![]() ![]() Without government interference, “Paramount-Vitaphone” and “Fox-Loew’s” might have divided the entertainment industries of the entire English-speaking world between them. Department of Justice intervened, forbidding Paramount’s merger with Warner Brothers and divorcing Fox from Loew’s. In an effort to become even more powerful, Paramount in 1929 acquired one-half of the newly formed Columbia Broadcasting System and proposed a merger with Warner Brothers. Its holdings were surpassed only by those of Paramount, which controlled an international distribution network and the vast Publix theatre chain. ![]() Fox went even farther, building the multimillion-dollar Movietone City in Westwood, California, in 1928 and acquiring controlling shares of both Loew’s, Inc., the parent corporation of MGM, and Gaumont British, England’s largest producer-distributor-exhibitor. By 1929, Warner Brothers had acquired the Stanley theatre circuit, which controlled nearly all the first-run houses in the mid-Atlantic states, and the production and distribution facilities of its former rival First National to become one of the largest studios in Hollywood. ![]() The unexpected success of their strategy forced the industrywide conversion to sound and transformed Warner Brothers and Fox into major corporations. It was primarily in response to those aggressive maneuvers that Warner Brothers and Fox sought to dominate smaller exhibitors by providing prerecorded musical accompaniment to their films. Throughout the 1920s, Paramount, MGM, First National, and other studios had conducted ambitious campaigns of vertical integration by ruthlessly acquiring first-run theatre chains. If the coming of sound changed the aesthetic dynamics of the filmmaking process, it altered the economic structure of the industry even more, precipitating some of the largest mergers in motion-picture history.
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