Pioneer Pictures, Inc. was a Hollywood motion picture company, most noted for its early commitment to making color films. Pioneer was initially affiliated with RKO Pictures, whose production facilities in Culver City, California were used by Pioneer, and who distributed Pioneer's films. Pioneer later merged with Selznick International Pictures.
History
The company was formed in 1933 by investor John Hay Whitney, who wanted to get into the motion picture business, and his cousin Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney, on the encouragement of RKO executive Merian C. Cooper, an enthusiast of the newly improved, full-color Technicolor Process No. 4, introduced in 1932.[1] The process had been used thus far only in Walt Disney cartoons. Technicolor, Inc. had been operating at a loss in 1931–1933, mostly servicing old contracts for its two-component color system, and badly needed a movie studio that would move the new three-component process into feature filmmaking.[2] Although there was no formal connection between Technicolor and Pioneer, the Whitneys invested in stock and stock options estimated at 15 percent of Technicolor.[3]
Pioneer announced that its first color production would be The Last Days of Pompeii,[4] but it was eventually filmed by RKO in black and white. Other never-realized color projects were adaptations of the novels The Three Musketeers and Green Mansions.[5] Instead, Pioneer designated the musical short La Cucaracha (1934) to be its Technicolor live-action showcase, and subsequently won an Academy Award for it.
Pioneer's Dancing Pirate (1936) was the second feature in full color
On May 18, 1933 Pioneer Pictures Inc. signed a contract with Technicolor for the production of eight feature films in the full color process, and hired RKO's Merian C. Cooper to be its vice-president in charge of production.[6]Becky Sharp (1935), an adaptation of Thackeray's novel Vanity Fair, became the first feature-length motion picture in full color, followed by Dancing Pirate (1936).[lower-alpha 1]
Helen Gahagan became the first actor under a multi-picture contract with Pioneer Pictures,[7] while John Ford was engaged to direct several color productions, starting with The Life of Custer.[8] Neither would actually make a picture with Pioneer.
The Whitneys became founding investors in the newly formed Selznick International Pictures in 1935, and Pioneer Pictures was informally merged with it the following year, after Pioneer completed its releasing obligations with RKO.[9] Directing contracts with John Ford and George Cukor were transferred.[10] Selznick International, which also used the RKO studio and Forty Acres backlot, carried out Pioneer's commitment to produce features in Technicolor. Two Selznick color productions, A Star Is Born (1937) and Nothing Sacred (1937), were in fact copyrighted to Pioneer Pictures.
Selznick International Pictures was dissolved by its owners in 1940–1943. John Hay Whitney then sold Becky Sharp, Dancing Pirate, A Star Is Born, and Nothing Sacred to the distributing company Film Classics, Inc.[11] Film Classics was acquired by Cinecolor Corporation in 1947— a company specializing in a two-component color process.[12] Cinecolor resold Film Classics to Film Classics' officers in 1949.[13]
References and notes
↑ Numerous earlier features had been made in color from 1912 onward, but used two-component color processes with limited color rendition. Technicolor Process No. 4 was a three-component system that covered the whole color spectrum.
↑ "Pioneer Pictures Formed", The New York Times, May 27, 1933, p. 11.
↑ "Inquiring Investor", The Wall Street Journal, August 16, 1933, p. 8.
David O. Selznick was an American film producer, screenwriter and film studio executive. He is best known for producing Gone with the Wind (1939) and Rebecca (1940), both of which earned him an Academy Award for Best Picture.
Becky Sharp is a 1935 American Technicolor historical drama film directed by Rouben Mamoulian and starring Miriam Hopkins who was nominated for the Best Actress Oscar. Other supporting cast were William Faversham, Frances Dee, Cedric Hardwicke, Billie Burke, Alison Skipworth, Nigel Bruce, and Alan Mowbray.
Merian Caldwell Cooper was an American aviator, United States Air Force and Polish Air Force officer, adventurer, screenwriter, film director, and producer. Cooper was the founder of the Kościuszko Squadron during the Polish–Soviet War and was a Soviet prisoner of war for a time. He was a notable movie producer, and got his start with film as part of the Explorers Club, traveling the world and documenting adventures. He was a member of the board of directors of Pan American Airways, but his love of film always took priority. During his film career, he worked for companies such as Pioneer Pictures, RKO Pictures, and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. He is also credited as co-inventor of the Cinerama film projection process. Cooper's most famous film was the 1933 movie King Kong. He was awarded an honorary Oscar for lifetime achievement in 1952 and received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1960. In 1925 he and Ernest B. Schoedsack came to Iran and made Grass: A Nation's Battle for Life, a documentary about the Bakhtiari people.
Cinecolor was an early subtractive color-model two-color motion picture process that was based upon the Prizma system of the 1910s and 1920s and the Multicolor system of the late 1920s and the 1930s. It was developed by William T. Crispinel and Alan M. Gundelfinger, and its various formats were in use from 1932 to 1955.
Color Classics are a series of animated short films produced by Fleischer Studios for Paramount Pictures from 1934 to 1941 as a competitor to Walt Disney's Silly Symphonies. As the name implies, all of the shorts were made in color format, with the first entry of the series, Poor Cinderella (1934), being the first color cartoon produced by the Fleischer studio. There were 36 shorts produced in this series.
John Hay Whitney was U.S. Ambassador to the United Kingdom, publisher of the New York Herald Tribune, and president of the Museum of Modern Art. He was a member of the Whitney family.
Selznick International Pictures was a Hollywood motion picture studio created by David O. Selznick in 1935, and dissolved in 1943. In its short existence the independent studio produced two films that received the Academy Award for Best Picture—Gone with the Wind (1939) and Rebecca (1940)—and three that were nominated, A Star Is Born (1937), Since You Went Away (1944) and Spellbound (1945).
Pandro Samuel Berman, also known as Pan Berman, was an American film producer.
Multicolor is a subtractive two-color motion picture process. Multicolor, introduced to the motion picture industry in 1929, was based on the earlier Prizma Color process, and was the forerunner of Cinecolor.
Color motion picture film refers both to unexposed color photographic film in a format suitable for use in a motion picture camera, and to finished motion picture film, ready for use in a projector, which bears images in color.
Trucolor was a color motion picture process used and owned by the Consolidated Film Industries division of Republic Pictures. It was introduced as a replacement for Consolidated's own Magnacolor process.
Natalie M. Kalmus was the executive head of the Technicolor art department and credited as the director or "color consultant" of all Technicolor films produced from 1934 to 1949.
The Prizma Color system was a color motion picture process, invented in 1913 by William Van Doren Kelley and Charles Raleigh. Initially, it was a two-color additive color system, similar to its predecessor, Kinemacolor. However, Kelley eventually transformed Prizma into a bi-pack color system that itself became the predecessor for future color processes such as Multicolor and Cinecolor.
Grand National Films, Inc was an American Poverty Row motion picture production-distribution company in operation from 1936 to 1939. The company had no relation to the British Grand National Pictures.
James Graham Stewart was an American pioneer in the field of sound recording and re-recording. His career spanned more than five decades (1928–1980), during which he made substantial contributions to the evolution of the art and science of film and television sound.
Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers were dance partners in a total of 10 films, nine of them with RKO Radio Pictures from 1933 to 1939, and one, The Barkleys of Broadway, with MGM in 1949, their only color film.
Technicolor is a series of color motion picture processes, the first version dating back to 1916, and followed by improved versions over several decades.
David O. Selznick (1902–1965) was an American motion picture producer whose work consists of three short subjects, 67 feature films, and one television production made between 1923 and 1957. He was the producer of the 1939 epic Gone With the Wind. Selznick was born in Pittsburgh and educated in public schools in Brooklyn and Manhattan. He began working in the film industry in New York while in his teens as an assistant to his father, jeweler-turned-film producer Lewis J. Selznick. In 1923, he began producing films himself, starting with two documentary shorts and then a minor feature, Roulette (1924). Moving to Hollywood in 1926, Selznick became employed at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), where he produced two films before switching to Paramount in early 1928. After helping to guide Paramount into the sound era, Selznick moved to RKO Radio in 1931 where he served as the studio's executive producer. During his time at RKO he oversaw the production of King Kong (1933) and helped to develop Katharine Hepburn and Myrna Loy into major film stars.
RKO Radio Pictures, Inc., commonly called RKO Pictures or simply RKO, was an American film production and distribution company that was one of the "Big Five" major film studios of Hollywood's Golden Age. The business was formed after the Keith-Albee-Orpheum (KAO) theater chain and Joseph P. Kennedy's Film Booking Offices of America (FBO) studio were brought together under the control of the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) in October 1928. RCA chief David Sarnoff engineered the merger to create a market for the company's sound-on-film technology, RCA Photophone. By the mid-1940s, the studio was under the control of investor Floyd Odlum.
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