Cosmopolitan Productions, also often referred to as Cosmopolitan Pictures, was an American film company based in New York City from 1918 to 1923 and Hollywood until 1938.
Newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst formed Cosmopolitan in conjunction with Adolph Zukor of Paramount after Hearst's bid for entry into the motion picture business was rebuffed by United Artists.[1] The advantage of Paramount having a production deal with Cosmopolitan was that they had the film rights to stories that had appeared in the wide variety of Hearst's magazines. These included Cosmopolitan magazine (from which Hearst took the film company's name), as well as Harpers Bazaar, and Good Housekeeping. Thus the stories arrived pre-sold to the public, who were familiar with them through reading them in Hearst's magazines.[2] Hearst's magazines would also advertise and promote his films.
For its studio complex, Hearst acquired Sulzer's[4] Harlem River Park and Casino[5][6] at 126th Street and Second Avenue[7] but a fire[8] on February 18, 1923, destroyed the complex[9] while shooting Little Old New York with Marion Davies, directed by Sidney Olcott. The sets had been designed by Joseph Urban.
Cosmopolitan heavily promoted the career of Hearst's lover, actress Marion Davies. She appeared in 29 silent and 17 talking films with the company.
Due to disagreements with Paramount in the distribution of the Cosmopolitan Pictures in block booking venues, Hearst left Paramount to have his films released by other studios. Starting in 1923, they were distributed or co-produced by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer until 1934 when a disagreement with Louis B. Mayer over the film Marie Antoinette led Cosmopolitan to go to Warner Bros.[10]
Legacy
William Randolph Hearst and Robert G. Vignola.
Robert G. Vignola was a director strongly associated with Cosmopolitan Productions. He directed several films there, including the extravagant When Knighthood Was in Flower (1922), which at a cost of $1.8 million, was then the most expensive picture ever made. Director King Vidor made three comedies with Cosmopolitan: Show People (1928), The Patsy (1928) and Not So Dumb (1930), each starring Davies. One film without Davies was The Mask of Fu Manchu (1932, MGM).
Marion Davies was an American actress, producer, screenwriter, and philanthropist. Educated in a religious convent, Davies fled the school to pursue a career as a chorus girl. As a teenager, she appeared in several Broadway musicals and one film, Runaway Romany (1917). She soon became a featured performer in the Ziegfeld Follies.
John Brisben Walker was a magazine publisher and automobile entrepreneur in the United States. In his later years, he was a resident of Jefferson County, Colorado.
Herbert Brenon was an Irish-born U.S. film director, actor and screenwriter during the era of silent films through 1940.
Metro Pictures Corporation was a motion picture production company founded in early 1915 in Jacksonville, Florida. It was a forerunner of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. The company produced its films in New York, Los Angeles, and sometimes at leased facilities in Fort Lee, New Jersey. It was purchased in 1919.
Frank Wright Tuttle was a Hollywood film director and writer who directed films from 1922 to 1959.
Jetta Goudal was a Dutch-American actress, successful in Hollywood films of the silent film era.
B. P. Schulberg was an American pioneer film producer and film studio executive.
Anita Stewart was an American actress and film producer of the early silent film era.
Joseph Urban was an Austrian-American architect, illustrator, and scenic designer.
The Kaufman Astoria Studios is a film studio located in the Astoria neighborhood of Queens in New York City. The studio was constructed for Famous Players–Lasky in 1920, since it was close to Manhattan's Theater District. The property was taken over by real estate developer George S. Kaufman in 1982 and renamed Kaufman Astoria Studios.
The Love of Sunya is an American silent drama film made in 1927. It was directed by Albert Parker, and was based on the play The Eyes of Youth by Max Marcin and Charles Guernon. Produced by and starring Gloria Swanson, it also stars John Boles and Pauline Garon. A copy of The Love of Sunya survives in the Paul Killiam collection.
Film Booking Offices of America (FBO), registered as FBO Pictures Corp., was an American film studio of the silent era, a midsize producer and distributor of mostly low-budget films. The business began in 1918 as Robertson-Cole, an Anglo-American import-export company. Robertson-Cole began distributing films in the United States that December and opened a Los Angeles production facility in 1920. Late that year, R-C entered into a working relationship with East Coast financier Joseph P. Kennedy. A business reorganization in 1922 led to its assumption of the FBO name, first for all its distribution operations and ultimately for its own productions as well. Through Kennedy, the studio contracted with Western leading man Fred Thomson, who grew by 1925 into one of Hollywood's most popular stars. Thomson was just one of several silent screen cowboys with whom FBO became identified.
Block booking is a system of selling multiple films to a theater as a unit. Block booking was the prevailing practice in the Hollywood studio system from the turn of the 1930s until it was outlawed by the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc. (1948). Under block booking, "independent ('unaffiliated') theater owners were forced to take large numbers of a studio's pictures without knowing much about them. Those studios could then parcel out B movies along with A-class features and star vehicles, which made both production and distribution operations more economical." The element of the system involving the purchase of unseen pictures is known as blind bidding.
Louis Monta Bell was an American film director, producer, and screenwriter.
Thomas Harper Ince was an American silent era filmmaker and media proprietor. Ince was known as the "Father of the Western" and was responsible for making over 800 films.
When Knighthood Was in Flower is a 1922 American silent historical film directed by Robert G. Vignola, based on the novel by Charles Major and play by Paul Kester. The film was produced by William Randolph Hearst for Marion Davies and distributed by Paramount Pictures. This was William Powell's second film. The story was re-filmed by Walt Disney in 1953 as The Sword and the Rose, directed by Ken Annakin.
Little Old New York is a 1923 American silent historical drama film starring Marion Davies and directed by Sidney Olcott that was based on a play of the same name by Rida Johnson Young. The film was produced by William Randolph Hearst's Cosmopolitan production unit.
Humoresque is a 1920 American silent drama film produced by Cosmopolitan Productions, released by Famous Players–Lasky and Paramount Pictures, and was directed by Frank Borzage from a 1919 short story by Fannie Hurst and script or scenario by Frances Marion.
Grantwood is an unincorporated community straddling the boroughs of Cliffside Park and Ridgefield, just south of Fort Lee, in eastern Bergen County, New Jersey, United States.
The Harlem African Burial Ground was a segregated cemetery created in 1668 for the burial of enslaved and freed Africans in the Dutch colony of Harlem, located at what is presently 2460 2nd Avenue in New York City. It was maintained until 1858 by the Elmendorf Reformed Church, the successor of the Low Dutch Reformed Church of Harlem which founded the cemetery. Although historians of New York and Harlem, as well as church historians, were aware of the cemetery's existence, the East Harlem community was largely unaware of its history until the late 1990s when the New York City Department of Transportation (DOT) began planning the reconstruction of the nearby Willis Avenue Bridge. The investigation revealed that the construction might affect a colonial site and historic burial ground which was under the decommissioned East 126th Street Bus Depot. Per New York State law, the DOT conducted a Phase I-A historical and archeological survey, which verified the existence of the burial ground.
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