Thursday, August 16, 2007

Hail and Farewell, Columbia

Hudson Capital now owns the old headquarters of Columbia Pictures on Gower Street, having paid $200 million. They will build a six-story office building for tenant Technicolor, upgrade amenities, and (per the Times) "make Sunset-Gower one of the region's few studios that offers preproduction, production and postproduction services for movie and television show makers."

The L.A. Times carries the story with snippets of the studio's history, but a better online resource for the Columbia saga is ReelClassics. their article starts:

"COLUMBIA PICTURES was originally founded in 1920 under the name of C.B.C. Sales Film Corporation by Joe Brandt and the brothers Jack and Harry Cohn (who later changed the company's name to Columbia in 1924 in a effort to "up" the studio's image)."
ReelClassics even has the story of the logo, and all the claimants to the torch.

(Sony Pictures had a flash-y history site but it doesn't seem to be working well now--possibly because of the sale?)

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