July-August 2019| FILMCOMMENT| 47longtime headquarters at 729 Seventh Ave. in Manhattan went on
the market; in ’86 a new boss, Ted Turner, rechristened MGM/UA as
MGM Entertainment Co., effectively ending the company’s nearly
70-year continuous run. Since the UA name has passed between dif-
ferent hands, some variation of the logo has cropped up in various
circumstances—here before Showgirls(1995), there as a temporary
home for Tom Cruise, the nearest thing to a modern-day Fairbanks,
and his production partner Paula Wagner.
Such reversals are not unheard of, for nothing is certain in the
movie racket but uncertainty. While sex and glamor have consis-
tently brought in money, those looking for a safe return on their
investment would do better to look elsewhere, for when the hits
and misses are all tallied up, profit margins in the modern film
game tend to top out around 10 percent. As Disney under Iger has
begun in recent years to routinely pull in 30 percent, however, there
is a sense that they’ve beaten the house. Ben Fritz, in his 2018 book
The Big Picture, which narrates the downfall of the star-friendly
Sony Pictures under Amy Pascal and Michael Lynton and the rise
of the new-look IP-oriented Disney under Iger, describes the situa-
tion thusly: “Though Disney still has flops, it has fewer than any
other studio—fewer than anyone ever dreamed was possible in a
business that has for decades seen more failures than successes and
has been compared to riding a roller coaster. Disney has, in short,
taken a huge chunk of the risk out of a risky business.”
And they’ve taken a huge chunk of the business, too. On
12:02 a.m. of Wednesday, March 20, 2019, a consolidation of
assets that comes as near to a stab at entertainment industry hege-
mony as anything seen since United States v. Paramount Pictures,
Inc. gave the death knell to the vertically integrated studio system,
as Disney acquired the film and television assets belonging to 21st
Century Fox for a cool $71.3 billion. Beneath fanboys’ hosannas
over the inevitability of an Avengers/X-Men crossover, faint mur-
murs could be heard regarding the 3,000 Fox employees laid off; the
uncertain future for projects begun under the pre-merger adminis-
tration; and the fate of the Fox back catalog in the hands of Disney,
whose draconian hold on their IP is well-known to repertory
programmers the world over. Will seeing most of John Ford
projected on celluloid be going the way of the Old Frontier?
As negotiations pertaining to this latest expansion of the
entertainment industrial complex massing in Burbank carried on
this February, the centennial of United Artists rolled by, marked
by an announcement that a joint distribution venture pooling the
resources of Annapurna Pictures, MGM, and Orion Pictures was
to be called United Artists Releasing. Thus spoke MGM World-
wide Motion Picture Group president Jonathan Glickman on the
occasion: “The United Artists brand is a natural fit, as our joint
venture was founded around the same principle as its namesake:
to help filmmakers main-
tain financial and artistic
control over the marketing
and distribution of their
diverse slate of films.”
It’s a nice gesture, if
hardly one to set the world
on fire, but we are a long
way removed from the
entertainment industry that
Chaplin, Fairbanks, Pick-
ford, and Griffith stood
astride, both larger and
smaller than our own. All
the same—the “purposes” of
the UA founders to which
Chaplin averred, that desire for artistic control, remains one of the
animating impulses of not only American cinema but of most any
cinematic endeavor aspiring to a commercial existence, with all the
compromises that implies.A
nd yet, filmmakers slog on. one possible solution
is to have access to a sympathetic ear and a massive
personal fortune, like that of Annapurna Pictures’
Megan Ellison, daughter of the fourth-wealthiest per-
son in the United States, whose company identity is
based on nurturing talent rather than IP (though
recent developments suggest there are limits even to her liberty).
Another is to have an enormous amount of moxie, as did Coppola,
whose American Zoetrope headquarters at the Sentinel Building in
San Francisco stood in the shadow of the Transamerica Pyramid dur-
ing the years when it housed the parent company of United Artists,
an organization that Coppola periodically imagined himself taking
control of, and even took a run at acquiring in 1999. The same strug-
gle evident in Coppola’s Tucker: The Man and His Dream—talent pit-
ted against money and management—defined this year’s Netflix
production High Flying Bird, directed by Coppola acolyte Steven
Soderbergh, who has thought long and hard and in public about
how to operate as an independent, and put those ideas into practice.
Rather than the total takeover perhaps envisaged by the UA
breakaways or Coppola and the New Hollywood vandals, Soder-
bergh seems focused on living to film again on his own terms,
picture by picture. “The idea of cinema as I’m defining it is not
on the radar in the studios,” he stated in a 2013 keynote at the
56th San Francisco International Film Festival, which found him
resigned to accept that inasmuch as there will henceforth be
artistry in American movies it will largely be found in small films
that live and die on the festival circuit and curated streaming ser-
vices, as the multiplex will exclusively come to resemble a Dave &
Buster’s–esque cacophony of dumb sensation, the endgame of a
system geared to produce, as the UA founders stated a century
ago, mediocre productions and machine-made entertainment.
Resistance may not quite be futile, but few who have the clout to
undertake it seem to have the will to do so; while Chaplin went
it almost alone, Robert Downey Jr., who played the Tramp in a
ponderous 1992 biopic, is content to let his Marvel Studios
checks clear. Meanwhile Joe and Anthony Russo, dependable
Marvel house directors who were mentored by Soderbergh after
he wandered into a screening of their still-unreleased 1997 debut
Piecesat a Slamdance screening, have begun construction on
AGBO, announced as an independent, artist-run movie studio.
The idea, Joe told Esquirein a recent profile, was “to try to pay
back our karma of debt to the universe that we owed Soderbergh
for what he did for us,” adding that “the closest model to what
we’re trying to accomplish is United Artists.”
United Artists remains both a touchstone and a warning, to
be invoked at the onset of any such venture as that which the
Russos propose—a DreamWorks SKG, for example, another tale
of vaulting ambition brought low. It remains to be seen if the
stated intentions for AGBO will go the way of George Lucas’s
long-threatened ventures into experimental films, and even with
the best of intentions, the distrust of any enterprise handled
by creatures as quixotic as show folk runs deep, as though
Voltaire’s jibe about the Holy Roman Empire (“neither Holy,
nor Roman...”) might apply just as well to the idea of “United
Artists.” But UA is as much an idea as a business interest—a con-
cept that, once named, cannot be forgotten. It has haunted Hol-
lywood for a hundred years now—and it will continue to do so
after Anaheim has fallen into the sea. The movie business
has always, when con-
sidered purely as a
business, been a bad
one, subject to the
unpredictable whims of
a fickle public whose
shifting enthusiasms
generally prove impos-
sible to accurately
gauge in advance.