Type: Public Company
Address: 30 Ave. Charles de Gaulle, Neuilly sur Seine, F-92522 Cedex, France
Telephone: (+33 01) 46 43 20 00
Fax: (+33 01) 46 43 20 00
Web: http://www.gaumont.fr
Employees: 116
Sales: EUR 131.1 million ($160 million) (2006)
Stock Exchanges: Euronext Paris
Ticker Symbol: GAM
Incorporated: 1895 as Société Léon Gaumont et Cie
NAIC: 512110 Motion Picture and Video Production
SIC: 7812 Motion Picture & Video Production
One of the most illustrious names in motion picture history, Gaumont S.A. is also one of France's leading film production and distribution companies. Founded in 1895, Gaumont has narrowed its focus in the middle of the first decade of the 2000s to its production and distribution operations. In 2006, the company produced nine films, including Je vous trouve très beau, starring popular French actor Michel Blanc; Un ticket pour l'espace, by Eric Lartigau; the James Bond spoof OSS 117, Le Caire nid d'espions; La science des rêves (The Science of Sleep); and Le lièvre de Vatanen, starring Christopher Lambert and Julie Gayet. Altogether, Gaumont-produced films generated more than 10.4 million in individual ticket sales in French theaters. The company also produces films for French television, and distributes its films on DVDs. Gaumont was part of the three-year Gaumont Columbia TriStar Films distribution partnership, which was dissolved in 2006. In that year, the partnership was the leading distributor in France. Gaumont also operates its own distribution subsidiary, Gaumont Video. In addition, the company controls 57.5 percent of the Gaumont-Pathé Archives, which represents arguably the most prestigious catalog of French films. Gaumont also holds a 34 percent stake in EuroPalaces SAS, France's largest operator of movie theaters, and one of the largest in Europe, with additional theaters in Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Italy. Gaumont is led by Chairman Sidonie Dumas, daughter of longtime leader Nicolas Seydoux, and CEO Christophe Riandee. The company is listed on the Euronext Paris stock exchange. In 2006, Gaumont's sales topped EUR 131 million ($160 million).
Late 19th-Century Pioneers of Film
A brilliant engineering student, Léon Gaumont was forced to leave school at the age of 16 when his father was unable to continue to pay his tuition. Gaumont apprenticed to a maker of binoculars, while continuing to study in the evenings. At the age of 28, Gaumont became the director of the Comptoir Général de la Photographie, a maker of optical and photographic equipment. A dispute among the owners of the company gave Gaumont the opportunity to buy the company and its equipment in 1895. Gaumont renamed the company Léon Gaumont et Cie.
At first producing equipment for still photography, Gaumont was quick to recognize the potential of the Cinématographe, introduced by the Lumière brothers in 1895 and inaugurating the era of motion pictures. Gaumont began working on his own motion picture camera; the following year the company brought out the Chrono. To sell the camera, Gaumont needed a means to demonstrate its usefulness. Film production was added quickly to the Gaumont enterprise and would establish the company worldwide as a leading manufacturer and production house. However, Gaumont's primary interest lay in his company's technical, not artistic, development. Much of the company's film production activity was placed in the hands of Gaumont's secretary, Alice Guy, with the agreement that her film work would not interrupt her other duties. Guy became the first female director and one of the originators of the scenario-based film.
Between Gaumont's cameras and Guy's films, the Gaumont name became one of the most important in the emerging film industry. The decision by the Lumière brothers to stop production of films in 1900 provided a boost to Gaumont. With the U.S. film industry still in its infancy, primarily based in New York, Gaumont became a principal supplier of moving pictures. Its chief competitor was another French firm, Pathé. Although much of the company's film work took place in natural settings, the company soon opened its first studio, the Théâtre Cinématographique, in Buttes-Chaumont, in 1905. Gaumont also became among the first studios to offer multifilm contracts to its directors and actors. By 1912 the company began adding the names of actors to its publicity, as the cinema began to produce its first stars.
By 1904 the company's revenues had grown to FRF 900,000. The expansion of Gaumont's activities called for increased capital. Already associated with La Banque Suisse et Française (later the Crédit Commercial de France) and with industrialist investors including Gustave Eiffel, Gaumont reorganized the company in 1906. Known by this time as Société des Etablissements Gaumont, the company's capital was raised to FRF 2.5 million. A year later the company raised its capital base to FRF 3 million.
For the first decade of the new century, Gaumont remained a manufacturer of cinema equipment and a producer of films. Distribution was added in 1910, following the move made two years earlier by Charles Pathé. Whereas films had previously been sold outright to the rising numbers of cinema operators, Pathé had introduced the concept of distributorships, renting films instead of selling them. Gaumont founded its own distributor group, called the Comptoir Ciné-location, which soon began exploiting cinemas as well. Owning the cinemas provided Gaumont not only with a means to distribute its films, but also the profits from the vast audiences flocking to the new entertainment form. At the time, most cinema houses in France had been converted from former theaters and vaudeville houses. Gaumont took the cinema concept a step further, converting the Hippodrome, a structure built for the 1900 Paris Expo, into the Gaumont-Palace. Opened in 1911, the Palace was the world's largest cinema, with 3,400 seats, setting a new standard for cinema comfort and opulence.
In the years leading to World War I, the company constructed a second studio in Nice, taking advantage of that region's natural light and mild climate. In Paris, meanwhile, the company had continued to expand its operations, building a complex of workshops, studios, and processing laboratories that became known as the Cité Elge (the pronunciation of Gaumont's initials) that eventually would cover some 25,000 square meters. Gaumont recorded a film first, with the presentation of the world's first animated film, Fantasmagorie, in 1908. The company soon launched its own string of serial films, including the famous Fantomas series directed by Louis Feuillade, who had succeeded Alice Guy in 1907. In 1910 Gaumont also began producing a cinema magazine, Gaumont Actualités, the forerunner to the newsreel. By 1914, with revenues of about FRF 3 million per year, Gaumont neared full vertical integration, not only producing film cameras and projectors, but also developing and processing film, operating studios, and building its own decor and storehouses for its sets, props, and costumes. The company also had established a worldwide presence, with offices, agencies, and studios in cities including New York, London, Moscow, Vienna, Budapest, Calcutta, Saigon, Barcelona, Casablanca, Buenos Aires, and Montreal. Gaumont had become one of the world's foremost providers of motion pictures and equipment, with production reaching as high as 145 films per year.
World War Setbacks
The consequences of World War I were dramatic for the French and European film industry and for Gaumont. Not only did Gaumont lose nearly 15 percent of its workforce to wartime casualties, but the war had also disrupted its international distribution. Emerging from the war, the film industry had undergone a drastic change: Hollywood had begun to conquer the worldwide motion picture scene. Meanwhile, the loss of Gaumont's Axis audiences extended beyond the war years. Even among Allied countries, the rise of national film industries throughout Europe during the war years resulted in the end of their dependence on the French filmmakers for product. Although the company had continued to produce films during the war, the loss of its international market forced Gaumont to cut back severely on production. In 1919 its total production was a mere 11 films.
Gaumont began losing money, forcing it to turn to its investors. By 1921 its capital investment had reached FRF 10 million. The company soon passed under the control of the Crédit Commercial. Although Léon Gaumont remained at the head of the company until 1932, the bank imposed its own members on the company's direction, eventually taking over Gaumont's operations entirely. The company attempted to shore up its position by forming strategic distribution partnerships with international film producers, including Italy's UCI, Sweden's Svenska, and the United States' Metro Goldwyn. The company also reopened many of its foreign agencies and offices. However there was little the company could do against the enormous success of Hollywood. By 1925 Gaumont's production had fallen to just three films, competing against as many as 400 Hollywood imports, which combined to account for more than 80 percent of the French box office. In that year Gaumont took the drastic step of abandoning nearly all of its film production efforts.
Gaumont fared little better on the technical side. The film industry was turning to "talking pictures," which required a new generation of film recording and projection equipment. Gaumont developed its own version of sound equipment, succeeding in outfitting a strong percentage of France's cinemas with its designs. To impose the Gaumont equipment on the cinema circuit, the company began forming alliances, merging with other cinema network operators to form Gaumont-Franco-Film-Aubert in 1930. The company also began looking to acquire other French cinema equipment manufacturers, including Constinsouza. However, the technical progress made by the company's American and German competitors proved to be too much competition for Gaumont.
In 1932, Gaumont, under a new director, Paul Keim, ended its film and projection equipment manufacturing activities. The company again closed down its foreign branches and shut down its costly Paris and Nice film studios. At the same time, Gaumont took steps to bring its distribution network under centralized control, taking over programming for its theater network. Although the company had stepped up film production in that year, to nine films, its debt was growing even faster. Exacerbated by the Depression, Gaumont's debt would reach some FRF 320 million by mid-decade. Finally, in 1935, the company declared bankruptcy. Its only consolation was that its chief French rival, Pathé, had declared bankruptcy several months earlier.
By 1937 Gaumont suspended all operations but its distribution and theater circuit. In 1938, however, the company found a new owner, the French media giant Havas. Renamed the Société Nouvelle des Etablissements Gaumont, the company was placed under the direction of Alain Poiré, grandson of Havas President Léon Rénier. Under Poiré, Gaumont would regain much of its international renown.
Gaumont was aided, paradoxically, by the German occupation of France during World War II. With British and, soon, American film imports banned, French filmmakers once again took a central place at the box office. Yet the uplift was short-lived. By the end of the war, with the French and European economies in ruins, with large numbers of the French theater circuit destroyed by bombs, and with a shortage of both film stock and personnel, Gaumont was forced to suspend production again. Meanwhile, the Hollywood invasion had returned in force.
Postwar Allure
Production resumed in 1947, inaugurating a period of renewed success for the French cinema. In the early 1950s Gaumont discovered a novel method of competing against the American film juggernaut. The 1953 film Caroline Chérie had proved a great success for Gaumont, paying back its production costs within months. The reason for the film's success was its willingness to portray nudity, a feature the U.S. film industry, under tight and puritanical censor, was forbidden to exploit. The success of the film sparked a series of sequels and made its lead actress, Martine Carol, a star.
At the same time, Gaumont was pursuing another strategy--buying many of France's cinemas and renovating all of its theaters to provide a new level of comfort to the audience. These audiences also were treated to a new era of filmmakers and their films that would place France once again at the pinnacle of international film. The French New Wave cinema, including directors such as François Truffaut, Alain Resnais, Jean-Luc Godard, and Claude Chabrol, gave new allure to Gaumont and the country's film industry. In the early 1960s, with the creation of subsidiary Gaumont International, the company began engaging in coproduction activities with producers in Italy, where such directors as Fellini, Antonioni, and Pasolini were making their marks on world cinema.
In the mid-1960s Gaumont formed a distribution alliance with rival Pathé, giving the two companies a network of 150 theaters, for a total of 120,000 seats, and a virtual monopoly on the French cinema industry. The alliance would last nearly 20 years, until it was broken by French government intervention. In the late 1960s and early 1970s the company began installing automatic projection booths, and then began converting its theaters into a new multiplex concept, which, affording greater programming flexibility, proved a hit with audiences. During the 1970s Gaumont's production arm would have a string of successes, including the Tall Blond Man series.
In 1975 a new director arrived at Gaumont. Through share purchases, Nicolas Seydoux, grandson of industrial leader Marcel Schlumberger and brother of later Pathé owner Jerome Seydoux, had succeeded in gaining control of the company. Under Seydoux and his CEO Daniel Toscan du Plantier, the company, renamed simply Gaumont, began an ambitious expansion program. Apart from forming distribution alliances, with the United States' Fox among others, Seydoux and Toscan moved to expand Gaumont's operations internationally by opening production and distribution subsidiaries in Brazil and Italy, forming Gaumont Inc. in the United States, founding Triumph Films in a partnership with Columbia, opening two Gaumont-owned theaters in New York City, and taking a 50 percent share of Téléfrance, a cable channel meant to bring French-language programming to U.S. audiences. Beyond film, the company sought to expand into publishing, purchasing Editions Ramsay and the weekly magazine Le Point.
Retreat and Rebuilding
The ambitious plans proved too much for Gaumont. By the early 1980s, with losses of FRF 245 million on revenues of FRF 1.3 billion, the company was forced to abandon many of its new projects, closing down its Italian and Brazilian subsidiaries and its U.S. cable venture. The company later would sell its money-losing publishing activities as well. Gaumont regrouped around its distribution and network and its production activities. The latter found a new market in the opening of the French television system to private broadcasters in the mid-1980s. The new competition not only produced a greater demand for programming, but also boosted prices. Gaumont extended its production activities to include programs and films for television, while finding a ready market for its vast archives of films and film footage.
The inauguration of a new theater concept, the giant screen, would help revive the dwindling cinema audiences. In the 1990s Gaumont would begin incorporating giant screens into each of its new and renovated multiplexes, which themselves were reaching as many as 15 theaters. A series of hits also would provide a boost to the company, including the international success of Luc Besson's The Big Blue and the 1993 smash hit Les Visiteurs, which set a French audience record of 14 million tickets sold. In the mid-1990s Gaumont would take a new risk, producing for a record European budget of FRF 500 million another Luc Besson feature, The Fifth Element. The production capped a developing Gaumont strategy of returning to the international production stage. Filmed in English and released in 1997, The Fifth Element would prove a resounding success worldwide, taking in $270 million at the box office to make it the world's third largest-selling film that year. That film alone was enough to double the company's cinema revenues for the year, pushing its sales to nearly FRF 2 billion. The Fifth Element's success continued through the company's video distribution wing, Gaumont Columbia TriStar Pictures Home Video, which sold 1.25 million copies of the film by the end of the decade. Back at home, the company had a new hit on its hand, with Les Visiteurs II. That film also had the effect of proving the existence of a sequel market in France.
Production and Distribution Focus in the New Century
Gaumont's successes at the end of the 1990s encouraged the company to make a larger effort to enter the English-language market. The company moved to focus more fully on its film production, shutting down its animation and video games division, Gaumont Multimedia. That division, launched in 1995, had only mild success, in particular with the "Oggy and the Cockroaches" and "The Magician" cartoon series, both of which were picked up for distribution by Fox in the United States.
Instead, the company began stepping up its big-budget film offerings. These included a Luc Besson epic, The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc, which cost $55 million. Another big budget feature, Vatel, which cost $35 million and featured Gérard Depardieu, Uma Thurman, and Tim Roth, proved highly disappointing, however. The last straw for the company came with the release of an English-language version of Les Visiteurs. That film, called Just Visiting, cost the company about $60 million to make. The film failed miserably, taking in less than $10 million at the box office.
By 2000, Gaumont's financial situation at last forced the company's hand. In December of that year, the company announced that it had agreed to merge its cinema operations with those of Pathé, led by Jerome Seydoux. The new company, EuroPalaces, boasted more than 700 theaters throughout France, as well as in the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Italy, and claimed the title of Europe's leading cinema operation. Gaumont took the minority share of just 34 percent in the new company. The company's scale-back continued, with an exit from television production. Making times still more difficult for the company was its loss of Luc Besson, who left the company to found his own film production and distribution operation in the early 2000s.
The EuroPalaces merger was soon followed by another union between the two Seydoux companies. In 2003, Gaumont and Pathé reached an agreement to combine their film archives into a new company, Gaumont Pathé Archives. That deal, this time with Gaumont taking the majority stake of 57.5 percent, created one of the world's most prestigious and valuable film collections.
With its operations largely refocused on its core film production and distribution division, Gaumont entered a new phase in its history when Nicolas Seydoux retired from active management of the company. In his place, Gaumont named Seydoux's daughter, Sidonie Dumas, then 37 years old, as company chair, and Frank Chorot and Christophe Riandee as co-CEOs. The new generation promptly stepped up the company's film production operations, doubling its film budget to more than $123 million in order to make eight films a year. Also in 2004, Gaumont signed a three-year distribution deal with Columbia TriStar, replacing its ten-year partnership with Buena Vista. The new Gaumont Columbia TriStar rapidly built up its position in France, and by 2006 became the top film distributor in the country. The partnership was dissolved in 2007.
Gaumont's production unit also appeared to have found the formula for renewed success as it moved into the second half of the decade. The company scored an international hit with the multilingual The Science of Sleep, directed by Michel Gondry. In France, the company found box-office success through such films as Palais Royal! and Je te trouve trés beau, starring popular actor Michel Blanc. By the end of that year, the company had brought eight films to the box office, and had sold more than 10.4 million tickets in France, including the James Bond parody OSS 117: Cairo: Nest of Spies. After more than 110 years, the world's oldest film company appeared to have found the secret for eternal youth and box-office success.
Principal Subsidiaries
Editions La Marguerite SARL; EuroPalaces SAS (34%); Gaumont Inc. (U.S.A.); Gaumont International SARL; Gaumont Pathé Archives SAS (57.5); Gaumont SA; Gaumont Vidéo SNC; Les Films du Dauphin SARL; Les Films du Loup SNC; Lincoln Cinema Associates (U.S.A.; 32%); Prestations et Services SARL.
Principal Competitors
Vivendi S.A.; Groupe Canal+ S.A.; France Televisions S.A.; Pathe S.A.S.; Groupe AB S.A.; Carrere Group S.A.; Passat S.A.; TF1 Films Production S.A.S.
Further Reading
Garçon, Françoise, Gaumont: Un Siecle de Cinéma, Paris: Gallimard, 1992.
"Gaumont Va Produire Plus de Films en Anglais," Les Echos, May 7, 1997, p. 50.
Leventer, Martine, "Gaumont: Un Nouveau Montage," Le Point, December 10, 1984, p. 120.
Meyer, Phillipe, "Gaumont: Le Retournement," L'Express, December 14, 1984, p. 107.
Normand, Clarisse, "Si Gaumont Nous Etait Compté," Journal des Finances, July 27, 1996, p. 6.
— M. L. Cohen
