United Artists: The Company Built by the Stars

United Artists was a unique motion picture company in the  history of Hollywood. Founded by Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Douglas  Fairbanks, and director D.W. Griffith —four of the greatest names of  the silent era—United Artists functioned as a distribution company for  independent producers. In this lively and detailed history of United  Artists from 1919 through 1951, film scholar Tino Balio chronicles the  company’s struggle for survival, its rise to prominence as the Tiffany  of the industry, and its near extinction in the 1940s.

Humor & Entertainment

Balio, Tino

Movies

Univ of Wisconsin Pr

United Artists was a unique motion picture company in the history of Hollywood. Founded by Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, and director D.W. Griffith —four of the greatest names of the silent era—United Artists functioned as a distribution company for independent producers. In this lively and detailed history of United Artists from 1919 through 1951, film scholar Tino Balio chronicles the company’s struggle for survival, its rise to prominence as the Tiffany of the industry, and its near extinction in the 1940s.

University of Wisconsin Press

Mission to Moscow (Wisconsin / Warner Bros. Screenplays)

Mission to Moscow  is a notorious classic among propaganda films produced in the United States. Never has another feature film been made with such explicit direction from the federal government, although the result failed to persuade every viewer.

The Public Enemy, a 1931 Warner Brothers gangster classic, is easily remembered as the movie in which James Cagney used Mae Clarke's nose as a grapefruit grinder. As Cagney recalls, it was just about the first time that "a woman had been treated like

The Public Enemy (Wisconsin / Warner Bros. Screenplays)

Literature & Fiction

Dramas & Plays

How did United Artists—“the company built by the stars”—go from being a company near death in 1951, to the most successful company in the history of the motion picture industry? The answers are the subject of this book. They are important not only because they illustrate a story of business success, but because it is the story of the development of the modern American film industry. It was United Artists that changed the industry from one relying on the old studio system of the “golden age” into today’s modern system of independent production and distribution. Tino Balio’s vivid history will be important reading for anyone interested in the American film industry.

United Artists: The Company that Changed the Film Industry

Business & Money

United Artists was a unique motion picture company in the history of Hollywood. Founded by Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, and director D.W. Griffith--four of the greatest names of the silent era--United Artists functioned as a distribution company for independent producers. In this lively and detailed history of United Artists from 1919 through 1951, film scholar Tino Balio chronicles the company's struggle for survival, its rise to prominence as the Tiffany of the industry, and its near extinction in the 1940s. This edition is updated with a new introduction by Balio that places in relief UA's operations for those readers who may be unfamiliar with film industry practices and adds new perspective to the company's place within Hollywood.

United Artists, Volume 1, 1919–1950: The Company Built by the Stars

Industries

In this second volume of Tino Balio's history of United Artists, he examines the turnaround of the company in the hands of Arthur Krim and Robert Benjamin in the 1950s, when United Artists devised a successful strategy based on the financing and distribution of independent production that transformed the company into an industry leader. Drawing on corporate records and interviews, Balio follows United Artists through its merger with Transamerica in the 1960s and its sale to MGM after the financial debacle of the film Heaven's Gate. With its attention to the role of film as both an art form and an economic institution, United Artists: The Company That Changed the Film Industry is an indispensable study of one company's fortunes from the 1950s to the 1980s and a clear-eyed analysis of the film industry as a whole. This edition includes an expanded introduction that examines the history of United Artists from 1978 to 2008, as well as an account of Arthur Krim's attempt to mirror UA's success at Orion Pictures from 1978 to 1991.

United Artists, Volume 2, 1951–1978: The Company That Changed the Film Industry

The Foreign Film Renaissance on American Screens, 1946–1973 (Wisconsin Film Studies)

Largely shut out of American theaters since the 1920s, foreign films such as Open City, Bicycle Thief, Rashomon, The Seventh Seal, Breathless, La Dolce Vita and L’Avventura played after World War II in a growing number of art houses around the country and created a small but influential art film market devoted to the acquisition, distribution, and exhibition of foreign-language and English-language films produced abroad. Nurtured by successive waves of imports from Italy, Great Britain, France, Sweden, Japan, and the Soviet Bloc, the renaissance was kick-started by independent distributors working out of New York; by the 1960s, however, the market had been subsumed by Hollywood. From Roberto Rossellini’s Open City in 1946 to Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris in 1973, Tino Balio tracks the critical reception in the press of such filmmakers as François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni, Tony Richardson, Ingmar Bergman, Akira Kurosawa, Luis Buñuel, Satyajit Ray, and Milos Forman. Their releases paled in comparison to Hollywood fare at the box office, but their impact on American film culture was enormous. The reception accorded to art house cinema attacked motion picture censorship, promoted the director as auteur, and celebrated film as an international art. Championing the cause was the new “cinephile” generation, which was mostly made up of college students under thirty. The fashion for foreign films depended in part on their frankness about sex. When Hollywood abolished the Production Code in the late 1960s, American-made films began to treat adult themes with maturity and candor. In this new environment, foreign films lost their cachet and the art film market went into decline.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Balio, Tino. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Balio, Tino

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Balio, Tino. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

United Artists: The Company Built by the Stars

United Artists: The Company Built by the Stars

Mission to Moscow (Wisconsin / Warner Bros. Screenplays)

The Public Enemy (Wisconsin / Warner Bros. Screenplays)

United Artists: The Company that Changed the Film Industry

United Artists: The Company that Changed the Film Industry

United Artists, Volume 1, 1919–1950: The Company Built by the Stars

United Artists, Volume 2, 1951–1978: The Company That Changed the Film Industry

The Foreign Film Renaissance on American Screens, 1946–1973 (Wisconsin Film Studies)

The Foreign Film Renaissance on American Screens, 1946–1973 (Wisconsin Film Studies)