Trem Carr(1891-1946)
- Producer
- Additional Crew
- Production Manager
Until the advent of television in the late 1940's there were two
distinct Hollywoods. Populated on one extreme were the major studios
(many of which owned their own theater chains) with the glamor made
possible with million dollar film budgets. On the other extreme,
centered along Gower Street off Sunset, was Poverty Row, where
innumerable independent producers of varying repute ground out three
and four-day wonders costing next-to-nothing by comparison. It's films,
most often westerns, featuring actors with vaguely familiar names in
material written to satisfy undemanding, largely rural audiences.
Lacking theater chains, these outfits sold their releases to a complex
network of film exchanges which would rotate bills up to three times
each week, keeping films circulating between theaters across the
country for years. Any given film would drift up and down these
theaters' double bills, ping ponging Saturday afternoon matinées,
literally until the prints wore out. Gower Gulch saw scores of these
companies come and go during it's two decade heyday. One studio,
Columbia Pictures, managed to break into the ranks of the A-list
studios (thanks to a wunderkind director, a crude-yet-crafty studio
boss and unique relationships with MGM and Warner Brothers). Another,
Republic, would briefly blur the definition of a B-studio by
occasionally producing exceptional films. The rest would survive by
eking out minuscule profits on a volume basis or fail miserably by
rolling the dice on a few ill-conceived projects. Trem Carr spent the
majority of his career in the latter of Hollywood's extremes. He's most
closely associated with his close friend and partner,
W. Ray Johnston. Together these two
low-budget veterans successfully established Monogram Pictures, shelved
it, only to resurrect it to even greater success... all within a span
of less than 6 years. Ray had learned the film business from the ground
up, having been the treasurer of Syndicate Pictures and a producer at
Florida's Thanhouser Studio. Based on his experience, he saw the key to
a company's success lay more in its distribution network than the
actual films themselves. With the advent of talkies, he set about to
build a tight knit distributor franchise and the first incarnation of
Monogram was born in 1931. Trem had joined up with Ray just prior to
the company's formation as production manager and operated through 1935
without any studio facilities of its own. Monogram entered into deals
with independent producers (including
Paul Malvern,
M.H. Hoffman and
I.E. Chadwick) to release their product
under its banner while occasionally renting studio sound stages and
producing their own product as well. Ray was the finance and
distribution end and Trem was the hands-on production chief of Monogram
Pictures from 1931-35. In late 1933, the pair were approached by
serial-specializing Mascot Pictures'
Nat Levine about joining forces under one
banner at the recently foreclosed-upon
Mack Sennett studio. Fearing the overhead,
they refused. By 1935, Nat Levine's reputation had grown significantly
since the release of his Tom Mix serial,
The Miracle Rider (1935) and
it's reported $1 million gross, an eye-popping accomplishment in Gower
Gulch. Levine next approached the head of Monogram's film processing
company, the wealthy, domineering
Herbert J. Yates. As the owner of
Consolidated Film Industries, Yates had amassed a fortune along Poverty
Row by providing processing services and advancing raw film stock on
credit to struggling producers, many of whom fail, leaving Yates free
to sue and distribute their product at huge profit. In his years doing
this, Yates had harbored a desire to become a legitimate movie mogul.
While both Trem and Ray had rejected Levine's proposition previously,
Yates' involvement made the deal worth serious reconsideration, since
Monogram's debts to Yates would be extinguished as part of the deal.
Monogram was shelved and the new company, Republic Pictures, was born.
Yates made several similar offers to other small outfits that were
rolled into the new studio, including Victory and Chesterfield. Under
the original plan, Carr, Johnston and Levine were to rotate as
production heads, unfortunately it soon became a test of wills; Yates'
money bankrolled the operation and he held all the cards. Trem's
management style severely clashed with the autocratic Yates and it soon
became clear that the unequal partnership was unworkable. Trem was the
one-time theoretical head of Republic and regarded Yates as a meddling
interloper. Levine did his best to remain neutral, but ultimately sided
with the money (ironically, he would be bought out by Yates in 1939 for
$1 million in cash and would soon find himself broke and washed up in
pictures). Their clashes with Yates escalating violently, Trem and Ray
left Republic in 1937 and after a brief stint producing B-pictures for
Universal Pictures they resurrected Monogram Pictures using rented
offices there, managing to release a remarkable 20 low budget features
that same year. With Trem as production manager and Ray as president,
this "new" version of Monogram became a label for independent producers
to group together largely for the convenience in distributing their
product through its network of film exchanges - and the relative
prestige of the Monogram name. This concept was virtually identical to
United Artists, albeit on a comparatively minuscule budget (Monogram's
published profits averaged less than $2,000 per release well into the
40's--- a laughable figure to most studios). For the 1938-39 season,
Monogram announced its intention to release 26 features and 16
westerns. The company became known for its ability to quickly
capitalize on topical news stories
(Atlantic Flight (1937)), modest
westerns starring
Jack Randall and
Tex Ritter and even managing to snag
Boris Karloff for the "Mr. Wong" detective
series. While none of these films could be considered classics, they
were mostly above-par by prevailing Poverty Row standards and most
importantly, profitable, an elusive goal for many of it's neighbors. An
extremely efficient production manager, Trem continued to attract a
number of equally efficient (meaning in most cases, extremely cheap)
producers under the Monogram banner in the early 40s, and scooping up
other studios' cast-off properties that he keenly sensed still had
money left to wring out of them. Among these were former 20th Century
Fox's Charlie Chan series (lifted nearly whole with it's aging star
Sidney Toler, albeit with diminishing
returns with each added entry) and getting tremendous mileage with
Samuel Goldwyn's recently unemployed Dead
End Kids (re-branded as the East Side Kids and later as the Bowery Boys
for legendary skin flint producer
Jan Grippo). Monogram maintained a heavy
emphasis on cheaply produced westerns, through the war (tragically
losing one of their biggest stars,
Buck Jones, in the infamous Coconut
Grove Fire in 1942). Trem and Ray made a fantastic business partnership
and remained close friends. Ray was devastated when Trem died of a
coronary in 1946 and the Monogram name gradually morphed into Allied
Artists (a name more reflecting the concept of primarily distributing
other producers' films) in the late 1940s. Despite the loftier sounding
name, Allied would continue to release films with the same low-budget
production values well into the 1950's. In retrospect, Monogram was
neither the best poverty row studio (the title ironically befitting
Republic) or the worst (inarguably, PRC), but largely thanks to Trem
Carr, successful, resilient and remarkably prolific.