T
he mouse has roared. the success story of the
last few years in American popular picture-making
has been the triumph of the Walt Disney Company
under the stewardship of Bob Iger, the conspicuous
financial windfall of which all competitors have
sought to imitate. It was Iger, CEO of the company
since Michael Eisner’s departure in 2005, who more than any
other single individual reoriented Disney toward investment in
intellectual properties (IP), guiding the company’s film division
to a policy of producing fewer and more extrav-
agant movies based on recognizable franchises
and characters, ensuring an infinitely renewable
store of such properties through the acquisition
of Pixar in 2006, Marvel Entertainment in
2009, and Lucasfilm in 2012, as well as through
cannibalizing Disney’s own back catalog of IP.
There is a sense that Iger, a onetime Ithaca
weatherman turned television executive turned
mega-mogul, has finally cracked the long-
believed-insoluble problem of the movie busi-
ness’s volatility and precariousness, as Disney’s
success under his tenure has prompted a land
rush on IP, and rival studios scurry to construct their own cine-
matic universes while they still have the autonomy to do so.
It is the nature of things that today’s monolithic, Goliath-like
megacorporation must spring from yesteryear’s plucky upstart
David. The Disney brothers, Walt and Roy, had once upon a time
been the prototypical long-shot outsiders, beginning their new Hol-
lywood cartooning concern in 1923, following the bankruptcy of
Walt’s short-lived Laugh-O-Gram Studios back in Kansas City. As
independent operators, they were beholden to established distribu-
tors to put their product in front of audiences, and by 1932, when
their ambitions for their enormously lucrative Silly Symphonies
series far surpassed what was possible with the production advances
being provided by current partner Columbia Pictures, it made too-
perfect sense to turn to an organization that had become a bastion
to independent producers, United Artists.
A hundred years old this year, United Artists had been con-
ceived as both a business venture and a utopian artistic endeavor,
formed in 1919 by a consortium made up of some of the most
commercially dependable, publicly venerated, and critically lauded
figures then at work in motion pictures: Douglas Fairbanks and
Mary Pickford, soon to be married, D.W. Griffith, and Charlie
Chaplin. (Cowboy star William S. Hart had been attached at one
point but, getting cold feet, moseyed back into the protective
embrace of Famous Players-Lasky.)
The idea behind the endeavor was that movie people who had
their rapport with ticket buyers could do their work just fine, thank
you very much, without the studios interfering and keeping a dis-
proportionate slice of the profits. International fame on the level
that the UA principals enjoyed was then a relatively recent phe-
nomenon, resultant from the development and synergistic interlac-
ing of new mass media at the turn of the last century—motion
pictures, newspapers addressing an increasingly literate population,
and the soon-to-arrive radio. These developments would elevate
celebrities to a heretofore unknown strata of recognition: star
sportsmen like Dempsey and Ruth; star tenors like Enrico Caruso;
star politicians like the Woodrow Wilson who attended the Paris
Peace Conference; star directors, like Griffith, and movie stars, like
Chaplin, Fairbanks, and Pickford. It was a development that the
early studio owners had been loath to see transpire, fearing that if
screen actors were to become known brand names, those actors
would enjoy greater bargaining power in negotiations. So whenPickford, who had first been hired at 17 by Griffith as a $5-a-day
utility player and shortly became a fan favorite as “The Girl with
the Curls,” petitioned her Biograph bosses for a publicity build-up
to the public announcement of her name, she was turned down,
getting her wish only when she hopped over to Carl Laemmle’s
Independent Moving Pictures Company in December 1910.
The concept of United Artists belonged to this moment of ascen-
dant stars flexing their muscle just as surely as Iger’s Disney business
model is founded on the chastening of the star, to be returned to the
status of contracted employee. Whereas the Tramp
only existed so long as Chaplin deigned to play
him, the Disney model assumes the existence of
deathless IP that can be handed from generation to
generation as a Jedi lightsaber or Captain America
shield is passed from one standard bearer to
another. When Harrison Ford, on a recent To d a y
Showappearance, scoffed at the prospect of pass-
ing the character of Indiana Jones off to another
actor (“When I’m gone, he’s gone; it’s easy”), this
was an assertion of the existence of such an ineffa-
ble quality as “star power” against a system predi-
cated on the idea of actors as replaceable parts.
When Bradley Cooper, a male A-lister of spandex age who has thus
far stayed free of cape-and-mask duty, chose to remake A Star Is
Bornfor his directorial debut, the title took on an almost plaintive air
of wish fulfillment, as if to say that stars can still be born.T
he history of american movies has to a significant
degree been defined by two opposing impulses, those
of organization and independence, the latter often a
reaction to the former. It was the Motion Picture
Patents Company’s monopolistic grip on the industry
from 1908 to 1912 that had driven early cinema’s out-
law pioneers to remote southern California, and it was fear of a
merger that might create a comparable superpower that catalyzed
the creation of United Artists. A convention off the First National
Exhibitors’ Circuit at the Alexandria Hotel in downtown Los Ange-
les in January 1919 spurred speculation that a union was being bro-
kered between the two mightiest forces in the American picture
business: Famous Players-Lasky, which under Adolph Zukor had
delivered a coup de grace to the MPPC and become the largest pro-
ducer and distributor of feature films in the world, and First
National Exhibitors’ Circuit, formed by a consortium of influential
theater owners with the specific intention of creating a bulwark
against the rapidly expanding power of Famous Players-Lasky and
its policy of block booking, which asked exhibitors to book an
entire season of studio output sight unseen, fobbing off second-rate
product in the package along with premium pictures. First National
had picked Zukor’s pocket, signing both Chaplin and Pickford to $1
million contracts in 1917-18, but the prospect of a merger meant
they would be left with no competition to go to in order to leverage
bargaining power. Facing such a possibility, which in fact never
came to pass, they decided to create the new competition.
United Artists was conceived not as an integrated studio opera-
tion but as a low-overhead boutique distributor servicing indepen-
dent producers, exercising strict quality control over its releases,
and eschewing block booking policies. After a turbulent early
period, United Artists attained a reasonable level of financial stabil-
ity under the oversight of Joseph M. Schenck, brought on as presi-
dent in November 1924, bringing with him considerable business
acumen and his wife, the star Norma Talmadge, who would hence-
forth be delivering her pictures to UA.
UN Tino Balio’s two-volume history of UA as a corporate entity is
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