Zukor worked....
Zukor worked his way up to become a well-heeled Chicago furrier and, in 1903, teamed with Marcus Loew to open the first of a series of penny arcades. Two years later the team formed Loew's Consolidated, with Zukor as treasurer of the far-flung empire of theaters.
Zukor went into films on his own in 1912 and reaped a windfall as the US distributor of the four-reel European production "Queen Elizabeth." With his profits he formed Famous Players, a production and distribution company modeled after France's Film d'Art, which filmed popular plays starring renowned stage performers. The resultant "canned theater" proved a resounding financial success, which was compounded by his signing of Mary Pickford, "America's Sweetheart," later that year.
In 1916 Famous Players joined forces with the Jesse Lasky Feature Play Company to form the Famous Players-Lasky Company, with Zukor as president. They soon took the name of a minor company they had bought (Paramount), snapped up a chain of movie theaters and hired two soon-to-be distinguished impresarios (Samuel Goldwyn, Cecil B. DeMille) to run the operation, which would emerge as one of the industry's leading studios.
With Zukor at the helm, Paramount weathered the financial downturn of the early 1930s. He fended off a number of attempts to unseat him until, in 1936, he was replaced as president by Barney Balaban. Zukor assumed the token position of chairman of the board and received a special Academy Award in 1948 for his "contribution to the industry". He published a memoir, "The Public is Never Wrong", in 1953 and remained as Paramount's "chairman of the board emeritus" until his death at the age of 103.