Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc., also referred to as Columbia Pictures, is an American film production and distribution company. It is the flagship unit of the Sony Pictures Motion Picture Group, a division of Sony Pictures Entertainment, which is one of the major film studios and a subsidiary of the Japanese conglomerate Sony Group Corporation. Columbia Pictures is one of the leading film studios in the world, and was one of the so-called "Little Three" among the eight major film studios of Hollywood's "Golden Age".Grady, Frank. "THE STUDIO ERA". umsl.edu. Retrieved March 14, 2011.

On June 19, 1918, brothers Jack and Harry Cohn and their best friend and business partner Joe Brandt founded the studio as Cohn-Brandt-Cohn (CBC) Film Sales Corporation. It adopted the Columbia Pictures name on January 10, 1924 (operating as Columbia Pictures Corporation until December 23, 1968), went public two years later, and eventually began to use the image of Columbia, the female personification of the United States, as its logo. The studio was acquired by the Coca-Cola Company in 1982, then by Sony Corporation of Japan in 1989. Columbia Pictures is presently headquartered at the Irving Thalberg Building on the former Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (currently known as the Sony Pictures Studios) lot in Culver City, California, since 1990.

In its early years, Columbia was a minor player in Hollywood, but began to grow in the late 1920s, spurred by a successful association with director Frank Capra. With Capra, Leo McCarey, George Stevens, and others, Columbia became one of the primary homes of the screwball comedy. In the 1930s, Columbia's major contract stars were Jean Arthur and Cary Grant. In the 1940s, Rita Hayworth became the studio's premier star and propelled their fortunes into the late 1950s. Rosalind Russell, Glenn Ford and William Holden also became major stars at the studio. The company was also primarily responsible for distributing Disney's Silly Symphony film series as well as the Mickey Mouse cartoon series from 1929 to 1932.

Columbia Pictures is currently one of the five live-action labels of the Sony Pictures Motion Picture Group, alongside TriStar Pictures, Screen Gems, Sony Pictures Classics, and 3000 Pictures. Columbia also releases most animated films produced by Sony Pictures Animation intended for a theatrical release.

History Early years as CBC Film Sales (1918–1924)

The studio was founded on June 19, 1918, as Cohn-Brandt-Cohn (CBC) Film Sales by brothers Jack and Harry Cohn and Jack's best friend Joe Brandt, and released its first feature film More to Be Pitied Than Scorned on August 20, 1922. The film, with a budget of $20,000, was a success, bringing in $130,000 in revenue for the company. Brandt was president of CBC Film Sales, handling sales, marketing and distribution from New York along with Jack Cohn, while Harry Cohn ran production in Hollywood. The studio's early productions were low-budget short subjects: Screen Snapshots, the Hallroom Boys (the vaudeville duo of Edward Flanagan and Neely Edwards), and the former Charlie Chaplin imitator Billy West. The start-up CBC leased space in a Poverty Row studio on Hollywood's famously low-rent Gower Street. Among Hollywood's elite, the studio's small-time reputation led some to joke that "CBC" stood for "Corned Beef and Cabbage".

Reorganization and new name CBC was reorganized as Columbia Pictures Corporation by Harry Cohn, Jack Cohn, and Joe Brandt on January 10, 1924. Harry Cohn became president in 1932 and remained head of production as well, thus concentrating enormous power in his hands. He would run Columbia for a total of 34 years, one of the longest tenures of any studio chief (Warner Bros.' Jack L. Warner was head of production or CEO longer but did not become CEO until 1956). Even in an industry rife with nepotism, Columbia was particularly notorious for having a number of Harry and Jack's relatives in high positions. Humorist Robert Benchley called it the Pine Tree Studio, "because it has so many Cohns".Thomas, Bob (1967). King Cohn: The Life and Times of Harry Cohn. London: Barrie and Rockliff. p. 40.

Brandt eventually tired of dealing with the Cohn brothers, and in 1932 sold his one-third stake to Jack and Harry Cohn. Harry took over from Brandt as president.

Columbia's product line consisted mostly of low- to moderately budgeted features and short subjects encompassing action subjects, comedies, sports films, serials, and cartoons. Columbia gradually moved into the production of higher-budget fare, eventually joining the second tier of Hollywood studios along with United Artists and Universal. Like United Artists and Universal, Columbia was a horizontally integrated company. It controlled production and distribution; it did not own any theaters.

Helping Columbia's climb was the arrival of an ambitious director, Frank Capra. Between 1927 and 1939, Capra constantly pushed Cohn for better material and bigger budgets. A string of hits he directed in the early and mid 1930s solidified Columbia's status as a major studio. In particular, It Happened One Night, which nearly swept the 1934 Oscars, put Columbia on the map. Until then, Columbia's business had depended on theater owners willing to take its films, since it did not have a theater network of its own. Other Capra-directed hits followed, including the original version of Lost Horizon (1937), with Ronald Colman, and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) with James Stewart.

In 1933, Columbia hired Robert Kalloch to be its chief fashion and women's costume designer. He was the first contract costume designer hired by the studio, and he established the studio's wardrobe department. Kalloch's employment, in turn, convinced leading actresses that Columbia Pictures intended to invest in their careers.

In 1938, the addition of B. B. Kahane as vice president would produce Charles Vidor's Those High Grey Walls (1939), and The Lady in Question (1940), the first joint film of Rita Hayworth and Glenn Ford. Kahane would later become the president of Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1959, until his death a year later.

Columbia could not afford to keep a huge roster of contract stars, so Jack Cohn usually borrowed them from other studios. At Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the industry's most prestigious studio, Columbia was nicknamed "Siberia", as Louis B. Mayer would use the loan-out to Columbia as a way to punish his less-obedient signings. In the 1930s, Columbia signed Jean Arthur to a long-term contract, and after The Whole Town's Talking (1935), Arthur became a major comedy star. Ann Sothern's career was launched when Columbia signed her to a contract in 1936. Cary Grant signed a contract in 1937 and soon after it was altered to a non-exclusive contract shared with RKO.

Many theaters relied on westerns to attract big weekend audiences, and Columbia always recognized this market. Its first cowboy star was Buck Jones, who signed with Columbia in 1930 for a fraction of his former big-studio salary. Over the next two decades Columbia released scores of outdoor adventures with Jones, Tim McCoy, Ken Maynard, Jack Luden, Bob Allen, Russell Hayden, Tex Ritter, Ken Curtis, and Gene Autry. Columbia's most popular cowboy was Charles Starrett, who signed with Columbia in 1935 and still holds the record for starring in the longest string of feature films (131 titles over 17 years).

Short subjects At Harry Cohn's insistence, the studio signed vaudeville comedians The Three Stooges in 1934. Rejected by MGM (which kept straight-man Ted Healy but let the Stooges go),Okuda, Ted; Watz, Edward (1986). The Columbia Comedy Shorts. p. 60. McFarland & Company, Inc. . the Stooges made 190 slapstick shorts for Columbia between 1934 and 1957. Columbia's short-subject department employed many famous comedians, including Buster Keaton, Charley Chase, Harry Langdon, Andy Clyde, and Hugh Herbert. Almost 400 of Columbia's 529 two-reel comedies were released to television between 1958 and 1961; to date, all of the Stooges, Keaton, Charley Chase, Shemp Howard, Joe Besser, and Joe DeRita subjects have been released to home video.

Columbia incorporated animation into its studio in 1929, distributing Krazy Kat cartoons, taking over from Paramount. The following year, Columbia served as the distributor for Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse and Silly Symphony series from Pat Powers's Celebrity Productions until 1932. In 1933, The Charles Mintz studio was re-established under the Screen Gems brand; Columbia's leading cartoon series were Krazy Kat, Scrappy, The Fox and the Crow, and (very briefly) Li'l Abner. Screen Gems was the last major cartoon studio to make black-and-white cartoons, producing them until 1946. That same year, Screen Gems shut down but had completed enough cartoons for the studio to release until 1949. In 1948, Columbia agreed to release animated shorts from United Productions of America; these new shorts were more sophisticated than Columbia's older cartoons, and many won critical praise and industry awards. Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera made TV cartoons for Columbia; Columbia asked the team for a theatrical series, and from 1959 to 1965 Columbia distributed cartoons featuring Loopy De Loop. It was Columbia's final theatrical cartoon series. In 1967, the Hanna-Barbera deal expired and was not renewed.

According to the Bob Thomas book King Cohn, studio chief Harry Cohn always placed a high priority on serials. Beginning in 1937, Columbia entered the lucrative serial market and kept making these weekly episodic adventures until 1955, after other studios had discontinued them; then the studio reissued older serials to theaters until 1966. The most famous Columbia serials are based on pulp magazine, comic-strip or radio characters: The Spider's Web (1938), Mandrake the Magician (1939), The Shadow (1940), Terry and the Pirates (1940), Captain Midnight (1942), The Phantom (1943), Batman (1943), and the especially successful Superman (1948), among many others.

Columbia also produced musical shorts, sports reels (usually narrated by sportscaster Bill Stern), and travelogues. Its Screen Snapshots series, showing behind-the-scenes footage of Hollywood stars, was a Columbia perennial the studio had been releasing since 1920; producer-director Ralph Staub kept this series going through 1958. Harry Cohn was especially proud of the longevity of the Snapshots, and only his death curtailed the series.

1940s

In the 1940s, propelled in part by the surge in audiences for their films during World War II, the studio also benefited from the popularity of its biggest star, Rita Hayworth. Columbia maintained a long list of contractees well into the 1950s; Glenn Ford, Penny Singleton, William Holden, Judy Holliday, The Three Stooges, Ann Miller, Evelyn Keyes, Ann Doran, Jack Lemmon, Cleo Moore, Barbara Hale, Adele Jergens, Larry Parks, Arthur Lake, Lucille Ball, Jock Mahoney, Kerwin Mathews, and Kim Novak.