In 1919, four enterprising Hollywood stars - Mary Pickford, Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks and D. W. Griffith - decided to come together to form a new film studio, which they named United Artists, and which was designed to give actors greater control over their work. Hollywood producers and distributors had begun tightening their grip on actors’ salaries and curbing their creative input. These actors wanted to safeguard freedom of expression and independence for their profession and give actors the authority and autonomy to create the films about which they were most passionate. Dozens of classic films have been made by UA over the intervening years, creating a library of almost 1,000 feature films.
In the mid 1990s, the studio’s archive of still photography was packed up and transported from its New York office to Kansas, where it was stored in a former salt mine.
“A United Artists team visited the vaults to evaluate assets and found the most amazing store of still photography which hasn’t been seen publicly before,” says Maggie Adams, vice-president, asset management, MGM Digital Media and an expert on the UA archive.
“There were thousands of images, stills taken on set by photographers for hire, who recorded the actors and directors between shoots for publicity purposes and for the studio’s archives. Eventually everything was brought back to Los Angeles and now we’re releasing the stills from classic films. There are some really fabulous photographs.”
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UA is planning to put many of them on to a website, and to organise an exhibition to mark the studio’s 90th anniversary.
The Magnificent Seven, 1960
When John Sturges decided to remake Akira Kurosawa’s masterpiece The Seven Samurai as a western, he gathered together a cast of actors with massive egos - Yul Brynner, Steve McQueen, Robert Vaughn, Charles Bronson, Horst Buchholtz (whose name is misspelt on his chair, below), James Coburn and Brad Dexter. This still, taken on set in 1960 by Charles Lang Jr, shows the dynamics of these very strong, narcissistic personalities. “You can see Steve McQueen’s charisma and Yul Brynner’s swagger even as they sit there,” says Adams. “Brynner had made The King and I a few years earlier and he’d pretty much retained that regal persona. He actually got married during the filming of this movie, and they gave him a wedding party on set. They really looked after their stars in those days, providing barbecues, swimming parties and all sorts of entertainments for them between filming. But I think Sturges had to look after them well given the personalities involved.”
Raging Bull, 1980
“This film was a great collaboration between Robert De Niro and Martin Scorsese,” says Adams. “De Niro brought the idea for the movie to his friend Scorsese. He’d found the book and wanted to play the lead and that’s how it came together.” De Niro plays Jake LaMotta, the temperamental 1949 middleweight champion boxer, whose aggression in the ring spills out into his private life and causes him to alienate his friends and family. Scorsese wanted to shoot the fighting scenes from inside the ring rather than from the point of view of the spectator (which is how the first two Rocky films in 1976 and 1979 had been shot). He wanted to capture the raw violence of every punch and make the audience almost feel the blows as the boxers took them. The choreography and filming sequences were so complicated that Scorsese reportedly drew each shot on paper before shooting. Christina Loss took the photographs, including this one, and later went on to shoot the stills on the set of the subsequent Rocky films.
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Midnight Cowboy, 1969
This 1969 film tells the story of two hustlers, the polio-crippled Ratso, played by Dustin Hoffman, and the naive young Texan loser, played by the newcomer Jon Voight, who team up to try to make enough money from the wealthy women of New York to fulfil their dreams of moving to Miami. “This photograph by an unknown stills photographer really captures the gritty, dark, forbidding feel of the film and of the city at that time,” Adams says. It also captures the desperation of Ratso even when the cameras were no longer rolling. When preparing to audition for the part, Hoffman reportedly persuaded the auditioning executive to meet him on a Manhattan street corner. He knew that his all- American image might ruin his chances of playing a crippled down-and-out, so he dressed in rags and accosted people for spare change while the executive waited, unaware, a few feet away. Eventually he revealed himself and got the part.
West Side Story, 1961
This shot shows that the Jets and the Sharks did actually get along together. “Here they are leaning on each other and stretching after a tough dance routine for the film in 1961. It’s a lovely example of them relaxing between shoots, but it just shows how gruelling the dance numbers were,” Adams says. The photograph was taken by Ernst Haas, the Austrian photojournalist who was one of the first photographers to be invited to join Magnum after it was founded in 1947. During the 1950s and 1960s he worked for a number of studios, but is best known for his photographs for the Marlboro Man advertisements.
Annie Hall, 1977
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This lovely shot was taken by Brian Hamill in 1977 during the chaotic scene in the beach house when Diane Keaton and Woody Allen are hysterically chucking lobsters around on the floor. Annie Hall (Keaton) gets out her camera in the movie and starts directing Alvy Singer (Allen) to pose for her with a broom in one hand and a lobster in the other. It shows that Allen was still a comedian who made films rather than the comic film-maker that he became. Adams says: “Just looking through the contact sheets years later still makes you laugh so much.”
Last Tango in Paris, 1972
When Bernardo Bertolucci began making this film, he either didn’t realise or didn’t care that Marlon Brando was going to dominate it to the extent that Maria Schneider, his co-star, would barely have a chance. This shot, taken by Angelo Novi in 1972, shows how the film was made in a very impromptu way, with passers-by all stopping to stare at the film stars as they shoot a scene in a busy street in Paris. “I love this photograph,” Adams says. “You can see the intensity of Brando even as he stands there in the street, resting between takes.”
Paths of Glory, 1957
This was one of Stanley Kubrick’s first polemical films, which came together as a powerful attack on the role of the French military authorities during the First World War through an account of the court martial and eventual execution of two innocent privates. It was banned on political grounds in France for 18 years after its release in 1957. “We don’t know who took the stills on this movie, but they were taken for publicity purposes, the design of advertising, that kind of thing,” says Adams. “I really like this picture of Kubrick, who was a really snappy dresser, standing in his re-creation of a First World War trench, full of mud and grit and filthy, demoralised soldiers.”
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12 Angry Men, 1957
We don’t know who took this photograph of Henry Fonda on the set of 12 Angry Men in 1957, but it encapsulates with great prescience the feel of the finished film. Fonda sits cool and calm while the film’s brilliant cameraman, Boris Kaufman, works out the angles to create the sweltering atmosphere of his scene.