We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
254 the house that SHADOWS BUILT
friends? You’ve learned a lot while we’ve lived apart, and you’ll be much more useful to us.”)
Burning for eminence and revenge, Schulberg and Abrams sat for days analyzing the motion-picture business in its larger aspects, looking for an opening. “And we found one as wide as the Grand Canon,” said Schulberg. First National intended to do away with all middlemen— one profit from studio to box office. But the stars, even though they enjoyed a share in the profits, must divide earnings with the company. Why should not the great stars, solely and entirely, own the producing company? Abrams and Schulberg made a list of the supremely eminent — Mary Bickford and Charlie Chaplin, of course, the new-risen Douglas Fairbanks, W. S. Hart, David Wark Griffith. All these had elastic agreements with their employers or were nearing the termination of existing contracts. A week of intense thought and calculation, then Abrams and Schulberg started for Hollywood with a complete plan in their portfolios. They had managed for two years the biggest system of distribution in the United States. They proposed to perform that function for the new company, and to take for recompense twenty per cent, of the gross receipts — they of course paying the expenses of distribution. That would yield a handsome profit.
To the day of his death, Hiram Abrams declared that he and Ben Schulberg jointly invented the plan which flowered into United Artists. The stars assembled in