The story
Founded by Gary Goetzman and Tom Hanks on Jan 23, 1998, in Santa Monica.1
In 1987, Tom Hanks formed its own production company, Clavius Base Productions, with a non-exclusive, first-look deal at the Walt Disney Studios. The company is named after the base from 2001: A Space Odyssey. After five years at Disney, the company signed a first-look deal with 20th Century Fox in 1992.
Although it was an in-name only operation, the company only produced one film under the original company name, the hit film That Thing You Do!, which inspired the later Playtone name. In 1995, the company produced the expensive HBO miniseries and its first foray into television, From the Earth to the Moon, in collaboration with Imagine Television, which was aired in 1998 and beginning of a long-running relationship between the company and HBO.
The success of the movie led Hanks to partner with Gary Goetzman, then of Jonathan Demme's production firm, to sign a deal with Universal Pictures in 1997, and eventually registered under the Playtone name, supplanting the earlier Clavius Base firm and adopted the firm, previously used for the Playtone Records label. The company then scored its hit with another HBO miniseries, Band of Brothers, which was released in 2001.
From Wikipedia’s article on Playtone, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.3