’s golden age, the major studios could sell pretty much anything they could produce. As a result, the production of motion pictures had been turned into an assembly line process. Having a ready to go stable of actors who could be called upon at a moment’s notice to act in a picture was a cost effective way to keep movie production going.

While this provided a stable income for many, some of the biggest stars chafed under this system. In order to stay on the good side of the powers that were, they had to do as they were told. If they didn’t want to make a particular picture, it was too bad; if they wanted to keep working they had to do it. Studio titans could punish big names by denying them the opportunity to make another picture. As long as the studio kept issuing the paychecks and were following the terms of the contract, the actor had no recourse. The collapse of the studio system put power into the hands of the big name talent.

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