Paramount charged producers a distribution fee of 35 percent of gross to cover operating costs and profit. The 'Hodkinson System' of film distribution existed with few changes for almost a century. Hodkinson first designed the Paramount logo in 1914. Legend has it that he doodled an image of a star-crested mountain on a napkin, clouds, and 27 stars. During a meeting with Adolph Zukor. It was an image of Utah's Ben Lomond Mountain in Ogden, Utah. According to a plaque in the Paramount Studios Lobby, Hollywood, CA this mountain, Ben Lomond, was inspired from his childhood memories, combined with the scripted word Paramount became the beginnings of the logo we know today. In 1916, Famous Players-Lasky formed from the merger of Famous Players Film Company and the Jesse L. Lasky Feature Play Company. The newly merged film studios acquired Paramount and became the parent company. Zukor soon fired Hodkinson and took over as president of Paramount and added motion-picture production to the company's film distribution business. Following his ouster, Hodkinson sold his Paramount interest to S.A. Lynch, one of Paramount's distribution franchise holders. Hodkinson soon joined Raymond Pawley to start Superpictures Incorporated in November 1916, and was the producer for the Leon F. Douglass color feature film Cupid Angling (1918). Hodkinson also served as president of the Triangle Distributing Company, the distribution arm of the Triangle Film Corporation. Hodkinson owned Triangle Distributing together with Pawley and his Paramount partner Lynch. After leaving Triangle, Hodkinson formed the W. W. Hodkinson Corporation, later reorganized as Producers Distributing Corporation (PDC). PDC lasted until 1929 and played an important role during Cecil B. DeMille's short-lived but ambitious plans as a full-fledged independent filmmaker in the late 1920s. Commercial aviation Hodkinson left the motion picture business in 1929 to form an airplane manufacturing concern, Hodkinson Aviation Corporation. Soon thereafter Hodkinson joined with Roderick Burnham, the son of Frederick Russell Burnham, to form the Central American Aviation Corporation and Companía Nacional de Aviación in Guatemala. Ultimately, a series of accidents forced Hodkinson and his company out of Guatemala in 1936. Grupo TACA later acquired Compañia Nacional de Aviación, S.A. of Guatemala. References External links Biography at the Society of Independent Motion Picture Producers page 1881 births 1971 deaths Film distributors (people) American film producers Businesspeople from Ogden, Utah American film studio executives People from Pueblo, Colorado Paramount Pictures executives American film production company founders 20th-century American