United Artists

United Artists, American film production company, based in Hollywood, California, formed in 1919 by Charles Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, and D. W. Griffith to distribute their own independently produced films and those of others. Among the films they themselves produced were Broken Blossoms (1919, directed by Griffith), Pollyanna (1920, Paul Powell), The Mark of Zorro (1920, Fred Niblo), and A Woman of Paris (1923, Chaplin). After 1925 the studio developed under the presidency of Joseph Schenck, who created a chain of cinemas and arranged for the company to distribute the films of Gloria Swanson, Rudolph Valentino, and the productions of Samuel Goldwyn.

Sound, and the diminishing creative authority of its founders, created problems for the company but, after handling the British director Alexander Korda‘s film, The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933), Korda became a partner and the company began distributing all the films from London Film Productions. Although it also distributed films produced by David Selznick—such as Rebecca (1940, Alfred Hitchcock)—and the British director and producer Herbert Wilcox, its financial difficulties did not subside. Unlike other Hollywood “majors”, it was to benefit from the anti-trust legislation of 1948 when cinemas became genuinely open to the independently produced film. The company’s losses, however, were frequently substantial, and eventually Korda, Pickford, and Goldwyn, who were frequently in dispute, sold their interests, while others, such as Selznick, ended their association with United Artists.

A new company was formed and a series of successful films—including The African Queen (1951, John Huston), High Noon (1952, Fred Zinnemann), Marty (1955, Delbert Mann), and Some Like it Hot (1959, Billy Wilder)—led to it being quoted as a public company. It was acquired by the TransAmerica Corporation and, with David Picker as its president, a series of successful, award-winning films followed: One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975, Milos Forman), Rocky (1976, John Avildsen), and Annie Hall (1977, Woody Allen) among them. Management changes, followed by the crippling financial disaster of Heaven’s Gate (1980, Michael Cimino), came close to ruining the company, and in 1981 it merged with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer to become MGM/UA. The merged company was acquired by Ted Turner in 1986, who, in a buy-back deal, sold United Artists to Kirk Kerkorian and disbanded the company. A further sale placed United Artists with Pathé Communications, which dropped the name altogether. After UA’s parent company MGM was reacquired by Kerkorian in the late 1990s, United Artists was revived as a minor studio, and then bought by Sony as part of its purchase of MGM in 2005. In 2006 MGM announced that United Artists would resume as a producing house run by Tom Cruise and his business partner Paula Wagner.