United Artists

For anyone looking for a good history of UA up till 1951 I'd recommend 'United Artists: The Company Built by the Stars' by Tino Balio. Shush's views agree with Balio's. From the preface:

United Artists was founded in 1919 as a distribution company for independent producers: those actors, directors, and producers who were constitutionally opposed to the studio system and who risked their own money on custom-made pictures that reflected their special talents.

- Rob

From the October 1943 stockholders meeting:

Pickford: If we can't sit down and discuss our business like any other modern organization, then it is too bad.

Chaplin: I don't think this was ever intended to be a modern corporation. We never intended it.

Pickford: It is not, if it was.

Chaplin: It was an ideal proposition in the beginning.... We had it for the purpose of exploiting our own pictures without block booking from other sources.

- Rob

She retired from the screen in the early '30s, but she didn't retire from the film business by a long shot. She was still overseeing the restoration and re-issuing of her films as late as the early 1970s, in fact.

I wasn't implying that Mary wore as many hats in her productions as Chaplin did for 'A Woman of Paris,' but she really did produce or co-produce nine features, through her own corporation.

Two or three books is a good start. But she still hasn't been given the wide recognition she deserves, in my opinion. Actresses like Clara Bow and Louise Brooks have been given a lot more attention than Pickford, who was far more popular in her time as well as being active behind the camera and in the business of film production and distribution. The popular perception of her, as I see it, is that she was basically just an old-time movie star known as 'America's Sweetheart' and little more.

According to Tino Balio: 'And to further stimulate the cooperative spirit of the venture and as a gesture of mutual trust, the owners decided to adopt an unwritten law stating that no proposal, policy, or decision could be effected without unanimous consent.'

But later on Balio states: '[Pickford's] goal was to have the unanimous vote provisions in the bylaws declared invalid because they threatened to destroy her 25 per cent interest in the company.

- Rob

principals involved can

From the minutes of a 1943 UA board meeting:

<<Chaplin: It was an ideal proposition in the beginning....

We had it for the purpose of exploiting our own pictures without block booking from other sources.>>

Thanks to Rob Moulton for posting this.

Clearly, Chaplin was principally concerned with maximizing the commercial opportunies of his pictures and essentially using the Company to service his requirements, to support whatever he chose to make regardless of his fiduciary responsibility as a director of the corporation

Stop worrying about my 'underlying assumptions' and deal with my arguments. Accept them. Reject them. And then move on. But if you continually attempt to question my motives, blacken my good name with terms like 'potential fascist,' I will continue to respond as below:

(The problem is, I regard insinuations about my lack of competence in reasoning to be a personal attack, and you apparently thinks it's A-OK. Maybe your cranial deficiency is the cause of that.)

This demonstrates that you don't understand Hearst, Kane, or Chaplin. They were all *conflicted* moguls.

Chaplin was only a knight.

Yes that is indeed a large part of the problem. You appear to be incapable of seeing someone else pointing out what they see as logical deficiencies in the arguments you present, especially if you deem their style unacceptable, as anything but a personal attack. You might be right, it may be a cranial deficiency on my part. If it is, you alone, unqualified as you are and with clearly insufficient contact or exposure, in contrast to many others with appropriate qualifications and much more contact, are the only one to diagnose any deficiency. Of course, since your underlying assumptions and logic structure

It might. Or it might just be that my understanding, based as it is on a) the historical facts you choose to ignore and b) underlying assumptions that demand at least minimal congruence with historical reality, is simply different from yours.

Yes, compared to you he clearly was outranked in the field of confusing fact with fantasy. Chaplin developed a very effective costume to give his ideas a grounding in reality. You choose instead to blow smoke to try to cover the nakedness of your ideas.