It was still 10 years before talkies and the start of the Golden Age of Hollywood when a few prominent movie actors and a director banded together to launch a movie studio of their own. Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks and D.W. Griffith, concerned with the consolidation of power between studios and distributors, incorporated United Artists on February 5, 1919. The studio faced challenges and ridicule almost immediately – feature films grew pricey to produce; sound ended Pickford’s career; Chaplin worked only rarely; and one producer is believed to have said, “The inmates have taken over the asylum.” The studio continued to struggle until its takeover by a pair of lawyers in the 1950s, when it produced films like The African Queen and A Hard Day’s Night. In his autobiography, Chaplin explained how he and his three co-investors hired a detective to see if studios were, in fact, planning to strike deals with distributors:

“We engaged a very clever girl, smart and attractive-looking. Soon she had made a date with an executive of an important producing company. Her report stated that she had passed the subject in the lobby of the Alexandria Hotel and had smiled at him, then made the excuse that she had mistaken him for an old friend. That evening he had asked her to have dinner with him. From her report we gathered that the subject was a glib braggart in an esurient state of libido. For three nights she went out with him, staving him off with promises and excuses. In the meantime she got a complete story of what was going on in the film industry. He and his associates were forming a forty-million-dollar merger of all the producing companies and were sewing up every exhibitor in the United States with a five-year contract. He told her they intended putting the industry on a proper business basis, instead of having it run by a bunch of crazy actors getting astronomical salaries. That was the gist of her story, and it was sufficient for our purposes. The four of us showed the report to D.W. Griffith and Bill Hart, and they had the same reaction as we did.”