Carl Laemelle: The Making of the Movie Business: Cinema With a Conscience
Carl Laemmle never confused the movie business with a charity. He watched receipts. He worried about production costs. He wanted his salesmen to squeeze every legitimate dollar from a successful picture.
He could be impatient with waste, suspicious of extravagance, and deeply interested in whether audiences were buying tickets. Yet there was another side to him that never fit neatly into the stereotype of the Hollywood mogul. Laemmle believed success came with obligations.
Sometimes that belief appeared on the screen, in films willing to confront uncomfortable subjects. Sometimes it appeared far from Universal City, in boxes of food sent to families struggling thousands of miles away.
Sometimes it appeared in a job offered to a man who had just left prison, or in a quiet financial gesture toward someone who had fallen on hard times. For Laemmle, conscience was rarely a speech. More often, it was something you did.
Late in his career, Laemmle remained blunt about the commercial realities of filmmaking. Movies had to attract audiences. Universal was a business, and businesses that continually lost money did not get the luxury of making more pictures. But that did not mean he believed box office was the only measure of a movie’s worth. The clearest example was All Quiet on the Western Front.
Erich Maria Remarque’s novel had become an international phenomenon by portraying war not as a parade of flags and heroes, but as an intimate human catastrophe. Its soldiers were frightened, exhausted young men whose dreams were steadily consumed by violence.
Bringing that book to the screen was not an obvious commercial choice. It was serious, bleak material arriving in an industry newly intoxicated by sound, music, spectacle, and celebrity. Universal made it anyway.
Laemmle was extraordinarily proud of the result. The biography records contemporary observers describing him as someone whose ambitions reached beyond simply making pictures that would “click” at the box office.
One writer described him as a man fundamentally committed to peace and goodwill, and argued that All Quiet on the Western Front had done something few political speeches could achieve. It allowed enormous audiences to experience the destruction of war emotionally rather than abstractly.
A statistic can tell you how many people died in a war. A movie can show a frightened young man looking at another frightened young man across a battlefield and make the distance between them suddenly seem absurd. Laemmle understood the difference.
He was not the director of All Quiet. Lewis Milestone deserves the director credit for shaping the film, just as Remarque deserves credit for the work that inspired it. But Laemmle helped create the conditions in which that story could reach millions. To him, that mattered.
There were even contemporary suggestions in the press that his association with the picture deserved recognition from the Nobel Peace Prize committee. The biography itself treats such talk cautiously, noting that Remarque and Milestone had obvious claims to recognition as well. What matters is not whether the proposal was realistic. What matters is that people were talking about a movie producer in those terms at all. fileciteturn10file0
Cinema had grown into something larger than amusement, and Laemmle had helped it get there. His willingness to gamble on socially provocative material appeared much earlier.
In 1913, Universal found itself debating a strange six-reel production called Traffic in Souls. The film dealt with the contemporary panic over organized prostitution and so-called white slavery. It was sensational material, certainly, but it was also far removed from the harmless one-reel comedies and melodramas filling many theaters.
There was another problem. It was long. Six reels looked dangerously excessive at a time when feature-length films were hardly standard American moviegoing. Some of Universal’s directors wanted nothing to do with it. The picture had already cost $5,700, a considerable sum, and there was no guarantee audiences would sit through it. Laemmle watched the film. He liked it.
When his board resisted, he became angry enough to offer to buy the picture personally from the company for $10,000. That ended the debate. If Laemmle was willing to put his own money behind it, the other directors decided perhaps Universal should keep it after all.
The gamble paid off and Traffic in Souls became a major commercial success, playing simultaneously in dozens of theaters around New York and grossing close to $100,000.
Laemmle did not separate significance from commerce as neatly as people sometimes do. A serious subject did not need to be financially suicidal. An entertaining picture did not need to be empty. Sometimes the thing audiences were most eager to see was precisely the thing other businessmen were afraid to show them.
Laemmle’s sense of responsibility became even clearer away from the camera. After the First World War, Germany entered a period of tremendous hardship. Inflation, hunger, unemployment, and political instability devastated families throughout the country, including people in and around Laemmle’s hometown of Laupheim.
For Laemmle, this presented a difficult problem. He had left Germany as a teenager and had become an American citizen. During the war he had supported the United States once America entered the conflict.
But Germany was still the country where his parents were buried, where his childhood friends lived, and where memories of his earliest life remained concentrated in a few streets and houses. When he returned after the war, he encountered people he had known as prosperous citizens reduced to asking for food or money. He could not ignore it.
Beginning in 1923, Laemmle used his regular advertising space in The Saturday Evening Post to appeal for relief. That carried risk. Anti-German sentiment remained strong in the United States. Universal depended on public goodwill.
A movie executive openly raising money for Germans only a few years after American soldiers had fought them could easily have been accused of divided loyalty.
Laemmle did it anyway. He asked Americans to send food, clothing, shoes, and money. Universal employees joined the campaign. Shipments went regularly to Germany. His argument was simple. Whatever people still felt about the war, suffering people were suffering people. He urged readers to forget the conflict long enough to answer what he called the call of humanity.
When Laemmle sent his own money to Laupheim, he stipulated that assistance should be divided equally between Jewish and Christian families. He was Jewish. His childhood community included both. Hunger, as far as Laemmle was concerned, did not require a religious test.
Hundreds of cases of food and clothing eventually went to Laupheim, Frankfurt, Stuttgart, Munich, and elsewhere. Laemmle personally made sure families he knew in Laupheim received monthly provisions. The biography notes that he continued overseeing the effort rather than simply writing a large check and allowing someone else to handle the details. fileciteturn12file6
That was typical for Laemmle. He could delegate an enormous motion picture operation. Charity, strangely enough, he often wanted to supervise himself.
His sense of responsibility also extended toward people whose troubles were considerably less sympathetic to polite society. In 1915, Samuel Mott Osborne, the reform-minded warden of Sing Sing prison, was trying to find employment for inmates who had completed their sentences and maintained good records. F
inding a job after prison was difficult then for the same reason it can be difficult now. Employers saw the conviction before they saw the person.
Laemmle agreed to employ two former inmates. Once they came to him, their past was treated as closed. They were given an opportunity to advance just like anyone else. According to his biography, both succeeded and established themselves in respectable employment.
Laemmle also helped introduce motion pictures into Sing Sing for the prisoners. On one occasion, an untitled Universal picture was screened there, and the inmates were invited to suggest a name. Laemmle offered $50 to the winner. Around four thousand suggestions came back.
The chosen title was Folly’s Crucible. The winning prisoner was released several weeks later and donated ten dollars of his prize money to the prison’s Mutual Welfare League. fileciteturn12file4
It is a small story, almost lost amid the construction of Universal City and the millions of feet of film passing through Laemmle’s company. It may tell us more about him than another studio opening. He believed people could begin again.
Perhaps that conviction came naturally to a man whose entire American life had been a succession of beginnings. He had arrived with almost nothing. He had been an errand boy, bookkeeper, clothing-store manager, theater owner, distributor, producer, and studio president. He knew how much difference one opportunity could make.
Laemmle was capable of conspicuous generosity, but some of his most revealing gestures were small. The biography describes a Chicago porter Laemmle had known for years.
Whenever Laemmle passed through Chicago, he expected to see the man waiting at the station. At some point, the porter’s family fell into serious financial difficulty. Later, the difficulty was gone. The book does not dramatize the details. It does not need to. fileciteturn11file1
Laemmle also supported educational work. In 1926 he established a scholarship for the best study of Victor Hugo. The following year he created the Laemmle Award, an annual $5,000 prize intended to recognize journalists who offered constructive ideas for improving motion picture production.
He also remembered Laupheim. The little German town where he had grown up eventually received public baths, a gymnasium, and a park with his help. One of its streets was named Carl Laemmle Strasse. Families there remained on his personal pension rolls.
This was not the philanthropy of someone trying to reinvent himself after becoming rich. The pattern ran too consistently through his life. He remembered people.
None of this makes Carl Laemmle a saint. Nor does it make every Universal picture an exercise in social enlightenment. He produced entertainment because people wanted entertainment. Universal made westerns, romances, comedies, adventures, serials, horror pictures, and plenty of films designed primarily to sell tickets. Laemmle never apologized for that.
At a Universal sales convention, he could speak almost comically bluntly about making pictures that performed at the box office. He could tell his men to get every dollar legally available from the market. fileciteturn10file4 Yet the same man could believe passionately in All Quiet on the Western Front.
That apparent contradiction is actually what makes him interesting. Laemmle did not believe commerce and conscience had to occupy separate rooms. A movie could make money and say something.
A studio could operate aggressively and still treat its employees honorably. A successful immigrant could love America without forgetting hungry people in the country he had left behind. A businessman could demand repayment while believing a former prisoner deserved another chance.
The principles were rarely expressed as a grand philosophy. They showed up as decisions. Put the money into the picture. Give the man a job. Send the food. Help the family. Keep your word.
By the time All Quiet on the Western Front arrived in 1930, Laemmle had been in motion pictures for nearly a quarter century. He had watched movies grow from five-cent curiosities projected in converted storefronts into one of the most powerful means of communication ever invented.
That transformation carried consequences. Millions of people could now watch the same story. Millions could laugh at the same joke. Millions could also watch young soldiers disappear into mud, fear, and artillery fire and leave the theater thinking differently about war.
Laemmle understood that power. He still wanted the audience to buy a ticket. He simply no longer believed selling the ticket was necessarily the end of the transaction.
Sometimes a movie could stay with people after the lights came up. Sometimes a studio could place something into the culture besides entertainment. And sometimes success could give a man enough influence to make another person’s life slightly easier.