W. Ray Johnston

W. Ray Johnston had years of silent film production experience (at Florida's Thanhouser Company and Syndicate Pictures) behind him when he became an independent producer, founding Big Productions Corp. in 1924 and, later, Rayart. These companies paved the way for his entry into sound pictures at the dawn of the Great Depression, forming Monogram Pictures in October of 1929. Falling back on his distribution background, Johnston set about lining up a group of film exchanges covering 39 key geographical areas of North America. For an independent film producer, distribution to rural and second-run theaters was crucial for success (typically a first-run "B" picture would be shown with an older second-run major studio release, or a smaller theater would choose two new Bs as a double feature. In those pre-TV days, theaters would change their bills completely three times a week! The demand for product in second-run theaters was insatiable until the end of WWII). Johnston assigned production responsibilities to his longtime friend and partner Trem Carr, who was a very capable manager. In the beginning Monogram had no real production facilities, operating similarly to the way United Artists operated later, albeit without the prestige and production budget. Johnston's and Carr's extensive distribution network became a magnet for a number of independent producers, and collecting franchise fees enabled them to begin producing their own low-budget features. Despite it being the darkest days of the Great Depression, Monogram succeeded, releasing its first small number of features in 1931. That grew to 32 releases in 1932 and 24 in 1933. Monogram had a roster of veteran producers under its banner, including Paul Malvern, Herbert Brenon, I.E. Chadwick, and M.H. Hoffman. Johnston and Carr could literally squeeze the buffalo off a nickel; their headquarters were nominally out of the old Talisman lot at 4516 Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood and were not put under contract but hired on a per-film basis. With a heavy emphasis on westerns--some of them starring a young John Wayne--many of its pictures were shot on locations near the studio itself, keeping overhead costs to a bare minimum. Silent-film mogul Mack Sennett went bankrupt in 1933 and his sprawling studio was an attractive target for several ambitious "Poverty Row" producers. Mascot Pictures chief Nat Levine, who ran his modest serial empire in rented space above a contractor's office, was the first to come up with a workable plan: buy an option, locate someone with deep pockets and attract experienced production staff. Levine approached Johnston and Carr (who initially snubbed the offer, fearing the overhead) and the head of a major film processing company, the overbearing but wealthy Herbert J. Yates of Consolidated Film Industries (CFI). Yates, relatively inexperienced in production, had his mind set on becoming a film mogul. A deal was dangled at Johnston and Carr in which they would serve as rotating chiefs with "autonomy" and the pair agreed to enlist. The result was Republic Pictures, which was formed in 1935. The idea must have seemed great--on paper. The Monogram name was shelved and Johnston was installed as the nominal studio chief, a title that initially rotated among the three lesser partners. But principal stockholder Yates made it crystal clear--he was in charge and he ruled with an iron fist. Johnston and Carr almost immediately clashed with Yates (Levine preferred to remain out of the fray, quietly and competently churning out modest, yet successful, films that mirrored his earlier Mascot productions; Yates bought him out in 1939 and his career in movies would be soon over), and it wasn't long--1937, actually--before things got so bad that Johnston and Carr left the company in disgust and resurrected Monogram. They quickly ramped up production to 20 features for the remainder of 1937, working out of rented office space at Universal Pictures (Carr actually produced a handful of "B" pictures for Universal while he was there), itself in its tumultuous post-Carl Laemmle period. If they learned anything from their experience at Republic, it was that having actual studio facilities had its advantages, and they finally located a production facility at Sunset Dr. and Hoover St. The little reborn studio specialized on producing two-week quickies that emphasized action, with many stories designed to capitalize on current events (such as Dick Merrill's trans-Atlantic flight), radio show tie-ins and venerable westerns. Johnston and Carr also saw a gold mine in pressing on with the major studios' cast-off programmers, correctly calculating that the Dead End Kids and Charlie Chan still had money left to wring out of them. With the major studios drastically reducing their "B" units in the 1940s, Monogram saw its niche expanding. Even so, the spunky little studio's average profit per picture into the mid-'40s was embarrassingly small (a mere $1932.12 in 1942, a figure that would cause even a short-subject producer at a major studio to howl with laughter), which may explain the rough edges, recycled music and continuity lapses ignored by the stable of hack directors Monogram hired to make its films. Continuing to operate more as a collection of independent producers under one brand, Monogram gained two notable additions, the colorful and legendary tight-fisted Sam Katzman (a man so cheap that he would rip out unfilmed pages of a script whenever a production fell behind) and the always parsimonious agent-turned-"B"-mogul Jan Grippo, who morphed Samuel Goldwyn's delinquent Dead-End Kid cast-offs into the East Side Kids and later as the Bowery Boys (the series would last well into the late 1950s in ever-cheaper-looking installments that seemed to get oddly more endearing the less money was thrown at them and the older and more complacent they became). The same can't be said for the Chan series, which suffered greatly in the move. Lifted from Fox nearly whole, with aging Sidney Toler pressing on in increasingly (and exponentially embarrassingly) cheap productions and replaced by the ineffective Roland Winters after his death in 1947. Monogram's product remained decidedly B-level; overall, its releases were generally fast-paced and satisfied the lower half of a three-day double bill in thousands of independent movie theaters making them, if not art, than at least profitable. Sadly, Trem Carr died of a heart attack in 1946. In November 1946 Johnston moved to merge Monogram into Allied Artists, a name more fitting the true nature of the company (with Steve Broidy), first with AA as a subsidiary company. The Monogram name increasingly became associated with cheap and shoddy product, and the company sought to increase its standing in the industry and the company eventually dropped the Monogram name in favor of Allied Artists. While loftier sounding, Allied Artists would continue to release the same low-budget product, with few exceptions, into the next decade.