I will be watching and reviewing all of the films included on AFI’s 100 Years…100 Passions list. The list contains the 100 greatest love stories in American cinema and I plan to consider how our views on romance and social issues have changed over the years as well as judge whether the romances in these films actually made me swoon. As a fan of the romance genre, I expect to love each and every one of the nominees but I also don’t know if I would consider all of them romantic.

When it came to last week’s entry on AFI’s list, Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing (1955), I was fascinated by the production of the film due to my interest in Jennifer Jones’s personal life and the ways in which her marriage impacted the romantic dramas she appeared in. I can’t say that I care about the union between Ali MacGraw and Robert Evans so I have almost no emotional investment in Love Story (1970) which is a far more conventional tearjerker. This film is most interesting when viewed as a holdover from the 1960s as it was made in a decade of experimentation and innovation and yet Love Story feels like it could have been made in the era of the studio system. It tells a very basic story about a young couple from different sides of the tracks falling in love and getting married before one of them slowly dies and the audience cries as the happiness experienced by this young couple is destroyed. This is a template that does work and I am susceptible to tearjerkers but I need to invest in the characters and believe in the situation and in this case, I found myself utterly bored by the two protagonists and shaking my head in disbelief at the scenes in which we a watch a dying girl growing even more beautiful.

Last week I talked about a big studio production from the 1950s and it was full of all of the tropes that we associate with that era as it was shot in a foreign location, it featured two major stars and it clumsily dealt with important themes like race. When we think of romance in the 1950s we do think about that sort of film as it was an era in which the studio system was shaky but still dominant and conservative politics reigned. You did get stories about blandly attractive youths who are kept apart for arbitrary reasons getting together before one of them starts to suffer from some disease and both of them get to act noble and serious. This is why a lot of people dismiss the 1950s as a time in which studios were afraid of stepping away from formulas and trying to do something new.

The 1970s are looked at differently as cinephiles will fondly wax poetic about the wonderment of that brief period in which directors like Hal Ashby, Francis Ford Coppola, Sidney Lumet, and Brian De Palma were able to get big studios to invest in their weird, irreverent projects. You typically think of character studies, gangster films, and paranoia thrillers when you think back to this time but you also had kooky little romantic comedies that have come to be regarded as classics. Harold and Maude (1971), Minnie and Moskowitz (1971), and What’s Up, Doc? (1972) all feel a little offbeat and inventive because they were produced by directors with unique artistic visions and those directors had the nerve to challenge audiences. I think that we would all like to pretend that these were the only romances that were being made during these time and these are films that still appeal to modern audiences and their weirdness means that there is still a reason to watch them as they could not have been produced at any other time.

Unfortunately, we must admit that while the 1970s were a great decade for cinema it was also a time in which ridiculous, overlong Irwin Allen disaster movies were massive hits and terribly unfunny, sexist comedies adapted from Neil Simon plays were released every year. These productions were not politically progressive and they might as well have been made in the 1950s as women were often presented as sex objects, people of color were pushed into the background, and cliché plots were presented as ‘deep and meaningful’ without a touch of irony or self-reflexiveness. Love Story could have been released in 1955 as it is a shamelessly manipulative tearjerker and it doesn’t aim to do anything new. It feels like a holdover from that decade and it was likely successful because parents were comfortable letting their young daughters watch it. There is a sex scene but for the most part it encourages people to adopt traditional values as two young virginal people get married but the girl’s father gets to give his daughter away and these young people have the sort of perfect marriage that people were told they should have in the 1950s.

The Motion Picture Production Code played a major role in censoring Hollywood films between 1934 and 1968 and it helped to cut nudity, frank explorations of sexuality and relationship issues, and people of color out of cinema. In the 1960s everything started to change and directors started to seriously push back against it with films like Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966) proving that audiences were hungry for cinema that featured curse words and conversations about sex, alcoholism, and painful marriages. In 1969, the industry went wild and films were released that broke every taboo as nudity was suddenly acceptable and producers were eager to cash in on this. There was still a large section of society that disapproved of depictions of sexuality and there were also racists in society who only wanted to see pretty white people who looked and acted as they did. They wanted to see traditional family films that did not push any boundaries and big studios tried their hardest to attract these audiences by pushing out musicals full of ‘pure’ characters. Love Story was almost certainly produced to appeal to this audience and it ticks all the boxes as it does not offend anybody and it ends up seeming so dull because of that.

I already explained the basic outline of the plot but the film concerns wealthy university student and ice hockey player Oliver Barrett, Ryan O’Neal, who has a strained relationship with his overbearing and emotionally distant father, Ray Milland. He falls in love with poor student Jenny Cavilleri, Ali MacGraw, and they are married even though Barrett’s father disapproves of their relationship. They are happy together but she develops a life-threatening illness and Barrett is forced to go to his father so that he can obtain the money that will pay for her treatment. She dies but Barrett has learned about the power of love.

My primary issue with this film is the writing of the characters. At the beginning of the film, we hear O’Neal saying “What can you say about a 25-year old girl who died? That she was beautiful. And brilliant. That she loved Mozart and Bach. And the Beatles. And me.” This is a line that suggests how flat and generic that these characters are going to be. What American girl who was alive in the 1970s didn’t like The Beatles? Cavilleri would be more distinctive if she wasn’t a fan of the Fab Four or if she took an interest in a band that wasn’t so aggressively mainstream. If she revealed that she was actually a big fan of Poco and regularly listened to “Just In Case It Happens, Yes Indeed” then I might have thought of her as a more distinctive figure. She is meant to be poor and slightly resentful of the rich kids who surround her at university but other than the opening scene in which she throws weak insults at the boy she likes we don’t see anything that supports the idea that she has a chip on her shoulder. If she had been more insecure about her social position and how poor her father is then there might have been more conflict in her relationship with her rich husband. She could have listened to music that established her working-class background and it could have made her seem different to the rich girls at university who like music that everybody listens to. Instead of giving her any flaws or insecurities, they turn her into a cute young woman who could be any girl in the audience.

I get the fact that you want to relate to the characters in the film and because this was a mainstream production it needed to appeal to a very wide audience but did this mean that the main characters needed to have no character traits. Maybe teenage girls looked at her and liked her because she was pretty and every other character in the film seemed to love her but surely they yearned to experience some of the struggles they went through in day-to-day life. Before she begins dying from a mysterious illness she is just an attractive model who features in scenes that could have come out of a jeans commercial. She drops the snark that she possessed in the opening scene almost immediately and starts to adopt mannerisms that were clearly meant to be whimsical and sweet. MacGraw is an actress of limited talent who never gave a performance that was reliant on anything more than her natural beauty. She isn’t working with much here but she lacks presence as a movie star and started to get on my nerves pretty quickly. She frequently wrinkles her nose and I could sense that she thought this made her look cuddly and worthy of our affection. I just wanted to slap her character whenever she did this and I kept wondering when she was going to start behaving like a human being who isn’t happy 100% of the time.

When she gets sick she starts to act like Greta Garbo and I became even more irritated as she is lit to the heavens and the camera admires her while she is in this suffering, weak position. We are meant to think that there is something glamorous and aspirational about this youthful, highly attractive girl who stoically deals with something that would presumably cause her great pain. We are never allowed to understand how this illness and the slow approach of depth is impacting her on a psychological level. She is saintly in the way that she simply accepts these things and her husband is allowed to express all of the anger while she angelically sits back and counsels him whenever he expresses doubts or concerns. I just don’t think that this is an accurate depiction of what it must feel like to be young, in love, and near-death and it makes young girls think that dying young is a romantic idea. This is a highly problematic notion that was heavily popularized during the 1960s and 1970s as a lot of countercultural icons died young. Dying young allows people to remain young, beautiful, and idealistic forever and it also lets people imagine what they could have been rather than dealing with what they truly were. It is disgusting that the screenwriters chose to turn dying young into something glamorous and their refusal to properly come to terms with how hard it would be to die at this age is angering.

This film also falls into the trap that Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing fell into as its midsection is essentially just an extended montage of two attractive people who are in love doing different activities while looking gleeful. In both cases, these scenes are not used to tell us more about the characters, their personalities, or why they are attracted to one another. They both look nice and they go to scenic areas but this series of fun activities starts to seem boring and repetitive after some time. The characters rarely get to talk and their ‘connection’ ends up seeming so shallow. Yes, they like having sex with one another and the cinematographer is very eager to show us that they both have nice bodies but neither of them seem at all anxious about sleeping together. I don’t think that this was realistic as both characters would seem to be sexually inexperienced based on the limited information we are given and I haven’t met any people in their early twenties who are as confident as these characters. They are meant to be extremely attracted to one another so I assumed that they would be uncomfortable presenting their bodies to one another because they are eager to please the person they are with. This does not turn out to be true and we get a fantasy sex scene in which everything works out perfectly for them. Again, this was probably feeding into the desires of the teenage girls in the audience who wanted to believe that their sexual experiences would be perfect someday but the scene would have been more interesting if it had explored the difficulties that young people face when they have sex with somebody they actually like.

The other activities they perform also lack specificity and that stupid montage of them flopping around in the snow did not put a smile on my face. I also want to touch on that awful, awful line that MacGraw’s character delivers as she says “Love means never having to say you’re sorry” and we are meant to think that this is wise and romantic. Anybody who has ever been in love, whether in a romantic or platonic sense, will know that this statement is factually incorrect. When you love people you often fight with them because you know that your bond with them is strong enough to overcome minor disagreements. You also end up fighting because you have to make some of the most important decisions of your life together and this inevitably creates conflict as you are both under stress when you have to make choices that could irrevocably change your lives. You end up saying sorry to the people you truly love every single day because you end up feeling guilty for arguing with them and because you want to see them happy again you decide to apologize for your rude and inappropriate conduct. If I approached my mother after arguing with her and told her that I shouldn’t have to say sorry to her because I love her I do not think that she would be very happy with me. MacGraw’s platitudinous line is meant to tie everything together and make us weep but she doesn’t impart anything of meaning to the audience when it comes to the experience of being in love.

If I am going to go even further in comparing this to the sort 1950s melodrama that I looked at last week then I would say it falls short in terms of the way it is written and the way it looks. I wouldn’t say that the 1950s were the apex of great screenwriting in Hollywood as you got formulaic scripts full of lines that felt overwritten rather than coming across as breezy and natural. At the same time, there is often a fascinating artificiality to dialogue from 1950s melodrama as a film like Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (1951) are full of lines that stretch the bounds of the imagination before becoming so otherworldly and thrillingly odd that you can’t help but be seduced by them. In that film, Ava Gardner’s character says “Yes, I would. I’d die for you without the least hesitation. I know that sounds extravagant. But, I thought about it and I meant it. I’d give up my life for you. That’s the measure of my love. And you? What would you give up?” She delivers lines that are full of platitudes but they take on grandiose proportions and the film never pretends that these are things that people would say in real life. Love Story wants to be realistic and grounded and all of MacGraw’s lines are delivered with a solemnity that made me want to roll my eyes. She delivers bad dialogue in the worst way possible as she acts like she is saying something that is really original and insightful and doesn’t have the sense to realize that she’s in a Hollywood melodrama and not an Ingmar Bergman family drama.

The cinematography is another big issue in this film as we usually look towards romances to give us imagery that evokes the passion and excitement of being in love. So often romances are set in exotic locations where shots of beaches and notable landmarks can be used to highlight the fact that these people are living in a fantasy land of sorts. They usually aren’t trapped in the suburbs where the cinematographer would have to make the broken roof of a tract house look visually stunning. Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing was not great but at least there was something romantic about the sight of a single tree wavering in the wind at the top of a hill while two lovers frolic around in the grass. Those visuals were what got me through that film but with Love Story I often found myself marveling at just how bland it looked. Brown and white seem to be the only colors that Richard Kratina wanted to highlight so we get plenty of MacGraw and O’Neal wandering around in beige jackets while the snow falls behind them. There is nothing remotely exotic or exhilarating about this! Perhaps these utterly boring colors are meant to represent these lifeless, un-engaging characters rather than adding any texture or detail to the university campus they inhabit.

The production values here are not very strong as the imagery is bland and unmemorable, the costumes don’t tell you anything about the characters and the production designers seemingly forgot what it was like to be a university student. There are posters plastered everywhere in this university but we don’t feel like we are immersed in day-to-day life at this university at any point. Barrett plays ice hockey and appears to be good at everything but we only get brief scenes in which he interacts with members of the student body who are not his wife. It is fun to see Tommy Lee Jones playing his roommate as you would never think that he would go on to become one of the most respected actors of his generation based on his role in this film. He looks too craggy, even as a 24-year old, to be a traditional leading man and you can see why the more traditionally attractive O’Neal was given the leading role in this film. Jones looks like a slightly dangerous older guy who might psychologically torture you on the way home from your first date. I kept entertaining the idea of what this film would look like with Jones in the O’Neal role and while the former wouldn’t be a perfect fit for the part I do think that he would have given a more interesting performance than O’Neal.

I want to close out this article by acknowledging the fact that I was once weak enough to give Love Story a three-star review. Back in the days when I had barely seen any films I was horribly uneducated and I didn’t know what constituted a good romantic drama. Superficially, Love Story had everything going for it and I was blinded by that so I dared to call it passable entertainment that would satisfy the needs of its target audience. I now have more respect for teenage girls and I realize that they could be consuming better entertainment as classic tearjerkers like Shadowlands (1993) exist and they will intellectually engage young women as well as making them feel sad when one half of the central couple dies. I hate myself for having so little self-respect in the past as I should have realized that there were better options out there rather than settling for something as poorly made like this.

I completely hated this film but I can completely see why AFI placed it so high on their list. They are a group of squares who would be resistant to any film that pushed back against the status quo. They are comfortable with something like Bonnie and Clyde (1967) because it is no longer a cause celebre and even the most mainstream critics have embraced it but they can’t handle anything from the 1990s that goes against the grain. Love Story was also a big hit in its day and I have to assume that a lot of AFI voters were part of its target audience when it was released. They were probably swept up in it at the time because it became such a sensation and in voting for it they are displaying the fact that they are nostalgic for a time in which something as unexciting and uninventive as Love Story could be a massive hit. It remains fairly well known as an example of the weepie genre even if modern teenagers aren’t actually watching it and while it doesn’t have critical support behind it I do think that some people still have warm feelings towards it. There are several entries on the list that got in based on populist support alone as the AFI voters didn’t seem to take the opinions of critics very seriously. Obviously, I wouldn’t have placed Love Story on the list at all but I do think that the high placement of the film is a sign that the voters often made poor choices when putting together their ranking.

Next week I’ll be taking a look at a film that has consistently attracted the admiration and love of audiences since it was first released in 1942. It is incredibly daunting to think about writing about such a revered piece of work and I fear the backlash that will be directed at me if I go against the traditionally held views of most cinephiles. Hopefully, I can make my feelings on this beloved film clear and I will try to put aside my strange aversion to Ingrid Bergman while I watch it again next week.

For many African native actors, getting to work in Europe or North America is a pipe dream. Only a select few make the successful jump over to where the pot of gold in acting comes from. For African-produced stories, because it is a Third World continent, it does not have the same output as it would be in any First World nation. Most African countries have low output and not much of a thriving base. Except here. In Nigeria. The most populous country in Africa, the home to 250 ethnic groups. Welcome to Nollywood.

Colonial Years

In the early 1900s, the first motion pictures arrived and were exhibited in Nigeria. Herbert Macaulay, a native politician who became the founder of Nigerian nationalism, invited over a Spanish film company who toured Western Africa showing the new medium to African natives. It quickly became popular and more European exhibitors came. The British Government used movies to raise money during the First World War, as well as espouse their culture to assimilate Nigerians. Regardless, people came to fill the halls every time a movie was playing.

In 1926, the first Nigerian film was released. Palaver was about a love triangle between an English nurse, a British officer on duty, and a local tin miner. While it is noted that locals were cast in the film, Palaver was also a movie that portrayed Africans as cannibals and savages who needed to be controlled because they were not civilized. A film that was successful and set in Nigeria was 1935’s Sanders of the River starring Paul Robeson, Leslie Banks, and Nigerian native Orlando Martins, an actor who did make the move to London. Robeson, an American living in London at the time, was tricked into believing the film would show Blacks as normal people but disowned it when the final cut showed them, including his character, as childish and abusive.

In the 1940s, the establishment of big commercial cinema houses… In 1954, as the push for independence grew, the Nigerian Film Unit was recognized as an essential entity, playing movies to 44 established cinemas that were free for the audience. The first copyrighted movies made by them was 1957’s Fincho, which was also the first Nigerian film that was shot in color. With non-professional actors, the story followed the titular character who struggles with industrialization and the threat to traditional jobs caused by it. By this point, the colonial era was about to end.

The Golden Age

After winning independence in 1960, Nigerian cinema expanded quickly as well as the import of numerous American, Indian, and Japanese films into the country. The growth was pushed by many stage actors and directors who came over to movies and TV, which were supported by the government. However, foreign control on movie theaters and continuous imports from abroad threatened the Nigerian market, so in 1972, President Yakubu Gowon signed the indigenization decree that declared several sectors of the Nigerian economy would keep out all foreign investment. This meant Nigerians would be in the key roles in the industry. Some of the names that would be in the center of this include Ole Balogun, Hubert Ogunde, Moses Olaiya, and Wole Soyinka, the latter of whom won a Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986.

Also in the 70s was an economic boom in the country because of the high sales of petroleum that came after the global oil glut. More money meant the middle class grew by buying TVs and visiting the cinemas a lot more and some economic incentives for foreign productions to come over. In 1979, the government recognized Nigeria’s cinema industry as permanent to the country’s cultural identity and formed the Nigerian Film Corporation (NFC) to regulate all showing of films. The Golden Age would slow down throughout the 1980s before it nearly collapsed in the 90s.

New Nigerian Cinema – aka “Nollywood”

The decline of the country’s movie industry was caused by a sharp economic downturn, government instability, and the rise of VHS where movies were made inexpensively and went straight-to-video for instant consumption. By 2000, with the film industry going bankrupt, many sought to bring back to glory years and help revamp the falling of old cinemas in the country. This included upgrading and building new movie theaters and getting new investment in productions that would raise the quality of their films where people would be encouraged to go to the theatre to see them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nORc0bGvbTo

In 2006, an initiative called “Project Nollywood” was started by the Nigerian Government and provided over ₦100 million (or $781,000) to filmmakers to produce the films they want, distribute them, and provide formal training for future directors. The sobriquet Nollywood was first used in 2002, although where it came from isn’t known. But to Nigeria, it became a word of pride to describe their industry as these new movies brought critical and commercial acclaim to a global audience. Films such as Amazing Grace (2006), Through The Glass (2008), The Figurine (2009), Ije (2010), and Half of a Yellow Sun (2013) raised the profile of Nollywood throughout Africa and the world. By 2014, the industry was worth an estimated USD$5.1 billion, third behind India and The United States.

One of the reasons Nollywood is massive is because it represents a continent where the stories are similar to many in other countries. Actors from all over fly to Nigeria for work and have caught the attention of Africans who have moved to Europe. Small groups of Nollywood fans are even in the United States and Canada. Nigeria has its own Actors Guild and Directors Guild, and besides the Nolly Awards (their version of the Oscars), the Africa Movie Academy Awards were established as a celebration to all African film industries. But it wouldn’t be until 2019 would they submit a film, Lionheart, to the Academy for consideration as Best International Feature. The film was disqualified because most of the dialogue was in English but is such an unfair punishment because English is their main language. Hollywood needs to open up to Nollywood and so do us, the cinephile because there’s a fountain of films that have to be openly tapped.

Follow me on Twitter: brian_cine (Cine-A-Man)

Once upon a time, there was a new studio that was created to stand out from the other studios where moguls ran the show. It was a place made to be free from the grasps of men like Zukor, Meyer, and Lasky, and studios like Biograph and First National, who wouldn’t raise the budgets or give creative freedom to its directors. The premise was allowing its creators to control why they did in their movies and distributing them the way they saw fit instead of attaching themselves to commercial studios, who only saw the money. This place was called United Artists (UA), and 101 years ago, four major Hollywood figures got together to compete against the big names.

The Rebels

Charlie Chaplin was the biggest comedy star in the world with his numerous movies of The Tramp in various situations that crossed countries and languages. His asking salary went higher every year and First National was his fourth studio to sign with as they were willing to pay him what he wanted and give him some freedom. Chaplin built his own studio (now owned by The Jim Henson Company) and went ahead to shoot A Dog’s Life and Shoulder Arms in 1918. When it came to a bigger budget the following year, First National denied him. Mary Pickford also was contracted by First National, but when her contract was expiring, she received no sign for a contract renewal. Her future husband, Douglas Fairbanks, was also in a similar situation with the Famous Players-Lansky company.

Meanwhile, director D.W. Griffith, whose films The Birth Of A Nation and Intolerance made him the most famous director in the world, was still facing backlash over his racist portrayals in the former film and had lost a lot of money while doing the latter. Studios sought to control Griffith’s expensive productions if they hired him, which Griffth refused to allow. All four players got together, feared the growing Hollywood system that would cap their ability to make movies, and decided to band together, establishing United Artists on February 5, 1919. Each has 25% of the company’s shares and established its headquarters in New York City.

Opening Struggles

The first film under the UA banner was Douglas Fairbanks’ His Majesty, The American, which was successful. However, by not going public and selling shares, UA’s funding was restricted to coming from theater owners buying future releases and small private investments, leading to just five films a year being made in their first five years. Some of those films include Griffth’s Way Down East, Little Lord Fauntleroy with Mary Pickford, and The Thief of Bagdad staring Fairbanks, one of the best silent films of the 1920s and among Fairbanks’ best performances. In 1924, Griffith sold his shares due to his own financial debts and UA signed Joseph Schneck as President, who brought with his wife, actress Norma Talmadge, and brother-in-law, Buster Keaton.

Slowly, United Artists were building a brand as they bought their own theatres for their future releases and signed well-known independent producers to release through UA. This included Howard Hughes, Samuel Goldwyn, Walt Disney, and David O. Selznick. But even as Hollywood adapted sound and the continuing major success of their films, the operations were still disorganized and constant conflicts led to their departure from UA as they signed with competing companies. Two events of misfortune affected the company in 1939: the death of Fairbanks and the missed opportunity to distribute Gone With The Wind which eventually went to MGM.

A Studio Without The Studio

In the 1940s, the Society of Independent Motion Picture Producers was founded by Pickford, Chaplin, Goldwyn, and Selznick among many others. Its purpose was to fight the studio industry and its practices in producing, distributing, and exhibiting movies, starting with suing Paramount for their monopoly on movie theatres in Detroit. In 1948, the Paramount Decree, as it was called, from the U.S. Supreme Court ordered studios to sell their theater chains. Recently, the Department of Justice successfully removed the decree, threatening independent theatres which will be harmed by this reverse and undermining the entire purpose of independent cinema.

Despite the legal success, UA was still struggling financially, so Pickford and Chaplin accepted a pitch by producers Arthur Krim and Robert Benjamin where, if they produced a profit in three years, they could own half of the studio. The gamble worked thanks to hits like The African Queen and High Noon. Their premise was simple: give money to independent producers, use the leased lot at the old Pickford/Fairbanks Studio (which they did not own), and avoid the costs of maintenance and production staff. But the rise of television threatened the entire industry and Pickford, who had long retired, and Chaplin, now exiled from the U.S. over his political beliefs, sold their shares to Krim and Benjamin for over $4 million. Still, UA pressed on, making Best Picture winner Marty and the courtroom drama masterpiece 12 Angry Men – both of them adapted from television, ironically.

The Peak And Hard Fall

United Artists finally went public with their shares, and as major studios were struggling, UA was prospering with many major hits and Oscar winners, most notably the James Bond franchise. They also went into television production and music. In 1967, like other studios, a major company bought every stock in the form of Transamerica. Under their ownership with the Krim and Benjamin in charge, United Artists had their greatest success in the 1970s, winning three consecutive Best Picture Oscars in One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, Rocky, and Annie Hall. Their highest-grossing film was Cuckoo, making $163 million at the box office. They even released two X-rated films (non-pornography) in Midnight Cowboy and Last Tango In Paris that deal with controversy, but with continued commercial acclaim.

Despite it all, Transamerica, growingly unhappy with the different subject matters being released and the annual costs, tried to curb what they could make and how much money being spent on productions. In 1978, the battle came to a head when Krim, Benjamin, and other top executives at UA left to form Orion Pictures. Under new leadership, UA immediately picked up the script to Heaven’s Gate by newly minted Oscar-winner Michael Cimino. The western quickly went over budget, costing an astonishing $44 million ($138 million today), and the stunning critical and commercial disaster from it destroyed UA’s reputation – and bank account. A humiliated Transamerica sold them and UA was consolidated with MGM in 1983. Then, in 1986, when Ted Turner bought the merged unit for $1.3 billion, he resold most of UA’s assets for $480 million. In turn, United Artists, founded by artists for artists to be independent of corporation interference, was now defunct.

Remenants Of Today

The United Artists seen today is a spin-off of another spin-off originating from the 1980s and 90s as it was bought, sold, restructured, and renamed several times. It was still attached to notable films like Showgirls, Bowling for Columbine, and Hotel Rwanda, but has not released a film under the UA banner since 2009 – the remake of Fame and the comedy Hot Tub Time Machine being the last two. Since then, the company is just a brand connected to releases, but not necessarily a United Artists film. Its most recent reincarnation was in 2018 as United Artists Releasing, owned equally by MGM and Annapurna Pictures. The first former release with the brand was the animated film, Missing Link. Others that have been released or will be released with the brand include Booksmart, Bill & Ted Face The Music, and the Bond film making its reunion with UA, No Time To Die.

If the four founders were alive, they would be vastly disappointed in what has become of their major creation. Yet, they would be happy that other independent studios have come out and the flux of indie filmmakers which make them as mainstream as the major studios. The studio system they despised has been long gone, yet these studios are now making billions and relying solely on commercial projects to bring in the money, in theatres, and streaming. The legacy of United Artists is that they were the first company where the creators were, “taking over the asylum,” as one studio head put it in 1919. And for these legends who put down the money to make the dream happen, it is embedded in Hollywood culture forever.

Follow me on Twitter: @brian_cine (Cine-A-Man)