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(From left, in foreground) D.W. Griffith, Mary Pickford, Charlie Chaplin, and Douglas Fairbanks at the signing of the contract establishing United Artists Corporation in 1919.
New York World-Telegram and the Sun Newspaper Photograph Collection/Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (Digital file no. cph 3c37195)
United Artists Corporation, major investor in and distributor of independently produced motion pictures in the United States. The corporation was formed in 1919 by Charlie Chaplin, the comedy star; Mary Pickford and her husband, Douglas Fairbanks, the popular film stars; and D.W. Griffith, the director who was a pioneer in the development of camera techniques. They were the leading filmmakers of their day and wanted complete freedom in producing and distributing their films. The company also handled the distribution of high-quality films made by independent producers. United Artists was the first major production company to be controlled by its artists rather than by businessmen. It also started the trend among studios to act as distributing agencies for films other than those it produced.
Besides the films of its founders (including Chaplin’s The Gold Rush, 1925), United Artists prospered in the 1920s with films starring Gloria Swanson, Norma Talmadge, Buster Keaton, and Rudolph Valentino. The company met the new challenge of sound films in the 1930s with the talents of such producers as Samuel Goldwyn, Howard Hughes, and Alexander Korda. The corporation eventually encountered financial difficulties, though, and was reorganized in 1951: the production studio was sold, and United Artists became solely a financing and distributing facility. Although the new administration established itself with modestly budgeted films, the company was fully competitive by the mid-1950s with all the major studios because of such films as The African Queen (1951), High Noon (1952), Marty (1955), Witness for the Prosecution (1957), Some Like It Hot (1959), The Apartment and The Magnificent Seven (both 1960), and West Side Story (1961). The company’s subsequent successes included the James Bond and Pink Panther series and such films as One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) and Rocky (1975). In its later years, United Artists underwent various ownerships and corporate organizations.
