Columbia’s run of profitable years, which extended back
to its founding in 1924, finally ended in 1958, the year
of Harry Cohn’s death. By then Columbia had sustained
its contract system, centralized management, and studio
production setup (still at Gower Gulch) longer than most
of its competitors, but its recent success had been primarily a function of Cohn’s willingness to take risks and
embrace change. At the time of Harry Cohn’s death,
which came two years after the demise of his brother
Jack, Columbia’s annual revenues exceeded $100 million,
putting it on a par with once-indomitable Paramount,
Fox, and MGM and well ahead of the other studios.
After Cohn’s death the penchant for innovation and risk
taking actually increased, which was scarcely avoidable
given the changes and challenges facing the industry and
which steadily dissolved Columbia’s on-screen personality,
since Columbia’s boldest ventures in the 1960s and 1970s
involved partnerships with overseas producers and with
a new generation of independent auteurs, all of whom
required creative control over their pictures. Thus,
Columbia was relegated increasingly to the role of a
financing and distribution company, and it experienced
far wider swings in its economic fortunes than it had
under Cohn.
Columbia’s Screen Gems operation continued to
produce hit TV series in the 1960s, most notably (and
profitably) prime-time sitcoms like The Flintstones
(1960), Bewitched (1964), I Dream of Jeannie (1965),
and The Partridge Family (1970). While these kept the
studio machinery running, feature film production
declined dramatically. During the 1950s, Columbia
released 450 films, with its output steadily falling from
about 60 per year in 1950 to less than 40 by decade’s
end. The decline continued in the 1960s, when
Columbia released 252 films and its annual output
declined to about 20 per annum—a pace that would
continue through the 1970s.
Most of Columbia’s releases in the 1960s and 1970s
were independent productions or co-productions, many
of them packaged and produced overseas without the
participation of top studio executives Abe Schneider
and Leo Jaffe. Columbia’s long-standing relationships
with top independent Sam Spiegel (1901–1985) (On
the Waterfront, The Bridge on the River Kwai) continued
into the 1970s, most notably with the monumental 1962
hit, Lawrence of Arabia. Another important relationship
involved Ray Stark, who partnered with Columbia on
several Barbra Streisand (b. 1942) hits: Funny Girl
(1968), The Owl and the Pussycat (1970), The Way We
Were (1973), and Funny Lady (1975). In 1965, as the
‘‘British invasion’’ spread from music to film, Columbia
opened offices in London that delivered A Man for All
Seasons (1966), Georgy Girl (1966), To Sir, with Love
(1967), and Oliver! (1968). An independent company
owned by producer-director Stanley Kramer (1913–
2001) gave Columbia its biggest commercial hit of the
era, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967), a then-daring
treatment of interracial romance—but equally an exercise
in nostalgia, considering its co-stars Spencer Tracy
(1900–1967) and Katharine Hepburn (1907–2003).
Far more daring—and in many cases far more profitable—was Columbia’s output of ‘‘youth pictures,’’ art
films, and auteur projects. In fact, no other studio
championed the director-driven Hollywood New Wave
to the degree that Columbia did with pictures like
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and
Love the Bomb (Stanley Kubrick, 1964), Mickey One
(Arthur Penn, 1965), In Cold Blood (Richard Brooks,
1967), The Swimmer (Frank Perry, 1968), Bob & Carol
& Ted & Alice (Paul Mazursky, 1969), Easy Rider
(Dennis Hopper, 1969), Five Easy Pieces (Bob Rafelson,
1970), Husbands (John Cassavetes, 1970), The Last Picture
Show (Peter Bogdanovich, 1971), Images (Robert Altman,
1972), The Last Detail (Hal Ashby, 1974), Shampoo
(Ashby, 1975), and Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, 1976).
But despite this truly phenomenal output of low-cost,
high-quality films, Columbia suffered record losses from
1971 to 1973 due to a run of big-budget flops like
McKenna’s Gold (1969), Cromwell (1970), Nicholas and
Alexandra (1971), and Lost Horizon (1973) as well as a
costly relocation. After a half-century on Gower Street,
Columbia executed a move between 1970 and 1972 to
lavish new facilities in Burbank, north of Hollywood.
Columbia survived this deepening financial crisis
with the help of the investment firm Allen and Co.,
which in 1973 purchased controlling interest in the
studio (for a paltry $1.5 million). That put the company under the command of Herbert Allen Jr., the son of
Allen and Co.’s co-founder, who installed a new management team of Alan Hirschfield, David Begelman, and
Peter Guber. Columbia’s finances rebounded, propelled
by the 1977 megahit, Close Encounters of the Third Kind
directed by Steven Spielberg (b. 1946), but the new
team’s tenure was cut short by a forgery scandal involving
Begelman. The resurgence continued under the new
studio head, Frank Price, whose five-year stint (1978–
1983) was highlighted by two huge Dustin Hoffman
(b. 1937) hits, Kramer vs. Kramer (1979), Columbia’s
first US-produced multiple Oscar winner in twenty-five
years, and Tootsie (1982).
The Price regime, while financially successful,
marked the end of Columbia Pictures’ control of its
destiny—or even of its production operations. By then
it was releasing only a dozen or so films per year, most of
them produced by independents, and many were ‘‘packaged’’ by talent agencies—most notably Mike Ovitz of
Creative Artists Agency (CAA), who certainly had more
to do with Tootsie, for example, than anyone at
Columbia Pictures. Columbia’s control of its destiny
was further compromised when Price engineered the
studio’s acquisition by Coca-Cola, which bought the
studio in 1982 for roughly $750 million. The new parent
company attempted to expand its ‘‘filmed entertainment’’ operations on various fronts, including the buyout
of partners HBO and CBS in TriStar Pictures, a new
production venture geared to the exploding pay cable and
home video markets. The Coca-Cola era brought huge
hits like Ghostbusters (1984) and costly flops like Ishtar
(1987) as well as considerable turnover in the studio
executive ranks after Price’s 1983 departure, culminating
in the disastrous stint of the British independent producer David Puttnam in 1986 and 1987.
By the late 1980s Columbia Picture’s fortunes had
again reached a low point; in fact, its share of the motion
picture market fell to 4.5 percent in 1988 and, incredibly, to 3 percent in 1989 (versus TriStar’s 6 percent
share). At that point Coca-Cola decided to sell the studio
to Sony, the Japanese electronics manufacturing giant
that had purchased CBS Records a year earlier and now
was looking for a film ‘‘software’’ company to complement its production of ‘‘hardware’’ (TVs, VCRs, and so
on). In a deal brokered by Mike Ovitz, Sony bought
Columbia Pictures Industries and all its assets, including
TriStar, in late 1989 for $3.4 billion. A year later Sony
bought the MGM Studio in Culver City, where it
housed the Columbia and TriStar operations. Sony also
became embroiled with Time Warner over the hiring of
producers Peter Guber and Jon Peters to run ColumbiaTriStar, which led to several years of management turmoil and subpar production results.
The Sony-Columbia alliance eventually coalesced
under the leadership of studio veteran John Calley, who
took over Sony’s Motion Picture Group in 1996. In
2002 Columbia was back to the top of the industry,
thanks largely to its blockbuster hits of that year,
Spider-Man and Men in Black II. Calley handed off the
top executive position in 2003 to another veteran studio
boss, Amy Pascal, whose portfolio expanded a year later
when a Sony-led media consortium acquired MGM (the
producer-distributor, not the MGM studio facility,
which Sony already owned) for $5 billion. Thus, Sony’s
Motion Picture Group, which already included
Columbia, TriStar, and two indie subdivisions, Sony
Pictures Classics and Screen Gems, now owned the largest film and television library in the industry, as well as
the lucrative James Bond and Pink Panther franchises.
The acquisition of MGM further diminished the
stature and importance of Columbia Pictures within the
Sony media empire. In fact, Sony seemed far less interested in sustaining and exploiting Columbia’s brandname value than in promoting its own, and thus the
emphasis in recent years has been on Sony Pictures
Entertainment (SPE) rather than on Columbia Pictures.
And because all of the Hollywood studios have become
little more than brand names and libraries, Columbia
Pictures seems to be an increasingly endangered studio.