Carl Laemelle: The Making of the Movie Business

If you wanted to understand Carl Laemmle’s genius, you could start with a scrap of paper he kept close at hand, four words that he treated like a working creed: “It Can Be Done.”

It wasn’t a slogan for posters. It was a private nudge, a dare to himself, a reminder that stubborn problems bend if you keep pushing. He leaned on it in 1911 when injunctions and “film cops” made independent production in New York almost impossible, he leaned on it again in 1912 when he set out to fuse a swarm of scrappy outfits into something bigger than any one man’s company.

The result was the Universal Film Manufacturing Company, a giant with a national footprint and global ambitions, built out of nerve, alliances, and a flair for logistics.

From siege to scale

The road to Universal really begins during The Trust years, when Laemmle’s IMP (Independent Moving Pictures) learned to survive by doing the unorthodox. With patent lawsuits choking the independents, he shifted production to Cuba, outside the Trust’s reach, and kept his release schedule alive.

The move yielded hits (including a “Little Mary” comedy with Mary Pickford) and, more importantly, proved that IMP could find oxygen wherever the Trust tried to seal the room.

When the heat eased and the company came home, Laemmle showed the same mix of practicality and principle that would win him allies. Asked by Pickford for a release to work again with D. W. Griffith, he tore up her still-valuable contract and wished her well, a gesture remembered for years. This wasn’t softness; it was strategy with a conscience. People wanted to work with a man who kept his word.

By 1910 Laemmle had helped convene a coalition of independents into a distribution shield called the Motion Picture Distributing and Sales Company, “the Sales Company” for short, where he was elected president.

The new network gave non-Trust producers a way to get their reels into theaters without begging favors from the enemy. Two years later, the courts served a major boost when a Judge with IMP in a key patent case the Trust had brought, a legal crack that widened morale and market share for the independents.

The market responded fast. In February 1912, Laemmle could claim that west of Chicago, independents were supplying half of all the films shown, proof that a parallel industry wasn’t just possible; it was already here.

Why a merger—and why now?

Laemmle wasn’t a romantic about business. He believed movies could uplift, but he also believed they lived or died on supply, speed, and trust. On any given day he was juggling two jobs: build a producing company and help dismantle a monopoly.

That balancing act pushed him toward a simple conclusion: the independents needed scale, a company large enough to make, market, and move pictures across the country without asking anyone’s permission.

The ingredients were ready. Through the Sales Company, Laemmle had gathered a circle of producers and organizers, Rex, Nestor, and capable lieutenants like Herbert Miles and J. V. Ward, who had weathered raids, lawsuits, and boycotts together. They weren’t just colleagues; they were foxhole friends.

He’d also cultivated an unusually frank relationship with exhibitors. When Pittsburgh exchanges tried to choke off IMP, Laemmle printed the names of the exchanges that still carried his reels and told showmen exactly how to keep the spigot of films open. That kind of candor turned buyers into partners, exactly the kind of network a new studio would need.

The birth of Universal

In 1912, the pieces clicked: IMP and allied companies were drawn together under a single banner, the Universal Film Manufacturing Company, with Laemmle at the top. In the space of three years he’d gone from founding IMP (1909), to leading the Sales Company (1910), to presiding over Universal (1912).

Titles mattered less than what they signaled, that the independents were done hiding. They were a system now, production units, distribution muscle, and a president who knew the exhibitor’s headaches because he’d had them himself.

Universal was a rethink of how you build a movie business when the old guard controls the ports. Instead of a few gilded stages and a trickle of prestige films, Universal promised volume with reliability, steady releases from multiple units, a salesman’s attention to regional tastes, and a message to theaters from Oshkosh to Oakland: you’ll never run dry if you’re on our program.

That vision was baked into Laemmle’s weekly bulletins and ad copy, pep talks that mixed homespun humor with hard numbers about prints, schedules, and quality control.

He had already set production at a clip under IMP with hundreds of releases, overlapping companies of players, directors squeezed to deliver a picture a week. That cadence, transferred into a larger organism, made Universal feel less like a newborn and more like a machine that had already been stress-tested.

National reach, human scale

What made Universal different was the way Laemmle translated scale back into human relationships. He’d been the man at the door of a nickelodeon, he never forgot that the chain is only as strong as each local link.

So the new company communicated with theaters, not in marble proclamations but in letters that sounded like the guy who once sold you a nine-ninety-eight suit and wanted to make sure it fit. If an exchange tried to pressure a house off Universal films, Laemmle didn’t counter with vague menace; he gave the theater names and options. “Here’s who will serve you. Here’s how to switch. Don’t let them starve your screen.”

And because Universal had many producing units, it could program to many audiences including one-reelers for the houses that needed a fast turnover, serials and multi-reel dramas for palaces discovering they could hold crowds all evening.

The point wasn’t a single aesthetic; it was a dependable menu. That reliability was rooted in Laemmle’s business-first realism and it helped Universal knit together a truly national circuit at exactly the moment American moviegoing was shifting from carnival novelty to weekly habit.

Freedom through structure

If The Trust tried to enforce order with a club, Laemmle built order out of structure with contracts that traveled with the pictures, distribution schedules that didn’t buckle under weather or whim, and a management style that rewarded speed without sacrificing standards.

He bragged in print that IMP had scrapped $45,000 in negatives because they didn’t meet the bar, and promised exhibitors he’d rather eat costs than send out junk under his name. That ethos carried into Universal: better to miss a quick buck than train your buyers not to trust your brand.

The legal winds were shifting, too. The Sales Company’s 1912 courtroom win under Judge Hand didn’t end The Trust, but it changed the mood. Independents were no longer rogues; they were the future.

When Universal unfurled its banner that year, it did so in an industry where the old monopoly was wobbling and where exhibitors, newly emboldened, were looking for a reliable partner to fill their screens. Universal stepped into that space with contracts ready, prints on rails, and a president who answered his own mail.

The boardroom, the bet, the blueprint

The new company wasn’t all harmony. Universal’s early board meetings could be rowdy with founders and financiers wrangling over risk. Laemmle, for his part, was not afraid to put his own skin in the game. When a group of young filmmakers brought him a controversial long picture (Traffic in Souls) and the board balked at the cost, he snapped that he’d personally buy it for $10,000 if they wouldn’t.

They relented and the picture became a sensation. The anecdote is 1913, not 1912, but it shows what the 1912 merger unlocked: a structure big enough to absorb a bold bet and a leader willing to make one.

“Universal” as a promise

The name was aspirational, but it wasn’t empty. Within three years Laemmle would take the next audacious step, move out west and open Universal City, a working municipality devoted to production, a physical proof that the merger wasn’t a paper trick but the skeleton of an empire. (Land purchased March 1914; ground broken in October; gates opened the following March.) You could walk its streets, watch its police, tour its props: a small city whose main export was stories.

But the soul of “Universal” was already present in 1912: dozens of hands moving in coordination so that a projectionist in Omaha, a box-office manager in Spokane, and a mother with two kids in Fort Worth could all count on the same thing, there will be a good picture on Thursday. That’s what national reach meant before radio ads and freeway billboards. It meant keeping promises, every week, everywhere.

The human math of a giant

Looking back, it’s easy to see only the grandeur, the mergers, the court victories, the studio city. But the alchemy that forged Universal was smaller and more human: a note torn from a contract when an actor asked for freedom, a circular to exhibitors that named names and offered fixes; a willingness to move a whole company to Cuba if that’s what the moment required. Those habits of practical, personal, and unglamorous scaled astonishingly well.

By the end of 1912, the independents led. Laemmle, who once counted nickelodeon patrons with a handful of beans outside a Chicago theater, had become the architect of a company sturdy enough to carry a new American pastime across a continent.

The Trust would finally go down in 1915, but the decisive turn had already been made: the trade was now flowing through a channel that men like Laemmle had dug with their own hands.

Behind the contracts and carloads of prints, four words kept paying off: It can be done.