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Media Start: How To Become A Movie Mogul Based On Reel History

Read more articles on Movies, visual media and Investing.

March 18, 2007

Posted by neillevine

About This Editor: I am a writer. Have been writing for other sites, but expect to do most of my future work HERE! My expertise extends from the esoteric such as burning hydrogen to the unpredictability of the stock market and my writing makes me a jack of all trades and exasperated master of none. I have had some influence over national wildfire and water policy and there are hints of a change in energy policy, BUT as Samuel Goldwyn once said, "A verbal promise is not worth the paper it is written on."

         

An abbreviated review of the history of movie business in comparison and as a parallel paradigm to some competing information technologies can provide insight into the transition that major media are now undergoing.

We can start with Thomas Edison, the inventor of and an investor in motion pictures, which we all enjoy, and sound recording or music, sometimes distinct and sometimes complementary businesses as when a movie has a hit sound track.

Edison started showing brief one minute films in a peek-a-boo device that was called a kinescope in theatres that could be called nickelodeons. The industry quickly evolved into what were called two reelers or fifteen minute films shown several at a time on a screen in a theatre that often also had a live show meaning, at the time, Kodak had a good business developing film and labor was a big factor in entertainment show costs at the time. There were several two reel production companies making a pretty penny, including one owned by Edison, one run by D.W. Griffith as the primary production employee and others owned by people using money made from selling lenses and projectors and so on to produce films, including people with mere money from various other sources to invest.

In many ways, the music business developed separately, starting out with sound on tin cylinders and evolving into vinyl discs, cassettes, CDs and now digital music and iPods. The creation of diodes and other amplifying radio tubes eventually led to broadcast radio and now satellite radio and internet radio. Sheet music developed as a separate source of revenue and, at one time, was far more important than it is now. The sale of various musical instruments went through boom and bust cycles through the years, too.

So fortunes were made and lost and some of the companies now in existence such as Universal Pictures and Warners can be traced back to Edison’s time as originally start ups or the result of mergers and some like XM Satellite and Sirius Satellite are much newer as are Apple’s iTunes and iPods.

It was when a theatre owners and investor named Adolph Zukor decided that he could make more money producing a series of feature length movies, in the beginning about and hour in length, and started two companies around 1913, named Famous Players-Lasky and Paramount, to produce his films that the business evolved more closely to what it is today in terms of product. He was so successful that Paramount was for a time listed amongst the Dow Jones thirty industrials.

So the industry began its first big change and that is a story for another article.