Consolidated Film Industries is a film laboratory, and film processing company, and has been the leading film laboratory in the Los Angeles area for many decades. CFI processed negatives and made prints for motion pictures and television. The company or its employees received many Academy Awards for scientific or technical achievements.
CFI was incorporated in New York in March 1924 by Herbert Yates. It was reincorporated in Delaware in 1927 by the merger of several earlier companies, including Republic Laboratories, which he bought in 1918, and the Allied Film Laboratories Association, which he formed in 1919.
The prospectus claimed, Consolidated Film Industries, Inc. of Delaware was being incorporated to succeed a Company of a similar name formed in March 1924 under the laws of New York, for developing of motion picture negatives, printing the necessary positives and delivering the positives as instructed by the motion picture producers or distributors, thus rendering an essential service to the motion picture industry. The Company operates six plants, known in the motion picture business as "laboratories," in New York, New Jersey, and California. One of these acquired properties was the Biograph Studios film laboratory facilities in the Bronx, New York.
Consolidated Film Industries, Inc. was the largest concern of its kind, and is the largest purchaser of motion picture film in the world. The business has been built up on the sound foundation of quality and service at a price, in most instances, below the motion picture producer's own laboratory cost. This low price made possible through the Company's efficient and large scale operations.
Consolidated Film Industries acquired Prizmacolor in 1928, and was acquired by Technicolor, Inc. in 2000.
In movies and television which used the company's color processing, they were typically only referred to by their initials, the credit usually reading "Color by CFI".
For a time in the late eighties CFI was jokingly said to stand for "Can't Find It" or 'C.F.I. Care'.
Gladys Baker, the mother of Marilyn Monroe, worked for Consolidated as a negative film cutter; Monroe's biological father is believed to have been fellow Consolidated employee Charles Stanley Gifford.
The laboratory still exists on the Universal lot as part of and Technicolor in Universal City., California.
Read more about Consolidated Film Industries: Scientific or Technical Academy Awards
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