101 Years Ago ...

This week in 1919, Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks (Sr.), Mary Pickford, and D.W. Griffth, join forces to form United Artists. Other studio moguls declare that the lunatics (i.e., the artistic creators) have taken over the asylum, but UA takes hold and goes on for decades and decades, outliving its founders, seen above in pristine newsreel footage.

While United Artists has a very long run, its four founders end up traveling way different paths through Hollywood.

At the time the company is formed, Doug Fairbanks and Mary Pickford are in the middle of a tempestuous extra-marital affair that's been going on for a year. They divorce their respective spouses thirteen months later, marry each other, and become Tinsel Town's first super-star power couple. Mr. and Mrs. Fairbanks jointly own the Pickford-Fairbanks studio and turn out a string of hit films through the 1920s, preside like royalty over Hollywood social events, and help found the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences (Mary wins a "Best Actor" Oscar in the Academy's second year).

They both become very very rich.

But then sound comes in and their stardom fades. Mary stops making films and hits the bottle. Doug stops making films and becomes a globe-trotting Anglophile. He divorces Mary, hangs out in London a lot, and hooks up with Lady Sylvia Ashley. By the end of 1939 Doug Fairbanks is dead of a heart attack at 56, and Mary has tied the knot with actor Buddy Rogers. Thereafter, Little Mary slowly becomes a recluse, and dies of a stroke in 1979 at age 87.

Griffith, oldest of the group, is already near the end of his time as a big commercial filmmaker. There is still the block-buster Way Down East immediately ahead, but by the mid-twenties he is eased out of UA and by 1931 (and two failed talkies), he is a former big-deal movie director. He dies alone and pretty much forgotten in July, 1948, age 73.

Only Charlie Chaplin forges successfully on into the sound era. From the founding of UA through 1940, almost every feature he makes (The Kid, The Gold Rush, The Circus, City Lights, Modern Times, The Great Dictator) is a sizable hit. Hounded out of the United States in the early fifties, Chaplin takes up residence in Switzerland, returning in triumph to Hollywood to pick up an honorary Oscar. (Victory is the best revenge.)

Charlie dies on Christmas day, five-and-a-half years later. He is 88.

At its beginning, United Artists distributed all of the Big Four's films. But there wasn't enough output between Fairbanks-Pickford-Griffith-Chaplin to sustain a distribution company, so outside producers were brought into the mix. UA distributed (among others) the films of Sam Goldwyn, Buster Keaton, Walt Disney, and David Selznick to name a few. What did serious damage to United Artists in its later years was the epic money-loser "Heavens Gate". The corporation was among the barely-crawling wounded after that fiasco.

Addendum: UA had an interesting history with Walt Disney. The company began distributing Disney shorts in the early thirties, and for a brief moment in 1933, Mary Pickford was going to do an animated/live-action version of "Alice In Wonderland" with Walt. But then Paramount did their star-studded, black-and-white version and the idea was shelved.

And then in 1937, UA and Disney couldn't come to an agreement on television rights. (Walt and Roy weren't sure what those were, but they didn't want to cede them to United Artists.) So Chaplin-Pickford-Fairbanks got a divorce, and RKO got a nice percentage for distributing "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs".