Selznick International Pictures

Selznick International Pictures was a Hollywood motion picture studio. It was founded in 1935 by producer David O. Selznick and investor John Hay Whitney after Selznick left MGM and leased a section of the RKO Pictures lot in Culver City, California. The studio itself had been built for Pathé Pictures in 1919.

Selznick raised the initial funding of US$400,000 in Los Angeles, with half of that amount coming from his brother Myron Selznick, a Hollywood agent. He raised an additional US$300,00 from "small" investors in New York, and then the final US$2.4 million from "Jock" Whitney and his family. Whitney himself became chairman of the board, and Selznick president, of the new company. Because Whitney and his cousin Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney also owned Pioneer Pictures, an independent studio they formed in 1933, that company was informally merged with Selznick International Pictures in 1936, which assumed Pioneer's contract to make at least six pictures in the new full-color Technicolor process, of which the Whitneys owned a 15 percent share.Because of its length, Gone With the Wind was considered two Technicolor pictures for the purpose of the contract.

A brief tradition of quality

Selznick intended to produce a few features each year, a plan which he hoped would allow him to be as picky and careful as he liked and to create the best films possible. He said to his company's board in 1935, "There are only two kinds of merchandise that can be made profitably in this business, either the very cheap pictures or the very expensive pictures." Selznick believed, "there is no alternative open to us but to attempt to compete with the very best."

Although Selznick foresaw a production schedule of six to eight features per year, the studio in fact made only two or three per year, due to Selznick's meticulous attention to detail and protracted writing and editing processes. But in its short life of five years and eleven features, Selznick International Pictures produced two winners of the Academy Award for Best Picture: Gone with the Wind (1939) and Rebecca (1940), and a third nominee, A Star Is Born (1937).

By 1940, Selznick International Pictures was the top-grossing film studio in Hollywood, but without a major studio set-up in which to re-invest his profits, Selznick faced enormous tax problems. That year, he and the other owners began dissolving the studio, while Selznick formed David O. Selznick Productions at the same studio location.

Trivia

To film the burning of the Atlanta Depot for Gone with the Wind, the standing Great Wall set used in RKO's King Kong on "the back forty" lot was redressed and used as a burning building.

Filmography

Ownership

Some Selznick International films (A Star Is Born and Made for Each Other) are now in the public domain, while most of the rest are now owned by ABC (via Disney/Buena Vista). The notable exception is Gone With the Wind, whose ownership was transferred to MGM in 1944 (currently owned by Warner Bros./Turner Entertainment).

Papers and other artifacts of the studio are now part of the David O. Selznick Collection in the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas, Austin.

References

External links

Hollywood history and culture | Defunct American movie studios