Leonard Goldenson
Goldenson orchestrated the merger of United Paramount Theatres with ABC in 1953 (after Paramount was ordered to spin it off in the wake of "United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc.", a 1948 decree of the U.S. Supreme Court). ABC was originally formed in 1943 in the wake of an earlier Supreme Court decree effectively ordering the spinoff of the largely secondary-status "Blue Network" from its then-parent, NBC; its buyer, industrialist Edward J. Noble, tried to build ABC into a competitive Broadcasting company, but by 1951 was rumored to be on the verge of selling the nearly bankrupt operation to CBS, whose management apparently wanted ABC's critically important owned-and-operated television stations.
List of production companies owned by the American Broadcasting Company
ABC Productions was formed in 1989 as ABC Network's in-house production unit after the alteration of the fin-syn rules that increased network ownership to only 40% of prime-time programs. Former ABC Motion Pictures president and ABC Entertainment president Brandon Stoddard on March 21, 1989 to head up the then unnamed production unit.