Background
Born in Laupheim, Germany, on Jenuary 17, 1867, Laemmle followed one of his brothers to the United States at age seventeen.
Born in Laupheim, Germany, on Jenuary 17, 1867, Laemmle followed one of his brothers to the United States at age seventeen.
He progressed from bookkeeper to store manager in a clothing company and was almost forty years old before conceiving of a more lucrative future in the infant film industry. In 1909, three years after opening his first nickelodeon, he emerged as the most prominent partner of the newly formed Motion Picture Patents Company that aspired to a total monopoly of all aspects of motion pictures. Producing films through his Independent Motion Picture Company (IMP), he initiated the star system when he won the “Biograph Girl,” Florence Lawrence, away from her home studio. In 1912 the Universal Film Company was formed as the result of a merger between IMP and a number of other firms.
Laemmle’s son, Carl Jr., was put in charge of the studio as a twenty-first birthday present from his father. With Dracula and Frankenstein he con¬tinued the horror-film tradition established a few years earlier by Thalberg’s production of The Hunchback of Notre-Dame. Following the 1930 Oscar-winning All Quiet on the Western Front, there was talk of Laemmle receiving the Nobel Prize for peace.
“Uncle Carl” was notorious for his nepotism. One nephew to whom he gave a start was William Wyler, soon to become a top director. Many blamed Carl Jr.’s extravagance for Universal’s financial difficulties, which in 1936 forced Laemmle to sell out his interest in the studio he had founded. The new regime at Universal found some seventy relatives and friends of Laemmle on the payroll, some already deceased.