The state of Triangle’s finances created a pressure on him to crank out films faster than he wished. He did not yet have the sort of ambitions that moved Griffith to build massive sets and make lengthy epics. But he did have a desire to take the time to make his films better. The Triangles, with rare exception, demonstrate the haste of their construction: interior sets had often looked flimsy and thrown together. But now the pinch was really on. Fairbanks had filmed both The Matrimaniac and The Americano in the six-week period between November 1 and December 16, 1916. Three weeks per feature was not the pace he wished to keep, nor did it result in films that he felt were of substantial quality. He could, conceivably, negotiate new terms with Aitken to obtain more control of his productions. But given Triangle’s financial straits, this scarcely made sense.
The answer, it seemed to him, was to have a production unit of his own and to seek a better distributor. He had been considering it for some time—thus the recruitment of brother John to the fold. In early October, after the completion of American Aristocracy, a Chicago Tribune reporter found him in a contemplative mood, businesswise. “There’s a lot of opportunity ahead, and I think ‘state rights’ is the big thing in releasing,” Fairbanks said. “Your pictures have got to circulate, and that is the coming way to make them. You do a good picture and sell it on its merits and you keep making money on it. Then you don’t need to make another picture until you can do a good one.” In fact, the state’s rights model—in which a film is leased to an organization or individual covering a territory instead of to individual theaters on a piecemeal basis—would not turn out to be the model of the future. Vertical integration, in which a powerful studio system would control production, distribution, and exhibition, would dominate the industry until the Supreme Court determined the model to be a violation of antitrust laws after Fairbanks’s death.
But his essential thinking was correct. Take more time, invest more money, make better pictures, and let the market determine their merit on a case-by-case basis. He also thought he knew the formula for better pictures. “I’d be happy if I had a studio and Anita Loos, who writes the funny captions, and John Emerson to direct me,” he said. “That’s all I ask for.” Loos and Emerson, being romantically involved, came as a unit. But it was Loos he really wanted. “Time and again I have sat through plays by Miss Loos and have heard the audience applaud her subtitles as heartily as the liveliest scenes,” he said later that autumn. “There have been cases I can mention where her comments outshone the scenes themselves. This has convinced me of the great value of the kind of work she does.”
It was not, in point of fact, all he asked for. He was beginning to feel his oats. It has already been demonstrated that upon arrival in Los Angeles he wired these requests (demands?) to Aitken. But the fact of his cross-country trip was in itself outside of Aitken’s original plans. He was supposed to stay out east that autumn. But, a Moving Picture World reporter wrote, “He left New York in a hurry when they told him to get ready for a picture. He said he did not want to work in the East, and that they could find him in California if they wanted to use him in any of the scenes.”
Aitken tried to meet his demands. By early December it was announced that Loos would be writing the intertitles for all his future productions. But as Christmas approached, Aitken found himself repeatedly denying that Fairbanks was going to leave Fine Arts to form his own company. He (rightly) pointed out that Fairbanks had signed a three-year contract with Triangle in September 1915. He conveniently left out the mention that this contract, as with his ten-week contract, stipulated that D. W. Griffith supervise his films. Griffith was gone.
Fairbanks, in turn, started getting his ducks in a row. He engaged Dennis “Cap” O’Brien, who—little coincidence here—served as Mary Pickford’s attorney. He brought on Bennie Zeidman as his “special representative” for publicity. And, on January 2, 1917, he notified the Triangle Film Corporation that he was severing business relations with it.
His summer with Mary Pickford had consisted of more than picnics and charades. There were serious business discussions as well. The story of how Mary discovered, in the summer of 1915, that she was being cheated on the profit-sharing component of her contract by the practice of “block booking” is now the stuff of legend—at least among those who study the history of films and finance. Her contract, negotiated in January 1915, called for her not only to double her salary to $2,000 a week but also to share in 50 percent of the profits of her films.
All well and good. But how was that 50 percent being calculated? Adolph Zukor, head of Famous Players, was much beloved by Mary Pickford as a father figure. But this did not stop him from being a sly fox when it came to all things financial. He had set up a system with his distributor, Paramount (in time the production company would assume the name), to offer films in packaged groups. Lesser films were accepted by exhibitors in order to ensure getting the Pickford features, which were goldmines. By spreading the revenue that the distributor (and, downstream, the producer) netted across a block of films, Zukor was artificially underreporting the profits on the Pickford films.
In the summer of 1915, when Douglas Fairbanks was heading to Hollywood for the first time, Mary Pickford was living and filming in New York City. Daily, her driver took her past the Strand Theatre, where crowds were lining around the block to see her latest feature, Rags. When the bill finally changed and another Famous Players film was at the Strand, the sidewalks were, she noticed, empty. She then did something that most actresses would not: she went in the theater and counted the house. At this point, she sweetly asked her dear Mr. Zukor to check the books. What was the rental for each film? The cat was out of the bag. Zukor had been charging theaters essentially the same for her hits as for the others’ duds, thus directing profits away from her films.
When her contract was up for renegotiation in the spring of 1916, dear Mr. Zukor was in for a trial. The contract, which took four weeks to negotiate, influences film industry deals to this day. Pickford was given her own production unit (albeit with Zukor as its president) and a guarantee of $10,000 a week against 50 percent of the profits—whichever was greater. Of equal importance, a separate distribution company was established as a division of Paramount. Artcraft, which ultimately would serve as distributor for both Douglas Fairbanks and D. W. Griffith, booked each Pickford film on an individual basis—no block booking. Zukor, to finance this venture, merged his Famous Players production company with that of Jesse Lasky, the other main producer to distribute through Paramount. The combination—Famous Players–Lasky, ultimately known as Paramount Pictures—became the largest motion picture company in the world.
Fairbanks’s Triangle salary had progressed through scheduled biannual raises to $3,250 a week. This was, of course, an enormous sum, and he asked for no pity. (Photoplay magazine stated puckishly, “No self-respecting actor can afford to labor for a paltry 3,000 iron men a week when potatoes are soaring around $4 a bushel and onions are almost ungettable.”) But consider his peers. He, Mary Pickford, and Charlie Chaplin were the three most popular stars in film. In February, Chaplin signed his record-breaking contract with Mutual for $10,000 a week, with a $150,000 signing bonus—but no profit sharing. Mary, four months later, matched Chaplin’s weekly salary and topped him by obtaining the unprecedented profit-sharing clause. Within the context of his value in the industry, Fairbanks was grossly underpaid. The free market recognized this as well. It started in late December, when Famous Players–Lasky put out a feeler to Fairbanks for $7,500 a week to leave Triangle.
He let it be known—by way of a front-page headline in Variety—that he was open to offers. Triangle, he said, had been in breach of contract. “One story,” wrote Variety, “is that Griffith has given no further attention to any Fairbanks release and never looked at one of the Fairbanks films before release excepting the first, when Griffith remained one day at the studio.”*25 He would entertain offers of $15,000 a week, he said. That, or he would produce his own films
at a cost to the distributor of $200,000 a film, with a promise of eight films a year.
The offers came. Novelist Rex Beach, who produced films based on his stories, offered $10,000 a week. Universal topped this with an offer of free distribution. Fairbanks declined. He needed, he told Variety, $15,000 weekly to “ensure against any judgment Triangle might obtain against him, if suit were to be brought . . . for breach of contract.” Louis B. Mayer, whose production company bore his name, approached Cap O’Brien with an offer of $15,000 a week.†*26Sam Goldwyn offered a comparable flat weekly rate, but learning that Fairbanks wanted to produce the films himself, offered a minimum guarantee of $225,000 per picture, against a division of 72.5 percent of the gross receipts to Fairbanks and 27.5 percent to the Goldwyn Pictures Corporation.
A generous offer, indeed. But by the first week of February came the public announcement that Artcraft would distribute Douglas Fairbanks films. The original contract was with Fairbanks personally: a minimum guarantee of $200,000 per picture, against 72.5 percent of the gross. (The split on international revenues was to be 60/40.) Why did he take the Paramount deal instead of the (presumably) richer one from Goldwyn? One can only speculate. He might have felt that the Famous Players–Lasky combine had a stronger distribution network. More likely, he was following in the footsteps of his fascination with Mary.
It can certainly be stated that Beth Fairbanks, who formerly prided herself on managing all of her husband’s negotiations and contracts, was not involved in this process—a considerable source of family strife. John Emerson later detailed this in a deposition asserting that:
Mr. Daniel Sully, the father of Mrs. Beth S. Fairbanks, had been busy in the affairs of Douglas Fairbanks, and that Douglas Fairbanks was very much opposed to the same. That Mr. Sully was employed by the Majestic Motion Picture Company, and that upon . . . Fairbanks serving notice of cancellation of his contract with the Majestic Motion Picture Company, the President of that company handed such notice to Mr. Sully, and later Mr. Sully sought Douglas Fairbanks and endeavored to have him recall such notice.
None of this, of course, sat well with Harry Aitken. He filed an injunction in New York against Fairbanks appearing in any Artcraft releases. Fairbanks, already at work on his first independent production, was served with papers at Lake Placid, New York, on Valentine’s Day. Further (and perhaps more to the point), by stopping Daniel Sully’s “salary,” Aitken opened a can of family worms. Sully claimed that his son-in-law had a personal contract with him. He, Sully, would negotiate a $10,000 a week contract for Doug. Fairbanks would keep $7,500 of it, and he would “enjoy a profit of $2500 a week thereby.” The contract, of course, had never been made with Douglas Fairbanks. If it existed—and this is questionable—it had been negotiated between father and daughter.
Cap O’Brien, who, with Douglas’s brother John, was handling the actual negotiations, stated: “Sully then sought to influence his daughter . . . to have her husband recall his written resignation. . . . Sully constantly interfered with all negotiations that were subsequently pending for the employment of Douglas Fairbanks, through influencing his daughter.”
Sully was betting on the wrong horse. When it came to business, Mary Pickford, Cap O’Brien, and John Fairbanks were the voices Douglas Fairbanks was heeding now. Enraged, Sully got a lawyer, who attempted to serve papers on O’Brien.
This would never do. Although he already had established contracts with Anita Loos, John Emerson, and Victor Fleming (for scripts, direction, and cinematography, respectively), Fairbanks was now required to build a legal firewall between himself and his angry father-in-law by forming the Douglas Fairbanks Pictures Corporation.
The entity served simply as a pass-through vehicle, having no independent source of income other than what came into and went out of it from Paramount and, later, United Artists. The contracts the corporation made were identical to the deals he had struck as an individual. Emerson and Loos were to be compensated both by way of weekly salaries ($1,000 per week for Emerson, $250 per week for Loos) and profit sharing (15 percent of net, capped at $10,500 per film, for Emerson; 7.5 percent of net but with no cap for Loos). Brother John also got 10 percent of the profits and even cameraman Fleming was awarded a 1 percent share, meaning that Fairbanks in effect retained two-thirds of the company’s profits and shared one-third with his creative and business team. It was an extraordinarily generous arrangement—and not typical of the industry. Chaplin was notorious for his penurious salaries, and while Mary was not as bad, she was extremely careful about every nickel.
This served to protect Doug from his father-in-law. He settled, in the end, with Aitken. Triangle’s books have a single page titled “Douglas Fairbanks Indemnity a/c” showing a payment of $12,673.81 on April 30 and $15,000 on July 23. How this odd sum was calculated is a mystery. The funds paid to Daniel Sully had totaled $9,800. But however derived, the amount satisfied Aitken, who dropped his suit and injunction against Fairbanks.*27
For West Coast production, Douglas leased space from Jesse Lasky at his Hollywood lot for $12,000 for the first fourteen weeks and then at a slightly reduced rate of $833.33 a week thereafter. Lasky would charge time and materials for set construction. The deal would work out strongly to Fairbanks’s advantage. He had no upfront, fixed costs in staffing or managing a lot, or in obtaining and maintaining props and sets. By late November, Famous Players–Lasky general manager Cecil B. DeMille grumbled in a letter to Lasky that they had already lost over $8,000 on the deal due to increased costs of material and overhead.
Even if he had lost money on the arrangement, one suspects that Doug would have stuck with it. For at the same lot, within one city block, were the production offices of Mary Pickford. The last two weeks of December 1916 did not merely bring about his rupture with Triangle and his union with Artcraft. They were to contain other momentous events. He would lose one woman who had been seminal in his life, and he would gain another.
* * *
*1. It is possible that Dwan confused incidents or chose to embellish them. There is a brief sequence in the film where Fairbanks is breaking up a fight between feuding millworkers. He defuses the situation with a joke. We never see the joke being told, but we get the following title card: “‘That reminds me. Did you ever hear the story about . . . ?’ Note—We’d like to let you in on this story, but it takes Mr. Fairbanks himself to put it over right.” It is conceivable that there was some colorful language in this sequence, which was handled in postproduction by this intertitle. But this title was in the premiere print, so there was no “calling back” of the prints to insert it.
*2. Fleming, of course, was famed as the principal director of Gone with the Wind and The Wizard of Oz. He was Fairbanks’s primary cameraman at Triangle and was to continue with him through his time with the Artcraft Pictures Corporation and into the United Artists years, when he was given his first directing opportunity with When the Clouds Roll By.
*3. Majestic was one of the many holding companies that preceded the Triangle Film Corporation. For purposes of this discussion, it is synonymous with Triangle’s Fine Arts.
*4. Someone must have done the typing for him, as the Triangle records at the USC Warner Archives document a canceled check to Fairbanks for $300 dated March 17, 1916, for the scenario (File 2721A).
*5. The mischievous eleven-year-old hero of a series of books by Booth Tarkington.
*6. The Balboa sequence was cut from the final release, but Triangle retained two reels of beach scenes as stock footage.
*7. He also would borrow Fairbanks’s leap from the door frame in a sequence ultimately cut from The General.
*8. † In the abridgment of The Half Breed, for example, Fairbanks ends up with the white Jewel Carmen and not the Spanish Alma Rubens. Also all mention of racism—the main point of the original film—was expunged.
*9. ‡ It was to little avail; Fairbanks appealed up to the Supreme Court of New York, losing every time on the grounds that he was an employee, n
ot a producer, of Triangle and thus had no say in the ultimate fate of the properties.
*10. “Suddenly,” the intertitle tells us, “Gladys remembers that Rosy never painted anything but horses.”
*11. In contrast, $500 was paid for Flirting with Fate, both story and finished script, a mere two months before completion of that production.
*12. Shots for the western sequences were filmed in California in late May.
*13. † He would appear in a few local fundraisers during World War I, reenacting his old vaudeville sketches.
*14. ‡ A tendency that director Dwan would later playfully document in Mr. Fixit.
*15. The column was ghostwritten by her friend and scenarist Frances Marion but was based on Pickford’s recollections of her day.
*16. His son recalls that he wore a black eye patch and “rather fancied the dashing look it gave him.”
*17. † Jackie Chan, one of the few authentic film athletes whose skills are comparable to those of Fairbanks, takes the same position, showing outtakes at the end of his films documenting the injuries he sustained during the course of shooting. Fairbanks, on the other hand, never lifted the curtain to actually let the audience see him getting hurt. The illusion of effortlessness was maintained on the screen, while the press reported the injuries.
The First King of Hollywood Page 16
