Biography
Until the advent of television in the late 1940's there were two distinct Hollywoods. Populated on one extreme were the major studios (many of which owned their own theater chains) with the glamor made possible with million dollar film budgets. On the other extreme, centered along Gower Street off Sunset, was Poverty Row, where innumerable independent producers of varying repute ground out three and four-day wonders costing next-to-nothing by comparison. It's films, most often westerns, featuring actors with vaguely familiar names in material written to satisfy undemanding, largely rural audiences. Lacking theater chains, these outfits sold their releases to a complex network of film exchanges which would rotate bills up to three times each week, keeping films circulating between theaters across the country for years. Any given film would drift up and down these theaters' double bills, ping ponging Saturday afternoon matinées, literally until the prints wore out. Gower Gulch saw scores of these companies come and go during it's two decade heyday. One studio, Columbia Pictures, managed to break into the ranks of the A-list studios (thanks to a wunderkind director, a crude-yet-crafty studio boss and unique relationships with MGM and Warner Brothers). Another, Republic, would briefly blur the definition of a B-studio by occasionally producing exceptional films. The rest would survive by eking out minuscule profits on a volume basis or fail miserably by rolling the dice on a few ill-conceived projects. Trem Carr spent the majority of his career in the latter of Hollywood's extremes. He's most closely associated with his close friend and partner, W. Ray Johnston. Together these two low-budget veterans successfully established Monogram Pictures, shelved it, only to resurrect it to even greater success... all within a span of less than 6 years. Ray had learned the film business from the ground up, having been the treasurer of Syndicate Pictures and a producer at Florida's Thanhouser Studio. Based on his experience, he saw the key to a company's success lay more in its distribution network than the actual films themselves. With the advent of talkies, he set about to build a tight knit distributor franchise and the first incarnation of Monogram was born in 1931. Trem had joined up with Ray just prior to the company's formation as production manager and operated through 1935 without any studio facilities of its own. Monogram entered into deals with independent producers (including Paul Malvern, M.H. Hoffman and I.E. Chadwick) to release their product under its banner while occasionally renting studio sound stages and producing their own product as well. Ray was the finance and distribution end and Trem was the hands-on production chief of Monogram Pictures from 1931-35. In late 1933, the pair were approached by serial-specializing Mascot Pictures' Nat Levine about joining forces under one banner at the recently foreclosed-upon Mack Sennett studio. Fearing the overhead, they refused. By 1935, Nat Levine's reputation had grown significantly since the release of his Tom Mix serial, The Miracle Rider (1935) and it's reported $1 million gross, an eye-popping accomplishment in Gower Gulch. Levine next approached the head of Monogram's film processing company, the wealthy, domineering Herbert J. Yates. As the owner of Consolidated Film Industries, Yates had amassed a fortune along Poverty Row by providing processing services and advancing raw film stock on credit to struggling producers, many of whom fail, leaving Yates free to sue and distribute their product at huge profit. In his years doing this, Yates had harbored a desire to become a legitimate movie mogul. While both Trem and Ray had rejected Levine's proposition previously, Yates' involvement made the deal worth serious reconsideration, since Monogram's debts to Yates would be extinguished as part of the deal. Monogram was shelved and the new company, Republic Pictures, was born. Yates made several similar offers to other small outfits that were rolled into the new studio, including Victory and Chesterfield. Under the original plan, Carr, Johnston and Levine were to rotate as production heads, unfortunately it soon became a test of wills; Yates' money bankrolled the operation and he held all the cards. Trem's management style severely clashed with the autocratic Yates and it soon became clear that the unequal partnership was unworkable. Trem was the one-time theoretical head of Republic and regarded Yates as a meddling interloper. Levine did his best to remain neutral, but ultimately sided with the money (ironically, he would be bought out by Yates in 1939 for $1 million in cash and would soon find himself broke and washed up in pictures). Their clashes with Yates escalating violently, Trem and Ray left Republic in 1937 and after a brief stint producing B-pictures for Universal Pictures they resurrected Monogram Pictures using rented offices there, managing to release a remarkable 20 low budget features that same year. With Trem as production manager and Ray as president, this "new" version of Monogram became a label for independent producers to group together largely for the convenience in distributing their product through its network of film exchanges - and the relative prestige of the Monogram name. This concept was virtually identical to United Artists, albeit on a comparatively minuscule budget (Monogram's published profits averaged less than $2,000 per release well into the 40's--- a laughable figure to most studios). For the 1938-39 season, Monogram announced its intention to release 26 features and 16 westerns. The company became known for its ability to quickly capitalize on topical news stories (Atlantic Flight (1937)), modest westerns starring Jack Randall and Tex Ritter and even managing to snag Boris Karloff for the "Mr. Wong" detective series. While none of these films could be considered classics, they were mostly above-par by prevailing Poverty Row standards and most importantly, profitable, an elusive goal for many of it's neighbors. An extremely efficient production manager, Trem continued to attract a number of equally efficient (meaning in most cases, extremely cheap) producers under the Monogram banner in the early 40s, and scooping up other studios' cast-off properties that he keenly sensed still had money left to wring out of them. Among these were former 20th Century Fox's Charlie Chan series (lifted nearly whole with it's aging star Sidney Toler, albeit with diminishing returns with each added entry) and getting tremendous mileage with Samuel Goldwyn's recently unemployed Dead End Kids (re-branded as the East Side Kids and later as the Bowery Boys for legendary skin flint producer Jan Grippo). Monogram maintained a heavy emphasis on cheaply produced westerns, through the war (tragically losing one of their biggest stars, Buck Jones, in the infamous Coconut Grove Fire in 1942). Trem and Ray made a fantastic business partnership and remained close friends. Ray was devastated when Trem died of a coronary in 1946 and the Monogram name gradually morphed into Allied Artists (a name more reflecting the concept of primarily distributing other producers' films) in the late 1940s. Despite the loftier sounding name, Allied would continue to release films with the same low-budget production values well into the 1950's. In retrospect, Monogram was neither the best poverty row studio (the title ironically befitting Republic) or the worst (inarguably, PRC), but largely thanks to Trem Carr, successful, resilient and remarkably prolific.
