Adolph Zukor (; ; January 7, 1873 – June 10, 1976)
was a Hungarian-American film producer best known as one of the three founders of
Paramount Pictures
Paramount Pictures Corporation, commonly known as Paramount Pictures or simply Paramount, is an American film production company, production and Distribution (marketing), distribution company and the flagship namesake subsidiary of Paramount ...
.
[Obituary '' Variety'' (June 16, 1976), p. 76.] He produced one of America's first
feature-length films, ''
The Prisoner of Zenda'', in 1913.
[
][
]
Early life
Zukor was born to an
Ashkenazi Jewish
Ashkenazi Jews ( ; also known as Ashkenazic Jews or Ashkenazim) form a distinct subgroup of the Jewish diaspora, that Ethnogenesis, emerged in the Holy Roman Empire around the end of the first millennium Common era, CE. They traditionally spe ...
family in
Ricse, in the
Kingdom of Hungary
The Kingdom of Hungary was a monarchy in Central Europe that existed for nearly a millennium, from 1000 to 1946 and was a key part of the Habsburg monarchy from 1526-1918. The Principality of Hungary emerged as a Christian kingdom upon the Coro ...
in January 1873,
which was then a part of the
Austro-Hungarian
Austria-Hungary, also referred to as the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Dual Monarchy or the Habsburg Monarchy, was a multi-national constitutional monarchy in Central Europe between 1867 and 1918. A military and diplomatic alliance, it consist ...
Empire. His father, Jacob, who operated a general store, died when he was a toddler, while his mother, Hannah Liebermann, died when he was 7 years old. Adolph and his brother Arthur moved in with Kalman Liebermann, their uncle. Liebermann, a
rabbi
A rabbi (; ) is a spiritual leader or religious teacher in Judaism. One becomes a rabbi by being ordained by another rabbi—known as ''semikha''—following a course of study of Jewish history and texts such as the Talmud. The basic form of t ...
, expected his nephews to become rabbis, but instead Adolph served a three-year apprenticeship in the dry goods store of family friends. When he was 16, he decided to emigrate to the United States.
He sailed from
Hamburg
Hamburg (, ; ), officially the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg,. is the List of cities in Germany by population, second-largest city in Germany after Berlin and List of cities in the European Union by population within city limits, 7th-lar ...
on the s/s Rugia on March 1 and arrived in New York City under the name Adolf Zuckery on March 16, 1891. Like most immigrants, he began modestly. After landing in New York City, he began working in an
upholstery
Upholstery is the work of providing furniture, especially seats, with padding, springs, webbing, and fabric or leather covers. The word also refers to the materials used to upholster something.
''Upholstery'' comes from the Middle English wor ...
shop. A friend then got him a job as an apprentice at a
furrier.
Zukor stayed in New York City for two years. When he left to become a "contract" worker, sewing fur pieces and selling them himself, he was 20 years old and an accomplished designer. He was young and adventuresome, and the 1893
Columbian Exposition in
Chicago
Chicago is the List of municipalities in Illinois, most populous city in the U.S. state of Illinois and in the Midwestern United States. With a population of 2,746,388, as of the 2020 United States census, 2020 census, it is the List of Unite ...
drew him to the Midwest. There he started a fur business. In the second season of operation, Zukor's Novelty Fur Company expanded to 25 men and opened a branch.
Historian
Neal Gabler wrote, "one of the stubborn fallacies of movie history is that the men who created the film industry were all impoverished young vulgarians..." Zukor clearly didn't fit this profile. By 1903, he already looked and lived like a wealthy young
burgher, and he certainly earned the income of one. He had a commodious apartment at 111th Street and Seventh Avenue in
New York City
New York, often called New York City (NYC), is the most populous city in the United States, located at the southern tip of New York State on one of the world's largest natural harbors. The city comprises five boroughs, each coextensive w ...
's wealthy German-Jewish section".
In 1918, he moved to
New City, Rockland County, New York, where he purchased 300 acres of land from
Lawrence Abraham, heir to the A&S Department Stores. Abraham had already built a sizable house, a nine-hole golf course and a swimming pool on this property. Two years later, Zukor bought an additional 500 acres, built a night house, guest house, movie theater, locker room, greenhouses, garages and staff quarters, and hired golf architect
A.W. Tillinghast to build an 18-hole championship golf course. Today, Zukor's estate is the private
Paramount Country Club.
Early film career
In 1903, he became involved in the film industry when his cousin, Max Goldstein, approached him for a loan to invest in a chain of theaters. These theaters were started by
Mitchell Mark in
Buffalo, New York
Buffalo is a Administrative divisions of New York (state), city in the U.S. state of New York (state), New York and county seat of Erie County, New York, Erie County. It lies in Western New York at the eastern end of Lake Erie, at the head of ...
, and hosted
Edisonia Hall. Mark needed investors to expand his chain of theaters. Zukor gave Goldstein the loan and formed a partnership with Mark and Morris Kohn, a friend of Zukor's who also invested in the theaters. Zukor, Mark, and Kohn opened a
penny arcade
''Penny Arcade'' is a webcomic focused on video games and video game culture, written by Jerry Holkins and illustrated by Mike Krahulik. The comic debuted in 1998 on the website ''loonygames.com''. Since then, Holkins and Krahulik have establish ...
operating as The
Automatic Vaudeville Company
The Automatic Vaudeville Company was a short-lived American entertainment business founded in 1903 by Adolph Zukor, David Warfield and Marcus Loew, which owned a chain of penny arcades.
The company opened its first store in Union Square, Manh ...
on 14th Street in New York City. They soon opened branches in
Boston
Boston is the capital and most populous city in the Commonwealth (U.S. state), Commonwealth of Massachusetts in the United States. The city serves as the cultural and Financial centre, financial center of New England, a region of the Northeas ...
,
Philadelphia
Philadelphia ( ), colloquially referred to as Philly, is the List of municipalities in Pennsylvania, most populous city in the U.S. state of Pennsylvania and the List of United States cities by population, sixth-most populous city in the Unit ...
, and
Newark, with funding by
Marcus Loew
Marcus Loew ( ; May 7, 1870 – September 5, 1927) was an American business magnate and a pioneer of the motion picture industry who formed Loew's Theatres and the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer film studio (MGM).
Life and career
Loew was born in New York ...
.
By 1910, Zukor already owned a nickelodeon chain and became Leow's partner in a theater circuit.
Two years later, he sold his shares in Loew's company in order to purchase the French film, ''Queen Elizabeth''.
Famous Players

In 1912, Adolph Zukor established
Famous Players Film Company—advertising "Famous Players in Famous Plays"—as the American distribution company for the
French film production ''
Les Amours de la reine Élisabeth'' starring
Sarah Bernhardt
Sarah Bernhardt (; born Henriette-Rosine Bernard; 22 October 1844 – 26 March 1923) was a French stage actress who starred in some of the most popular French plays of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, including by Alexandre Dumas fils, ...
.
[ Wu, Tim, , New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2010. . Cf. especially on the film and Sarah Bernhardt. Sections of the book are on the film industry's early days and the then independent film studios such as Paramount.] The following year he obtained the financial backing of the
Frohman brothers, the powerful New York City theatre impresarios. Their primary goal was to bring noted stage actors to the screen and Zukor went on to produce ''
The Prisoner of Zenda'' (1913). He purchased an
armory on 26th Street in Manhattan and converted it into
Chelsea Studios, a movie studio that is still used today.
In 1916, the company merged with
Jesse L. Lasky's company to form
Famous Players–Lasky.
Paramount Pictures
The
Paramount Pictures Corporation was formed to distribute films made by Famous Players–Lasky and a dozen smaller companies which were pulled into Zukor's corporate giant. The consolidations led to the formation of a nationwide film distribution system.
In 1917, Zukor acquired 50% of
Lewis J. Selznick's Select Pictures which led Selznick's publicity to wane. Later, however, Selznick bought out Zukor's share of Select Pictures.
Zukor shed most of his early partners; the Frohman brothers, Hodkinson and Goldwyn were out by 1917.
In 1919, the company bought 135 theaters in the Southern states, making the producing concern the first that guaranteed exhibition of its own product in its own theaters.
He revolutionized the film industry by organizing production, distribution, and exhibition within a single company.
Zukor believed in employing stars. He signed many of the early ones, including
Mary Pickford
Gladys Louise Smith (April 8, 1892 – May 29, 1979), known professionally as Mary Pickford, was a Canadian-American film actress and producer. A Canadian pioneers in early Hollywood, pioneer in the American film industry with a Hollywood care ...
,
Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle,
Marguerite Clark,
Pauline Frederick,
Douglas Fairbanks
Douglas Elton Fairbanks Sr. (born Douglas Elton Thomas Ullman; May 23, 1883 – December 12, 1939) was an American actor and filmmaker best known for being the first actor to play the masked Vigilante Zorro and other swashbuckler film, swashbu ...
,
Gloria Swanson
Gloria Mae Josephine Swanson (March 27, 1899April 4, 1983) was an American actress. She first achieved fame acting in dozens of silent films in the 1920s and was nominated three times for the Academy Award for Best Actress, most famously for h ...
,
Rudolph Valentino
Rodolfo Pietro Filiberto Raffaello Guglielmi di Valentina d'Antonguella (May 6, 1895 – August 23, 1926), known professionally as Rudolph Valentino and nicknamed The Latin Lover, was an Italian actor who starred in several well-known sile ...
, and
Wallace Reid
William Wallace Halleck Reid (April 15, 1891 – January 18, 1923)
was an American actor in silent film, referred to as "the screen's most perfect lover".
He also had a brief career as a racing driver.
Early life
Reid was born in St. Lou ...
. With so many important players, Zukor also pioneered "
Block Booking
Block or blocked may refer to:
Arts, entertainment and media Broadcasting
* Block programming, the result of a programming strategy in broadcasting
* W242BX, a radio station licensed to Greenville, South Carolina, United States known as ''96. ...
" for Paramount Pictures, which meant that an exhibitor who wanted a particular star's films had to buy a year's worth of other Paramount productions. That system gave Paramount a leading position in the 1920s and 1930s, but led the government to pursue it on antitrust grounds for more than 20 years.
Zukor was the driving force behind Paramount's success. Through the teens and twenties, he also built the Publix Theatres Corporation, a chain of nearly 2000 screens. He also ran two production studios, one in Astoria, New York (now the
Kaufman Astoria Studios
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 ...
) and the other in Hollywood, California.
In 1926, Zukor hired independent producer
B. P. Schulberg, who had an unerring eye for new talent, to run the new West Coast operations. Lasky and Zukor purchased the Robert Brunton Studios, a 26-acre facility at 5451 Marathon Street, for US$1 million.
In 1927, Famous Players–Lasky took the name Paramount Famous Lasky Corporation. In 1930, because of the importance of the Publix Theatres, it became the Paramount Publix Corporation.
By then, Zukor was turning out 60 features a year. He made deals to show them all in theaters controlled by
Loew's Incorporated, and also continued to add more theaters to his own chain. By 1920, he was in a position to charge what he wished for film rentals. Thus he pioneered the concept, now the accepted practice in the film industry, by which the distributor charges the exhibitor a percentage of box-office receipts.

Zukor, ever the impresario, bought a huge plot of ground at Broadway and 43d Street, over objections of his board of directors, to build the Paramount Theater and office building, a 39-story building that had its grand opening in 1926. He managed to keep stars such as
Pola Negri, Gloria Swanson, and most important of all, Mary Pickford, under contract and happy to stay at Paramount. At one point, Pickford told Zukor: "You know, for years I've dreamed of making $20,000 a year before I was 20, and I'll be 20 very soon."
"I could take a hint," Zukor recalled wryly. "She got the $20,000, and before long I was paying her $100,000 a year. Mary was a terrific businessman."
Zukor was, primarily, also a businessman. "He did not take the same personal, down-to-the-last-detail interest in the making of his movies that producer-executives such as Samuel Goldwyn and Louis B. Mayer did," wrote ''The New York Times'' in Zukor's obituary at the age of 103. He became an early investor in radio, taking a 50 percent interest in the new
Columbia Broadcasting System
CBS Broadcasting Inc., commonly shortened to CBS (an abbreviation of its original name, Columbia Broadcasting System), is an American commercial broadcast television and radio network serving as the flagship property of the CBS Entertainme ...
in 1928, but selling it within a few years.
Partner Lasky hung on until 1932, when Paramount nearly collapsed in the Great Depression years. Lasky was blamed for that and tossed out. In the following year, Paramount went into receivership. Ultimately at fault were Zukor's over-expansion and use of overvalued Paramount stock for purchases that made the company file for bankruptcy. A bank-mandated reorganization team kept the company intact, and, miraculously, Zukor was able to return as production chief. On June 4, 1935,
John E. Otterson became president. When
Barney Balaban was appointed president on July 2, 1936, Zukor was relegated to chairman of the board.
He eventually spent most of his time in New York City, but passed the winter months in Hollywood to check on his studio. He retired from Paramount Pictures in 1959 and in 1964, stepped down as chairman and assumed Chairman Emeritus status, a position he held up until his death at the age of 103 in
Los Angeles
Los Angeles, often referred to by its initials L.A., is the List of municipalities in California, most populous city in the U.S. state of California, and the commercial, Financial District, Los Angeles, financial, and Culture of Los Angeles, ...
.
Personal life and death
In 1897, he married Lottie Kaufman;
they had two children, Eugene J. Zukor, who became a Paramount executive in 1916, and Mildred Zukor Loew who married Arthur Loew, son of
Marcus Loew
Marcus Loew ( ; May 7, 1870 – September 5, 1927) was an American business magnate and a pioneer of the motion picture industry who formed Loew's Theatres and the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer film studio (MGM).
Life and career
Loew was born in New York ...
.
Zukor was a
Freemason
Freemasonry (sometimes spelled Free-Masonry) consists of fraternal groups that trace their origins to the medieval guilds of stonemasons. Freemasonry is the oldest secular fraternity in the world and among the oldest still-existing organizati ...
at Centennial Lodge No. 673, New York.
[Royal Arch Mason Magazine, Spring, 1981, p. 271]
Zukor died from natural causes at his
Los Angeles
Los Angeles, often referred to by its initials L.A., is the List of municipalities in California, most populous city in the U.S. state of California, and the commercial, Financial District, Los Angeles, financial, and Culture of Los Angeles, ...
residence at age 103 in June 1976.
He is buried at the Temple Israel Cemetery in
Hastings-on-Hudson, New York
Hastings-on-Hudson is a administrative divisions of New York#Village, village in Westchester County located in the southwestern part of the administrative divisions of New York#Town, town of Greenburgh, New York, Greenburgh in the state of New Yo ...
.
Filmography
Producer
Actor
References
Further reading

*Adolph Zukor, ''The Public Is Never Wrong: My 50 Years in the Picture Industry'' (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1953)
*David Balaban, ''The Chicago Movie Palaces of Balaban and Katz'' (Arcadia Publishing, 2006)
*
Neal Gabler, ''
An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood'' (New York: Anchor Books, 1989)
*
Will Irwin, ''The House That Shadows Built'' (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1928)
External links
*
*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Zukor, Adolph
1873 births
1976 deaths
American Ashkenazi Jews
Jewish American film people
20th-century American Jews
20th-century American businesspeople
American film studio executives
American film production company founders
Producers who won the Best Picture Academy Award
Film producers from California
Hungarian men centenarians
Paramount Pictures executives
Jews from Austria-Hungary
Academy Honorary Award recipients
American Freemasons
American men centenarians
American people of Hungarian-Jewish descent
Emigrants from Austria-Hungary to the United States
People from Borsod-Abaúj-Zemplén County
People from the Kingdom of Hungary
Hungarian film directors
Hungarian Freemasons
Fleischer Studios people
Presidents of Paramount Pictures
Members of The Lambs Club
Jewish centenarians