United Artists may have been the first major American film studio to be set up, back in 1919, in some kind of spirit of. . . if not utopianism, then at least something other than outright hostile opposition to the people on the creative end. It was the people on the creative end who set it up — four of them, to be precise — D. W. Griffith, Charles Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., and Mary Pickford — with an eye towards distributing their own movies, and accounts of its founding that sought out the opinion of their rival studio heads tended to be long of images of asylums taken over by the inmates, that sort of thing. Originally each member of the original triumvirate was supposed to help the studio make its nut by turning out four films a year, which might not have been such a crackpot idea at one point, but Griffith and Chaplin and Fairbanks were beginning to think bigger and bigger on projects that they fussed over for longer and longer periods, and none of them were getting any younger, and it wasn't long before other filmmakers were being invited to make films for UA. In the 1950s, producers Arthur Krim and Robert Benjamin took it over, with Chaplin and Pickford's blessings. (Fairbanks and Griffith had died by then.)
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