![]() ![]() “People were scared and fascinated, but everyone had to see these monster pictures,” says Marc. Remembering the success of 1925’s The Phantom of the Opera, Universal returned to producing creepy dramas with sinister and fantastic central characters. In 1931 Universal decided to do some low-budget, “shock value” movies to make money, and Dracula marked the first horror picture of the sound era. They were in a terrible condition,” says Marc. “They couldn’t afford the facilities plus the making of the films. Observes Marc Wanamaker, a film and LA historian and owner of Bison Archives, “These musicals were so big and costly, they were starting to break the company financially.”Īdditionally, sound was coming in, and all the studios had to spend vast sums building sound stages and investing in new equipment-all this at the same time as the Wall Street crash. One was that Universal had been losing money on their lavish Broadway musicals, such as King of Jazz (1930). Two big changes affected the movie industry around the early ‘30s. ![]() Recalls Leonard, “When ‘talkies’ came in, ‘Uncle Carl,’ as he was called, turned the reins over to his enterprising son.” Junior took a chance on something no one had made before-horror movies. As Leonard points out, Universal became, for the most part, a financially successful operation.īut the movie industry was going through a dramatic upheaval. The two films proved to be the biggest movies that Universal produced during the silent era. Soon after, Lon appeared in The Phantom of the Opera (1925), also based on a classic work of French literature, by Gaston Leroux. “It was a genius performance by Lon Chaney,” claims Leonard, and the movie was a hit. However, Victor Hugo’s classic novel was the draw, and the studio gambled on it. That, plus the unknown lead, made it a risky venture. The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923) was a comparatively expensive picture. (known as “Junior”), who discovered actor Lon Chaney on the stage and decided to put him in pictures. It was actually Carl’s son, Carl Laemmle, Jr. Universal’s first few movies were generally less flashy than those released by their rival studios but proved to be crowd-pleasing fare: mostly inexpensive melodramas, Westerns and serials. He converted 230 acres of farmland just north of Hollywood on the Cahuenga Pass into a working backlot. It was 1915 when entrepreneur Carl Laemmle opened Universal City Studios-the world’s largest motion picture production facility. “They didn’t own a chain of movie theaters as the other ‘big boys’ did, so they were a little scrappier.” But Universal was a ‘bread-and-butter’ studio,” shares film critic and historian Leonard Maltin. MGM was called the ‘Tiffany’ of movie studios-everything was ‘class.’ Paramount was considered the most sophisticated studio. “People have to understand that Universal was not one of the leading studios. While rival studios, such as Warner Bros., delivered highly popular gangster movies, Universal stuck to producing monsters, giant robots, aliens and otherworldly creatures. Indeed the famous large creatures, such as Frankenstein’s monster and the stealthy, bloodsucking killer vampire Dracula, formed the grisly backbone of Universal’s growth through the decades. ![]() One major Hollywood movie studio-the oldest one in town-still profits from the B movies that initially put them on the map. Horror movies and creature features never seem to go out of style, enjoying a perennial popularity way beyond the Halloween season. ![]()
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