Without These Companies, Movies Would Never Have Made It 120 Years | QDaily Business History

Kodak, General Electric, Sony, Vivendi… Do you know what each of them did for the movies?

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Cinema was born in the basement of the Grand Café at 14 Boulevard des Capucines in Paris, on the afternoon of December 28, 1895 — 120 years ago.

Here is the story you probably know. That day the Lumière brothers screened a short film about a minute long, The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat. The audience watched a train bear down on them, seemingly about to burst through the screen, and panicked; some got up and fled. Quite a few of them were prominent figures of the day.

Here is the story you probably don't know. What made that screening possible was a company that got its start making photographic dry plates — the Lumière family's own factory. Dry plates were a new way of taking pictures: before them came wet plates, and after them the film stock everyone knows today. The crucial piece of work was done by one of the two brothers, Louis Lumière, who at seventeen (in 1881) developed a new dry-plate process called "Étiquette Bleue." (The French means, literally, blue label.)

Two years later his father, Antoine Lumière, who ran a photography studio, built a factory for the process at Monplaisir on the outskirts of Lyon to make photographic equipment. Business was very good — by 1894 the factory was turning out 15 million dry plates a year.

It was on the back of this company that the Lumière brothers developed the Cinématographe. That is why they were able to screen those astonishing films in a Paris café 120 years ago and become the pioneers of cinema. They also showed another minute-long short that day, Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory, which was exactly that: workers streaming out of the Lumière factory at the end of the day.

Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory, a film by the Lumière brothers

When we talk about movie companies we talk about Disney, Paramount, Fox, Weinstein — and forget to talk about Kodak, General Electric, Philips, and that factory the Lumière family once ran.

Plenty of companies that look as though they have little to do with film have done things over these 120 years that mattered enormously to the movies. Let's look at the ones we nearly forgot.

1. Kodak: Edison used its film to invent the first movie camera

If you still aren't sure what a "dry plate" is, stay on the subject a moment: Kodak began life as the Eastman Dry Plate Company. This was the period when one photographic method was giving way to another, and a good many far-sighted people could see where the technology was going. George Eastman, then a bank clerk, built a device of his own — an emulsion-coating machine — and went into the dry-plate business too.

But Eastman moved faster than the Lumière factory. In 1885 he launched Eastman film and started making film stock. Six years later Thomas Edison, who was tinkering with cameras at the time, saw it, decided he could use it, shot a series of images with it — and the world's first movie camera was born.

It was because of Edison's invention that the company we now know as Kodak got its opening into movie film, where it held a monopoly for a very long time.

We also know, and always take for granted, that Kodak makes cameras. To be fair, it was very good at that: in the same year the Lumières held their screening, Kodak had already put out a portable camera, and it went on to release one camera innovation after another. If anything, that reputation has obscured its place in the history of film.

On Hollywood Boulevard in Hollywood, California, the old Kodak Theatre was where the Academy Awards were handed out. After Kodak filed for bankruptcy in 2012 it gave up the naming rights, and the Dolby Theatre took over. But Kodak's tie to the Oscars went well beyond a name on a building. The company won 12 Academy Scientific and Technical Awards or awards of merit — for panchromatic film stock, the perforated screen, safety film base, color-coated paper stock. Whether or not we understand what those things mean, Kodak was pushing them forward from 1930 to 1990.

"Kodak only makes movie film now," said Kodak CEO Jeff Clarke at a meeting with several Hollywood studios in Los Angeles in 2015. With theaters now projecting digitally, the company's business has run into trouble. But Hollywood always has a few holdouts who refuse to let go — directors like Christopher Nolan, Quentin Tarantino and J.J. Abrams — and it was they who pushed the studios into an agreement with Kodak: each studio would buy a set quantity of movie film every year, so that film could keep being made.

Interstellar, directed by Christopher Nolan

Kodak is now looking for new openings, and the strongest force keeping it alive at any cost comes from Hollywood. Christopher Nolan's Interstellar, released late last year, was shot on film Kodak made on a production line it opened for that picture alone.

1. General Electric: we have talking pictures because of it

If you have watched 30 Rock, the sitcom starring Tina Fey — the funniest of the good-looking actresses in American show business — you will have heard how often it makes fun of General Electric. The reason it could do so freely, of course, is that GE was the show's own parent company.

The chain runs like this. 30 Rock is an NBC show; NBC was bought by General Electric; NBC's studios sit at 30 Rockefeller Plaza in midtown Manhattan, which is also GE's New York headquarters. The building is called the GE Building and is nicknamed "30 Rock," which is where the show got its name.

GE also owned 80% of Universal Pictures. In 2004 Universal's previous owner, France's Vivendi, sold that 80% stake to GE because of its debts, and GE merged NBC with Universal into what we now know as NBCUniversal.

This may be worth a reminder: one of GE's founders was Thomas Edison, the inventor of the movie camera and of the talking picture. In 1880 Edison gathered his various businesses into the Edison General Electric Company. Later, with the American banker J.P. Morgan brokering the deal, Edison General Electric merged with two other companies to become today's General Electric.

GE's grip on the movie business first appeared in the 1920s, the decade the talking picture was born. In 1927 the first sound feature, The Jazz Singer, was released.

The Jazz Singer, the first sound feature film

Sound film ran into trouble when it was first rolled out. The technical obstacles included electrical amplifier recording and triode vacuum tubes — problems hard enough to follow that only companies making radio equipment could solve them. RCA, the Radio Corporation of America, was founded by GE, AT&T and Westinghouse. GE held the patents on sound-film technology, and that is how it came to own and dominate the field at that moment.

A word more about Edison, who made all of it possible. In 1910 he invited people into his laboratory to watch him combine two of his own inventions, the phonograph and the kinetoscope, into his newest one: the talking picture. Others had tried before him; none had managed it.

Some people simply call Edison the man who invented the movies, and there is nothing very wrong with that. But in fairness, Edison invented only a way of shooting film, not a good way of watching it. Films shot with his camera could be seen by one person at a time, peering into a small dark box. That is where Antoine Lumière, founder of the Lumière factory, spotted his opening. He told his two sons: look, there's a man named Edison selling his film machine at a high price — you two ought to make one as well.

The Lumière brothers saw what the problem was. They rebuilt Edison's invention: the camera became less bulky, the image easier to work with, and — more important — they turned movies into a public entertainment. With a projector, people could sit together and laugh, jump or cry at the same moving images.

1. Vivendi: the company that once bought Pathé and Universal spent a century supplying water

You may at some point have heard of a company called Vivendi Universal. Yes — that same Vivendi, which in 2000 merged with Universal Pictures, France's Canal+ network and the Canadian drinks giant Seagram to form Vivendi Universal Entertainment. Five months before it took that name, it was still a company in the business of water supply, waste and other public utilities.

It was founded in 1853 as the Compagnie Générale des Eaux, when Napoleon's nephew was in power. It won the concession to supply water to Lyon, and later a fifty-year concession to supply Paris. After 123 honest years as a water company, a new CEO arrived and pushed it into waste management, energy and transport; it even bought a carmaker. Before long it went into media, launched France's Canal+ network, and over these last few decades turned into a media giant. So what became of the water?

Five months before the Universal merger, Vivendi spun its utility business off into a separate company, Vivendi Environnement. Four years after that, debt forced the company to sell to General Electric — perhaps one of the prices a newcomer to media pays for expanding too fast.

Universal Pictures had been bought and sold for years by then. After the Great Depression it ran into debt, and its founders, the Laemmles, father and son, decided to sell; the company never really recovered afterwards. In the 1960s Music Corporation of America bought it and signed hot stars such as Doris Day and Cary Grant. Later, needing money for other things, MCA sold Universal to Panasonic. Five years on, finding it hard to handle, Panasonic sold it to the Canadian drinks company Seagram. Then came Vivendi. Panasonic sold electronics, Seagram sold liquor, Vivendi sold water — companies with no apparent connection to film each owned Universal for a stretch, then passed it on when they found themselves out of their depth.

In the Vivendi years Universal put out films we know fairly well: the Fast & Furious series, Seabiscuit, The Incredible Hulk and Love Actually.

1. Polaroid: it invented the polarizing filter, and 3D movies came with it

Mention Polaroid today and people start looking for the newest $99 instant camera, but it began as an eyewear company. Its founder, Edwin Land, loved optics. While at Harvard, working on how to stop car headlights from dazzling drivers, he invented the polarizing filter — a way of changing how light vibrates — and patented it. Polaroid's name comes from the scientific term for the polarizing material.

Before it began making camera equipment during the Second World War, the company spent its early years on optics and sold sunglasses. Two years after it was founded (in 1939), it used the same principle to show the first 3D movie glasses at the New York World's Fair. The difference is that the two lenses of 3D glasses filter light in different directions, while both lenses of sunglasses filter it in the same one. People had already been experimenting with the idea of 3D, but the polarizing filter carried the technology a long way forward.

1. And some companies that didn't start in film, then entered it on the strength of their technology

Pixar:

Pixar was a computer company to begin with, not an animation house. Its first business was making computer hardware; it used a product called the Pixar Image Computer to win clients, producing animation for government and medical institutions and making television commercials. There was also the well-known RenderMan software and the Z-buffer pixel-depth algorithm — both of which would matter greatly to animation later, but at the time the company that produced them looked, by any measure, like a technology company. Why else would Steve Jobs, just squeezed out by Apple's board, suddenly take an interest and buy it?

One of Pixar's central figures was Ed Catmull, a technical head who can fairly be called a genius. Yet none of this advanced technology made the business work — not until they took an order from Disney to make the first feature-length film animated entirely by computer, Toy Story. Only then did things fall into place, and Pixar became the animation studio we know, the one that can still make us cry in a cinema.

Toy Story

Sony:

Sony sold electronics to begin with, but videotape and the DVD gave it two different ways into the film business. It started out as the Tokyo Telecommunications Research Institute, working on transistors; it built the world's first transistor radio, then moved into television. Let's start, though, with videotape, in 1970.

At the time Sony, JVC and Panasonic all put out videotape systems together. Sony developed Betamax; JVC developed the VHS system everyone has heard of. Sony believed its own standard was the better one, but VHS won the commercial fight. After more than a decade of that, the CEO of the day, Akio Morita, concluded that pushing hardware they considered high quality required good content to go with it. So Sony bought Columbia Pictures — the studio behind what we now call Sony Pictures Entertainment — and that is how Sony entered the 120-year history of film.

Anyone who knows Sony's products would say 1994 was a remarkable year, because Sony launched the revolutionary PlayStation. But something more remarkable happened that year: Sony published the world's first DVD specification. The DVD was nothing like videotape. What it changed was how films were distributed. It cost far less than tape, could be pressed in bulk, and was easy to sell any way you liked. The beneficiaries were the independent film companies of the day. Remember how a batch of independents were bought up by the major studios in the 1990s?

Sony had its own independent arm, Sony Pictures Classics. Like the other majors, its aim was to take shelf space at Walmart. Independent films, unlike commercial blockbusters, do not need heavy spending on theatrical marketing and do not live or die by box office; they were more interested in using the DVD — cheap and convenient — to reach more people, and more film festivals, win prizes and sell pre-sale rights.

Dolby:

Dolby, which supplies noise-reduction systems and surround-sound technology, still serves many industries; in film, more people have come to hear of it in recent years, and in 2013 it partnered with Lucasfilm to enter China's home-theater market. Dolby's noise-reduction system was in the tape recorders ordinary people could buy in the 1970s, and the company soon began licensing the technology to audio-equipment makers. Technology like that was never going to skip the cinema: Dolby was working with the Chinese film industry as early as 1984. But what fixed the company in the minds of audiences worldwide was Tim Burton's Batman Returns in 1992. The Academy has given Dolby its Scientific and Technical Award or its honorary award ten times.

IMAX:

IMAX, the thing we now say we are going to see, set out to build a film projection system with higher resolution. Supplying directors with cameras and installing its own screens in cinemas was not the original goal. In the 1970s the company wanted to give millions of visitors at world's fairs a powerful visual experience. The World's Fair in Spokane, Washington, showed a giant IMAX screen measuring 27.3 by 19.7 meters.

But IMAX did not really register with the public as filmmaking equipment until Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight in 2008, the first film to shoot part of its footage with IMAX cameras. More people learned of it when Avatar came out in 2009. Frankly, what Avatar left with people at the time was not much concern for how a badly wounded Marine used human and Na'vi genes to create the hybrid creature called an "avatar" — that plot has probably been more or less forgotten. All we thought back then was: let's go see that movie where everyone wears glasses, the screen is in 3D and the whole thing looks spectacular!