it was east coast president, barney balaban, who ran all corporate affairs for paramount from the mid0s, by which time the company was already a vast multinational with nearly 200 listed subsidiaries. the story with barney balaban evidently is he was encouraged by his mother to get into the business because she was quite impressed by a business in which people paid cash, before they made the product. so when she saw these nickels and dimes and quarters crossing the transit and said, "it's a good business to be in. i like this business." (announcer) in the lobby, more and still more crowds. (douglas gomery) in an era when business people were just winging it, he hired a statistician from columbia university. it was the statistician's job to get figures reported out from all the theatres all over the world and distribution figures as best they could, with the constraints of the telephone at the time and have those reports on barney's desk as he arrived. when you finished working on a film, whatever you did, the brass, the money came from new york to see it before the negative was cut, w