Central Studios
 |
|
| Managing Agency ,later Private Limited Company | |
| Industry | Motion pictures |
| Founded | 1935 |
| Defunct | 1956 (de facto) |
| Headquarters | Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, India, |
|
Key people
|
B. Rangaswamy Naidu, Sriramulu Naidu, Samikannu Vincent, R. K. Ramakrishnan Chettiar, Lakshmi Mills |
Central Studios was a motion picture movie studio in Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, India, started by B.Rangaswamy Naidu (a.k.a. B. R. Naidu) and other prominent industrialists like Swamikannu Vincent of Coimbatore in 1935 to make Tamil and other South Indian language movies. The Studio was a major hub of Tamil Movie production and notable for many early day Tamil Movie Superstars starting and spending their early part of career in this Studio.
Movies became a major industry in Coimbatore when in 1905 a South Indian Railways employee Samikannu Vincent purchased a film projector along with some silent films from a Frenchman named Du Pont who had fallen ill on his touring exhibition. Samikannu Vincent then built a business as film exhibitor first by traveling around the country and finally erecting tents theaters for screening films. His tent cinema became popular as he traveled all over the state with his mobile unit. In 1917, Samikannu Vincent built South India's first permanent cinema theater, Variety Hall Cinema, at the Town Hall; it is now called the Delite Theater. As Samikannu Vincent also generated his own electric power for his theaters, he built a series of theaters in and around the city to screen silent films. He also became a distributor for the French Pathé Frères movie projectors. In the early 1930s he launched the Variety Hall Talkies banner to make sound film (a.k.a. talkies) and released a few movies which were mainly shot in Calcutta. Feeling a need to have a movie studio, he was instrumental, along with other industrialists and movie makers, in establishing a fully equipped studio in Coimbatore.
Also during the late 1920s, another firm under Sabapathy was involved in the distributorship of an Italian movie projector company, eventually leading to the manufacture of their own brand of movie projectors in Coimbatore. By the early thirties Coimbatore already had a studio named Premier Cinetone Studio (later renamed Pakshiraja Studios). In 1935 a London-educated graduate, T. R. Sundaram, built a fully equipped movie studio, Modern Theatres, in Salem, and the region became the central hub for movie activity.
...
Wikipedia