Revisit heyday of the 'studio without a studio'
Brattle hosts United Artists film festival
A Hollywood sometime gold standard, sometime tarnished relic gets buffed and polished again next month, as United Artists is saluted with a 90th anniversary touring festival that stops at the Brattle Theatre beginning Friday.
Established early on as an alternative for producing films outside of the old studio system, the company eventually came to be associated with risky fare that other studios couldn't or wouldn't touch. The Brattle's 20-picture slate reflects this, from Billy Wilder's suggestive double-shot of "Some Like It Hot" and "The Apartment" to the infamously X-rated "Midnight Cowboy" to Martin Scorsese's timelessly graphic "Raging Bull." The lineup also includes two of the company's three consecutive Best Picture winners of the mid-'70s: "Rocky" and "Annie Hall," which followed on the success of "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest." And festivalgoers can of course revisit UA's other two heavyweight properties, the James Bond and Pink Panther franchises, as "Dr. No" and the original "Panther" kick off the schedule.
United Artists was founded in 1919 as a savvy cooperative venture by Charlie Chaplin, D.W. Griffith, Mary Pickford, and Douglas Fairbanks, one that would allow them to control their own work. In the years that followed, as the company and the industry evolved, the group turned to like-minded creators to realize its vision. UA branched out to distribute films by Buster Keaton, silent screen icon Norma Talmadge, and producers Samuel Goldwyn and Alexander Korda, among others.
"The company really was United Artists," says Brattle creative director Ned Hinkle. "That's such a rarity, even today, to have a consortium of creative people come together and form a place where artists can really produce work the way they want. And consequently, they had a lot of success. You know, they weren't producing the world's most obscure Charlie Chaplin art films. They made popular movies that won awards and did big box office."
The Oscars and blockbusters, though, were a little while in coming. UA had actually fallen on hard times when, in 1951, lawyers-turned-producers Arthur Krim and Robert Benjamin came to surviving founders Chaplin and Pickford with a new plan. By aggressively seeking to finance independent productions rather than merely distributing them, as UA had traditionally done, they'd turn things around - and if they did, they'd have the option to buy the company. Filmmakers and actors stymied by the outmoded, controlling studio system responded in a big way. UA's structure as "a studio without a studio," traditionally a handicap, started to turn into a competitive advantage, as the other majors found themselves burdened with high overhead at a time when location filming was on the rise.
"The structure under Krim and Benjamin allowed talented people in Hollywood to make good films, without a lot of interference from the front office," says University of Wisconsin professor emeritus Tino Balio, author of a pair of authoritative UA histories slated for new printings later this year. "They were able to attract Stanley Kramer, Kirk Douglas, Burt Lancaster, Woody Allen, and many, many more. For 25 years, it was ideal management."
Several other films on the Brattle's program are culled from this lengthy fertile period, including "West Side Story," "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly," "In the Heat of the Night," and UA's first Best Picture winner, "Marty," with Ernest Borgnine. (Hinkle notes that the theater is forgoing Chaplin's oeuvre and other early classics partly because so many of the later films are must-see new prints.) Not coincidentally, only "Rain Man" is drawn from the period after the two executives departed, the catalyst for a string of ownership changes that gradually robbed UA of most of its luster and its creative relevance. Once a treasure, the company became just an asset.
Even the legacy-minded festival, to an extent, is about exploiting the UA brand. Two years ago, distribution rights for UA's home entertainment library shifted from
Still, says Hinkle, "It's rare that a studio will get behind an anniversary this way. They're obviously promoting DVD releases, but there's enough consciousness of history here that it's not just about marketing. It's about getting the films into movie theaters so that people can see them again."
"It's amazing how United Artists fades in and out of the public's attention," adds Balio. "But for people who grew up watching these movies in the '60s and '70s, during the heyday, clearly the name still has a lot of value." 