Columbia Pictures

The original Columbia Pictures was a child of the Roaring '20s. Two brothers—the Cohns, not the Warners, and not those Coens—went into business in 1919 with a friend to form Cohn-Brandt-Cohn Film Sales. CBC made short low-budget films and renamed themselves the more aspirational "Columbia Pictures" in 1924.

In 1928, in a genius move, the company hired director Frank Capra, who'd go on to become a Hollywood legend, and just like that, Columbia was one of the big guys in Hollywood, winning Best Picture in 1934 and 1938 (both Capra films). In the 1940s, Columbia entered the new world of television in its Screen Gems division, which would eventually give the world I Dream of Jeannie, Bewitched, and the Monkees (source).

Since then, Columbia's had its fair share of Oscar winners and box-office smashes. Coca-Cola bought it in 1982 and sold it to Sony in 1989. Which is why the pokerfaced lady in the Columbia Pictures logo now has a Sony Pictures tagline. For a walk down Columbia's memory Lane, check out their timeline here and see how many of their films you've seen.

Trouble on the Set

We always knew that the Columbia torch lady was a total drama queen, and Kramer vs. Kramer has plenty of it.

The film's production brought the drama, too. As we've mentioned elsewhere in this guide, Dustin Hoffman dominated the shoot with his Method acting and desire to ratchet up the on-screen tension with authenticity, which involved tormenting his co-stars to keep it real. Here are the star's greatest hits from the set of Kramer vs. Kramer, as recounted in Vanity Fair, as well as by the actors themselves in various interviews through the years:

• Hoffman talked trash about Meryl Streep's boyfriend, actor John Cazale (The Godfather), who'd very recently died of cancer, to Meryl Streep.
• To get Justin Henry to cry, he'd tell him that he'd never see his friends on the crew ever again.
• He slapped Streep before the scene where she walks out into the hallway.
• He didn't tell Streep he was going to break that wine glass in the restaurant scene, and he broke it so close to her head that she had glass in her hair.
• He got the original Margaret (Gail Strickland) fired by making her so panicky that she developed a stutter that made her dialogue unusable.

Hoffman was separated from his wife during the production of Kramer vs. Kramer, and they'd eventually divorce. We're just speculating here, but maybe the subject matter of Kramer vs. Kramer may've hit just a little close to home for the star.

Needless to say, writer-director Robert Benton was anxious about the shoot. On the first day of principal photography, he was so nervous that it made his stomach growl; that made him even more nervous because he was afraid the sound guys were picking up the grumbling and it was ruining the shot (source).

In the end, Benton and the bigwigs at Columbia needn't have worried. Hoffman and Streep finished the job without killing one another and turned in a pair of Oscar-winning performances—even if their eight-year-old co-star, Justin Henry, may've seemed like the most mature and reasonable person on set most of the time.

And stop us if you'd heard this one: When Hoffman was making Marathon Man (1976), he told his co-star, the stage and screen uber-legend Laurence Olivier, that he'd stayed up for three days and nights to get into the right frame of mind for his character, who'd been awake for three days. Olivier is rumored to have replied, "My dear boy, why don't you just try acting. It's much easier" (source).