Biography|Robert Shaye — The Union Square Tower the Times Found When New Line Turned a Profit

New Line did not begin as a studio with a plaza and a logo.

By August 1976 it had a commercial address a reporter could print.

The New York Times of 13 August 1976 located Robert Shaye's company at 853 Broadway, the twenty-one-story tower on the east side of Union Square. The piece said the firm had earned in the low six figures the year before by sending karate pictures and Lina Wertmüller titles through the same pipeline.

That is the first office that is not a private flat.

The founding year remains 1967. Later company histories print 18 June. Starting capital is told as three hundred dollars in one Vanity Fair reconstruction and as a thousand in older trade summaries. The honest range is a few hundred dollars and a checking account he opened himself.

From this stretch of Broadway the company moved prints of Reefer Madness, John Waters films, and imported features onto campuses that already knew how to thread a 16-millimeter projector.

The building still stands. It is an office tower at the foot of Union Square, renovated since Shaye's tenancy, with a café in the base as of the 2020s.

The pin is the 1976 address, not the fifth-floor walk-up where he knocked a hole in a nursery wall to make a projection booth. That earlier room is a private residence and stays off the map.

What 853 Broadway marks is the moment a one-man distributor had become a firm a newspaper could visit.

Photo: Ajay Suresh, 2021, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons