Jesse Lasky: The Man Behind Paramount Pictures

Jesse Lasky’s nickname could have been goldfinger, for he was born with the golden touch.

That was not exactly what his parents, Ike and Sarah Lasky had in mind about striking gold in the “New Country” when newly arrived in New York City because of the Russian Pogroms, they set out for the Yukon to pan for gold, but it worked for him.

For, like his parents, Jesse was always the opportunist, panning for gold. First, he opened his Lasky Feature Play Company with money borrowed from his brother-in-law, Samuel Goldfish, (he changed it to Goldwyn years later and founded his own studio MGM¹). With that money, he hired as his first employee, William C. Demille,² a stage director with virtually no film experience, but was a gifted New York playwright, through the recommendation of the playwright’s mother Beatrice no less. Of course, that worked out too.

Later he merged his Lasky players with Hungarian-born Adolph Zukor³ who was making money making nickelodeons.⁴ Zukor’s most successful flick highlighted the French actress Sarah Bernhardt.⁵ Noticing most people who went in for entertainment were working class Americans, the two geared their film studio likewise. After their Demille hit, Squawman, brought in some profits, the duo aimed for William Wadsworth Hodkinson and his Paramount Pictures because they shared his vision of the future of motion pictures, and loved the name. On May 12, 1912, the trio had the fifth largest motion picture in the world.

Lasky’s Entry

Jesse Louis Lasky was born on September 12, 1880 per Marc Jones in San Francisco, but he cites no time. Astro.com has two rectifications.  One at 3:15 PM and the other at 3:30.  We are adding a third, 19:01 PDT.

This gives him the ascendant of 09 Aries 15 with the fitting symbol of “In his dressing room, a star strikes a pose in front of a round convex mirror. Later, he wades through a flock of admirers, signing autographs as he goes.”

True to his Virgo Sun, in every picture I have seen of him, he is always immaculately coiffed and dressed. Mars in the sixth house shows how he had many work partners, but it seems it was women — Demille’s mother, his sister that brought him luck.

At the Midheaven, is his moon showing how he dreamt of his success and made it happen through his earth trine — a true, determined locomotive and that is probably because he is an Unaspected Saturn chart.

During the late 1920s, Lasky was among the many luminaries who helped establish the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, the organization behind the annual Oscars, but it was his founding of Paramount that made his name.

Jesse married Bessie Mona Lasky in 1909. They had three children, Jesse, Jr., Betty and Billy.

His sister, Blanche, married Samuel Goldwyn of MGM whose cousin was director Mervyn LeRoy.

He titled his bio, “I blow my own horn.” It was published by Doubleday & Co., in 1957 and now runs about $30.00, unless you want an autographed copy which sells for ten times more.

Mr. Lasky died on January 13th, 1958 in Beverly Hills, CA, just short of a golden anniversary. His widow Bessie reposed in 1973.

Footnotes:

1. MGM is now owned by Amazon Studios. ↩︎
2. This of course is Cecil B. Demille. ↩︎
3. Zukor’s autobiography “The Public is never Wrong,” was published by G.P. Putnam’s sons, New York, 1953. This can be found gratis on Archive.org. ↩︎
4. Nickelodeons get their name from being a store-front movie theatre that charged a nickel and showed a flick. Louis Mayer of MGM fame started with a nickelodeon in Haverhill, Massachusetts, a town thirty-six miles north of Boston where he was working the scrap metal (junk) business. ↩︎
5. Sarah Bernhardt, the French actress, is also a Jones 1000 luminary. Because Marc Edmund Jones started out as a Hollywood script writer in the silent era , he favored, celebrities and his 1000 is chockfull of them. While competing MGM boasted more stars than in heaven, they never said more than Paramount, and Jones had the natals of most of them. ↩︎

This post was checked for errors on 27 May 2025. The footnotes were added then.