Jesse L. Lasky was born in San Francisco
but raised in San Jose, California, where he graduated from Santa
Clara High School. Lasky, son of a shoe salesman, tried a wide variey
of jobs from musician to travelling to Alaska to pan for gold.
Attracted to the theater, he embarked
on a tour of America in a duo act with his sister Blanche (who later
became the first wife of Samuel Goldfish).
He worked his way into theatrical
production and made a name for himself by 1913. Lasky invested the
proceeds into the Folies-Bergere theater in New York. He also raised
the funds to produce the operetta California (1911), written by Cecil
B. DeMille. The Folies-Bergere investment was a disaster BUT the investment
into DeMilles' operetta wasn't.
With DeMille and Lasky's brother-in-law,
Samuel Goldfish (later changed to Goldwyn), Lasky formed the Jesse
L. Lasky Feature Play Company in 1914.
They arrived in California with $25,000
and some big ideas. They decided to start off boldly by filming a
stage hit of the day, The Squaw Man. $5000 went to Dustin Farnum as
star, $5000 for the film rights, and the rest was spent on production.
The company didn't have enough money
to establish itself in Los Angeles, so they had to be content with
renting a barn for $25 a month, in a miserable little district on
the outskirts called Hollywood.
The Squaw Man was a huge success and
within weeks, they had doubled their money.
The next major problem was how to
get a wider distribution of their films. Edison's Trust made it difficult
to book films into any of the larger and more established circuits.
Lasky met with W.
W. Hodkinson who had changed the name of his Progressive Pictures
Company into Paramount
Pictures to distribute films for smaller independent film companies.
Progressive had distributed throughout the west coast, but the change
to Paramount was to distribute nation wide.
Lasky continued to grow, opening 2
sister production companies, Pallas Pictures and the Oliver Morosco
Photoplay Company.
Lasky also met another independent
Paramount producer, Adolph Zukor, who owned Famous Players Film Company.
Lasky and Zukor planned together to have more control of their distribution.
Lasky and Zukor each sold off part
of their companies to Paramount to raise a large sum of money. Zukor
and Lasky then together acquired a majority of the capital stock of
Paramount Pictures, Inc. They took control of Paramount and ousted
the Hodkinson.
New directors were elected, followed
by the forced resignation of W. W. Hodkinson and his treasurer Raymond
Pawley on June 13, 1916. Zukor instituted his own president Hiram
Abrams as the new head of Paramount. On July 19, 1916, Zukor and Lasky
merged their companies with Paramount, and created the Famous Players-Lasky
Corporation, a $12.5 million producer-distributor—the largest
film company at the time.
Production boomed for Paramount until
the depression. Hard times soon forced Paramount into receivership
and Jesse Lasky was forced to leave his job as head of production
in 1932.
He became an independent producer
at 20th Century-Fox.
He was also briefly associated with Mary Pickford in the Pickford-Lasky
Company, which made a few features in the mid-1930s.
Lasky was an associate producer at
RKO Radio Pictures, and then settled in as an independent producer
at Warner Bros.
In 1941, he produced his most successful
independent movie Sergeant York starring Gary Cooper and directed
by Howard Hawks.
He died January 13, 1958
