UA
officially began on February 5, 1919 by Douglas Fairbanks, D.
W. Griffith. Mary Pickford, and Charles
Chaplin (shown on the left). The idea for the venture originated with
Fairbanks, Chaplin, Pickford, and cowboy star William S. Hart a year earlier
as they were traveling around the U.S. selling Liberty bonds to help the
World War I effort. Hart dropped out before the company was formed.
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 expanded to around ninety minutes. It was soon clear that times had changed and no one could produce and star in five films a year.
By 1924, Griffith had dropped out and Joseph Schenck was hired as president. Schenck 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.
In 1933, Schenck resigned to organize a new company with Darryl F. Zanuck, Twentieth Century Pictures, which soon provided four pictures a year to UA's schedule. He was replaced as president by sales manager Al Lichtman who only lasted a few months before resigning.
Pickford herself produced a few films, and at various times Goldwyn, Korda, Walt Disney, Walter Wanger and David O. Selznick were made producing partners and sharing in the profits, but ownership still rested with the founders. As the years passed, these producing partners drifted away, Goldwyn and Disney went to RKO, Wanger went to Universal, and Selznick retired. By the late 1940s, United Artists had virtually ceased to exist as either a producer or distributor.
In 1951, two lawyers-turned-producers Arthur Krim and Robert Benjamin approached Pickford and Chaplin with the wild idea to 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 almost inactive, Pickford saw nothing to lose and agreed. Chaplin was against the deal, but changed his mind in late 1952 when the US government revoked his re-entry visa while he was in London for the UK premiere of Limelight.
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. 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.
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, having purchased Associated Artists Productions, owners of Warner Bros. pre-1948 shorts and cartoons as well as Popeye cartoons, purchased from Paramount Pictures a few years earlier.
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.
In 1978, following 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. The picture turned out to be a colossal box office bomb, angering critics and alienating audiences. The publicity about runaway costs soured the relationship between UA and Transamerica. Within a year, UA was sold to Kirk Kerkorian, who merged it into his MGM.
Under Kerkorian, United Artists became a shell. The studio, which was essentially bankrupt following the disaster of Heaven's Gate, cut its production schedule sharply. MGM and UA were merged into MGM/UA Entertainment Co. from 1981 to 1987. UA 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 (with the exception of those MGM/UA releases by United Artists).
In 1990, an Italian promoter Giancarlo Parretti bought MGM/UA but 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. MGM was sold in 1997, again to Kirk Kekorian.
UA (re-named United Artists Films) distributed a few "art-house" films, such as 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.
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 had said little about UA's future. While Sony announced that the MGM name would continue to be used on more low budgeted to mid-ranged films or on other selected features, their plans for UA seemed unclear. A few pictures in the pipeline at the time of the Sony takeover were "jointly" released by UA and Sony Classics. These include films such as Capote and Art School Confidential.
United Artist Rebirth
On November 2, 2006, MGM announced that actor Tom Cruise and his long-time production partner Paula Wagner were resurrecting United Artists. The duo acquired a small stake in the studio, with the approval by MGM's consortium of owners, which includes Sony and Comcast. The deal gives them control over production, from development to the "green-lighting" of films. Wagner was named CEO of United Artists, which will have an annual slate of four films with different budget ranges, while Cruise serves as a producer for the revamped studio as well as serving as the occasional star.
This announcement came after Cruise and Wagner ended a fourteen-year production relationship at Viacom-based Paramount Pictures earlier in 2006.