Sun, Sep 19, 2004 page12

• After Sony takeover, a hazy future for United Artists

  Sony will acquire a name with a tradition of creative freedom and smart filmmaking going back to Chaplin

  • NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
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  In 1919 the four most powerful figures in US filmmaking -- Charles Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford and D.W. Griffith -- came together to found their own distribution company, which they called United Artists. The lunatics have taken over the asylum, the producer Richard Rowland remarked, a quip that has continued to make life easier for headline writers to this day.

  The joke may outlive the famous trademark that spawned it. Last week the Sony Corporation of America reached an agreement to buy Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the company that absorbed United Artists in 1981. Sony has not commented on the future of United Artists as a producing and distributing entity, though many industry experts expect the brand to slowly fade away or perhaps to remain a logo on United Artists' big-money franchise, the James Bond pictures.

  

  In 1919 the four most powerful figures in American filmmaking -- from left, Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, Charlie Chaplin and D.W. Griffith -- came together to found their own distribution company, which they called United Artists. ``The lunatics have taken over the asylum,'' the producer Richard Rowland remarked. The joke may outlive the famous trademark that spawned it.

  PHOTO: MILESTONE FILMS/THE NEW YORK TIMES

  Since 2001, MGM has mostly been using United Artists as its specialty division, releasing films like Bowling for Columbine and Pieces of April to art house theaters. But Sony already has its own in-house specialty division, Sony Pictures Classics, and it seems unlikely that it will need or want another.

  United Artists, though, continues to possess a certain cachet as a brand name, while MGM has come to represent nothing so much as constant corporate turmoil and most studios have no brand identity at all.

  United Artists' signature -- which stands for creative freedom and smart yet commercial films -- is largely left over from the 1960s and 1970s when, under the leadership of Arthur B. Krim and Robert S. Benjamin, the company led the way in sophisticated adult entertainment. In those heady days United Artists released films like Billy Wilder's Apartment, John Huston's Misfits and John Frankenheimer's Manchurian Candidate, movies with a daring and a maturity that the other studios, still laboring under the restrictions of the outmoded Production Code, seldom could equal.

  Keeping the United Artists trademark alive certainly would be a way for Sony to brand its elite product line, just as Universal now uses its specialty division, Focus Features, to designate upscale releases like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Fox uses Fox Searchlight to issue the likes of The Dreamers and Garden State.

  These brand names may set up certain expectations among critics and dedicated filmgoers, but do they mean anything to the general public? Only the Walt Disney Co. and, to a lesser extent, its specialty division, Miramax, have name recognition in the malls, where the Disney brand stands for quality family entertainment and Miramax means classy, middlebrow films with Oscar appeal.

  It wasn't always so. When the studio system was functioning at its height in the 1930s and 1940s, the studio brand was second only to stars' names in generating popular appeal. At a time when neighborhood theaters changed double features two or three times a week, when the great majority of movies were not reviewed in newspapers or magazines and the publicity machine was still in its relative infancy, filmgoers learned to identify Warner Brothers with a certain kind of socially engaged realism, Paramount with elegant romantic comedies and 20th Century Fox with rural comedies.

  MGM, the dominant studio during the classic period, consciously designed a look for its films, assembling its house style out of the blindingly white Art Deco sets supervised by the studio's art director, Cedric Gibbons, and the flowing evening gowns designed by the chief costumer, Adrian. MGM cinematographers achieved the studio's bleached-out, almost antiseptic look by flashing the raw film stock with a brief exposure to light, which had the effect of reducing contrast and making the actors look like figures in a Greek frieze.

  But this kind of conscious branding could also be a tremendous impediment to creativity. Today the MGM product of the 1930s, with several important exceptions, looks cold, constrained and excessively standardized, without the gritty vitality of Warner Brothers' street-level look or the aura of continental elegance spun by Paramount.

  If there is a house style flourishing today, it is the similarly restrictive one of Miramax's annual Academy Award candidates. Indeed Miramax often seems to be following the MGM model when assembling its Oscar projects. Like many of MGM's Oscar winners, Miramax academy bait is usually based on well-known literary sources, features a stable of Oscar-winning actresses (Nicole Kidman and Gwyneth Paltrow to MGM's Norma Shearer and Luise Rainer) and tends to be directed by filmmakers with minimal personalities who can be depended upon to stick to the script.

  (In an exception this year, Miramax is banking heavily on The Aviator, a biographical film about Howard Hughes by the director Martin Scorsese, who goes his own way and is a brand name unto himself.)

  Right now Sony finds itself with a whole range of established trademarks: mainstream Columbia, art house Sony Pictures Classics, genre-oriented Screen Gems (a name lifted from Columbia's old television division) and all-purpose TriStar, a once-dead label (taken from another studio that Sony absorbed) now stuck on everything from Japanese anime (Metropolis) to midnight movie spoofs (The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra).

  With the addition of MGM and United Artists, Sony will have almost as many brand names at its disposal as General Mills. Certainly, some of those names will go dormant, joining Orion, Lorimar and countless others on the slag heap of history.

  But Sony also has the opportunity to bring some meaning back to its brands. The company could reserve the Columbia mark for its tent-pole movies, like Spider-Man and XXX; MGM could apply its associations of glamour and romance to tweener films like Legally Blonde; Screen Gems (a name most will associate with the Three Stooges films released to television in the 1950s) could become the teenage boy division, selling horror films and teen sex comedies; Sony Pictures Classics would continue to release foreign films and US indies.

  And United Artists could once again become the grown-up company that Benjamin and Krim made of it, a haven for US auteurs like Wes Anderson, Paul Thomas Anderson, Quentin Tarantino and Alexander Payne, filmmakers who work on a larger canvas than the average indie production but who don't easily fit into a mainstream studio's release slate of comic book movies and science fiction fantasies. They are the Wilders, Hustons and Frankenheimers of today, and they deserve a home as cozy and congenial as the one United Artists provided for their predecessors.
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