Cy Leslie, 85, Home Video Pioneer
Cy Leslie, who died Sunday at 85, pioneered the "paperback" concept of cheap record reprints, then founded the MGM/UA Home Entertainment Group, among the first enterprises to issue videotapes of Hollywood movies for VCRs.
Born in Brooklyn and raised in the Bronx, Leslie lost his Lithuanian-immigrant father before he was a teenager and helped support his family by delivering ice while attending DeWitt Clinton High School.
He once claimed he got his first idea for a business — records featuring birthday songs and other greeting-card-like music — while serving with the American Army Signal Corps in the Philippines during World War II. With a business partner and their wives, Leslie wrote the lyrics and sold records through drug stores.
In 1953, he founded Pickwick International, a record label dealing mainly in children's recordings. Pickwick was among the first to sell records through supermarkets and other non-music-store retailers. By 1957, he claimed to have sold over 100 million records, and he was known in the business as "King of the Kiddie Records." A 1962 Supreme Court decision banning prayer in schools had the unexpected effect of spurring the label's spoken-word offerings. "The sales we're getting now on our Bible stories line are beyond our wildest expectations," he told the Wall Street Journal in 1962.
Pickwick also got into the business of reissuing recordings in what he described as "paperback format" — using old master tapes that he leased and reproduced with new sleeves. The new records sold for $1.49 each, half of what a new record sold for at the time. Among the artists on Pickwick were Sammy Davis Jr., Fats Waller, and Dizzy Gillespie. In the 1970s, Pickwick was the main reissuer of Elvis recordings.
Pickwick became a publicly traded company in the 1960s. By the 1970s, it was attracting interest from potential acquirers, including Hartz Mountain Corp. In 1977, Mr. Leslie sold the business to the American Can Co.
He next got into the nascent home video business, at first with a joint venture with CBS and MGM. In 1982, he founded MGM/UA Home Entertainment, which could draw on the industry's largest library of films for rerelease on video. Among the first titles were "Doctor Zhivago" and the best-selling "The Wizard of Oz."
But in its early years, the business was relatively tiny.
"There were 300,000 VCR machines in existence when I came into video," Leslie told Video Store magazine in 1999. "I'm looking at awards in my office and there are outstanding awards for sales of 25,000 and 35,000 units." He would later sell millions of copies of "Gone With the Wind" for $89.95 apiece. He retired from MGM/UA after Ted Turner bought the company in 1988 and moved it to California. Leslie continued to invest in entertainment enterprises, including home video companies, and never fully retired, his family says.
Leslie was a member of ASCAP, a member of the Friar's Club and director of its foundation, and vice chairman of the Songwriter's Hall of Fame.
Seymour Leslie
Born December 16, 1922, in Brooklyn; died of heart failure at his home in Woodmere, N.Y.; survived by his wife of 60 years, Barbara Miller, his daughters, Ellen, Jane, and Carol, and four grandchildren.
