On this day in 1916, Canadian Gladys Smith (aka Mary Pickford), signs a contract with Adolph Zukor, head of Famous Players Film Corporation. Her deal is sweet: she gets $10,000 a week and half the film receipts, with a guarantee of $1,040,000 for 2 years work. She produces the films through her own company, "The Mary Pickford Film Corporation".
Of course, $500k a year doesn't sound like much NOW, but it was a potful in 1916. And Gladys/Mary went on to greater glory in the 1920s, marrying super-star Doug Fairbanks and founding United Artists, through which she released her movies from 1920 onwards.
That United Artists thing, that "form your own distribution company" strategy? It turned out to have implications for the course of the cartoon business. In the early 1930s, Walt Disney began distributing his shorts through United Artists, and Miss Pickford came within a whisker of partnering with Walt on the making of the first animated feature.
Mary was going to play Alice in Alice In Wonderland for the Disney studio. They shot some color live-action footage, but that's as far as the project got. Paramount Pictures (Adolph Zukor's new, LARGER movie company) beat Mary and Walt to the punch by making its own version of Alice, and Walt decided to move on to another feature project with a female lead.
And Miss Pickford stopped making movies, since talking pictures didn't really jazz her anyway. And as with a number of other screen icons from the silent era, her stardom faded, she divorced her movie star husband, and she ended her days as an elderly alcoholic recluse, holed up in an upstairs bedroom of her Beverly Hills estate.
But, man. NOBODY can take that $1,040,000 away from her.
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