W.W. Hodkinson

Notable work and positions

Paramount Pictures Corporation - Founder and first President (1914-1916)
W.W. Hodkinson Corporation - Founder (1917)

Biography

William Wadsworth Hodkinson (1881-1971) founded Paramount Pictures Corporation on May 8, 1914, merging 11 regional film-rental firms into the first nationwide U.S. film distributor and serving as its first president. He began his motion-picture career by opening one of the first theaters in Ogden, Utah, in 1907, before moving into film distribution and becoming a leading West Coast distributor. Hodkinson's distribution system, which financed and advertised producers' films in exchange for a share of rental revenue, became the standard model for major Hollywood studios for decades, and he is credited with sketching the original Paramount mountain-and-stars logo. After being forced out of Paramount by Adolph Zukor and Jesse Lasky in 1916, Hodkinson founded his own distribution company, the W.W. Hodkinson Corporation, in 1917, which he sold in 1924; it was later reorganized as Producers Distributing Corporation. He left the film industry in 1929 to found an aircraft manufacturing company and later aviation ventures in Central America.