Carl Laemmle

• Born: January 17, 1867
• Birthplace: Laupheim, Württemberg (now in Germany)
• Died: September 24, 1939
• Place of death: Beverly Hills, California

German-born business executive and entrepreneur

In the early 1900’s Laemmle led other independent film producers, many of whom were immigrants as Laemmle was, in successfully opposing the monopolistic East Coast Motion Picture Patents Company. He subsequently founded Universal Pictures, a major studio in the era of silent films.

Areas of achievement: Business; entertainment

Early Life

Carl Laemmle (LEHM-lee) was born in 1867 in a small village in southwestern Germany, near the former Jewish quarter of Laupheim. He was never close to his father, a land speculator, who was forty-seven when Laemmle was born, but the boy was devoted to his mother, Rebekka, who died shortly before his sixteenth birthday. By then the young Laemmle had been apprenticed for three years to a stationer in a village five hours from his home. Leaving Laupheim to join his older brother in Chicago was the next step in seeking his fortune. For years Laemmle, uneducated and without a trained craft, moved from job to job, often working as a clerk or a bookkeeper. He even tried farming in South Dakota. In his late twenties, he married the daughter of the owner of a clothing company for which he worked in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, for twelve years.

Approaching forty and the father of two children, Laemmle moved to Chicago, where he saw his first film. In 1906, Laemmle opened his first film theater, a nickelodeon he named The White Front. In only two months, he launched his second theater, in a better neighborhood, where he charged a dime for admission. He was finally on his way to becoming a business success. Laemmle soon became a leader in a film exchange, comprised mostly of Jewish immigrants, who opposed the monopoly on patents held by Thomas Edison and his American-born colleagues, a group Laemmle dubbed The Trust. In the fall of 1909, Laemmle began producing films, under the name Independent Motion Picture Company of America (IMP). A publicist at heart, Laemmle exploited audiences’ interests in performers. He created the first film “star” in Florence Lawrence, who had previously been known only as the Biograph Girl, and he also lured Mary Pickford from Biograph. By the time Laemmle and his colleagues defeated The Trust in the courts, the independents were well on their way to creating a new film industry.

Life’s Work

In 1912, Laemmle merged his IMP studio with those of three other independent studio owners to form the grandly named Universal Motion Picture Manufacturing Company; by 1915 Laemmle was firmly in control of Universal Pictures. In the silent era, Universal became one of the largest film producers in America; nevertheless, Laemmle saw every picture. Laemmle’s skill at marketing served him well as a film mogul. He made the opening of Universal City a public event, which garnered such attention that he decided to make studio tours a permanent feature. Dubbed “Big U” within the industry, Universal was most famous for its silent action films, especially Westerns and serials, and comedies with a devoted following among rural audiences. However, the studio also produced some quality films, which Laemmle proudly labeled Universal Jewels and Universal Super Jewels. Actor and director Eric von Stroheim brought his fierce talent and sophistication to Blind Husbands (1919) and Foolish Wives (1922); the brilliant actor Lon Chaney starred in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923) and The Phantom of the Opera (1925), memorable films that young studio manager Irving Thalberg had set into motion before leaving Universal for a storied career at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM).

Laemmle was violently opposed to sound film, and the slow conversion of Universal to sound in the late 1920’s kept the studio from the robust growth that other studios enjoyed in the 1930’s. Unlike the five studios that became known as The Majors, Universal did not invest in a theater chain, instead relying on independent exhibitors, another business mistake. Additionally, and somewhat ironically because of Laemmle’s role in the creation of the star system, Universal did not contract star performers, adding to the studio’s inability to prosper at the same pace as its aggressive competitors. Known as Uncle Carl in the film industry, Laemmle took the Hollywood practice of nepotism to an extreme, with dozens of relatives on the Universal payroll. In 1929, he named Carl, Jr., chief of production on his twenty-first birthday. Although the appointment met with much skepticism, the young Laemmle soon produced the hit talking picture Broadway (1929), followed by the moving antiwar drama All Quiet on the Western Front (1930). During the younger Laemmle’s short tenure, Universal produced a cluster of horror films, including Frankenstein (1931), Dracula (1931), The Mummy (1932), and The Bride of Frankenstein (1935), directed respectively by James Whale, Tod Browning, Karl Freund, and Whale. These formed the enduring legacy of the studio’s contribution to the golden age of the studio system and to American genre film.

Laemmle was among dozens of film executives who were members of the Los Angeles B’nai B’rith and among a minority who regularly conducted a Passover seder at their homes and actively observed religious holidays. In contrast to the Jewish moguls who cut all ties with their Eastern European roots, Laemmle stayed in contact with his former home. Every year (of peacetime) he visited his native village of Laupheim. After World War I, he sent provisions to destitute villagers; during the Nazi era, he sponsored hundreds of Jews who wished to immigrate to America and lobbied on behalf of the Jewish refugees who had fled Germany on board the SS St. Louis.

Laemmle’s wife Recha died in January, 1919, during the national influenza epidemic. In 1936, Laemmle sold his interests in Universal and died of cardiovascular disease only three years later.

Significance

The oldest of the silent-film moguls and the most personally conservative, German immigrant Laemmle was a businessman at heart, with his bookkeeper’s eye always on the bottom line. Diminutive in size but large in energy and ambition, “Uncle Carl” built Universal Pictures into a robust production factory during the early years of Hollywood. Beginning in 1915 and continuing for decades, Universal led the industry in the production of serials and inexpensively made genre films. Its Westerns and comedies delighted audiences, especially in the Midwest, where Laemmle had first entered the film business as an exhibitor and later became the leader of a film exchange. Although Universal’s horror films stand as the studio’s most enduring legacy, these classics, inspired by German narratives and the stylistics of German expressionism, were a small percentage of the studio’s massive output between 1915 and 1936.

Bibliography

Dick, Bernard F. City of Dreams: The Making and Remaking of Universal Pictures. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1977. The first half of this careful study concentrates on the studio that “Uncle Carl” built; many black-and-white photographs; excellent bibliography.

Drinkwater, John. The Life and Adventures of Carl Laemmle. London: W. Heinemann, 1931. Laemmle, unsuccessful at writing his own memoir, turned to Drinkwater to compose this biography, which brims with personal details.

Edmonds, I. G. Big U: Universal in the Silent Era. New York: A. S. Barnes, 1977. Includes many rare photographs of Laemmle’s IMP years and of the Universal studio in its early manifestations.

Gabler, Neal. An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood. New York: Crown, 1988. Well-researched, readable social history of the early studio system; chapter two focuses on Laemmle, the eldest of the Jewish moguls.

Koszarski, Richard. Universal Pictures: Sixty-Five Years. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1978. Heavily illustrated, this slim volume documents the museum’s retrospective exhibition of the studio in 1977 and 1978.

Weaver, Tom. Universal Horrors: The Studio’s Classic Films, 1931-1946. 2d ed. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2007. A definitive study of Universal’s most memorable genre.