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One century ago this week, the following announcement appeared in the June 7, 1924 edition of “Exhibitors Herald”:
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Subsequently, the following two-page ad was run in a number of industry trade papers:
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The Motion Picture Directors Association was not a new organization; it had been established back in 1915. Its inauguration had barely made a ripple at that time. “Moving Picture World,” in its July 10, 1915 edition, took note of its incorporation in a brief item gleaned from the local newspaper:
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The stated goals of the organization, as reported in the August 7, 1915 edition of “Motion Picture News,” included generalities about working conditions and the industry’s somewhat tarnished public image:
![](https://steve-jarrett.sites.wfu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/image-6.png)
An unstated additional goal was likely to garner more respect for movie directing as a profession. In the early days of the industry, the director was more of a facilitator than a creator. Indeed, in the beginning there would often be a single person running the camera, setting the lights (if any), and directing the action. And even after camerawork became a separate job, the director’s main responsibility was managing the various activities on the set. It was only later that the position of “assistant director” was created to take over that task. The A.D. then became the person who ran the set, leaving the director free to work with the actors and make creative decisions about camera placement, etc. In 1915, however, the movie director’s job was only beginning to be seen as the work of an artist. In its early years, the MPDA mostly seems to have sponsored social events like elaborate banquets, as depicted in the February 10, 1917 edition of “Motion Picture News”:
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But in 1924, as noted above, they decided to get into the business of producing their own pictures independently of the restrictions imposed by working for one of the established studios. The resulting films would be called “Blue Ribbon Pictures” and would be released through the Grand-Asher Distributing Corporation.
In taking this step, the MPDA may have had in mind the example of United Artists, which had been formed in 1919 by Charles Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, and D.W. Griffith. (William S. Hart had initially been a fifth partner, but he quickly dropped out.) These three major stars, and one powerful director, had gone into business for themselves to guarantee that they could make their films as they saw fit, and had largely been successful in charting their own course in the industry. Why shouldn’t a group of directors band together in a similar way?
The downside, of course, was that they were not necessarily prepared to take on the business pressures that come with being self-employed. Working for a studio may have felt, at times, like being a sweatshop worker bending under the lash of the straw boss, but it also meant that meeting the payroll, including one’s own pay, was somebody else’s problem. United Artists had an advantage in that Pickford and Chaplin, in addition to being superior artists, each had a good head for business. The leadership of the MPDA turned out to be regrettably lacking in that skill set.
For the MPDA, confronting business challenges proved to be a significant stumbling block, as documented in the September 3, 1924 edition of “Variety”:
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The deal with Grand Asher had fallen apart before it ever got off the ground, ironically on a picture entitled HER MARKET VALUE.
The untimely demise of the Blue Ribbon film series did not put an end to the MPDA; only to its aspirations to produce films independently. The organization continued to sponsor social events, and also published its own magazine, initially called “The Director”:
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And later renamed “The Motion Picture Director”:
![](https://steve-jarrett.sites.wfu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/image-12.png)
Eventually, however, the organization would suffer a membership drain following the establishment, in 1927, of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The idea of the Academy was pushed by the studios, especially Louis B. Mayer, as an alternative to unionization. (That ploy worked until it didn’t, which is another story.) But the fraternal aspect of the Academy was enough to lure MPDA members into its fold, rendering the MPDA redundant, and ultimately defunct.
However, the idea of a directors’ collective getting into independent production would resurface multiple times over the succeeding decades. In 1931, industry elder statesman Cecil B. DeMille tried to set up what he called “The Directors’ Guild” with fellow directors King Vidor, Frank Borzage, and Lewis Milestone, and producer Walter Wanger. The addition of Borzage to the roster was reported in the July 14, 1931 edition of “Motion Picture Daily”:
![](https://steve-jarrett.sites.wfu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/image-13-362x1024.png)
However, the proposed organization never got off the ground. The early 1930s was not an auspicious time to be looking for financial backing for a new and untested venture. The necessary funding could not be found, leaving DeMille’s dream of creative independence unrealized.
Another directors’ collective was attempted in 1945. Frank Capra had returned from his war service to find a changed Hollywood that seemed in some ways to have passed him by. Along with Sam Briskin, William Wyler, and George Stevens, he formed an independent company called Liberty Films. The addition of Wyler was noted in the July 6, 1945 edition of “The Film Daily”:
![](https://steve-jarrett.sites.wfu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/image-14.png)
One of the problems with being an independent production company is that you need a distributor to get your films out to the theaters. “The Film Daily” reported on August 24, 1945 that Liberty Films had secured a distribution contract with RKO:
![](https://steve-jarrett.sites.wfu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/image-15.png)
It seemed initially that this venture had a brighter future than DeMille’s ill-fated Directors’ Guild. But Capra’s first release for the company, IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE, did not do well at the box office. In fact, it failed even to earn back the money that was spent producing it, leaving the fledgling company in the red. The partners were not prepared for this. Unwilling to barter away their creative control by soliciting an up-front infusion of working capital from investment banks, they had opted to use their own money, which was now flying out of their pockets at an alarming rate. As had been the case with the MPDA, these were movie directors, not businessmen. Ultimately, their only good option was to get out from under by selling the company. The May 24, 1947 edition of “Boxoffice” reported that the assets of Liberty Films had been sold to Paramount:
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Still another attempt at a directors’ collective was “The Director’s Company,” formed in 1972 by Peter Bogdanovich, Francis Ford Coppola, and William Friedkin. This was not a completely independent venture, as it was created under the auspices of Paramount, which held a 50% ownership interest. Still, the directors owned the other 50%, and they were given an unusual measure of creative freedom. They did not have to get prior script approval from Paramount, and as long as their budgets were kept under $3 million per picture the promise was that studio interference would be minimal. “The New York Times” reported on the deal on August 22, 1972:
![](https://steve-jarrett.sites.wfu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/image-18.png)
In proposing the company, Paramount president Charles Bluhdorn may have had in mind the “First Artists” company, which had been formed in 1969 and was then a couple of years into what would be a ten-year run, including some notably successful releases. That company was dedicated to giving creative control to stars – initially Barbra Streisand, Paul Newman, and Sidney Poitier – making it more directly akin to the original United Artists model. The Director’s Company was to be an equivalent arrangement for prominent directors.
Unfortunately, it didn’t last very long. Only three films were released under the Director’s Company banner – Coppola’s THE CONVERSATION and Bogdanovich’s PAPER MOON and DAISY MILLER. Of these, PAPER MOON did decent business, but THE CONVERSATION seriously underperformed at the box office, and DAISY MILLER was an outright flop. Friedkin left the partnership without contributing even a single film. Like Liberty Films before it, the Director’s Company was barely off the launching pad before it imploded.
There was, however, one independently-run, director-oriented production company that did enjoy some success. It was called BBS, named for the first initials of its three executives, Bert Schneider, Bob Rafelson, and Steve Blauner. Schneider and Rafelson had hit the jackpot by producing EASY RIDER, released by Columbia, in 1969. In a time when Hollywood studios had been drowning in red ink after releasing a spate of big-budget flops, EASY RIDER’s miniscule budget and huge box office returns gave the two young Turks leverage. In short order, they had a six-picture deal with Columbia guaranteeing them complete creative freedom as long as they kept the budgets under $1 million per picture.
With the Columbia deal in hand, they brought Blauner on board and began hiring directors. And in the spirit of the MPDA’s “Blue Ribbon Films” project, and of Liberty Films, and of The Director’s Company, the young executives passed on the creative control they had been granted to their directors. But unlike their predecessors, BBS was able to complete and release all of their planned films. Rafelson, who was himself a director, contributed HEAD, FIVE EASY PIECES, and THE KING OF MARVIN GARDENS. Peter Bogdanovich contributed THE LAST PICTURE SHOW. Jack Nicholson, in the director’s chair for a change, contributed DRIVE, HE SAID, and Henry Jaglom contributed A SAFE PLACE.
Not all of these releases did well at the box office, but overall the output of BBS was solid enough that Columbia would likely have extended the deal. What killed the company was, to a large extent, burnout on the part of Schneider and Rafelson. Schneider began increasingly to focus his attention less on film production and more on politics, becoming heavily involved with the anti-war movement and the Black Panthers. Rafelson, for his part, just wanted to be left alone to make his movies without bearing any responsibility for other directors’ projects, and he was tired of seeing the BBS offices hosting Schneider’s political cronies instead of filmmakers. Personal relationships had always been at the core of BBS, and as they fizzled out, so did the company.
Garson Kanin famously observed that the trouble with movies as a business is that it’s an art, and the trouble with movies as an art is that it’s a business. This wry observation would seem to account for the fate of most attempts at establishing an independent directors’ collective in Hollywood. It is a rare individual who possesses both creative talent and business acumen. And even those creators who can handle the business end will sooner or later burn out, frustrated by the time that is stolen from their creative work by the necessity of handling the unending business headaches. Cinema artists and studio executives may, in some sense, be natural enemies, but the bottom line is that, in the main, they need each other.