(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.
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.
