“Uncle Carl” – The Man Who Invented Hollywood

The American movie studio Universal Pictures was incorporated (as The Universal Film Manufacturing Company) in New York City on 30 April 1912 by the German Jewish immigrant Carl Laemmle (1867-1939) and several partners when the Independent Motion Picture Co. (IMP, founded in 1909) and several other film production companies were merged into the new Universal.

It is the oldest surviving film studio in the United States. By 1915 the new company was operating in California and had established Universal City, a 230-acre (93 ha) film complex and community in Southern California’s San Fernando Valley, in what is now the North Hollywood area. It was just one of many film production innovations by Laemmle and Universal, including the movie-star system, studio tours open to the public, and classic monster/horror films such as The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923) and The Phantom of the Opera (1925), both starring Lon Chaney in the silent era, and later, in the sound era, Dracula (1931), Frankenstein (1931), The Mummy (1932), The Invisible Man (1933), and Bride of Frankenstein (1935).

One of Laemmle’s partners in founding Universal was Robert H. Cochrane (1879-1973), a Chicago advertising man. Cochrane helped Laemmle financially and in many other ways in the process of establishing Universal. Beyond advertising advice, Cochrane helped Laemmle navigate American business culture and later served as president of Universal after Laemmle was forced out in 1935. Cochrane retired in 1938. He started his career as a reporter and city editor at The Toledo Bee in Ohio.

The Unknown Hollywood Movie Mogul Pioneer
Unlike most other foreign-born, Jewish film studio founders such as the Warner (Wonsal) brothers (Warner Bros.), Samuel Goldwyn (Goldfish/Gelbfisz) and Louis B. Mayer (Lazar Meir) of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), or William Fox (Wilhelm Fried Fuchs) of Fox Studios, later 20th Century Fox, Carl Laemmle did not incorporate his name into the name of the studio he founded (Universal Pictures). Which in part helps to explain why few people today have ever heard of Carl Laemmle and the seminal role he played in the creation of Hollywood and the American film industry.

Although Neal Gabler devotes more than 165 pages to Laemmle and Universal in his excellent An Empire of Their Own (see Books below), no Carl Laemmle biography or autobiography worthy of the name has ever been published in English, which is remarkable considering the vital role he played in the history of American and international cinema. (A good biography of Laemmle in German came out in 2016.) The Swabian-born Laemmle did start an autobiography, but it was never completed, even after Laemmle assigned the project to John Drinkwater, whose “stilted British prose” did not accurately reflect the writing style in Carl’s original 227-page fragment. (Laemmle had used competent ghost writers before for magazine articles, but unfortunately Drinkwater was not one of them.)

Laemmle’s Constant Ties to His Homeland
Unlike most Jewish Hollywood studio owners and producers, Carl Laemmle never changed his birth name, other than to anglicize the German spelling (Karl Lämmle). Although he became a naturalized US citizen in 1889, Laemmle never turned his back on Laupheim, the Swabian town where he was born, only 15 miles (25 km) south of Ulm via today’s B30 highway. Even before he became rich and famous as a movie studio owner, as a young man he had sailed home for visits. As the boss at Universal, Carl Laemmle sailed to Europe and Laupheim on an annual basis. He enjoyed spending time in his Heimatstadt and speaking German with his friends and relatives there. He also used his annual sojourns to keep tabs on German and European film studios and European film talent. He was forced to suspend his German visits during the Great War and its aftermath from 1914 to 1918.

The archives of the Laupheimer Verkündiger (“Laupheim Herald”) newspaper, are filled with news of Laemmle’s annual visits, and articles about his support for his hometown and the local Jewish community. In 1919, following his notable postwar aid to the city, he was proclaimed an honorary citizen of Laupheim, despite having become a US citizen. Soon after that, a street was named for him. He continued his regular visits to Laupheim until 1936, when the Nazis’s rise to power finally made it impossible for him to enter Germany. He would die in 1939, not having been able to visit his hometown for three years. But in his final years Laemmle did set up a foundation with $100,000 in funding (equal to $2.1 million in 2023) to support Laupheim. In his will, he instructed his children to continue the foundation’s support of the city and the Jewish community.

From Laupheim to Chicago

Karl Lämmle (Carl Laemmle in the US) was born on 17 January 1867 in the Jewish quarter of Laupheim, Kingdom of Württemberg (now the state of Baden-Württemberg, Germany). The American Civil War had only ended about two years before his birth. His Jewish parents, Julius Baruch Lämmle and Rebekka “Babette” Lämmle (née Lämmle), lived in a modest house at Radstraße 9. His father scraped out a living dealing in cattle and land sales. Karl was one of 12 siblings (a 13th was stillborn), and one of the four who survived to adulthood (Joseph [1864], Siegfried [1858], Karoline [1864], Carl [1867], Louis [1870]). He was close to his mother, and she made sure he (and all her children) got an education, first in a Jewish school (four years) in Laupheim, and later at the “Latin” school (two years) that had an entrance exam and charged a tuition fee. He later served an apprenticeship in a nearby town learning accounting and sales.

Young Laemmle had already become a bookkeeper and office manager before he set out for the United States in 1884. Part of the reason for leaving Germany when he was only 17 years old was the death of his beloved mother in 1883, aged 52. His older brother Joseph Baruch Laemmle (1854-1929) was already in America. With financial support from his father, Karl sailed from Bremerhaven aboard the S.S. Neckar with a school friend, arriving in New York City on 14 February 1884. He spent some time in New York learning English while working as an errand boy at a drugstore, before settling in Chicago, where his brother was. Oddly, Carl did not know exactly where his brother was living at the time. He wrote a letter to the Illinois Staatszeitung newspaper inquiring about his brother. Joseph happened to be working there and read Carl’s letter, and that’s how they got together in Chicago. Joseph sent his brother a rail ticket and a little cash.

Carl Laemmle worked for two decades in Chicago and Oshkosh as a bookkeeper and office manager. By 1894 he was a bookkeeper for the Continental Clothing Company in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. He married the boss’s German-born Jewish niece, Recha Stern (1875-1919) on 28 August 1898 in Chicago. They had two children: daughter Rosabelle (1903-1965) and son Carl Julius (Carl Jr., 1908-1979). Back in Chicago, and now looking for a business investment, 39-year-old Laemmle took the road common to most future film moguls by buying a nickelodeon in 1906. The young entrepreneur soon had his own film distribution business (Laemmle Film Service) in addition to his chain of modest but tidy movie theaters that charged a nickel (five cents) for admission. (A nickel in 1906 would equal about $1.50 in 2023.)

The ongoing attempts by Edison’s Motion Picture Patents Company to put him out of business led to staunch resistance by Laemmle. Laemmle founded IMP, the Independent Motion Picture Company. He understood publicity well enough to invent and promote “The Imp Girl” by faking the death of the popular “Biograph Girl”, Florence Lawrence, whom he had stolen away from Biograph. Laemmle further helped create the Hollywood star system by also hiring Mary Pickford away from Biograph, which did not identify its stars by name out of the justifiable fear they would ask for more money. (Pickford was no dummy. She soon left IMP, where she made $175 per week, for an eventual $10,000 a week from Adolph Zukor’s Famous Players, and $350,000 a film from First National.)

Irving Thalberg at Universal
Carl Laemmle knew that day-to-day management of a film studio was not his chief strength. Besides that, he spent most of his time at the Universal Pictures headquarters in New York, far away from the studios.

Like most American film studios in the 1920s, Universal had its headquarters on the East Coast and its production facilities on the West Coast. Although the film business in the United States had begun in New York and New Jersey, the sunny climate of Southern California proved to be better for filming than the often gray skies of Ft. Lee, New Jersey. Soon the production facilities of the movie business were 2,800 miles away from the management offices. In the 1920s, travel between New York City and Los Angeles meant a five-day rail journey via Chicago. Wire and telephone communications were not the same thing as being on site in person.

Carl Laemmle needed a talented studio manager he could trust at Universal City in Los Angeles. Completed in 1915, the Universal film complex was the company’s film factory in California, far away from headquarters at 1600 Broadway in New York City. Irving Grant Thalberg had been Laemmle’s secretary in New York since 1918. Just how he came to work for Laemmle is uncertain. There are several versions of how it happened, but it would be fateful for Universal and Thalberg.

In the fall of 1919, Laemmle brought Thalberg, not yet 21 years old, along on his trip to “the Coast” without telling his young secretary what he had in mind. Thalberg always looked younger than he actually was, and he came to resent his later “Boy Wonder” nickname. Irving was born in Brooklyn, New York on 30 May 1899. His father, William (Wilhelm) Thalberg (1868-1944), a lace importer, was a German Jewish immigrant from Wetzlar, Germany (north of Frankfurt am Main). Henrietta Heymann, his mother, was also a German Jew whose father, Henry (Heinrich) Heymann was born in Germany and ran a department store business.

What Laemmle had in mind was to leave Thalberg in California when he returned to New York in January 1920. Thalberg was told to learn the ropes at the studio. Without any clear instructions other than to share equal responsibilities with three executives, he worked alongside them.

In March 1920, when Uncle Carl returned to California, after receiving positive reports of how Thalberg was doing, he asked Thalberg what his recommendations were. Thalberg told him frankly that the studio needed a new position of studio general manager with the responsibility of watching over productions and day-to-day operations. To which Laemmle said, “All right. You’re it.” He told Thalberg he was was now completely in charge of the studio. Not yet 21, Thalberg thus became the youngest person ever to be a Hollywood studio boss.

At the end of April, Laemmle headed off for his regular visit to Laupheim and Europe, leaving Thalberg in Los Angeles to deal with nine film productions, plus several scenarios to develop, and not enough money to do it. But he did it anyway. Soon he was fully in charge, functioning as the studio’s executive producer. He proved his mettle by tangling with the imperious Austrian-born director Erich von Stroheim over serious cost overruns on Foolish Wives (1922) and Merry-Go-Round (1923). He fired the director after the second film, an act that was like an earthquake in the industry. He made other drastic changes at Universal and wanted to make more, but he would end up leaving the studio after three years, in early 1923, switching to MGM and Louis B. Mayer.

It did not have to be that way. Though Uncle Carl had been wise to choose Thalberg to run Universal, he unwisely rejected Thalberg’s proposals for making better films by using bank financing. For all the years he had been in the film business, Laemmle had never borrowed money to fund a film production, and he did not want to start now. Also, due to his own nickelodeon/Trust history, he dismissed another Thalberg suggestion: to set up a chain of studio-owned movie theaters. Finally, Laemmle, ever the thrifty Swabian, also denied Thalberg a well-deserved raise to match his responsibilities.

Considering what he did later to improve MGM, one wonders what might have happened if Irving Thalberg could have stayed longer at Universal. In any case, he had a short but very productive life. Always slight, born with a heart defect and a frail constitution, he would die of pneumonia in September 1936, at only 37 years of age. He was survived by his wife, actress Norma Shearer, their two children, and his mother Henrietta.

His funeral at the B’nai B’rith Synagogue was attended by most of Hollywood’s royalty, including movie stars, directors, producers, and studio heads. MGM closed for the day. Louis B. Mayer mourned his young partner, and probably had deep regrets about the rift that had developed between him and Thalberg in recent years. Thalberg’s legacy to the art and business of motion pictures is still considered momentous to this day – even if he, like Carl Laemmle, is now largely forgotten.

Laemmle Loses Universal
Carl Laemmle gave a start to many people in the film industry, but he suffered the same fate that also befell some other studio owners during the Depression. Partly due to the arrival of sound pictures, his tight-fisted financial policies, and the rampant nepotism at Universal (there were at least 70 relatives and friends on the payroll at one time), Laemmle was forced to sell Universal in 1935.

Laemmle’s son, Carl junior, had some success as a producer for Universal, most notably with the Oscar-winning All Quiet on the Western Front (1930). The younger Laemmle also produced Universal successes such as Dracula (1931), Frankenstein (1931), The Bride of Frankenstein (1935), and Show Boat (1936). But it was in part due to his son’s budget excesses that Carl Laemmle Sr. had to settle for a mere $5 million, a fraction of his studio’s former value, when he was forced to divest the film empire he had founded.

After its sale, Universal Pictures continued, rescued by the singing teenage star Deanna Durbin, only to return to financial difficulties in the 1960s. As of 1946, Universal was known as Universal-International, and later Universal became a subsidiary of Decca Records. The Music Corporation of America (MCA) bought up both troubled firms, with MCA eventually becoming a conglomerate with divisions for film, television, music, and theaters. MCA in turn was taken over by the Japanese company Matsushita in 1990. Then Edgar Bronfman Jr.’s Canada-based Seagram bought Universal. In December 2000, Universal Studios and Vivendi (a French company) merged to form Vivendi Universal.

After Vivendi, it all got rather complicated, so we’ll just skip to 2011, when General Electric (GE) purchased Vivendi’s share in NBCUniversal, and then sold 51 percent of the company to cable provider Comcast. Then Comcast merged the former GE subsidiary with its own cable TV programming assets, creating the current NBCUniversal, Universal Pictures parent company. In March 2013, Comcast bought the remaining 49 percent of NBCUniversal for $16.7 billion. On 22 August 2016, NBCUniversal completed a $3.8 billion deal to buy DreamWorks Animation. Today, when you watch a Universal film, it displays the logo with the tag line: “A Comcast Company”.

In recent decades Universal has become known for many popular top-grossing movies worldwide. To name just a few (with box office gross for North America):
King Kong (2005) $218,080,025
The Bourne Ultimatum (2007) $227,471,070
Despicable Me (2010) $251,513,985
Fast & Furious 6 (2013) $238,679,850
Minions (2015) $336,045,770
Jurassic World (2015) $652,270,625
Furious 7 (2015) $353,007,020
Sing (2016) $270,329,045
The Secret Life of Pets (2016) $368,384,330
Despicable Me 3 (2017) $264,624,300
Jurassic World: Dominion (2022) $376,009,080
SOURCE: Universal Pictures (wikipedia.org)

That’s what has become of the studio that Carl Laemmle had to sell for $5 million in 1935. Laemmle died in Los Angeles on 24 September 1939 of a heart attack. He had lived long enough to see Universal’s recovery in the late 1930s. Would he be happy to see his former family-run company in its present corporate form in the 21st century? Only Uncle Carl could answer that question.

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Books Related to Carl Laemmle and Universal

The books listed below are about Universal Pictures, Carl Laemmle, and his family. The only full Laemmle biographies we know of are in German (see below), but we have also listed books in English that contain information about “Uncle Carl” and the studio he founded. NOTE: As an affiliate of Amazon.com and Amazon.de, The German Way may earn a commission from your purchase, at no extra cost to you.

About the Family and the Studio (English)
An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood
by Neal Gabler (2010 edition – Kindle, hardcover, paperback)
Originally published in 1988, Gabler’s survey of the many Jewish studio founders in Hollywood remains a classic work. The book includes over 165 pages about Carl Laemmle and Universal. Even in other sections, Laemmle and related people are covered as well.

Among the Rugged Peaks: An Intimate Biography of Carla Laemmle
by Rick Atkins (Kindle, paperback)
Carla Laemmle, a niece of Carl Laemmle, was born Rebekah Isabelle Laemmle (1909-2014). The daughter of Carl’s older brother Joseph used the name Carla as an actress and dancer. Until her death at the age of 104, she was one of the last surviving actors of the silent film era.

Haunted Universal Studios (Haunted America)
by Brian Clune and Bob Davis (2018, Kindle, hardcover, paperback)

Biographies (German)
Carl Laemmle: Der Mann, der Hollywood erfand (German Edition)
by Cristina Stanca-Mustea (2016, Kindle only)
I have read this German bio, and in fact it was a source of much of the information in this GW article about Laemmle and Universal. If you can read German, I recommend this bio by Cristina Stanca-Mustea. From Amazon.com

Carl Laemmle – Von Laupheim nach Hollywood: Die Biografie des Universal-Gründers in Bildern, Geschichten (2018, German Edition, hardcover)
by Udo Bayer and Gabriele Bayer
A biography of Carl Laemmle (From Laupheim to Hollywood: The biography of the founder of Universal Studios in pictures and stories). In German. From Amazon.com.

More | Featured Biographies

Related Pages
AT THE GERMAN WAY

• Featured Biographies – More full bios of notable people from the German-speaking world
• Germans (and Others) in Hollywood – About the three main waves of Germanic immigration to Hollywood
• Mini Bios A-Z – Brief biographies of people from the German-speaking world
• Featured Biographies – More detailed bios of notable people from the German-speaking world

ON THE WEB

• Carl Laemmle’s Grave at Home of Peace Memorial Park in Los Angeles (Find A Grave)
• Recha Stern Laemmle’s Grave, the wife of Carl, at Home of Peace Memorial Park in Los Angeles (Find A Grave)
• TCM: Irving G. Thalberg – A biography, filmography, photos and more
• universalstudios.com – Movies, theme parks, news, videos
• Reading Uncle Carl with Antonia Carlotta: Notes on the Unpublished Autobiographical Fragment The Business of Motion Pictures – An interview (text) with Antonia Carlotta, a great grandniece of Carl Laemmle, by Leslie Kreiner Wilson of Pepperdine University (americanpopularculture.com)

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