Showcase Cinemas history

After the war, Redstone entered Harvard Law School, where he finished his studies in 1947.

The theater chain he joined in 1954 and gradually took control of expanded to 59 screens a decade after his arrival and swelled to 129 screens after another decade.

In 1959, when the business reached down the Eastern seaboard, it was incorporated as National Amusements.

“You shoved me and said you would like to throw me out the window,” Sumner recounted in a nine-page, single-spaced letter written in 1971 detailing their deteriorating relationship.

In 1972, National agreed to pay Edward $5 million for a 27 percent stake.

At the end of this 20-year expansion period in 1974, Redstone was 51 years old and financially independent, but his greatest fame and wealth still lay ahead.

Impressed by the movie Star Wars, Redstone began accumulating stock in Twentieth Century Fox in 1977.

In 1980, Redstone began investing in another motion picture studio, acquiring ten percent of Columbia Pictures.

When he sold his stake in 1981, Redstone's shares sold for $60 each, netting him at least $20 million.

The appraisal of the grandchildren’s stock was done in 1982 by Sam Rosen, Sumner’s personal accountant and the accountant for National.

That deal was only the prelude for what Michael and his co-plaintiffs contend was a greater fraud by Sumner: the 1984 repurchase of the grandchildren’s trust shares that had been put in place by Mickey.

Redstone repeated his pattern of investment success with an interest in MGM/UA, which he sold to Kirk Kerkorian in 1985 for a $15 million profit.

Fifty years later in 1986, when the founder's son Sumner Redstone joined the company, it was renamed to National Amusements.

There weren't even enough tapes in the stores," Redstone told Forbes in June 1998, rattling off several of the chain's problems.

Instead, there were more lawsuits, including one in 2004 that produced the financial documents Michael’s suit claims Sumner and Edward had kept secret from their children for more than 20 years.

In March 2005, the company announced plans of looking into splitting Viacom into two publicly traded companies under the continuing ownership of National Amusements because of a stagnating stock price.

A split of his empire into two publicly traded companies in January 2006 has been deemed faulty by many on Wall Street.

At the end of 2008, due to financial troubles, owners Sumner Redstone and Shari Redstone sold $400 million of nonvoting shares in National Amusements.

In October 2009, the company sold almost $1 billion of its interest in the stock of CBS and Viacom and sold 35 theaters to Rave Motion Pictures.