Producers Distributing Corporation

Producers Distributing Corporation was a short-lived Hollywood film distribution company, organized in 1924 and dissolved in March 1927. In its brief heyday, film director Cecil B. DeMille was its primary shareholder and major talent.

Corporate history
The Mansion at Culver Studios, later the logo for Selznick International Pictures

PDC's beginnings lay with film pioneer William Wadsworth Hodkinson, founder of Paramount Pictures in 1912. In late 1924 Hodkinson sold one of his struggling distribution companies to Jeremiah Millbank, a "wealthy, extremely religious, and politically conservative financier."[1] Millbank partnered with DeMille and renamed the company Producers Distributing Corporation. Part of Millbank's investment went to purchase the former Thomas H. Ince Culver Studios, the property whose main building is a replica of Mount Vernon.

In March 1927, Pathe Exchange and Producers Distributing Corporation merged under the control of the Keith-Albee-Orpheum chain of theaters. In early 1928, Joseph P. Kennedy merged Film Booking Offices of America (FBO) and KAO, in part to promote the new RCA Photophone sound-on-film system, and created RKO Radio Pictures.

PDC is unrelated to the company of the same name organized by Ben Judell in 1939, and which produced four films then evolved into the Poverty Row studio Producers Releasing Corporation.

Filmography
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References
  1. Empire of dreams: the epic life of Cecil B. DeMille, Scott Eyman, page 212


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