Gulf and Western Industries

Bluhdorn period

Gulf and Western's origins date to a manufacturer named the Michigan Bumper Company founded in 1934, although Charles Bluhdorn treated his 1958 takeover of what was then Michigan Plating and Stamping, as its "founding" for the purpose of later anniversaries.

Under Bluhdorn the company diversified widely, leaving behind such things as stamping metal bumpers for a variety of businesses, including financial services, manufacturing, apparel and home, consumer and agricultural, auto parts, natural resources and building products, entertainment and publishing. A partial list of Gulf and Western's holdings between 1958 and 1982, with year of acquisition in parentheses:

With the Paramount acquisition, Gulf and Western became parent company of the Dot Records label and the Famous Music publishing company. After Stax was acquired, that label became a subsidiary of Dot, although Dot was not at all mentioned on the label (rather, Dot and Stax were noted as subsidiaries of Paramount). Later on, the record operation was moved under Famous Music and renamed the Famous Music Group.

In 1967, the company also purchased Lucille Ball's Desilu Productions library, which included most of her television product, as well as such properties as Star Trek and Mission: Impossible, both of which would rank amongst its most profitable commodities over the years. Desilu was renamed Paramount Television.

Gulf and Western sold Stax back to its original owners in 1970, and with it the rights to all Stax recordings not owned by Atlantic Records. A year before, Dot's non–country music roster and catalog was moved to a newly created label, Paramount Records (the name was previously used by a label unrelated to the movie studio; Paramount acquired the rights to that name in order to launch this label). It assumed Dot's status as the flagship label of Paramount's record operations, releasing music by pop artists and soundtracks from Paramount's films and television series. Dot meanwhile became a country label.

Famous Music provided distribution for several independent labels, such as Neighborhood Records and Sire Records. Famous began distributing yet another independent label, Blue Thumb Records, in 1971, before buying it outright in 1972. In 1974, Gulf and Western sold the entire record operation to the American Broadcasting Company, which continued the Dot and Blue Thumb imprints as subsidiaries of ABC Records, while discontinuing the Paramount label altogether.

While working for Paramount, Barry Diller had proposed a "fourth network", but he could not convince the board of trustees/directors of the wisdom of this idea. Fox owner News Corporation was, however, interested in starting a network.

The early 1980s

On June 5, 1980, Gulf and Western unveiled an electric car, powered by a zinc chloride battery that would hold a charge for several hours and permit speeds of up to 60 miles per hour (97 km/h). By year's end, however, the U.S. Department of Energy (which had invested $15 million in the project) reported that the battery had 65% less power than predicted and could be recharged only by highly trained personnel.

In 1981, former officials of Gulf and Western's Natural Resources Division led a buyout of New Jersey Zinc and made it a subsidiary of Horsehead Industries, Inc.

In 1983 Bluhdorn died of a heart attack on a plane en route home from Dominican Republic to New York headquarters, and the board bypassed president Jim Judelson and named senior vice president Martin S. Davis, who had come up through Paramount Pictures, as the new chief executive officer.

The Martin Davis restructuring

Davis slimmed down the company's wilder diversifications and focused it on entertainment, and sold all of its non-entertainment and non-publishing assets.

In 1983, Gulf and Western sold Consolidated Cigar Corporation to five of its senior managers.

Also in 1983, Gulf and Western sold the U.S. assets of Sega to pinball manufacturer Bally Manufacturing. The Japanese assets of Sega were purchased by a group of investors led by David Rosen and Hayao Nakayama.

In 1984, Gulf and Western divested itself of its many Taylor Forge operations to private owners. Taylor Forge's Somerville, NJ plant became Taylor Forge Stainless, while its facilities in Paola, KS and Greeley, KS became Taylor Forge Engineered Systems.

South Puerto Rico Sugar Co. (renamed) was sold to an investment group including The Fanjul Brothers in 1984.

In 1985, APS auto parts, Kayser-Roth clothing and Simmons Bedding were sold to the Wickes Companies. The company, thus restructured, subsequently renamed itself Paramount Communications in 1989, and promptly sold The Associates to the Ford Motor Company.

Headquarters

The Gulf and Western Building (15 Columbus Circle in Manhattan) by Thomas E. Stanley, was built in 1970 for the Gulf and Western company north of Columbus Circle, at the south-western corner of Central Park. The building occupies a narrow block between Broadway and Central Park West and, at 583 feet (178 m), it commands the dramatic view to the north, as well as its immediate surroundings.

The top of the building sported a restaurant, The Top of the Park, which was never a full success even though run by Stuart Levin, famous for the Four Seasons, Le Pavillon, and other "shrines of haute cuisine," and it being graced with Levin's own elegant signature sculpture by Jim Gary, "Universal Woman."

Similarly, the cinema space in the basement—named Paramount after the picture company that Gulf and Western owned—was closed as the building was sold.

Problems with the 45-story building's structural frame gave it unwanted fame as its base was scaffolded for years and the upper floors were prone to sway excessively on windy days, even leading to cases of nausea akin to motion sickness.

The 1997 renovation into a hotel and residential building, the Trump International Hotel and Tower (One Central Park West), by Costas Kondylis and Philip Johnson involved extensive renovation of both interior and facades. For example, the 45 stories of the original office tower were converted into a 52-story residential building, enabled by the lower ceiling height of residential spaces. The facade was converted with the addition of dark glass walls with distinctive shiny steel framing.

Paramount Communications Incorporated

In 1983 Gulf and Western began a restructuring process that would transform the corporation from a bloated conglomerate consisting of subsidiaries from unrelated industries to a more focused entertainment and publishing company. The idea was to aid financial markets in measuring the company's success, which, in turn, would help place better value on its shares. Though its Paramount division did very well in recent years, Gulf and Western's success as a whole was translating poorly with investors. This process eventually led Davis to divest many of the company's subsidiaries. Its sugar plantations in Florida and the Dominican Republic were sold in 1985; the consumer and industrial products branch was sold off that same year. In 1989, Davis renamed the company Paramount Communications Incorporated after its primary asset, Paramount Pictures. In addition to the Paramount film, television, home video, and music publishing divisions, the company continued to own the Madison Square Garden properties (which also included MSG Network), a 50% stake in USA Networks (the other 50% was owned by MCA/Universal Studios) and Simon & Schuster, Prentice Hall, Pocket Books, Allyn & Bacon, Cineamerica (a joint venture with Warner Communications), and Canadian cinema chain Famous Players Theatres.

That same year, the company launched a $12.2 billion hostile bid to acquire Time Inc. in an attempt to end a stock-swap merger deal between Time and Warner Communications, which also renamed itself after a movie studio it owned upon selling off its non-entertainment assets. (The original name of Warner Communications was Kinney National Company.) This caused Time to raise its bid for Warner to $14.9 Billion in cash and stock. Gulf and Western responded by filing a lawsuit in a Delaware court to block the Time-Warner merger. The court ruled twice in favor of Time, forcing Gulf and Western to drop both the Time acquisition and the lawsuit, and allowing the formation of Time Warner.

Paramount used cash acquired from the sale of Gulf and Western's non-entertainment properties to take over the TVX Broadcast Group chain of television stations (which at that point consisted mainly of large-market stations which TVX had bought from Taft Broadcasting, plus two mid-market stations which TVX owned prior to the Taft purchase), and the KECO Entertainment chain of theme parks from Taft successor Great American Broadcasting. Both of these companies had their names changed to reflect new ownership: TVX became known as the Paramount Stations Group, while KECO was renamed to Paramount Parks.

Paramount Television launched Wilshire Court Productions in conjunction with USA Networks, before the latter was renamed NBCUniversal Cable, in 1989. Wilshire Court Productions (named for a side street in Los Angeles) produced made-for-television movies that aired on USA, and later for other networks. USA Networks launched a second channel, the Sci-Fi Channel (now known as Syfy), in 1992. As its name implied, it focused on films and television series within the science fiction genre. Much of the initial programming was owned either by Paramount or Universal. Paramount bought one more television station in 1993: Cox Enterprises' WKBD-TV in Detroit, Michigan, at the time an affiliate of the Fox Broadcasting Company.

New ownership, later acquisitions and split-off

Paramount Communications Inc. was acquired by Viacom on July 7, 1994 following the purchase of 50.1% of Paramount's shares for $9.75 billion. At the time, Paramount's holdings included Paramount Pictures, Madison Square Garden, the New York Rangers, the New York Knicks, and the Simon & Schuster publishing house. The deal had been planned as early as 1989, when the company was still known as Gulf and Western. Though Davis was named a member of the board of National Amusements, which controlled Viacom, he ceased to manage the company.

Under Viacom, the Paramount Stations Group continued to build with more station acquisitions, eventually leading to Viacom's acquisition of its former parent, the CBS network, in 1999. Around the same time, Viacom bought out Spelling Entertainment, incorporating its library into that of Paramount itself.

Viacom split into two companies in 2006, one retaining the Viacom name (which continues to own Paramount Pictures), while another was named CBS Corporation (which now controls Paramount Television Group, which was renamed CBS Paramount Television, now known as CBS Television Studios and worldwide distribution unit is now CBS Television Distribution and CBS Studios International, in 2006, Simon & Schuster [except for Prentice Hall and other educational units, which Viacom sold to Pearson PLC in 1998], and what's left of the original Paramount Stations Group, now known as CBS Television Stations). National Amusements retains majority control of the two.

Together, these two companies own many of the former media assets of Gulf and Western and its Paramount successor today. Meanwhile, the Madison Square Garden properties (including the Knicks and Rangers) were sold to Cablevision not long after the Viacom takeover. Cablevision owned the MSG properties until 2010, when they were spun off as their own company. CBS retained ownership of the Paramount Parks chain for a short while, but sold the parks to Cedar Fair in 2006, and thus National Amusements got out of the theme park ownership business entirely. Over the next few years, Cedar Fair purged references to Viacom-owned properties from the former Paramount Parks, a task completed in 2010. Viacom also sold its stake in the USA Networks to Universal in 1997, and the channels came under the ownership of Universal's successor, NBCUniversal, which still retained those holdings as of late July 2013.

Another communications company, Western Gulf Media, was incorporated in Texas in 1994. Based in Dallas and The Rio Grande Valley this media company owned and operated broadcasting interests, Internet publications and on-line radio streams. It has no relationship with the former communications group mentioned above.

Famous Music