Mary Pickford: United Artists Co-Founder and Film Pioneer

Introduction: America's Sweetheart and Hollywood Power

Although there is much talk today of "power couples" in Hollywood, no pair can parallel the domination of Mary Pickford, widely known as America's Sweetheart, and her husband, the swashbuckling action hero Douglas Fairbanks Sr., during the era of silent film. Pickford and Fairbanks established their stardom during the early days of cinema, and although they did attempt to make talking pictures — including an ill-advised production of The Taming of the Shrew that incorporated interpolated dialogue with Shakespeare's timeless words — their sound films never garnered the beloved status of their silent-era work.

Despite Mary Pickford's links to an old-fashioned style of moviemaking that is now a part of twentieth-century history, her work as a producer and one of the co-founders of United Artists was incredibly modern and remains relevant today. The philosophy of United Artists became a harbinger of the way gritty, independent films were made during the 1960s and 1970s, one of the greatest periods of independent filmmaking in America. Although it may be difficult to see the parallels between Taxi Driver and Pickford's films, they exist in the sense that Pickford was determined to support innovative visions in the medium she loved. As the studios gradually gained more and more control over stars' lives, Pickford and her United Artists co-founders Fairbanks and Chaplin wished to make a case for the importance and quality of independent moviemaking before the American public. "The inmates are taking over the asylum," one wag reportedly exclaimed when UA was formed. But this takeover created an infusion of creativity into the movie business when it was sorely needed. The creation of United Artists was a defense of film as a true art. Pickford and her co-founders believed that films were the product of a director and a collection of actors, not merely a money-making venture.

It is somewhat ironic that Pickford never established a career in talkies, given that she began in the theater. Born Gladys Smith, her name was made more marketable through the pseudonym Mary Pickford, and her beautiful face and doll-like appearance caused her to be spotted and quickly launched into Hollywood stardom during the heyday of silent pictures. Pickford, in contrast to other box-office starlets of the 1920s, conveyed an otherworldly, innocent, and childlike image. Central to her success was her head of cascading golden curls that, unlike the sultry flapper bobs of Louise Brooks and "It Girl" Clara Bow, almost reached her waist. The diminutive Pickford frequently played children, in films such as Pollyanna and Little Lord Fauntleroy. During this more innocent era, the appeal of a beautiful woman playing a young girl went largely unremarked upon, and when Pickford married the popular heroic actor Douglas Fairbanks Sr., it seemed as if a Hollywood dynasty had been created.

But both Pickford and Fairbanks chafed at the limits of their popular yet rather confined screen images. Furthermore, they disliked the often overbearing studio heads: the stars were the reason Americans came to see films in such overwhelming numbers, they believed, not the producers. Pickford's standing as "America's Sweetheart" — a winsome image perpetuated by films like 1914's Tess of the Storm Country, 1917's Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, and 1917's Poor Little Rich Girl — began to straitjacket her creative ambitions. After 1920's Pollyanna, which cast the 27-year-old as a girl fifteen years her junior, she defiantly chopped off her long, angelic curls into a short bob and set about updating her image once and for all ("Mary Pickford," Columbia, 2010). Only creative control over her films would give her the power to thrive as an artist. To her credit, she tried to stretch her range and bring new directing talent to America at the same time: "Toward these aims, Pickford lured director Ernst Lubitsch from Germany to the U.S. to helm 1923's Rosita, and out went the Cinderella tales on which her stardom rested. By 1929's Coquette, for which she won an Academy Award, her transformation was complete" ("Mary Pickford," Columbia, 2010).

The Studio System and the Rise of Vertical Integration

Despite their successes, Pickford, Fairbanks, close friend Charlie Chaplin, and renowned silent-film director D.W. Griffith all wanted to challenge the limitations placed upon them by their screen images. The seed of an idea — the dream that later became United Artists — was born. Griffith, director of Birth of a Nation (1915), wanted to continue creating equally ambitious epics, though studio heads preferred shorter and less risky works. Chaplin's strong personality similarly craved greater freedom, and like Griffith, he also wanted to create longer, feature-length works such as The Kid (1921). UA would give Chaplin greater ability to publicize and distribute the works he was already creating independently.

"Originally, in the earliest years of the motion picture industry, production, distribution, and exhibition were separately controlled. When the industry rapidly grew, these functions became integrated under one directorship to maximize profits, something called vertical integration" (Dirks 2001, p. 1). This total control over so many facets of the industry gave tremendous power to the large studios. "By 1929, the filmmaking firms that were to rule and monopolize Hollywood for the next half-century were the giants, or the majors, sometimes dubbed the Big Five. They produced more than 90% of the fiction films in America and distributed their films both nationally and internationally" (Dirks 2001, p. 1). Hollywood was, effectively, an oligopoly.

Founding United Artists: A Radical Act of Creative Independence

Each studio had a slightly different brand: Warner Brothers Pictures was known for its gritty gangster pictures, MGM for its splashy musicals. Part of that branding involved promoting certain specific stars, as the image of stars was linked to the image of the studios. "The studio system was essentially born with long-term contracts for stars, lavish production values, and increasingly rigid control of directors and stars by the studio's production chief and in-house publicity departments" (Dirks 2001, p. 1). Rather than viewing film as an artistic medium, as D.W. Griffith aspired to do, the major studios viewed their films as products of a factory system of production, much as Henry Ford manufactured cars on an assembly line.

United Artists was "formed in 1919 by movie industry icons Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks Sr., Charlie Chaplin, and director D.W. Griffith as an independent company to produce and distribute their films. United Artists utilized an 18-acre property owned by Pickford and Fairbanks, known as the Pickford-Fairbanks Studio, and later named United Artists Studio in the 1920s" (Dirks 2001, p. 1). Despite near-total opposition from the rest of the film industry, United Artists almost immediately managed to release popular and lucrative films, such as D.W. Griffith's Orphans of the Storm (1921) and Fairbanks's star turn in The Three Musketeers (1921). These early films, though unique realizations of their creators' visions, were not as radical in their approach as some later UA releases. Griffith's film, for example, was a condemnation of Bolshevism disguised as an anti-leftist French Revolution tale, while Fairbanks's film featured him doing handsprings to grab swords, demonstrating his athletic star power. Nevertheless, merely splitting from studio control was viewed as a radical act during the era.

Only artists of Pickford's and Chaplin's stature and money-generating ability could have taken such a bold step. It was, to some degree, even more risky for Pickford than for Chaplin. Pickford was a woman in a male-dominated industry, and her image was that of sweetness and light — not the humorous, authority-challenging image of Chaplin's Little Tramp.

Conclusion: Pickford's Legacy as a Pioneer Producer

Compared to other producers working at that time, Pickford's style was far more eclectic. Unlike the Warner brothers' highly efficient system and signature style of hard-boiled crime epics, United Artists and Mary Pickford had no specific trademark that would reveal at a glance that a film had been made under her watch. Rather, the films Pickford was influential in producing are better known by the signature styles of the actors and directors who gave birth to them. United Artists was always more a means of releasing new creative visions to the public than a vehicle for crafting a distinctive Pickford aesthetic. As Pickford herself believed, diversity was the core of cinema's survival. She was fundamentally an actress, not a director like Griffith or Chaplin, and just as an actress tries out many different roles, she wished to collaborate with many different creative partners.