Joe Brandt

Biography

Troy, New York, baked in midsummer heat on July 20, 1882, the day Joe Brandt first drew breath. By the time he collected a law degree from NYU and passed the bar in 1906, he had already traded upstate quiet for Manhattan’s roar. A desk at Hampton Advertising and a string of bylines for Billboard and the Dramatic Mirror primed him for a leap into flickering lights: in 1908 he became Carl Laemmle’s right-hand man, gate-keeper of the mogul’s chaotic empire. Four years later Brandt helped solder the pieces that became Universal Film Corporation, steering it as general manager until 1918. Restless, he and Isadore Bernstein enlisted cowboy-comic William “Smiley Billy” Parsons to launch National Film Corporation of America, but Parsons dropped dead on September 29, 1919—two reels short of finishing Lightning Bryce, the fifteen-chapter serial Brandt had scripted. The company folded with the director’s coffin. Undeterred, Brandt grabbed cousins Harry and Jack Cohn to mint C.B.C. Sales in 1921; by the time he cashed out in February 1932, those initials had morphed into Columbia Pictures. He sprinted straight into the next venture, grabbing the presidency of WorldWide Pictures and the vice-chair at Educational Pictures that May, only to kick both posts aside in November. A final curtain-call as head of Associated Productions ended with his own exit in late 1933; he never worked again. Brandt died six years later, leaving the reel—and his son Jerrold—to spin without him.