Top Mark Studios

Top Mark Studios was a Hollywood film studio that had fallen into near-bankruptcy by the mid-1930s, its fortunes tied to a single child star whose death had left the company without a viable product. Horace Derwent, the enigmatic millionaire inventor and entrepreneur, purchased the foundering studio as one of his most famous investments, and under his ownership it became a notorious but highly profitable operation that churned out scores of films, many of which deliberately challenged the era's censorship standards.

Origins and Decline

By the time Derwent acquired it, Top Mark Studios had not produced a successful picture since its child star, Little Margery Morris, died of a heroin overdose in 1934 at the age of fourteen. Little Margery had specialized in playing sweet seven-year-olds who saved marriages and the lives of dogs unjustly accused of killing chickens, a formula that had made the studio money until her death. The studio gave her the biggest Hollywood funeral in history, with the official story claiming she had contracted a "wasting disease" while entertaining at a New York orphanage; some cynics suggested the studio laid out all that money because it knew it was burying itself. The studio was on the verge of collapse when Derwent stepped in.

Derwent's Transformation

Derwent hired a keen businessman and raging sex maniac named Henry Finkel to run Top Mark. In the two years before Pearl Harbor, the studio ground out sixty movies, fifty-five of which glided right into the face of the Hayes Office and spit on its large blue nose. The other five were government training films. The feature films were huge successes. During one of them, an unnamed costume designer had jury-rigged a strapless bra for the heroine to appear in during the Grand Ball scene, where she revealed everything except possibly the birthmark just below the cleft of her buttocks. Derwent received credit for this invention as well, and his reputation—or notoriety—grew. The studio's output was characterized by its willingness to push against the boundaries of what was considered acceptable, and this approach proved commercially viable, at least for a time.

Legacy and Significance

Top Mark Studios represents a key chapter in Horace Derwent's career, illustrating his ability to take a failing enterprise and wring profit from it through unconventional and often morally dubious means. The studio's history is part of the larger, sordid tapestry of the Overlook Hotel's past, which Jack Torrance uncovers in the scrapbook he finds in the basement. The studio's connection to Derwent, who also owned the Overlook and poured millions into its renovation, ties the hotel's glittering facade to a world of Hollywood excess, organized crime, and institutionalized scandal. The studio's eventual fate is not detailed in the scrapbook, but its brief, lurid existence under Derwent's control serves as a microcosm of the corrupting influence that the Overlook itself exerts on those who come into its orbit.