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Screen Gems

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Screen Gems logo
Screen Gems logo

Screen Gems is an American subsidiary company of Columbia Pictures Corp. that has served several different purposes for its parent companies over the decades since its incorporation.

Animation studio: 1940–1946

For an entire decade, Charles B. Mintz distributed his Krazy Kat, Scrappy, and Color Rhapsody animated film shorts through Columbia. When Mintz became indebted to Columbia in 1939, he ended up selling his studio to them. Under new management, the studio assumed a new name, Screen Gems. Jimmy Bronis, Mintz's production manager became the studio head, but was shortly replaced by Mintz's brother-in-law, George Winkler. After this, Columbia decided to "clean house" by ousting the bulk of the staff (including Winkler) and hiring creative cartoonist, Frank Tashlin. After Tashlin's short stay came Dave Fleischer and after several of his successors came Ray Katz and Henry Binder from Warner Bros. Notable animators, directors, and writers at the series included people such as Art Davis, Sid Marcus, Bob Wickersham, and, during its latter period, Bob Clampett.

The studio had several characters on their roster. These included Flippy, Willoughby Wren, and Tito and his Burrito. However, the most successful characters the studio had were The Fox and the Crow, a comic duo of a refined Fox and a street-wise Crow.

Screen Gems is also notable for being, in an attempt to keep costs low, the last American animation studio to stop producing black and white cartoons. The final black-and-white Screen Gems shorts appeared in 1946, over three years after the second-longest holdouts (Famous Studios and Leon Schlesinger Productions). During that same year, the studio shut its doors for good, though their animation output continued to be distributed until 1949.

The Screen Gems cartoons were only moderately successful when compared to those of Disney, Warner Bros., and MGM. The studio's purpose was assumed by an outside producer, United Productions of America (UPA), whose cartoons, including Gerald McBoing Boing and the Mr. Magoo series, were major critical and commercial successes.

Television subsidiary: 1948–1974

File:S from Hell.jpg
Screen Gems television studio logo

In 1948, Screen Gems was revived to serve as the television subsidiary of Columbia, producing and syndicating several popular shows (see below) and also syndicating Columbia Pictures' theatrical film library to television, including the wildly successful series of two-reel short subjects starring The Three Stooges in the late 1950s. Earlier, they also acquired syndication rights to a package of Universal horror films, which was enormously successful in reviving that genre. The final notable production from this incarnation of Screen Gems was the 1974 mini-series QB VII.

In the late 50's Screen Gems would also go into broadcasting. Stations that would be owned by Screen Gems over the years would include KCPX (now KTVX) (Salt Lake City), WVUE (New Orleans), WAPA (San Juan), WNJU (Linden, NJ), and several radio stations as well.

In 1974, the Screen Gems name was retired and Columbia's television subsidiary became Columbia Pictures Television. Changes in corporate ownership of Columbia came in the early-1980s when the Coca-Cola Company bought the company, although continuing to trade under the CPT name. In the mid-1980s, Coca-Cola reorganized its television holdings to create Coca-Cola Television, merging CPT with the television unit of Embassy Communications as Columbia/Embassy Television, although both companies continued to use separate identities until 1988, when it and TriStar Television were reunited under the CPT name. In 1989 Columbia Pictures was purchased by Sony Corporation of Japan. In 1991, Columbia Pictures Entertainment was renamed to Sony Pictures Entertainment as a film production-distribution subsidiary, and subsequently combined CPT with a revived TriStar Television in 1994 to form Columbia-TriStar Television.

The television division today is presently known as Sony Pictures Television.

Notable TV shows

Notable television programs produced and/or syndicated by Screen Gems include:

Specialty feature film studio, 1999–Present

File:S From Heaven.jpg
Current Screen Gems logo (the "S from Heaven").

In September 2002, Columbia TriStar Television became Sony Pictures Television, while three years earlier, in 1999, Screen Gems was resurrected as the specialty film producing arm of Sony's Columbia Pictures. Similar to Dimension Films, Screen Gems produces and releases smaller-budget science fiction, horror, farce or ethnic films with more centralized target audiences than Columbia's mainstream output.

The most-successful Screen Gems film commercially as of 2006 was The Exorcism of Emily Rose, which grossed $136,661,432 in international box office receipts.

Screen Gems films

EUE/Screen Gems

Screen Gems should not be confused with EUE/Screen Gems, which uses the same "S" logo. EUE/Screen Gems was founded by Frank Capra, Jr., and owns and operates motion picture and television production facilities in Wilmington, North Carolina and New York, New York. (The WB drama Dawson's Creek was filmed at the Wilmington facility, and the soap opera Guiding Light is videotaped at the New York studio). In 1984, Capra purchased the assets of Screen Gems from Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc., but apparently not the name because he was forced to make a minor change in the company's name (thus the EUE).


See also

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