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If it weren’t for Paramount’s Adolph Zukor, Hollywood might never have started making feature length movies.

Zukor was born in Hungary Jan. 7, 1873 and lost his parents while he was very young. At 16, an Orphans Board advanced him $40 to move to New York. In 1892 he visited Chicago for the Columbian Exposition and found work there in the novelty fur business. A few years later, he moved his already prosperous fur enterprise to New York where fate led him into the fledgling film industry.

A cousin asked Zukor for a $3,000 loan in 1903 to invest in a New York arcade showing Edison inventions like phonographs, electric lights & peep shows. Zukor made the loan — and then wound up going into arcades, himself, as a side venture. He opened Automatic Vaudeville on 14th Street, a busy area then for arcades & saloons. When it did over $100,000 in its first year, Zukor expanded to Boston, Newark & Philadelphia. By 1906, he’d turned his NYC arcade’s top floor into a theatre showing short films on a screen.

What put Zukor on track to becoming a movie mogul was his idea to show films that ran much longer than 20 minutes, which was then the industry standard. He recognized the potential of producing features starring “famous players in famous plays.” He named his new company Famous Players and started in 1912 by distributing the French production QUEEN ELIZABETH, starring the legendary stage actress Sarah Bernhardt. Zukor, always the showman, opened it at New York’s Lyceum, a legitimate theatre, where the 44 minute silent movie was a huge hit.

Zukor next joined forces with prominent theatre producers Charles & Daniel Frohman to cast stage stars in movies of plays whose rights the Frohmans controlled. By 1913, Zukor had produced five features, including THE PRISONER OF ZENDA & THE COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO. In 1916, he merged Famous Players with a production company run by Jesse L. Lasky, executive producer of the 1914 classic THE SQUAW MAN. Their Famous Players-Lasky studio was suddenly the major source of product for their distributor Paramount Pictures.

Plotting from the start to control Paramount, Zukor quietly acquired Paramount stock until he had enough to elect his candidate Hiram Abrams, a film distributor from Maine, as its president, replacing Paramount founder W.W. Hodkinson. It was Hodkinson who created Paramount’s logo, recalling a snow-capped Wasatch Range mountain peak from his childhood in Utah. The name Paramount came from him having seen it displayed on a New York apartment building.

Zukor’s ups & downs could and have filled books. When he died in Los Angeles June 10, 1976 at 103, he’d outlived his many rivals from Hollywood’s earliest days. Given Zukor’s own bare knuckles route to ruling Paramount, what’s been going on there lately seems in the spirit of the studio’s origins.