[3] On June 19, 1918, brothers Jack and Harry Cohn and their business partner Joe Brandt founded the studio as Cohn-Brandt-Cohn (CBC) Film Sales Corporation.

In its early years, Columbia was a minor player in Hollywood, but began to grow in the late 1920s, spurred by a successful association with director Frank Capra.

Columbia's product line consisted mostly of moderately budgeted features and short subjects including comedies, sports films, various serials, and cartoons.

Columbia gradually moved into the production of higher-budget fare, eventually joining the second tier of Hollywood studios along with United Artists and Universal.

Other Capra-directed hits followed, including the original version of Lost Horizon (1937), with Ronald Colman, and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), which made James Stewart a major star.

B. Kahane as vice president would produce Charles Vidor's Those High Grey Walls (1939), and The Lady in Question (1940), the first joint film of Rita Hayworth and Glenn Ford.

Columbia's short-subject department employed many famous comedians, including Buster Keaton, Charley Chase, Harry Langdon, Andy Clyde, and Hugh Herbert.

In 1933, The Mintz studio was re-established under the Screen Gems brand; Columbia's leading cartoon series were Krazy Kat, Scrappy, The Fox and the Crow, and (very briefly) Li'l Abner.

The most famous Columbia serials are based on comic-strip or radio characters: Mandrake the Magician (1939), The Shadow (1940), Terry and the Pirates (1940), Captain Midnight (1942), The Phantom (1943), Batman (1943), and the especially successful Superman (1948), among many others.

In the 1940s, propelled in part by the surge in audiences for their films during World War II, the studio also benefited from the popularity of its biggest star, Rita Hayworth.

Columbia maintained a long list of contractees well into the 1950s; Glenn Ford, Penny Singleton, William Holden, Judy Holliday, The Three Stooges, Ann Miller, Evelyn Keyes, Ann Doran, Jack Lemmon, Cleo Moore, Barbara Hale, Adele Jergens, Larry Parks, Arthur Lake, Lucille Ball, Kerwin Mathews and Kim Novak.

Another biopic, 1946's The Jolson Story with Larry Parks and Evelyn Keyes, was started in black-and-white, but when Cohn saw how well the project was proceeding, he scrapped the footage and insisted on filming in Technicolor.

[17] By 1951, Screen Gems became a full-fledged television studio and became a major producer of sitcoms for TV, beginning with Father Knows Best and followed by The Donna Reed Show, The Partridge Family, Bewitched, I Dream of Jeannie, and The Monkees.

Katzman contributed greatly to Columbia's success by producing dozens of topical feature films, including crime dramas, science-fiction stories, and rock'n'roll musicals.

Some of its significant films from this era include the studio's adaptation of the controversial James Jones novel From Here to Eternity (1953), On the Waterfront (1954), and The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) with William Holden and Alec Guinness, all of which won the Best Picture Oscar.

[21] The new management was headed by Abe Schneider, who had joined the company as an office boy out of high school and become a director in 1929, rising through the financial side of the business.

[26] In 1973, Allen & Co took a financial stake in Columbia Pictures Industries and Alan Hirschfield was appointed CEO,[27] succeeding Leo Jaffe who became chairman.

[36] On January 15, 1979, the United States Department of Justice filed an antitrust suit against Kerkorian to block him from holding a stake in Columbia while controlling MGM.

Arnold had dropped the federal and state lawsuits against the television studio, who was accusing them of antitrust violations, fraud, and breach of fiduciary duty.

[clarification needed] Puttnam then discontinued multi-picture pacts with various filmmakers, including Norman Jewison, which was permitted to expire before all of the promised product could be delivered.

)[72] In June 1988, CPE announced the sale of Columbia Pictures Publications (consisting of the print music operations) to the investment firm Boston Ventures and was renamed CPP/Belwin.

[75][76] On September 28, 1989, the Columbia Pictures empire was sold to the electronics giant Sony, one of several Japanese firms then buying American properties, for the amount of $3.4 billion.

On December 1, 1989, Guber and Peters hired a longtime lawyer of GPEC, Alan J. Levine, to the post of president and COO of Columbia's newly formed company Filmed Entertainment Group (FEG).

[84] The entire operation was reorganized and renamed Sony Pictures Entertainment (SPE) on August 7, 1991,[85] and at the same time, TriStar (which had officially lost its hyphen) relaunched its television division in October.

MGM and Danjaq, LLC, owners of the franchise, sued Sony Pictures in 1997, with the legal dispute ending two years later in an out-of-court settlement.

Columbia's box office successes of 2006 included such blockbusters as The Da Vinci Code, The Pursuit of Happyness, Monster House, Casino Royale, and Open Season.

[citation needed] In 1936, the logo was changed into the well known classic look: the Torch Lady now stood on a pedestal, wore no headdress, and the text "Columbia" appeared in chiseled letters behind her.

Pittsburgh native Jane Chester Bartholomew, whom Harry Cohn discovered working as an extra at Columbia, portrayed the Torch Lady in the logo.

VHS promos featured the current logo with a stylized "75" behind the Torch Lady, commemorating the studio's 75th anniversary in 1999 with the slogan, "Lighting Up Screens Around the World".

The current logo was also used for Screen Gems Network and Columbia Showcase Theatre, both now defunct programming blocks that featured syndicated airings of Sony Pictures-owned shows and films, respectively.