Carl Laemmle Biography

Fast Facts

• After discovering the huge threat the Nazis posed during visits to his native Europe in the mid-1930s, he began using his own money to save more than 300 Jewish families from persecution by moving them to the U․S․ and finding them jobs
• After immigrating to America with his family in 1884, he worked at several low-paying jobs in Chicago before becoming a bookkeeper in Oshkosh, Wisconsin for 12 years
• Bought a nickelodeon, which he called the White Front Theater, in Chicago in 1906 and established the Laemmle Film Service, a distribution company, later that year
• Quote: "(On why he insisted on helping Jewish people escape Germany): "I have never been so sympathetic to any cause as I am to these poor innocent people who are suffering untold agony without having done any wrong whatsoever․""
• Created the Independent Motion Picture Company in New York in 1909, which would later become Universal when he moved the company to Los Angeles in 1912
• Best known as the founder of Universal Studios and is thought to be the creator of the Hollywood star system
• Universal was the most productive studio in the world from 1915 to 1925, specializing in low-budget Westerns and melodramas and finding success with the Lon Chaney films "The Hunchback of Notre Dame" and "Phantom of the Opera․"
• Was the first studio head to give actors onscreen credit and is thought to have created the first named movie star with Florence Lawrence, who had until then been known as "The Biograph Girl․"