In 1943 Mr. Manners joined the Army, serving with the Army Air Forces' motion picture unit.
As a member of the US air force motion picture unit for four years during the Korean war, he said: "I learned everything I could about making movies".
A bright spot for Sony was a 6.5percentt increase in quarterly sales at its motion picture unit, buoyed by hits like "Angels & Demons".
People like Walter Helfer, who taught at Hunter College in New York for more than 20 years, and Alexander Lang Steinert, who became the music director of the Army Air Forces' motion picture unit during World War II.
And Walter Parkes, co-head of the motion picture unit at DreamWorks, said that in this atmosphere he would have shied from making films like "The Peacemaker" (1997), about a nuclear threat to New York.
Set for a March release, the film will be distributed by Viacom, whose Paramount motion picture unit handled most of the movie's production.
Jack Warner began the process of developing the organizational structure for an independent motion picture unit.
After officer training, Gable headed a six-man motion picture unit attached to a B-17 bomb group in England to film aerial gunners in combat, flying five missions himself.
With large-budget films like John Ford's "Stagecoach" and Henry King's "Jesse James" (both 1939), the major studios reclaimed the western from their B-picture units and the Poverty Row studios that had kept it alive through the Great Depression.
Prices are dropping: Small-picture HD-ready sets can be had for $700, big-picture units for $1,500 and outboard decoder boxes for $400.
After playing Charlie Chan in 11 films for 20th Century Fox, he learned that the studio was phasing out its B-picture unit and with it the Chan series, so he bought the rights to the character from the widow of Earl Derr Biggers, the novelist who had created Chan.
