The time Rin Tin Tin set up a studio staffed exclusively by dogs

September 1930. Rin Tin Tin is curled up on the porch, his tail softly banging against the wooden floor.

He is the most successful actor in Hollywood, an incredible achievement for a human actor, but unheard of for a dog. The previous year he would have won the ‘Best Actor’ award were it not for a late change in the voting rules.

He even had a nice big bone to gnaw on.

Yet, he was unhappy.

Yes, he was the most successful dog ever, but he wasn’t master of his own fortune. He had saved Warner Brothers from bankruptcy and what had he got for that? A nice steak, a chew toy, and Jack Warner telling him he was a good boy.

The time had come for Rin Tin Tin to stop taking orders from any human. He was going to set up his own studio; a studio entirely for dogs.

“I think that in any other industry, a dog setting up his own company would have seemed crazy. Outlandish,” said Rin Tin Tin superfan and biographer Barry Tin Tin in a 1946 Wogan interview.

“But this was the nascent film industry. It was America. Anyone could do anything. Look at Charlie Chaplin. He was just a kid from a London workhouse. Is it any more unlikely that a dog could set up a studio than Chaplin to be the most famous man on the planet?”

“Well, I mean yes, of course it is. But the point really is that very, very unlikely things could happen in Hollywood in those days.”

Recognising that most dogs wouldn’t own a telephone in 1930, Rin Tin Tin set off around Hollywood to recruit his talented doggie colleagues.

A cocker spaniel called Daphne handled finance. A big Irish Red Setter called Happy looked after the talent, Rin Tin Tin himself was producer and a precociously talented Labrador called Baxter was director.

Studio rivals laughed. Harry Warner laughed that if he wanted to shut the studio down, all he needed to do was to walk a cat past the lot gates.

“Yeah, they laughed,” said Mr Tin Tin.

“I guess that would have hurt too. I mean, Rin Tin Tin had worked with Harry Warner, he’d worked with a lot of people who were now laughing at him.”

But that ridicule only seemed to spur on the talented German Shepherd. In 1931, Rough Waters, the first film from Tin Tin Studios was released.

“It was the proudest moment of his life, to see the phrase ‘produced by Rin Tin Tin’ on a poster,” smiled Mr Tin Tin.

Sadly, that pride wasn’t to last, and the following year Rin Tin died in the arms of Hollywood superstar Jean Harlow, with whom he’d been having an affair.

Tin Tin studios continued on, successfully producing films. It branched into human films and won five Academy Awards in 1942 for How Green Was My Valley.

In 1950, it changed its name to Paramount Pictures and to this day remains a successful studio, and if you look very closely at the famous Paramount mountain logo, just near the summit, you will see a tiny German Shepard, honouring the dog that started it all.