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185 Chapter 6 Prologue As chronicled in detail in our earlier volume, His Majesty the American (1977), the founding of United Artists in 1919 marked an important development in the history of Hollywood and in the trajectory of Fairbanks’s screen career.1 The story of United Artists is too complex to repeat here, but it is enough to note that when he tumbled through the title credits in the prologue to United Artist’s first release, His Majesty the American, he was entering into a new engagement with the American century. While Hollywood was busily reinventing itself—the major studios were achieving a vertical organization that permitted total control of picture-making, distribution and exhibition—the four members, Fairbanks, Chaplin, Pickford, and D. W. Griffith, were planning to produce , market, and distribute each of their films individually as handcrafted super productions. It had only been two years since a 1917 editorial in Photoplay had predicted a bright future for Fairbanks. “Here he is,” began the editorial, “a sane, commonplace, aggressive young fellow in his early thirties, getting a ground work of combined experience and celebrity from which no middle -age triumph can jar him. . . .” He is devoted to the screen, doesn’t consider it a mere makeshift for the big money, but an absolute medium for the best that’s in him. He is going to grow right along with camera-craft, and when, in a few years, we come to those absolutely certain sun-plays of serious life, let us hope that he will crown his career with a man of maturity who will be not only a triumph of acting but a national expression.2 “The Imperial Reach” 186 A “national expression”? The prediction was not far off the mark. With the American film industry emerging unscathed from the Great War, and the dominance of foreign markets in the offing, Fairbanks—ever the personification of the Old World aristocrat and the New World self-made man, a man tied to tradition yet emancipated from history—was ready to extend his national grasp into a global reach. Behind him were the years at Triangle and Artcraft, a time when Americans supposed themselves to suffer, in the words of historian Richard Pells, “from a deeply ingrained sense of cultural inadequacy”; and when the Old World cognoscenti regarded American culture as “derivative, provincial , second-rate, a pitiable imitation of what was going on in the arts across the Atlantic.” As we have seen, Fairbanks’s sharp social satires and energetic sermons had put the lie to all that. He had been energetically demonstrating that America in the new century was emerging as not just “a consumer of foreign intellectual and artistic influences,” observes Pells, but as “a shaper of the world’s entertainment and tastes.” His American aristocrats cultivated Old World traditions and, at the same time, infused moribund class structures with a fresh and heady dose of American democratic activism. To the dismay of some foreign observers, he was “Americanizing ” their imaginations and attitudes, and his agile and leaping body was a compelling metaphor for surmounting the artificial barriers separating “high” and “low” class and culture. The rub, concludes Pells, was that his and other American movies “had not been imposed or inflicted upon the populace, that the common folk were voluntarily and enthusiastically watching what their mentors told them to shun.”3 Now, in the postwar decade of the 1920s, Fairbanks and his United Artists partners entered a golden age of the Hollywood studio film. Utilizing the full technical resources of their studios and backlots, they abjured the contemporary satires and location shooting of earlier years and instead converted Old World history and myth into studio-crafted commodities —classy exhibits of memory and nostalgia—and exported them back to foreign markets. “One of our greatest achievements has been the progress we have made in the building of sets,” boasted Fairbanks in 1923. “We know that we make mistakes, but we are getting more and more of the period that we wished to recreate.”4 Consider their productions as the prototypes of the later Disney theme parks, a kind of cultural imperialism that “Americanized” the world’s cultures for popular consumption. Thus, Mary Pickford created Elizabethan and Edwardian worlds in the studio (Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall and Little Lord Fauntleroy, respectively), Charles Prologue 187 Chaplin constructed his own Yukon in The Gold Rush, Griffith recreated the French and American revolutions for his Orphans of the Storm and America...

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