The Gaumont-British Picture Corporation produced and distributed films and operated a cinema chain in the United Kingdom. It was established as an offshoot of the Gaumont Film Company of France.
Gaumont-British was founded in 1898 as the British subsidiary of the French film studio Gaumont.
In 1910, Gaumont Graphic Studios were at Shepherds Bush, in London.
In 1914, the Gaumont-British film studios were opened, then completely rebuilt for sound, re-opening on 29 June 1932.
"Gaumont Graphic newsreels were exhibited as part of larger cinema programmes from 1910 to 1932, when Gaumont Sound News was launched (superseded by Gaumont British News in 1934)." [1]
Gaumont's British subsidiary became independent of its French parent in 1922 when Isidore Ostrer acquired control of Gaumont-British. In 1927 the Ideal Film Company, a leading silent film maker, merged with Gaumont.
The company's Lime Grove Studios was used for film productions, including Alfred Hitchcock's adaptation of The 39 Steps (1935), while its Islington Studios made Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes (1938). [2] In the 1930s, the company employed 16,000 people. During her first attempt in 1933 at circumnavigation of the UK, kayaker Fridel Meyer gave lectures about her journey at various landing places, for the Gaumont-British Picture Corporation. [3]
In the United States, Gaumont-British had its own distribution operation for its films until December 1938, when it outsourced distribution to 20th Century Fox.
In 1941 the Rank Organisation bought Gaumont-British and its sister company Gainsborough Pictures. Rank also took control over rival cinema chain Odeon Cinemas the same year.
Gaumont-British and its sister company Gainsborough Pictures are now owned by Gregory Motton. [4] [5] [ dubious – discuss ]
Gaumont-British were the first large British cinema chain controlling 180 cinemas by 1928 and up to 300 the following year. Fox Film Corporation indirectly acquired shares in the company to help with the expansion. [6] Gaumont-British developed or acquired large "super-cinemas". The New Victoria (later Gaumont and finally Odeon) in Bradford opened in 1930, the Gaumont in Manchester opened in 1935, and the Gaumont State Cinema in Kilburn, London, opened in 1937. They also took over many smaller cinemas across the country, eventually owning 343 properties. One such property was the Holderness Hall in Hull, built by the pioneering William Morton in 1912 and managed by him until 1930, when he could no longer compete.
Many of the Gaumont cinemas had a theatre organ for entertainment before the show, in the intervals, or after the show. The name "Gaumont" was adopted to describe the style of the flat-top organ console case (originally for the Pavilion Theatre, Shepherd's Bush), [7] for some Compton organs built from October 1931 to 1934.
Cinema exhibition in the UK was characterised by alignments between exhibitors and distributors. After the Odeon and Gaumont takeovers, Rank had access to the product of 20th Century-Fox, Paramount, Walt Disney, Columbia, Universal, United Artists, Samuel Goldwyn, RKO, Alexander Korda's London Films, Republic Pictures, British Lion Films, and its own film productions. Rivals ABC had only Warner Brothers, MGM, Monogram Pictures, and the productions of its parent company Associated British Picture Corporation (ABPC). Both cinema circuits also took films from smaller distributors. With ample supply of product, Rank maintained the separate Odeon and Gaumont release pattern for many years. Some Odeon cinemas were renamed Gaumont when transferred to Gaumont release.
In 1948, Rank merged the management and booking operations of Odeon and Gaumont. [8] As attendances declined during the 1950s, many cinemas on all circuits were closed and eventually the booking power of the Gaumont circuit declined. In January 1959, Rank restructured its exhibition operation and combined the best Gaumonts and the best Odeons in a new Rank release, while the rest were given a new "National" release. In 1961, Paramount objected to Rank consigning its Dean Martin comedy All in a Night's Work to the national circuit and henceforth switched its allegiance to the ABC circuit. With the continuing decline in attendance and cinema numbers, the National release died on its feet and henceforth there were two release patterns, Rank and ABC. There was no reason to perpetuate the Gaumont name, and in towns that lost their Odeon, the Gaumont was usually renamed Odeon within a couple of years of the latter's closure. Even so, the Gaumont name continued to linger until, in January 1987, the last Gaumont, in Doncaster, was renamed Odeon.
G.B. Equipments Ltd, a subsidiary of Gaumont-British, made a number of 16-mm film sound projectors in Britain before and during the Second World War, including models such as the G.B.-Scope A and B, Grosvenor and G.B. K and L series. [9]
After the war, G.B. Equipments Ltd decided not to manufacture models of its own. Instead they began to manufacture, under licence, models of American design by Bell & Howell. These models, branded as either G.B.-Bell & Howell or Bell & Howell-Gaumont in Great Britain, were identical to the American models except in model number. [9] During the 1950s G.B.-Bell & Howell either manufactured or distributed a number of 8 mm and 16 mm cine-cameras and projectors. [10] [11]
In 1888 Abram Kershaw established a business in Leeds making photographic items, including lanterns and projection equipment. Kershaw produced cinema projectors under the Kalee trade name (from the initials of Kershaw, A, Leeds) from the 1910s. [12] [13] Later, the company became part of Amalgamated Photographic Manufacturers, forming the Kershaw-Soho Ltd group. [14]
The brand Kalee continued to be used until the Kershaw group was acquired by Gaumont British to become G.B.-Kalee Ltd. [14] Both GB-Kershaw and GB-Kalee were used as brand names for a range of 8-mm and 16-mm cine-cameras, movie projectors, slide projectors and still cameras. [11] [15] G.B.-Kalee was also the distributor in the United Kingdom for the 16-mm and 35-mm Arriflex cinema cameras, [15] as well as a range of professional cinema projectors and sound equipment under the brand name Gaumont-Kalee. [16]
35 mm film is a film gauge used in filmmaking, and the film standard. In motion pictures that record on film, 35 mm is the most commonly used gauge. The name of the gauge is not a direct measurement, and refers to the nominal width of the 35 mm format photographic film, which consists of strips 1.377 ± 0.001 inches (34.976 ± 0.025 mm) wide. The standard image exposure length on 35 mm for movies is four perforations per frame along both edges, which results in 16 frames per foot of film.
Lime Grove Studios was a film, and later television, studio complex in Shepherd's Bush, West London, England.
Ealing Studios is a television and film production company and facilities provider at Ealing Green in west London, England. Will Barker bought the White Lodge on Ealing Green in 1902 as a base for film making, and films have been made on the site ever since. It is the oldest continuously working studio facility for film production in the world, and the current stages were opened for the use of sound in 1931.
A movie camera is a type of photographic camera that rapidly takes a sequence of photographs, either onto film stock or an image sensor, in order to produce a moving image to display on a screen. In contrast to the still camera, which captures a single image at a time, the movie camera takes a series of images by way of an intermittent mechanism or by electronic means; each image is a frame of film or video. The frames are projected through a movie projector or a video projector at a specific frame rate to show the moving picture. When projected at a high enough frame rate, the persistence of vision allows the eyes and brain of the viewer to merge the separate frames into a continuous moving picture.
The Rank Organisation is a British entertainment conglomerate founded by industrialist J. Arthur Rank in April 1937, Rank also served as the company chairman. It quickly became the largest and most vertically integrated film company in the United Kingdom, owning production, distribution, and exhibition facilities as well as manufacturing projection equipment and chairs. It also diversified into the manufacture of radios, TVs and photocopiers. The company name lasted until February 1996, when the name and some of the remaining assets were absorbed into the newly structured Rank Group plc. The company itself became a wholly owned subsidiary of Xerox and was renamed XRO Limited in 1997.
Gainsborough Pictures was a British film studio based on the south bank of the Regent's Canal, in Poole Street, Hoxton in the former Metropolitan Borough of Shoreditch, northeast London. Gainsborough Studios was active between 1924 and 1951. The company was initially based at Islington Studios, which were built as a power station for the Great Northern & City Railway and later converted to studios.
Bell and Howell is a United States brand of cameras, lenses, and motion picture machinery. It was originally founded as a company in 1907, and headquartered in Wheeling, Illinois. The company was acquired by Böwe Systec in 2003. Since 2010, the brand name has been licensed for a variety of consumer electronics products.
Cooke Optics Ltd. is a camera lens manufacturing company based in Leicester.
The Phoenix Cinema is an independent single-screen community cinema in East Finchley, London, England. It was built in 1910 and opened in 1912 as the East Finchley Picturedrome. It is one of the oldest continuously-running cinemas in the UK and shows mainly art-house films.
Odeon Cinemas Limited, trading as Odeon, is a cinema brand name operating in the United Kingdom, Ireland, Norway and Greece, which along with UCI Cinemas and Nordic Cinema Group is part of the Odeon Cinemas Group subsidiary of AMC Theatres. It uses the famous name of the Odeon cinema circuit first introduced in Great Britain in 1930. As of 2016, Odeon is the largest cinema chain in the United Kingdom by market share.
The Children's Film Foundation (CFF) is a non-profit organisation which makes films and other media for children in the United Kingdom. Originally it made films to be shown as part of children's Saturday morning matinée cinema programming. The films typically were about 55 minutes long. Over time the organisation's role broadened and its name changed, first to the Children's Film and Television Foundation in the mid-80s and to the Children's Media Foundation in 2012.
The Movietone sound system is an optical sound-on-film method of recording sound for motion pictures, ensuring synchronization between sound and picture. It achieves this by recording the sound as a variable-density optical track on the same strip of film that records the pictures. The initial version of this system was capable of a frequency response of 8500 Hz. Although modern sound films use variable-area tracks instead, modern motion picture theaters can play a Movietone film without modification to the projector. Movietone was one of four motion picture sound systems under development in the U.S. during the 1920s. The others were DeForest's Phonofilm, Warner Brothers' Vitaphone, and RCA Photophone. However, Phonofilm was principally an early version of Movietone.
The Electric Palace cinema, Harwich, is one of the oldest purpose-built cinemas to survive complete with its silent screen, original projection room and ornamental frontage still intact. It was designed by the architect Harold Ridley Hooper of Ipswich, Suffolk and opened on 29 November 1911.
ABC Cinemas was a cinema chain in the United Kingdom. Originally a wholly owned subsidiary of Associated British Picture Corporation (ABPC), it operated between the 1920s and the 1980s. The brand name was reused in the 1990s until 2000.
The Odeon Haymarket was a cinema on Haymarket, London. Three cinemas occupied the site between 1925 and 1996, predecessors being Capitol Cinema (1925–1936) and Gaumont Haymarket (1937–1959). It became the Odeon Haymarket in 1962, before closing in 1996.
Kodascope is a name created by Eastman Kodak Company for the projector it placed on the market in 1923 as part of the first 16mm motion picture equipment. The original Kodascope was part of an outfit that included the Cine-Kodak camera, tripod, Kodascope projector, projection screen, and film splicer, all of which sold together for $335. By 1924, Victor Animatograph Corporation and Bell and Howell had placed 16mm projectors on the market, so Kodak eliminated the requirement to purchase the equipment as a complete outfit and sold the projector separately. Kodascope was retained as the primary marketing name for 16mm projectors throughout their production life at Kodak.
John Stanley Coombe Beard FRIBA, known professionally as J. Stanley Beard, was an English architect known for designing many cinemas in and around London.
Bradford Odeon is the name applied to two different cinemas in central Bradford, West Yorkshire, England. One, in Godwin Street, was built in 1930 and survives; the other, in Manchester Road, was built in 1938 and demolished in 1969.
Islington Studios, often known as Gainsborough Studios, were British film studios located on the south bank of the Regent's Canal, in Poole Street, Hoxton in the former Metropolitan Borough of Shoreditch, London between 1919 and 1949. The studios are closely associated with Gainsborough Pictures which was based there for most of the studios' history. During its existence Islington Studios worked closely with its sister Lime Grove Studios in Shepherd's Bush and many films were made partly at one studio and partly at the other. Amongst the films made at the studios were Alfred Hitchcock thrillers, Will Hay comedies and Gainsborough melodramas.
The Embassy Cinema is a former cinema in the town of Chadwell Heath, Greater London. It was once known, among locals, as The Gaumont. It was designed in an art deco style, with a streamline moderne interior, by Harry Weston in 1934. The building is situated on the border of Redbridge and Barking & Dagenham, in the Chadwell Heath District Centre. The cinema closed in 1966 and became a Bingo Hall. In 2015, following the closure of the Bingo Hall, it was then used as a wedding hall/banqueting suite. The building was listed as an Asset of Community Value by the 'Chadwell Heath South Residents' Association' in August 2017 and is currently the focus of a major cinema restoration project.