Jesse L. Lasky

Biography

Jesse Louis Lasky was an American film producer and one of the key founding members of what would become Paramount Pictures. Beginning his career as a producer of Broadway musicals, including 1911's Hello, Paris and A La Broadway, he would later be introduced to filmmaker Cecille B. DeMille by fellow Broadway producer and DeMille's mother, Beatrice deMille. This meeting would lead to the founding of the Jesse L. Lasky Feature Play Company, a join venture between Lasky and DeMille as well as Samuel Goldwyn (then Samuel Goldfish) and Oscar Apfel. This team would go on to produce The Squaw Man, considered to be first feature film produced in Hollywood. Lasky would go on to produce many films in early Hollywood, including The Call of the North, Beau Geste, and Wings.