Stooges. The Three Stooges worked for Columbia.
The history of Hollywood is a big subject. A lot has happened in the over one hundred years since the first movie-makers in New York City were fighting over the patent rights to their equipment, and the smart ones went to a remote agricultural town in Southern California close to the Mexican border to set up shop away from the cops and the process servers.
Lots of studios from that era are long gone. Edison. Famous Players Lasky, Hal Roach Studios (creators of "The Little Rascals"). Etc. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer was a conglomerate of earlier businesses.
The star system lasted from the late twenties to the early sixties. Everybody on this planet knows their names. Chaplin, Fairbanks, Dietrich, Garbo, Fields, Groucho, Mae West, Swanson, Astaire, Grant, Hepburn, Tracy, Garland, Taylor, Wayne, Monroe, Fonda, his daughter, Bogart, Bacall, Newman, Lancaster, Douglas, his son, Lemmon, Curtis, Peck, the other Hepburn, McQueen, Poitier, MacLaine, etc. etc. etc.
The studios kept their stars under lock and key, though they often loaned them out to other studios in return for a consideration. Rarely did the stars have the power to change studios on their own terms. Until the studio system began to fall apart around 1960. Which happened because audiences were more sophisticated and wanted on-location realism instead of fantasies performed on sound stages. And the Supreme Court had recently busted the biggest studios for operating what was, in effect, a cartel.
And audiences wanted realism in other ways too. By the middle of that decade, all of the most artistic and sexy and dramatically powerful movies were being done by independent producers, and the studios were only producing "family values" shows like "The Sound of Music," "Doctor Dolittle," and "My Fair Lady."
For years now the movie industry has been very democratic. Anybody with determination and a really good idea can make a movie and get it distributed. There are lots of stories of people who have mortgaged their house or whatever to raise fifty or a hundred thousand dollars to make a low-budget movie that eventually gets picked up by a distributor and earns millions.
Just one example: When the "indie" directors Joel and Ethan Coen made their first movie, "Blood Simple," in 1984, they went to their parents' friends and various business people in their home town of Minneapolis to raise just enough money to rent camera equipment at the weekend rate and hire a couple of character actors whose names were barely recognizable. And they made a small masterpiece, which then allowed them to get big money from the studios for their subsequent movies.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vI0ov8zzfQA