Welcome to the Deep Dive. Yeah. I am so thrilled
you are joining us today. Yeah, it is a really
great one. Because we're going to look at something
that functions almost like a, well, like a hidden
gem or a historical detective story, if you will.
Right. If you want to understand how modern Hollywood
monopolies were built, you really have to look
at the blueprints from the 1920s. Exactly. And
today, our mission is focused on just a single
Wikipedia article. It's a stub, really. Just
a tiny, easily overlooked corner of the internet
about a company called the Producers Distributing
Corporation. It is a remarkable little document
because on the surface, you are reading what
appears to be a dry corporate summary of a Hollywood
distribution company that existed for barely
three years, just from 1924 to 1927. A blip.
A total blip. But when you slow down and read
between the lines, the scope of what was happening
in those three years is staggering. That short
window is an... absolute masterclass in 1920s
corporate strategy. You have a cast of legendary
historical titans colliding in the boardroom.
We're talking founders of major studios, political
patriarchs, and tech innovators. And on top of
all that, by the time we get to the end of our
source material today, the text offers this incredibly
haunting look at the fragility of art itself.
So to you listening, pull up a chair and get
comfortable. The roaring 20s in Hollywood was
a time of unimaginable wealth, massive egos and
cutthroat business tactics. And PDC, despite
its short lifespan, was operating right at the
epicenter of that chaos. It really is a perfect
encapsulation of the era. So let's start at the
very beginning and set the stage. The origins
of PDC go back to a man named William Wadsworth
Hodkinson. A major player. Right. The text notes
that Hodkinson was a true film pioneer. He actually
founded Paramount Pictures back in 1912. Which
is incredible. That is a massive monumental credential
in the film industry. But the text jumps forward
a dozen years to late 1924 and things are not
looking so great for him. He has this struggling
distribution company that he desperately needs
to offload. Which serves as a brilliant reminder
of how incredibly volatile the early film industry
was. You could be the visionary mastermind who
founds Paramount in 1912 and a mere 12 years
later, you are scrambling to sell off the struggling
parts of your portfolio just to stay afloat.
Yeah, it's wild. The landscape was shifting beneath
their feet almost daily. I mean, the medium was
so new and the business models were completely
untested. OK, let's unpack this because Hodgkinson
clearly needs. the lifeline here. He has this
distressed asset. Who actually steps in to buy
it? This is where the story takes a sharp left
turn. The buyer is a man named Jeremiah Milbank,
and the source provides a very specific and very
telling description of Milbank. Tell me. It quotes
a biography of Cecil B. DeMille describing Milbank
neutrally as a wealthy, extremely religious,
and politically conservative financier. Which
completely flips the script on what you'd expect
for a Hollywood bailout. Complete. Keep that
austere image in your head. You have a wealthy,
conservative, highly religious financier entering
the 1920s film industry, which was essentially
viewed by much of the country at the time as
a den of sin and debauchery. Right. A total moral
panic. And his very next move makes the situation
even more baffling. What's fascinating here is
the sheer contrast of the partnership he forms.
You have Milbank representing this traditional
conservative wealth joining forces with the legendary
film director Cecil B. DeMille. The master of
the epic. Exactly. Milbank buys the company,
renames it Producers Distributing Corporation,
and installs DeMille as the primary talent. It
is the ultimate odd couple. You have the strict
financier holding the purse strings and the poster
child for Hollywood excess and spectacle directing
the actual product. I would love to have been
a fly on the wall for those boardroom dynamics.
It's a purely pragmatic alliance. Milbank brings
the cash and DeMille brings the flash. Very well
put. And speaking of cash, the text tells us
exactly where a big chunk of Milbank's money
went. They needed a physical footprint, so they
purchased the former Thomas H. Ince Culver Studios.
A legendary piece of Hollywood real estate. But
this wasn't just a collection of standard sound
stages and warehouses. No, it was not. The source
explicitly mentions an architectural quirk about
this property that requires a moment of reflection.
The main administrative building of this Culver
City studio was a replica of Mount Vernon. George
Washington's estate. George Washington's estate.
A full -blown replica. The text even notes that
this exact mansion at Culver Studios later became
the famous logo for Selznick International Pictures.
So if you've ever seen the opening of the movie
Gone with the Wind. Which everyone has. Right.
You've seen this building. I want you, the listener,
to just imagine the sheer vanity and logistics
of this for a second. Put yourself in 1920s California.
You are surrounded by orange groves and dust.
And suddenly, boom, there is a massive replica
of a presidential mansion. Built specifically
so you have a fancy administrative building to
shoot movies behind. The amount of money and
ego required to construct that is staggering.
It perfectly captures the mindset of the era.
These early studio heads weren't just making
entertainment, they were building empires. Yeah,
they wanted to be taken seriously. Exactly. The
film industry was still fighting for cultural
legitimacy. They wanted the gravitas and the
authority of American history, so they simply
bought a replica of it and set up shop inside.
Just incredible. But as we see in the text, having
a majestic building doesn't protect you from
the sharks circling in the water. It certainly
does not. Which brings us to the next phase of
PDC's incredibly short life. Because their independence
under Milbank and DeMille didn't last long at
all. What unfolds in the text is a dizzying sequence
of corporate mergers between 1927 and 1931. It
reads like the ultimate game of Hollywood Monopoly.
We really need to walk through this timeline
carefully because these aren't just random business
transactions. There is a very deliberate, aggressive
strategy playing out across the industry. Okay,
take it away. It starts in March 1927. PDC, despite
having the powerhouse talent of DeMille and their
Mount Vernon replica, merges with the small Pathé
Exchange studio. And through this specific merger,
they fall under the control of a theater chain
called the Keith Albee Orpheum Chain, or KAO.
That move... Makes strategic sense from a business
perspective. We are talking about vertical integration.
For anyone unfamiliar with the term vertical
integration in this era, man, they didn't just
make the movies. They owned the physical buildings
where you had to go to watch them. Exactly. They
owned the entire pipeline from the camera to
the ticket booth, control the distribution, control
the market. Right. But the chessboard flips again
almost immediately. We move to early 1928 and
a massive historical figure enters the picture.
The patriarch of the Kennedy political dynasty
himself. Joseph P. Kennedy. At this time, the
text notes he is the owner of the Film Booking
Offices of America, or the FBO studio. And Kennedy
swoops in and takes control of that K -A -O theater
chain. He is aggressively aggregating power.
So now Kennedy controls his own studio, FBO.
He controls the massive K -A -O theater chain.
Wow. And because K -A -O swallowed Pathé, which
swallowed PDC, Kennedy now holds all of PDC's
assets. Including that Culver City studio and
the Mount Vernon replica, he is building a fortress.
Here's where it gets really interesting. Because
you would logically think Kennedy is the end
of the line. He has the monopoly. He's the big
boss. But later that exact same year, another
Titan steps onto the field. And this time he's
not a Hollywood studio head. No, he is not. He's
from the tech world. The text introduces David
Sarnoff, the general manager of RCA. This is
a brilliant pivot in the narrative. Sarnoff and
RCA are not looking at this from the perspective
of making better movies or telling better stories.
They're looking at it from the perspective of
pushing a brand new technology. The source material
explains that Sarnoff was leading an effort to
promote the RCA photophone. Which was a sound
-on film system. We were talking of the dawn
of the talkies. This is the transition away from
playing a separate phonograph record alongside
a silent film and actually printing the audio
track directly onto the film strip itself. It
was a revolutionary piece of hardware. RCA has
invented this new sound system, but they face
a massive hurdle. How do you get... thousands
of independent movie theaters to buy and install
your specific hardware when there are competing
formats on the market. Right. They don't want
to spend the cash. Theaters were naturally resistant
to spending the money. So Sarnoff decides that
if the theaters won't buy the tech voluntarily,
he will buy the theaters and the studios himself
and force the integration. That is so aggressive.
RCA acquires and merges KAO and FBO. They smash
Kennedy's entire empire together to create a
brand new entity. RKO Radio Pictures. Let's just
pause and think about the mechanics of that move.
I really want to point this out to you because
it is wild to see how history repeats itself.
This 1920s corporate maneuver perfectly mirrors
the strategies modern tech companies use today.
Oh, absolutely. Think about it. When a massive
tech giant today wants to push their new streaming
platform or sell their new tablet or get you
to adopt their virtual reality headset. What
do they do? They buy the content. Exactly. They
go out and buy a legacy media studio. They buy
the James Bond franchise or the rights to massive
film libraries. They aren't doing it because
they love cinema. They are buying the content
to force you into their distribution pipeline.
RCA was executing this exact playbook 100 years
ago with RKO. Sarnoff realized a fundamental
truth of the media business. Content is the Trojan
horse for hardware. If you want to win a format
war, you don't just advertise the tech, you own
the exclusive rights to the movies people want
to see. It is a masterful, utterly ruthless piece
of corporate strategy. It really is. But wait,
we have to look at where this leaves Joseph P.
Kennedy. The text notes that during this massive
RCA buyout, Kennedy actually retained control
of Pathé, meaning he managed to keep his hands
on PDC's old assets, including that Culver City
studio. He held onto a very valuable piece of
the pie while the rest of his empire was absorbed,
but he didn't hold it for long. The article states
that in January 1931, Kennedy finally sells Pathé
to RKO, completely giving them the monopoly on
those assets. And then he exits the film business.
We're going to come back to that specific 1931
exit in a moment because the timing of it is
fascinating. But before we pivot from the boardroom
to the actual movies themselves, we should probably
do a quick bit of housekeeping for anyone trying
to Google this company later. Always important
to be precise when dealing with historical archives.
According to the source, we must clarify that
this producer's distributing corporation should
definitely not be confused with the professional
darts corporation. Which admittedly would be
a very different kind of analysis. Extremely
different. Also, the text notes, it is totally
unrelated to a 1939 company organized by a man
named Ben Judel, which confusingly had the exact
same name before evolving into the Producers
Releasing Corporation on Poverty Row. Right,
the low budget guys? Yeah, that whole tier of
low budget B -movie studios operating on the
fringes of Hollywood. And finally, it has absolutely
no connection to the Producers Distribution Agency
founded in 2010. So just to be crystal clear,
for the record, we are talking strictly about
the 1920s, Mount Vernon -owning, DeMille -directed,
RCA -acquired PDC. Thank you for clearing that
up. The film industry is a crowded field of recycled
acronyms. But I agree, it's time we shift our
focus. We have spent this entire time dissecting
the boardroom maneuvers, the financiers, the
real estate, and the tech acquisitions. We need
to look at the actual product. What about the
art? This is where the tone of our source material
takes a really sharp and frankly sobering turn.
The Wikipedia article provides a filmography.
A massive list of the film is released by PDC
during that brief window between 1924 and 1927.
And just reading the titles feels like stepping
into a time machine. The titles alone evoke the
entire atmosphere and aesthetic of 1920s cinema.
Listen to some of these. You've got The Hoosier
Schoolmaster. You've got The Siren of Seville.
Hell's High Road. The Volga Boatman. Up in Mabel's
room. And then, of course, the massive 1927 blockbuster,
The King of Kings. You can practically picture
the glowing marquees lighting up the night sky
with these names. They are incredibly evocative.
You have sweeping historical epics, high society
scandals, comedies and westerns. It shows that
PDC, despite its brief three year existence and
constant corporate turmoil, was churning out
a massive volume of popular entertainment. They
were highly productive. So what does this all
mean? We look at this long, vibrant list of titles,
dozens and dozens of them. But as you read down
the list in the source text, there is this repetitive,
almost chilling annotation sitting right next
to title after title. The word lost. Lost. Just
completely gone. You read the list and the reality
of it hits you like a ton of bricks. Another
scandal from 1924 lost. Welcome Stranger lost.
The Chorus Lady lost. Pals in Paradise lost.
And we don't mean they're just missing from a
streaming service or out of print on DVD. They
are wiped from the face of the earth. And even
the ones that aren't completely lost are hanging
by a thread in the archives. The source notes
that the 1925 film Madam Behave is listed as
incomplete. The 1924 release of The Hoosier Schoolmaster
has one reel missing. And then there's the 1926
film Red Dice, where the text simply says, Trailer
survives. Trailer survives. That phrase is so
deeply sad to me. Think about the human effort
behind that. You have an entire cast of crew,
a director, lighting technicians, costume designers,
set builders, months of labor and artistic expression,
all reduced to a two -minute promotional clip
that happened to survive by pure chance. This
raises an important question about our relationship
with media and preservation. We just spent the
first half of this deep dive outlining the immense
power and wealth surrounding PDC. Millions of
dollars were changing hands. Huge studio lots
were being bought and sold. Titans of industry
like Kennedy and Sarnoff were fighting tooth
and nail in boardrooms over these assets. Right.
They built a literal replica of Mount Vernon
to project their permanence and authority. The
corporate infrastructure felt monolithic. It
felt invincible. But the actual art, the physical
celluloid human itself, it was incredibly fragile.
Nitrate film is highly flammable and deteriorates
quickly if not stored perfectly. Despite all
that money, all that power and all those cutthroat
business strategies, the vast majority of what
they actually created simply vanished. It turned
to dust in a vault somewhere or burned in a warehouse
fire or was just thrown into a dumpster because
no one at the time thought to save last year's
commercial product. I really want you listening
to this right now to think about the digital
media you consume today. The photos on your phone,
the videos you upload, the movies you stream
on servers. We have this built -in assumption
that it's all permanent. We assume that because
it exists right now and because the companies
hosting it are massive and wealthy, it will exist
forever. But this PDC filmography is a stark
historical reminder of how easily cultural history
can just evaporate into thin air. It is a powerful
lesson in impermanence. History shows us that
culture is ephemeral unless it is actively and
deliberately preserved. The business deals of
Jeremiah Milbank and Joseph P. Kennedy are securely
recorded in ledgers and history books. The corporate
entity of RKO lived on for decades, but the art
they financed the stories they told to the public
is largely a ghost town. A ghost town filmography.
That's exactly what it feels like. A list of
phantoms. Let's recap this wild journey because
we have covered a massive amount of ground from
a very small source text. We started with PDC
as a struggling side hustle from the guy who
literally founded Paramount. Then it transforms
into a Cecil B. DeMille powerhouse financed by
a wealthy conservative millionaire who bought
a fake presidential estate to shoot movies. Then
it gets swept up in a massive wave of consolidation,
becoming a pawn in RCA's aggressive, hostile
rollout of sound on film technology. If we connect
this to the bigger picture, PDC is a perfect
microcosm of Hollywood's evolution. It only existed
for a blink of an eye, just three years. But
it was the connective tissue. It bridged the
gap between the Wild West days of independent
silent film pioneers and the massive vertically
integrated tech driven studio system that defined
the golden age of Hollywood. It really was the
crucible where modern Hollywood was forged. But
as we wrap up this deep dive, there was one final
lingering thought from the source that I just
cannot shake. I mentioned we would come back
to Joseph P. Kennedy's exit. I want to leave
you with this. The January 1931 sale. Exactly.
The text clearly states that in January 1931,
Kennedy abruptly cashed out. He sold Pathé to
RKO, washed his hands of the whole thing, and
completely left the film business. Think about
the historical context of that date, January
1931. The stock market had crashed in October
1929. The world is plunging headfirst into the
deepest, darkest depths of the Great Depression.
Millions are losing everything. And Kennedy is
sitting on a mountain of liquid cash from a massive
Hollywood buyout. It just makes you wonder what
exactly does a mastermind, a political patriarch
like Joseph P. Kennedy pivot to next? He is armed
with a vast fortune made from the ashes of PDC
and the studio wars right at the dawn of the
Great Depression. What does he do with all that
concentrated power and capital while the rest
of the country is reeling? The Wikipedia article
ends right there. But the implications of that
timeline are absolutely staggering when you think
about the dynasty that followed. It is a brilliant
thread to pull on. It shows how the history of
a seemingly obscure three year film distributor
can ripple out and touch the very fabric of American
political history. It really does. And that is
exactly why we love. doing this. Thank you so
much for joining us on this deep dive. It has
been an incredible journey from the birth of
Paramount through the boardroom brawls of the
1920s and down into the tragic vault of lost
cinema. Keep your eyes open, keep wondering about
the past, and always remember to keep questioning
the history behind your entertainment. We'll
catch you next time.