Selznick_International_Pictures

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 "Jock" Whitney after Selznick left Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer 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, and the other half from MGM production chief Irving Thalberg and his wife actress Norma Shearer. He raised an additional $300,000 from "small" investors in New York, and then the final $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.

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, to draw down their profits as capital gains, he and the other owners made an agreement with the Internal Revenue Service to liquidate Selznick International within three years, which they did by dividing and selling to each other the company's assets. Jock Whitney and his sister Joan Whitney Payson acquired Gone with the Wind, which they resold at a substantial profit to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1944.

To complete his obligation to deliver two more pictures to United Artists, Selznick formed David O. Selznick Productions in 1940 at the same studio location. The new company also took over the old company's contracts with individual directors and actors.

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

Film library

The rights to the Selznick library have been scattered, as noted in the following timeline.

1943: Jock Whitney sold to Film Classics, Inc. the rights to A Star Is Born and Nothing Sacred (both of which were actually owned by Pioneer Pictures), and the Selznick International productions Little Lord Fauntleroy, Made for Each Other, and The Young in Heart.

1947: Cinecolor Corporation acquired Film Classics, Inc.

1949: Cinecolor Corp. resold the company to Film Classics' officers.

1950: Film Classics was merged with Eagle-Lion Films to form Eagle Lion Classics.

1951: When Eagle Lion Classics collapsed, United Artists acquired its assets.

David O. Selznick retained ownership of The Garden of Allah, The Prisoner of Zenda, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Intermezzo, and Rebecca after the liquidation of Selznick International Pictures. The copyrights to A Star Is Born, Nothing Sacred, and Made for Each Other are now in the public domain, while most of the rest are now owned by ABC (via Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures, with the DVD rights currently licensed to MGM). The notable exception is Gone with the Wind, whose ownership was transferred to MGM in 1944 (and subsequently acquired by Warner Bros. (via its Turner Entertainment division).