much the best work on the studio of its type, covering the com-
pany’s profits, deficits, and boardroom decision-making in enor-
mous detail. The Introduction of Balio’s study, which recalls a
meeting in Vevey, Switzerland, with an elderly Chaplin, suggests
however an avenue for further study, as Chaplin, in Balio’s words,
advises the author to “focus the story of United Artists on the pur-
poses of the owners rather than on the business of the company.”
Balio would opt to scan the legible ledgers left behind rather than
such intangibles, but it can reasonably be assumed that the “pur-
poses” that Chaplin refers to had something to do with art—per
the press release that went out following UA’s formation, pursuing
the “furtherance of the artistic welfare of the moving picture indus-
try” and protecting their public from “mediocre productions and
machine-made entertainment.”
So how did they make out? Well, success as determined by profit
margins is a clear-cut matter; success as determined in the currency
of culture, less so. Notwithstanding, one can understand something
of UA’s priorities in its release schedule. Broken Blossoms(1919), the
first film that Griffith delivered to UA, had in fact been made under
the auspices of Famous Players-Lasky, but was off-loaded as Zukor
doubted the commercial prospects of a film about the relationship
between much-misused white waif Lillian Gish and a gentle Chinese
man set against a Dickensian background of squalor and poverty—
UA took it over, and the acclaim that came with it. If Chaplin would
have been Chaplin in any case, would he have had quite so easy a
time making a silent film like City Lightsfour years after The Jazz
Singer(1927) if he hadn’t owned the shop? Aside from movies pro-
duced by its founders, UA became a destination for independent
producers and their films, among them The Salvation Hunters
(1925), a proto-neorealist work shot around the drabber districts of
San Pedro by a 30-year-old unknown named Josef von Sternberg.O
f united artists’ famous founders, only
Chaplin’s fame was undiminished through the
1930s, and so new independent producers, like
Samuel Goldwyn, would become essential to the
studio’s continued health. After those of its
framers and Goldwyn’s, the most important
names in the history of UA are those of partners Robert Benjamin
and Arthur B. Krim, the latter a former chairman of Poverty Row
mainstay Eagle-Lion Films, who in 1951 came to Pickford and
Chaplin with a proposition for the stalled company, stating that
given a free hand they could make UA profitable within a decade,
and asking for half of the company if delivered.
Krim and Benjamin’s intervention happened to coincide with
the dissolution of the studio system and the rise of the independent
producer, and they had a knack for picking winners: producer-
directors like Stanley Kramer and Otto Preminger, or producers
like Joseph E. Levine and the Mirisch brothers. As “Hollywood”
became a decentralized phenomenon, UA’s operations became
international in scope, importing the Mirisch-underwritten Pink
Pantherfilms that Blake Edwards made in his Swiss exile and the
Italian Westerns that Clint Eastwood made with Sergio Leone, dis-
tributing several landmarks of European mid-century modernism
through Lopert Pictures Corporation, cashing in on Beatlemania
via Richard Lester’s A Hard Day’s Night(1964) and Help!(1965)
and doing still better with Harry Saltzman and Albert Broccoli’s
adaptations of Ian Fleming’s James Bond books, an early “cine-
matic universe” model replete with revolving-door lead actor.
In 1967, still holding a hot hand, Krim and Benjamin sold out to
Transamerica Corporation, a holding company moving into con-
glomerate diversification. This wasn’t the end of their involvement
with the company, but it was the beginning of the final act in the lifeof United Artists, now
marked in its logo as “A
Transamerica Company.”
Financial reversals notwith-
standing, UA was a power
player in the era of New
Hollywood, so-called. They
inked a three-picture deal
with Robert Altman. They
distributed the Mirisches’
The Landlord(1970), the
directorial debut of Hal
Ashby, who’d cut the 1967
Academy Award–winner In
the Heat of the Night, and
later Ashby’s lousy, lauded
Coming Home(1978). They
helped to establish two of
the decade’s key star personas, distributing Woody Allen’s Annie
Hall(1977) and the Sylvester Stallone vehicle Rocky(1976), whose
producer, Irwin Winkler, leveraged that film’s success to ensure the
completion of its evil twin, Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull(1980).
And as the decade wound down, they seemed to have a hand in
every extravagant auteurist folly out there: Scorsese’s New York, New
Yo r k(1977), Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now(1979), and,
finally, fatally, Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate(1980).
Initially budgeted at $7.5M, delivered at $44 million with P&A,
and bringing in only $3.5M domestic, Heaven’s Gatewas a financial
debacle of impressive proportions, but almost at the moment of its
desultory release Cimino’s film would come to stand for something
more than bad box office. It would become a cautionary tale, an
object lesson in what happens when creative ambition is allowed to
go unchecked by front-office pragmatism, foundering UA and
making it, per Peter Biskind, “the symbol of a discredited, director-
centric system.” This would be the ultimate fulfillment of the
much-quoted apercu issued by the head of Metro Pictures, Richard
A. Rowland, upon hearing of the formation of United Artists back
in 1919: “The inmates are taking over the asylum.”
It was Rowland who, at the fateful Alexandria Hotel convention,
had been quoted as saying that “motion pictures must cease to be a
game and become a business.” This was wishful thinking, for the
movie business has always, when considered purely as a business,
been a bad one, subject to the unpredictable whims of a fickle public
whose shifting enthusiasms generally prove impossible to accurately
gauge in advance.After Heaven’s Gate, Transamerica decided they’d
seen enough of show business and sold UA to Tracinda Corp., also
then MGM’s owner, who effected a merger. In 1983 the company’s46 | FILMCOMMENT| July-August 2019KOBAL/SHUTTERSTOCKUnited Artists was
conceived not as an
integrated studio
operation but as a
low-overhead bou-
tiquedistributor ser-
vicing independent
producers, exercising
strict quality control
over its releases, and
eschewing block
booking policies.From left: Fairbanks, Pickford, Chaplin, and Griffith