Berowne's 247

(Looks like a virus has got hold of my blog.  I hope you'll be tolerant; I apologize if it looks screwed-up this week.)

    The Original Team: the Four “A”s

(Also for Three Word Wednesday and ABC Wednesday: "T" is for "Team")

No quiz this week.  Berowne is back with another bit of personal history.

For those of you who have had the dubious pleasure of following this blog over the past year or two may know, I used to work in the film business.

As a cinematographer I was destined never to be listed among the great names in the history of moom pitchas, but I managed to get by.

I began, as so many do in this field, with little film jobs for business: training movies, employee-relations, safety films, technical instruction, top executives issuing vital – or kinda vital – messages , and of course the potential gold mine for the struggling cinematographer: Public Relations films.

Every business of any size in this land seems to need a PR film to distribute to an eagerly waiting world.  They aren’t hard to write and produce since they’re pretty much all the same.

The message they put across is that we’re better than the other companies, losers mostly, who are in the same field.  We have better products, better customer relations, better business philosophy, und so weiter.

But what distinguishes our outfit - what makes us the leader – is our key ingredient…

(Here we should have music: cymbals crashing or something similar,)

Our people!

Yes, it’s the people who work here who have made us the envy of the entire industry.  (Presumably those other outfits have orangutans).

Well, after some years of this, I hopefully wanted to try something else.  I made a film on my own, no sponsor - someone I'd have to distrust - to deal with.  To my surprise, it turned out well and a top film company, United Artists, took it for national distribution.

I went to meet the folks at UA.  They introduced me around and then asked if I’d like to see a bit of history.

I said of course.  They showed me an office that looked as though it had seen many years of service.  This, they explained, is where the team, the original four artists, signed the papers that formed the new company back in 1919.

That was a bit of a shock.  Because I knew enough about that outfit to know who those four folks were.  They were united and no question, they were artists.  There’s a picture of them at the beginning of this post.

That’s Doug Fairbanks there on the left, then Mary Pickford.  Next to her is the one and only Charlie Chaplin, with D W Griffith on the right.

They were the “A” in “UA.”

I’m well aware that a large portion of our younger population today may not have heard of all of them, but for older types like me those were some of the founding virtuosi of the art of the cinema.  Standing in that office, I had the feeling that their spirits lived on.