Jesse Lasky was an American film producer, one of the founders of Paramount Pictures.
Background
Born in San Francisco to the children of German immigrants, Lasky appeared on the vaudeville stage from childhood. He was later joined in the act by his sister Blanche, who, like Jesse, played the cornet. At Blanche’s urging, he relinquished performing for the more financially rewarding roles of booking agent and producer.
Career
Blanche’s husband, the glove salesman Samuel Goldfish (later Goldwyn), tried to persuade Lasky to enter motion-picture production with him. Lasky, however, wanted no part of the film business until he was made a lucrative offer for the use of his name, well-known in the theater, as the trademark of a film company. Realizing the potential of movies.
Lasky, with his brother-in-law and a dramatically inclined friend. Cecil B. DcMillc. formed the Jesse L. Lasky Feature Play Company in 1913. The company’s first film, The Squaw Man, was a tremendous success. In 1916 Lasky merged his firm with that of Adolph Zukor. The result of the merger, the Famous Players-Lasky Corporation, became more widely known by the name of Paramount, the distributor in which it owned a controlling interest. As vice-president in charge of production, Lasky ruled over the West Coast operations of Paramount for over fifteen years. Mary Pickford. Rudolph Valentino. Gloria Swanson, Ernst Lubitsch, Josef von Sternberg, the Marx Brothers, Maurice Chevalier, Bing Crosby, and Cary Grant, to name but a few, were among the talents that graced the Paramount lot during Lasky’s period.
In the early 1930s Lasky lost his executive post at Paramount, which was then struggling through the depression. He continued his career as a producer at a number of studios. He also produced for radio and had a short-lived partnership with Mary Pickford. Few of his post-Paramount films were notable, the most successful being Sergeant York in although The Power and the Glory and The Gay Desperado have increased in critical stature over the years. Constantly seeking to make a comeback, and in debt to the Internal Revenue Service, Lasky had returned to Paramount and was preparing a new film with Goldwyn and DeMillc at the time of his sudden death.