Today, The Grandma has been reading about UnitedArtist, the Americanproduction and distribution company, that was founded on a day like today in 1919.
United Artists Corporation (UA), was an American production anddistributioncompany.
Founded in 1919 by D. W. Griffith, Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, and Douglas Fairbanks, the studio was premised on allowing actors to control their own interests, rather than being dependent upon commercial studios.
UA was repeatedly bought, sold, and restructured over the ensuing century. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer acquired the studio in 1981 for a reported $350 million ($1 billion today).
On September 22, 2014, MGM acquired a controlling interest in entertainment companies One Three Media and Lightworkers Media, then merged them to revive United Artists' television production unit as United Artists Media Group (UAMG). However, on December 14 of the following year, MGM wholly acquired UAMG and folded it into MGM Television.
United Artists was briefly revived again in 2018 as United Artists Digital Studios, being launched along with the Stargate Origins web series and the Stargate Command streaming service. In December 2019 following the closure of Stargate Command, by early 2020 the original UA incarnation was folded, this time permanently, into MGM.
Mirror, the joint distribution venture between MGM and Annapurna Pictures, was subsequently rebranded as United Artists Releasing in early February 2019, in honor of its 100th anniversary, and currently the UA name lives on in that company.
In 1918, Charlie Chaplin could not get his parent company First National Pictures to increase his production budget despite being one of their top producers. Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks had their own contracts, with First National and Famous Players-Lasky respectively, but these were due to run out with no clear offers forthcoming. Sydney Chaplin, brother and business manager for Charlie, deduced something was going wrong, and contacted Pickford and Fairbanks. Together they hired a private detective, who discovered a plan to merge all production companies and to lock in exhibition companies to a series of five-year contracts.
Chaplin, Pickford, Fairbanks, and D. W. Griffith incorporated United Artists as a joint venture company on February 5, 1919.
Each held a 25 percent stake in the preferred shares and a 20 percent stake in the common shares of the joint venture, with the remaining 20 percent of common shares held by lawyer and advisor William Gibbs McAdoo. The idea for the venture originated with Fairbanks, Chaplin, Pickford and cowboy star William S. Hart a year earlier. Already Hollywood veterans, the four stars talked of forming their own company to better control their own work.
They were spurred on by established Hollywood producers and distributors who were tightening their control over actor salaries and creative decisions, a process that evolved into the studio system. With the addition of Griffith, planning began, but Hart bowed out before anything was formalized. When he heard about their scheme, Richard A. Rowland, head of Metro Pictures, apparently said, The inmates are taking over the asylum.
The four partners, with advice from McAdoo (son-in-law and former Treasury Secretary of then-President Woodrow Wilson), formed their distribution company. Hiram Abrams was its first managing director, and the company established its headquarters at 729 Seventh Avenue in New York City.
The original terms called for each star to produce five pictures a year. By the time the company was operational in 1921, feature films were becoming more expensive and polished, and running times had settled at around ninety minutes (eight reels). The original goal was thus abandoned.
UA's first production, His Majesty, the American, written by and starring Fairbanks, was a success. Funding for movies was limited. Without selling stock to the public like other studios, all United had for finance was weekly prepayment installments from theater owners for upcoming movies. As a result, production was slow, and the company distributed an average of only five films a year in its first five years.
In 1941, Pickford, Chaplin, Disney, Orson Welles, Goldwyn, Selznick, Alexander Korda, and Wanger -many of whom were members of United Artists- formed the Society of Independent Motion Picture Producers (SIMPP). Later members included Hunt Stromberg, William Cagney, Sol Lesser, and Hal Roach.
The Society aimed to advance the interests of independent producers in an industry controlled by the studio system. SIMPP fought to end ostensibly anti-competitive practices by the seven major film studios -Loew's (MGM), Columbia Pictures, Paramount Pictures, Universal Pictures, RKO Radio Pictures, 20th Century Fox, and Warner Bros./First National-that controlled the production, distribution, and exhibition of motion pictures.
In 1942, SIMPP filed an antitrust suit against Paramount's United Detroit Theatres. The complaint accused Paramount of conspiracy to control first-and subsequent-run theaters in Detroit. This was the first antitrust suit brought by producers against exhibitors that alleged monopoly and restraint of trade.
In 1948, the U.S. Supreme Court Paramount Decision ordered the major Hollywood movie studios to sell their theater chains and to end certain anti-competitive practices. This court ruling ended the studio system.
By 1958, SIMPP achieved many of the goals that led to its creation, and the group ceased operations.
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer acquired the studio in 1981 for a reported $350 million ($1 billion today).
Today, The Grandma is relaxing at home. She has received the wonderful visit of one of her closest friends, Claire Fontaine, who shares lots of hobbies with The Grandma.
They love classic and mute films and they have been talking about RudolphValentino, the Italian actor based in the United States who starred in several well-known silent films and became a sex symbol during the 1920's.
Rodolfo Alfonso Raffaello Pierre Filiberto Guglielmi di Valentina d'Antonguella (May 6, 1895-August 23, 1926), known professionally as RudolphValentino, was an Italian actor based in the United States who starred in several well-known silent films including The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, The Sheik, Blood and Sand, The Eagle, and The Son of the Sheik.
He was a sex symbol of the 1920s, who was known in Hollywood as the Latin Lover, a title invented for him by Hollywood moguls, The Great Lover, or simply Valentino. His premature death at the age of 31 caused mass hysteria among his fans and further propelled his status as a cultural film icon.
Valentino was born in Castellaneta, Apulia, Kingdom of Italy and named Rodolfo Pietro Filiberto Raffaello Guglielmi di Valentina d'Antonguella.Hisfather, Giovanni Antonio Giuseppe Fedele Guglielmi di Valentina d'Antonguella, was Italian; he was a captain of cavalry in the Italian Army, later a veterinarian, who died of malaria when Rodolfo was 11 years of age.
After living in Paris in 1912, he soon returned to Italy. Unable to secure employment, he departed for the United States in 1913. He was processed at Ellis Island at age 18 on December 23, 1913. Although he found unparalleled fame and success in America, Valentino never filed the necessary papers for naturalization, and so retained his Italian citizenship.
Arriving in New York City, he supported himself with odd jobs such as busing tables in restaurants and gardening. Valentino once worked as a bus boy at Murray's on 42nd Street and was well liked, but didn't do a good job and was fired. While he was living on the streets, Valentino would occasionally come back to Murray's for lunch and the staff would slip him some food.
Around 1914, Restaurateur Joe Pani who owned Castles-by-the-Sea, the Colony, and the Woodmansten Inn was the first to hire Rudolph to dance the tango with Joan Sawyer for $50 per week. Eventually, he found work as a taxi dancer at Maxim's Restaurant-Cabaret. Among the other dancers at Maxim's were several displaced members of European nobility, for whom a premium demand existed.
Rudolph Valentino
In 1917, Valentino joined an operetta company that traveled to Utah, where itdisbanded. He then joined an Al Jolson production of Robinson Crusoe, Jr. which was travelling to Los Angeles.
By fall, he was in San Francisco with a bit part in a theatrical production of Nobody Home.While in town, Valentino met actor Norman Kerry, who convinced him to try a career in cinema, which was still in the silent film era.
Valentino and Kerry moved back to Los Angeles and became roommates at the Alexandria Hotel. He continued dancing, teaching dance, and building up a following that included older female clientele who would let him borrow their luxury cars. At one point after the United States entered World War I,both Kerry and Valentino tried to get into the Canadian Air Force to fly and fight in France.
With his dancing success, Valentino found a room of his own on Sunset Boulevard and began actively seeking screen roles. His first part was as an extra in the film Alimony, moving on to small parts in several films.
Despite his best efforts, he was typically cast as a heavy (villain) or gangster. At the time, the archetypal major male star was Wallace Reid, with a fair complexion, light eyes, and an All-American look, with Valentino the opposite, eventually supplanting Sessue Hayakawa as Hollywood's most popular exotic male lead.
By 1919, he had carved out a career in bit parts. It was a bit part as a cabaret parasite in the drama Eyes of Youth that caught the attention of screenwriter June Mathis, who thought he would be perfect for her next movie. He also appeared as second lead in The Delicious Little Devil (1919) with star Mae Murray.
In 1919, Valentino also impulsively married actress Jean Acker. Their marriage was never consummated.
Displeased with playing heavies, Valentino briefly entertained the idea of returning to New York permanently. He returned for a visit in 1917, staying with friends in Greenwich Village, eventually settling in Bayside, Queens. There he met Paul Ivano, who would greatly help his career.
Valentino's final film for Metro was the Mathis-penned The Conquering Power. The film received critical acclaim and did well at the box office. After the film's release, Valentino made a trip to New York, where he met with several French producers. Yearning for Europe, better pay, and more respect, Valentino returned and promptly quit Metro.
After quitting Metro, Valentino took up with Famous Players-Lasky, forerunner of the present-day Paramount Pictures, a studio known for films that were more commercially focused. Mathis soon joined him, angering both Ivano and Rambova.
Rudolph Valentino
In November 1921, Valentino starred alongside Gloria Swanson in Beyond the Rocks.
In 1922, Valentino began work on another Mathis-penned film, Blood and Sand.
Valentino went on strike for financial reasons. At the time of his lawsuit against the studio, Valentino was earning $1,250 per week, with an increase to $3,000 after three years. This was $7,000 per week less than Mary Pickford made in 1916.
He was also upset over the broken promise of filming Blood and Sand in Spain, and the failure to shoot the next proposed film in either Spain or at least New York. Valentino had hoped while filming in Europe he could see his family, whom he had not seen in 10 years.
Valentino returned to the United States in reply to an offer from Ritz-Carlton Pictures, working through Famous Players, which included $7,500 a week, creative control, and filming in New York.
The first film under the new contract was Monsieur Beaucaire, wherein Valentino played the lead, the Duke of Chartres.
During the filming of Monsieur Beaucaire, both Charlie Chaplin and DouglasFairbanks approached Valentino privately, due to his contract with Ritz-Carlton, about joining with United Artists. Valentino's contract with United Artists provided $10,000 a week for only three pictures a year, plus a percentage of his films. Valentino chose his first UA project, The Eagle.
In 1923, Valentino published a book of poetry titled Day Dreams. He later serialized events in various magazines. With Liberty magazine, he wrote a series entitled, How You Can Keep Fit in 1923. My Life Story was serialized in Photoplay during his dance tour. The March issue was one of the best-selling ever for the magazine. He followed that with My Private Diary, serialized in Movie Weekly magazine. Most of the serials were later published as books after his death.
On August 15, 1926, Valentino collapsed at the Hotel Ambassador on Park Avenue in Manhattan. He was hospitalized at the New York Polyclinic Hospital. Following an examination, he was diagnosed with appendicitis and gastric ulcers, and surgery was performed immediately.
During the early hours of Monday, August 23, Valentino was briefly conscious and chatted with his doctors about his future, but soon lapsed into a coma. He died a few hours later at the age of 31.
An estimated 100,000 people lined the streets of Manhattan to pay their respects at his funeral. Suicides of despondent fans were reported. Windows were smashed as fans tried to get in and an all-day riot erupted on August 24.
Over 100 mounted officers and NYPD's Police Reserve were used to restore order. A phalanx of officers lined the streets for the remainder of the viewing. Polish actress Pola Negri, claiming to be Valentino's fiancée, collapsed in hysterics while standing over the coffin.
After an intensive night celebrating Saint John, TheGrandma is exhausted. Today, she has decided to relax at home and enjoy with one of her passions, classic cinema.
TheGrandma has started to watch MaryPickford's films, masterpieces of cinema, performed by one of the greatest actresses of the cinema. The Grandma admires MaryPickford and all the great silentfilm actors of her age. Charles Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, Rudolph Valentino, Douglas Fairbanks, William S. Hart, Richard Barthelmess, William Haines, John Gilbert...
On a day like today, Mary Pickford became the first female film star to sign a million-dollar contract, something amazing for a woman in this profession and in this age and The Grandma wants to homage her talking about her awesome career.
Mary Pickford is one of the greatest actresses of all times but she was also the founder of United Artists an independent cinema studio that helped actors and actresses to keep their jobs during the worst years of WWI and Post War.
Gladys Louise Smith (April 8, 1892-May 29, 1979), known professionally as Mary Pickford, was a Canadian-born American film actress and producer. With a career spanning 50 years, she was a co-founder of both the Pickford–Fairbanks Studio, along with Douglas Fairbanks, and, later, the UnitedArtists film studio, with Fairbanks, Charlie Chaplin and D. W. Griffith, and one of the original 36 founders of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences who present the yearly Oscar award ceremony.
Pickford was known in her prime as America's Sweetheart and the girl with the curls. She was one of the Canadian pioneers in early Hollywood and a significant figure in the development of film acting. Pickford was one of the earliest stars to be billed under her own name, and was one of the most popular actresses of the 1910s and 1920s, earning the nickname Queen of the Movies. She is credited as having defined the ingénue archetype in cinema.
Mary Pickford & Frances Marion
She was awarded the second ever Academy Award for Best Actress for her first sound-film role in Coquette(1929) and also received an honorary Academy Award in 1976.
In consideration of her contributions to American cinema, the American Film Institute ranked Pickford as 24th in its 1999 list of greatest female stars of classic Hollywood Cinema.
Mary Pickford was born Gladys Louise Smith in 1892 at 211 University Avenue, Toronto, Ontario. Her father, John Charles Smith, was the son of English Methodist immigrants, and worked a variety of odd jobs. Her mother, Charlotte Hennessey, was of Irish Catholic descent and worked for a time as a seamstress. She had two younger siblings, Charlotte -Lotti- and John Charles, who also became actors.
After being widowed in 1899, Charlotte Smith began taking in boarders, one of whom was a Mr. Murphy, the theatrical stage manager for Cummings Stock Company, who soon suggested that Gladys, then age seven, and Lotti, then age six, be given two small theatrical roles -Gladys portrayed a girl and a boy, while Lottie was cast in a silent part in the company's production of The Silver King at Toronto's Princess Theatre, destroyed by fire in 1915, rebuilt, demolished in 1931, while their mother played the organ.
Pickford subsequently acted in many melodramas with Toronto's Valentine Stock Company, finally playing the major child role in its version of The Silver King. She capped her short career in Toronto with the starring role of Little Eva in the Valentine production of Uncle Tom's Cabin, adapted from the 1852 novel.
By the early 1900s, theatre had become a family enterprise. Gladys, her mother and two younger siblings toured the United States by rail, performing in third-rate companies and plays. After six impoverished years, Pickford allowed one more summer to land a leading role on Broadway, planning to quit acting if she failed.
In 1906 Gladys, Lottie and Jack Smith supported singer Chauncey Olcott on Broadway in Edmund Burke. Gladys finally landed a supporting role in a 1907 Broadway play, The Warrens of Virginia. The play was written by William C. deMille, whose brother, Cecil, appeared in the cast. David Belasco, the producer of the play, insisted that Gladys Smith assume the stage name Mary Pickford. After completing the Broadway run and touring the play, however, Pickford was again out of work.
Mary Pickford
On April 19, 1909, the Biograph Company director D. W. Griffith screen-tested her at the company's New York studio for a role in the nickelodeon film Pippa Passes. The role went to someone else but Griffith was immediately taken with Pickford.
She appeared in 51 films in 1909, almost one a week. In January 1910, Pickford travelled with a Biograph crew to Los Angeles. Many other film companies wintered on the West Coast, escaping the weak light and short days that hampered winter shooting in the East. Pickford added to her 1909 Biographs (Sweet and Twenty, They Would Elope, and To Save Her Soul, to name a few) with films made in California.
Actors were not listed in the credits in Griffith's company. Audiences noticed and identified Pickford within weeks of her first film appearance. Exhibitors, in turn, capitalized on her popularity by advertising on sandwich boards that a film featuring The Girl with the Golden Curls, Blondilocks, or The Biograph Girl was inside.
Pickford left Biograph in December 1910. The following year, she starred in films at Carl Laemmle's Independent Moving Pictures Company (IMP). Unhappy with their creative standards, Pickford returned to work with Griffith in 1912. That year, Pickford also introduced Dorothy Gish and Lillian Gish to Griffith, and each became major silent film stars, in comedy and tragedy, respectively. Pickford made her last Biograph picture, The New York Hat, in late 1912.
She returned to Broadway in the David Belasco production of A Good Little Devil (1912). In 1913, she decided to work exclusively in film.
Pickford left the stage to join Zukor's roster of stars. Zukor first filmed Pickford in a silent version of A Good Little Devil.
Pickford's work in material written for the camera by that time had attracted a strong following. Comedy-dramas, such as In the Bishop's Carriage (1913), Caprice (1913), and especially Hearts Adrift (1914), made her irresistible to moviegoers. Hearts Adrift was so popular that Pickford asked for the first of her many publicized pay raises based on the profits and reviews. The film marked the first time Pickford's name was featured above the title on movie marquees.
Mary Pickford & Charles Chaplin
Only Charlie Chaplin, who slightly surpassed Pickford'spopularity in 1916, had a similarly spellbinding pull with critics and the audience. Each enjoyed a level of fame far exceeding that of other actors.
Throughout the 1910s and 1920s, Pickford was believed to be themost famous woman in the world, or, as a silent-film journalist described her, the best known woman who has ever lived, the woman who was known to more people and loved by more people than any other woman that has been in all history.
Pickford starred in 52 features throughout her career. On June 24, 1916, Pickford signed a new contract with Zukor that granted her full authority over production of the films in which she starred, and a record-breaking salary of $10,000 a week. In addition, Pickford's compensation was half of a film's profits, with a guarantee of $1,040,000 (US$ 18,130,000 in 2019).
In August 1918, Pickford's contract expired and, when refusing Zukor's terms for a renewal, she was offered $250,000 to leave the motion picture business. She declined, and went to First National Pictures, which agreed to her terms.
In 1919, Pickford, along with D.W. Griffith, Charlie Chaplin, and Douglas Fairbanks, formed the independent film production company United Artists. Through United Artists, Pickford continued to produce and perform in her own movies; she could also distribute them as she chose.
In 1920, Pickford's film Pollyanna grossed around $1,100,000. The following year, Pickford's film Little Lord Fauntleroy was also a success, and in 1923, Rosita grossed over $1,000,000 as well. During this period, she also made Little Annie Rooney (1925), another film in which Pickford played a child, Sparrows (1926), which blended the Dickensian with newly minted German expressionist style, and My Best Girl (1927), a romantic comedy featuring her future husband BuddyRogers.
Mary Pickford
The arrival of sound was her undoing. Pickford underestimatedthe value of adding sound to movies, claiming that adding sound to movies would be like putting lipstick on the Venus de Milo.
She played a reckless socialite in Coquette (1929), a role for which her famous ringlets were cut into a 1920s' bob. Pickford had already cut her hair in the wake of her mother's death in 1928. Fans were shocked at the transformation. Pickford's hair had become a symbol of female virtue, and when she cut it, the act made front-page news in The New York Times and other papers.
Coquette was a success and won her an Academy Award for Best Actress,although this was highly controversial. The public failed to respond to her in the more sophisticated roles. Like most movie stars of the silent era, Pickford found her career fading as talkies became more popular among audiences.
Her next film, The Taming of The Shrew, made with husband DouglasFairbanks, was not well received at the box office. Established Hollywood actors were panicked by the impending arrival of the talkies.
In 1933, she underwent a Technicolor screen test for an animated/live action film version of Alice in Wonderland, but Walt Disney discarded the project when Paramount released its own version of the book. Only one Technicolor still of her screen test still exists.
She retired from acting in 1933; her last acting film was released in 1934. She continued to produce for others, however, including Sleep, My Love (1948) with Claudette Colbert and Love Happy (1949), with the Marx Brothers.
Pickford used her stature in the movie industry to promote a variety of causes. Although her image depicted fragility and innocence, Pickford proved to be a worthy businesswoman who took control of her career in a cutthroat industry.
During World War I, she promoted the sale of Liberty Bonds, making an intensive series of fund-raising speeches that kicked off in Washington, D.C., where she sold bonds alongside Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, Theda Bara, and Marie Dressler.
Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford & Charlie Chaplin
At the end of World War I, Pickford conceived of the Motion Picture Relief Fund, an organization to help financially needy actors. In 1932, Pickford spearheaded the Payroll Pledge Program, a payroll-deduction plan for studio workers who gave one half of one percent of their earnings to the MPRF.
As a result, in 1940, the Fund was able to purchase land and build the Motion Picture Country House and Hospital, in Woodland Hills, California.
An astute businesswoman, Pickford became her own producer within three years of her start in features. In 1916, Pickford's films were distributed, singly, through a special distribution unit called Artcraft. The Mary Pickford Corporation was briefly Pickford's motion-picture production company.
In 1919, she increased her power by co-founding United Artists (UA) with Charlie Chaplin, D. W. Griffith, and her soon-to-be husband, Douglas Fairbanks. Before UA's creation, Hollywood studios were vertically integrated, not only producing films but forming chains of theaters.
United Artists broke from this tradition. It was solely a distribution company, offering independent film producers access to its own screens as well as the rental of temporarily unbooked cinemas owned by other companies.
Pickford and Fairbanks produced and shot their films after 1920 at the jointly owned Pickford-Fairbanks studio on Santa Monica Boulevard. The producers who signed with UA were true independents, producing, creating and controlling their work to an unprecedented degree. As a co-founder, as well as the producer and star of her own films, Pickford became the most powerful woman who has ever worked in Hollywood.
By 1930, Pickford's acting career had largely faded. After retiring three years later, however, she continued to produce films for United Artists. She and Chaplin remained partners in the company for decades. Chaplin left the company in 1955, and Pickford followed suit in 1956, selling her remaining shares for three million dollars.
Mary Pickford
After retiring from the screen, Pickford became an alcoholic, as her father had been. Her mother Charlotte died of breast cancer in March 1928. Her siblings, Lottie and Jack, both died of alcohol-related causes. These deaths, her divorce from Fairbanks, and the end of silent films left Pickford deeply depressed. Her relationship with her adopted children, Roxanne and Ronald, was turbulent at best.
Pickford withdrew and gradually became a recluse, remaining almost entirely at Pickfair and allowing visits only from Lillian Gish, her stepson Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., and few other people.
Pickford believed that she had ceased to be a British subject when she married an American citizen upon her marriage to Fairbanks in 1920. Thus, she never acquired Canadian citizenship when it was first created in 1947. However, Pickford held and traveled under a British/Canadian passport which she renewed regularly at the British/Canadian consulates in Los Angeles, and she did not take out papers for American citizenship. She also owned a house in Toronto, Canada. Toward the end of her life, Pickford made arrangements with the Canadian Department of Citizenship to officially acquire Canadian citizenship because she wished to die as a Canadian. Canadian authorities were not sure that she had ever lost her Canadian citizenship, given her passport status, but her request was approved and she officially became a Canadian citizen.
On May 29, 1979, Pickford died at a Santa Monica, California, hospital of complications from a cerebral hemorrhage she had suffered the week before. She was interred in the Garden of Memory of the Forest Lawn Memorial Park cemetery in Glendale, California.
.jpg)
