United Artists

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The United Artists Corporation (aka United Artists Associated, United Artists Pictures, and United Artists Films) was formed on February 5, 1919 by four of the leading figures in early Hollywood: Charles Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, and D. W. Griffith. The idea for the venture originated with Fairbanks, Chaplin, Pickford, and cowboy star William S. Hart a year earlier while they were traveling around the U.S. selling Liberty bonds to help with the World War I effort. The four film stars began to talk over the idea of forming their own company so as to have more control their own works, as well as their futures. Hart eventually bowed out, but director D. W. Griffith soon was joined in. When he heard of this plan, Richard A. Rowland, head of Metro Pictures, said, "The inmates are taking over the asylum." The four partners, with advice from former Secretary of the Treasury William G. McAdoo (son-in-law of then-President Woodrow Wilson), formed their distribution company, with Hiram Abrams as its first managing director.

Contents

The Early Years

Image:UnitedArtists-founders fairbanks-griffith-pickford-chaplin.jpg UA began as a joint venture, featuring three of the country's most popular stars and its leading director. The original terms called for Pickford, Fairbanks, Griffith and Chaplin to produce five pictures each year. But by the time the company got under way in 1920-1921, feature-films were becoming more expensive and more polished; running times had settled at around ninety minutes (or eight reels). It was was clear that no one, no matter how popular, could produce and star in five films a year. By 1924, by which time Hart and Griffith had dropped out, the company was facing a crisis: either bring in others to help support a costly distribution system or concede defeat. The veteran producer Joseph Schenck was hired as president; not only had he been producing pictures for a decade, but he brought along commitments for films starring his wife, Norma Talmadge, his sister-in-law, Constance Talmadge, and his brother-in-law, Buster Keaton. Contracts were signed with a number of independent producers, especially Samuel Goldwyn, Alexander Korda and Howard Hughes. Schenck also formed a separate partnership with Pickford and Chaplin to buy and build theaters under the United Artists name.

Still, even with a broadening of the company, UA struggled. The coming of sound all but ended the career of Fairbanks; Chaplin, rich enough to do what he pleased, worked only occasionally. Schenck resigned in 1933 to organize a new company with Darryl F. Zanuck, Twentieth Century Pictures, which soon added four pictures a year to UA's schedule; Pickford herself produced a few films, and at various times Goldwyn, Korda, Walt Disney, Walter Wanger and David O. Selznick were made "producing partners" (i.e., sharing in the profits), but ownership still rested with the founders. As the years passed and the dynamics of the business changed, these "producing partners" drifted away, Goldwyn and Disney to RKO, Wanger to Universal, Selznick to retirement. By the late 1940s, United Artists had virtually ceased to exist as either a producer or distributor.

The 1950s and 1960s

In 1951, two lawyers-turned-producers Arthur Krim and Robert Benjamin approached Pickford and Chaplin with a wild idea: let them take over United Artists for five years. If, at the end of those five years, UA was profitable, they would be given an option to buy the company. Since UA was barely alive, Pickford saw nothing to lose and agreed; Chaplin, not favorable at first, came around when his circumstances changed abruptly in 1952.

Hounded by the American Legion and others for years over his left-wing politics and his lurid private life, Chaplin left the country for a vacation in Europe. While he was away, his visa expired; when he asked the State Department for a renewal, he was refused. Never having bothered to become an American citizen though he had lived in the US since 1914, Chaplin found himself rejected by his adopted land on grounds of "moral turpitude." Unable to return home, he was amenable to selling his half of United Artists, as well as his own studio on La Brea Avenue.

In taking over UA, Krim and Benjamin created the first studio without a "studio." Primarily acting as bankers, they offered money to independent producers. UA leased space at the Pickford/Fairbanks Studio, but did not own a studio lot as such; thus UA did not have the overhead, the maintenance or the expensive production staff which ran up costs at other studios. Among their first clients were Sam Spiegel and John Huston, whose "Horizon Productions" gave UA two major hits, The African Queen and Moulin Rouge. Others followed, among them Stanley Kramer, Otto Preminger, Hecht-Hill-Lancaster, and a number of actors, newly freed from studio contracts and anxious to produce or direct their own films. UA production-head Arnold Picker could do no wrong in selecting the properties which the company would back. With UA's new success, Pickford saw a chance to exit gracefully, though she still held out for top dollar, walking away with $1.5 million in 1955.

UA went public the following year, and as the other mainstream studios fell into decline, UA prospered, adding relationships with the Mirisch brothers, Billy Wilder, Joseph E. Levine and others. In the 1960s, UA introduced U.S. audiences to The Beatles by releasing producer Walter Shenson's A Hard Day's Night (1964) and Help! (1965). At the same time it backed two expatriate Americans in Britain, who had acquired screen rights to Ian Fleming's Bond novels. For $1 million, UA backed Harry Saltzman and Albert Broccoli's Dr. No (which was a sensation in 1962) and served as the launching point for the James Bond series. That franchise has outlived UA's tenure as a major studio, still running forty years later. Other successful projects backed in this period included Blake Edwards's Pink Panther series, which began in 1964, and Sergio Leone's Spaghetti Westerns, which made a star of Clint Eastwood.

Borrowing the idea of financial backing for television, UA's television division was responsible for shows like Gilligan's Island, The Fugitive, Outer Limits, The Patty Duke Show, and thirtysomething. The television unit also had begun to build up a substantial -- and profitable --rental library. (See note below at '"The Fall and Slight Rise of UA"' for more on this). There was also a short-lived record division, later sold to Thorn EMI.

On the basis of its fantastic string of film and television hits in the 1960s, the company was an attractive property, and in 1967 Krim and Benjamin sold control of UA to the San Francisco-based insurance giant, Transamerica Corp.

The 1970s and 1980s

What Transamerica got was not just the UA name and library, but the expertise and experience of Krim, Benjamin and a team of others. For a time the flow of successful pictures continued. New talent was encouraged, including Woody Allen, Robert Altman, Sylvester Stallone, Saul Zaentz, Milos Forman, and Brian De Palma. In 1973 UA took over the sales and distribution of MGM's films.

But insurance companies are a cautious, steady business. The ups-and-downs of movie making made them nervous. And then there were the costs; Hollywood has always been based on image, so executives had to be pampered a bit. All of this drove the insurance suits crazy. Finally in 1978, after a dispute over administrative expenses, UA's top executives, including chairman Krim and president Benjamin, walked out. Within days they announced the formation of Orion Pictures, with backing from Warner.

The inexperienced new leadership of UA, anxious to show that they could make quality pictures too, agreed to back Michael Cimino's pet project, a big-budget western, Heaven's Gate. After a tumultuous two-year gestation, the picture proved to be a colossal failure, angering critics and alienating audiences. The publicity about runaway costs far overshadowed any appeal the film might have. United Artists recorded a major loss for the year; to Transamerica, it was only a blip on a multi-billion dollar balance sheet, but it soured the relationship forever. To the greater Hollywood community, it also signalled that this was a company that could no longer produce pictures. Within a year, UA was sold to Kirk Kerkorian, who merged it into his MGM.

In 1975, Harry Salzman sold UA his 50% stake in Danjaq, L.L.C., the holding-company for the Bond films. UA was to remain a silent partner, putting up money, while Albert Broccoli took producer credit. John Cork, producer of dozens of documentaries for the Bond films on DVD, claims that UA sold this 50% stake back to Broccoli in the mid-1980s. It has also been claimed that MGM/UA kept a distribution deal with Danjaq said to be far better than that given Broccoli and Salzman in 1962.

The Fall and Slight Rise of UA

Under Kerkorian, United Artists became a shell. The studio was essentially dormant after 1989, releasing no films for several years. In part this was due to the continuing turmoil at MGM/UA; bought by Ted Turner in 1986, he could not get financial backing to complete the deal and, seventy-four days later, re-sold UA and the MGM trademark to Kerkorian, while keeping the MGM/UA library for himself. (See below for a note on the film library.)

In 1990 came the farcical sale to the Italian promoter Giancarlo Parretti; having bought MGM/UA by wildly overstating his own financial condition, within a year Parretti had defaulted to his primary bank, Crédit Lyonnais, which foreclosed on the studio in 1992. In an effort to make MGM/UA saleable, Credit Lyonnais ramped up production, reviving two long-running franchises, the Pink Panther and James Bond films, while beginning to re-position UA as a boutique or specialty studio. UA (re-christened United Artists Films) released a few "art-house" films, among them Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine, 2002's foreign-film Academy Award winner, No Man's Land, and 2004's Hotel Rwanda, a co-production of UA and Lions Gate Films.

United Artists' Last Act

On April 8, 2005, a partnership of Comcast, Sony and several merchant banks bought United Artists and its parent, MGM, for a total of $4.8 billion.

Since then, Sony has said little about UA's future. While Sony annnounced that the MGM name will continue to be used on selected features, their plans for UA seem unclear. A few pictures in the pipeline at the time of the Sony takeover are being "jointly" released by UA and Sony Classics. After a sometime splendid, sometimes awful eighty-six year history, this seems to be the last act for "the studio of the stars," United Artists.

Memorable releases

1920s and 1930s

1940s

1950s

1960s

1970s

1980s

1990s

Film Archives

The value of film libraries has increased exponentially in recent years, even as ownership gets more fractured. Few studios had the foresight or ability to maintain control over every picture they produced or released. United Artists, through various strategic purchases, built up a substantial film library. Included were rights not only to some of UA's own releases, but to the pre-1948 Warner Bros. and RKO libraries. Having passed through numerous hands, this catalog now belongs to Warner Bros.' Turner Entertainment diivision.

Since UA produced very few of the pictures it released, ownership of UA's output often rests with the individual or company producing. Some UA films of the 1930s, 1940s and early 1950s fell into the public domain, to be picked up by Republic Pictures (today part of Paramount Pictures) or small boutique houses like Castle Hill Productions.

Charlie Chaplin's films, features and shorts, are controlled by his estate.

When she retired from pictures in 1933, Mary Pickford wanted to destroy her films; afraid that they would be laughed-at, she was finally made to see that they would have artistic or historic value, and today rights to all of her films are held by the Pickford Foundation.

All of the Disney shorts released through United Artists in the early 1930s are owned by The Walt Disney Company. Rights to Selznick International Pictures and other later productions from David Selznick are held by ABC. The Twentieth Century pictures released by UA between 1933 and 1935 rest with the successor company, Twentieth Century-Fox. The pre-1941 Samuel Goldwyn films released by UA are now held by a company with which Goldwyn feuded for years, MGM.

Most of the Beatles' films are owned by the surviving members of the group, through Apple Corps; A Hard Day's Night is controlled by Miramax Films, but Yellow Submarine is held by UA. Rights to Mike Todd's splashy Around the World in Eighty Days and the UA-distributed Saul Zaentz films are now in the hands of Warner Bros.

But a good number of United Artists' films from the 1920s through the 1940s, in the public domain, have been forgotten. Of the hundreds of fiilms distributed by UA over eighty-plus years, those which it owns outright today are its own productions from 1951 forward (plus a few pre-1951 films such as 1933's Hallelujah, I'm A Bum and Howard Hawks's Red River).

See also

Notes on Sources

  • Bach, Steven. Final Cut. New York: Morrow, 1985.
  • Balio, Tino. United Artists: The Company Built by the Stars. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1976.
  • Berg, A. Scott. Goldwyn. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988.
  • Gabler, Neal. An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood. New York: Crown Publishers, 1988.
  • Schickel, Richard. D.W. Griffith: An American Life. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1983.
  • Thomson,David. Showman: The Life of David O. Selznick. New York: Alfred A, Knopf, 1992.


External links

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