On this day in 1919, Hollywood superstars Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, and director D.W. Griffith launch the United Artists Corporation, agreeing to share full financial and artistic control. The leading film artists of their era, the partners established the company seeking complete creative freedom in their work. United Artists was the first studio to be controlled by artists, not businessmen.The company, which produced and distributed films, quickly gained prestige and raked in profits during the silent-film era, releasing films featuring Buster Keaton, Rudolph Valentino, and Gloria Swanson, as well as the company’s three famous founders. Chaplin directed as well as acted, and Pickford, a brilliant and shrewd businesswoman, concentrated on producing after she retired from acting in the 1930s.
Significant stockholders Samuel Goldwyn and Alexander Korda pulled out of United Artists in the early 1940s, and the company began to struggle financially, partly because it lacked its own studio. In the 1950s and ’60s, however, location shooting became popular, and the company’s lack of a shooting studio became an advantage, keeping overhead low.
By the mid-1950s, the original partners had sold their shares of the company, but United Artists continued to thrive, releasing such films as The African Queen (1951), Witness for the Prosecution (1957), Some Like It Hot (1959), and the James Bond films. United Artists went public in 1957 and became a subsidiary of the TransAmerica Corporation a decade later. It garnered three consecutive Best Picture Academy Awards in the 1970s, for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975), Rocky (1976), and Annie Hall (1977). But soon after that, five top executives left the company in a disagreement over the formation of Orion Pictures, and the company took a further blow when it released the big-budget box office flop Heaven’s Gate in 1980. In 1981, MGM bought the company, merging with it in 1983 to become MGM/UA Entertainment. In 1992, the French bank Credit Lyonnais acquired the company and changed its name back to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Inc., abandoning the United Artists name altogether.
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On this day in 1919, Hollywood superstars Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, and director D.W. Griffith launch the United Artists Corporation, agreeing to share full financial and artistic control. The leading film artists of their era, the partners established the company seeking complete creative freedom in their work. United Artists was the first studio to be controlled by artists, not businessmen.The company, which produced and distributed films, quickly gained prestige and raked in profits during the silent-film era, releasing films featuring Buster Keaton, Rudolph Valentino, and Gloria Swanson, as well as the company’s three famous founders. Chaplin directed as well as acted, and Pickford, a brilliant and shrewd businesswoman, concentrated on producing after she retired from acting in the 1930s.
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