A Studio for All Seasons

Starting Friday, Columbia Pictures comes home to its birthplace in Hollywood. That’s when the Pacific Cinerama Dome hosts a retrospective featuring a dozen of the studio’s most lauded films to commemorate Columbia’s 75th anniversary. It should be quite a party.

The two-week theatrical showcase will include new prints (and in some cases enhanced soundtracks) of such legendary Oscar winners as David Lean’s “Lawrence of Arabia” and “The Bridge on the River Kwai,” Fred Zinnemann’s “From Here to Eternity,” Frank Capra’s “It Happened One Night” and Elia Kazan’s “On the Waterfront.”

Never in his wildest mogul-like dreams could co-founder Harry Cohn have imagined that his 1919 film company CBC Films Sales Co. (derisively nicknamed Corned Beef and Cabbage) would evolve over the next three quarters of a century into a major Hollywood studio, much less its current incarnation as part of the entertainment-electronics conglomerate called Sony Pictures Entertainment.

The studio that was officially named Columbia Pictures in 1924 spent its first 50 years at the junction of Sunset Boulevard and Gower Street (a few blocks away from the Pacific Cinerama Dome). In 1920, Cohn first rented office and production space at Berwilla Studios in what was then known as Poverty Row, adjacent to such long-forgotten film companies as Gold Metal, Loftus, Chadwick and Wilnat Films.

As he expanded from two-reel shorts series like Hall Room Boys and Star Ranch westerns, Cohn leased Paulis Studios in 1922 and produced his first feature film, called “More to Be Pitied Than Scorned.” When CBC was renamed Columbia Pictures Corp., Cohn gradually absorbed all the surrounding offices and sound stages, aided by hits from his superstar in-house director Frank Capra, who directed his first film for the studio, “That Certain Thing,’ in 1928.

Capra would bring Columbia respectability in Hollywood and its first two best picture Oscars: “It Happened One Night” (1934) and “You Can’t Take It With You” (1938). “It Happened One Night” and Capra’s 1939 “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” (his last film for Columbia) will be shown as part of the current retrospective.

Columbia’s roller-coaster ride included such high points as the films of Rita Hayworth, Judy Holliday, Jack Lemmon and Kim Novak, and directors George Stevens, Zinnemann and Lean. The studio won best picture Oscars in every decade from the 1930s through the 1980s: the Capra films in the ‘30s; “All the King’s Men” in the ‘40s; “From Here to Eternity,” “On the Waterfront” and “Bridge on the River Kwai” in the ‘50s; “Lawrence of Arabia,” “A Man for All Seasons” and “Oliver!” in the ‘60s; “Kramer vs. Kramer” in the ‘70s; “Gandhi” and “The Last Emperor” in the ‘80s.

But there have been downsides as well. The company came close to bankruptcy in the 1970s and was hit by then-studio head David Begelman’s check-forging scandal. Columbia was saved by its purchase by Coca-Cola and was then subsequently sold to Sony Corp. in 1989. The company added a second motion picture entity in the ‘80s, TriStar Pictures (originally a co-venture with CBS and HBO), which was merged with Columbia recently.

After being purchased by Sony, Columbia moved from its home at the Burbank Studios (which it shared with Warner Bros. for the better part of two decades) to the former home of MGM in Culver City. The tyrannical Cohn, who died at the age of 67 in 1958, would undoubtedly be smiling that his Poverty Row-born company now occupies the physical property of what was once Hollywood’s crown jewel studio.

Michael Schlesinger, vice president of repertory at the studio, has supervised several major restorations in recent years, including those of “Lawrence of Arabia,” Orson Welles’ “The Lady From Shanghai,” “Taxi Driver,” “Dr. Strangelove,” “Picnic,” “The Big Chill,” “Easy Rider” and Capra’s 1928 silent “The Matinee Idol,” a film previously thought to be lost (it turned up several years ago at a film festival in Bologna, Italy).

He says he took the easy way out in selecting the 12 films for the retrospective, which will launch in L.A. and New York, then travel to major cities around the country. “All 12 films are part of the AFI’s list of the 100 greatest films and are Columbia’s most popular and enduring works,” says Schlesinger.

All the films in the series have been restored and some, like Stanley Kramer’s “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” will be shown in stereo for the first time. “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” will boast a digital soundtrack. A new 70-millimeter print of “Lawrence of Arabia” has been struck, which will take full advantage of the Cinerama Dome’s giant screen.

The other films in the series are each groundbreakers in their own way: Dennis Hopper’s “Easy Rider,” Stanley Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove,” Martin Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver” and Sydney Pollack’s “Tootsie.” In late summer the American Cinematheque will host a larger, more film-buff-oriented retrospective of Columbia’s movies, according to Schlesinger, consisting mostly of rare or long-forgotten titles.

Though the program’s contents have yet to be decided, the studio’s repertory chief certainly has a wish list. At the top is “Angels Over Broadway,” a 1940 film directed by screenwriter Ben Hecht and starring Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and Rita Hayworth. Other more recent gems which bear revisiting are Richard Brooks’ western “Bite the Bullet” and John Frankenheimer’s “The Horsemen.”

Schlesinger would also like to strike a new print of Josef von Sternberg’s adaptation of Dostoevsky’s “Crime and Punishment,” which has only been available in recent years on video. “Columbia did a lot of screwball comedies in the ‘30s, including some undeservedly obscure ones like ‘If You Could Only Cook,’ with Jean Arthur and Herbert Marshall,” says Schlesinger. He hopes to include several Columbia silent films, including Capra’s “That Certain Thing” (which is being restored) and some raunchier pre-Hays Code titles like “Circus Queen Murder,” starring Adolphe Menjou (a sequel to “Night Club Lady,” which was screened last year in a pre-Hays Code series at the Nuart).

Other works that may pop up in the Cinematheque summer retrospective include selections of Budd Boetticher’s westerns, William Castle’s horror films and shorts by great comics like Buster Keaton, Harry Langdon and Charley Chase.