Adolph Zukor (/ˈzuːkər/; Hungarian: Czukor Adolf; January 7, 1873 – June 10, 1976)[1] was a Hungarian-American film producer best known as one of the three founders of Paramount Pictures.

[3][4] Zukor was born to an Ashkenazi Jewish family in Ricse, in the Kingdom of Hungary in January 1873,[5] which was then a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

[8] Historian Neal Gabler wrote, "one of the stubborn fallacies of movie history is that the men who created the film industry were all impoverished young vulgarians..." Zukor clearly didn't fit this profile.

[8] In 1918, he moved to New City, Rockland County, New York, where he purchased 300 acres of land from Lawrence Abraham, heir to the A&S Department Stores.

Zukor, Mark, and Kohn opened a penny arcade operating as The Automatic Vaudeville Company on 14th Street in New York City.

[11] The following year he obtained the financial backing of the Frohman brothers, the powerful New York City theatre impresarios.

Their primary goal was to bring noted stage actors to the screen and Zukor went on to produce The Prisoner of Zenda (1913).

He signed many of the early ones, including Mary Pickford, Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle, Marguerite Clark, Pauline Frederick, Douglas Fairbanks, Gloria Swanson, Rudolph Valentino, and Wallace Reid.

That system gave Paramount a leading position in the 1920s and 1930s, but led the government to pursue it on antitrust grounds for more than 20 years.

In 1926, Zukor hired independent producer B. P. Schulberg, who had an unerring eye for new talent, to run the new West Coast operations.

Thus he pioneered the concept, now the accepted practice in the film industry, by which the distributor charges the exhibitor a percentage of box-office receipts.

He managed to keep stars such as Pola Negri, Gloria Swanson, and most important of all, Mary Pickford, under contract and happy to stay at Paramount.

"He did not take the same personal, down-to-the-last-detail interest in the making of his movies that producer-executives such as Samuel Goldwyn and Louis B. Mayer did," wrote The New York Times in Zukor's obituary at the age of 103.

He became an early investor in radio, taking a 50 percent interest in the new Columbia Broadcasting System in 1928, but selling it within a few years.

Ultimately at fault were Zukor's over-expansion and use of overvalued Paramount stock for purchases that made the company file for bankruptcy.

[16][17] He eventually spent most of his time in New York City, but passed the winter months in Hollywood to check on his studio.