Word: pickfords
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Giannini also made a career out of lending to out-of-favor industries. He helped the California wine industry get started, then bankrolled Hollywood at a time when the movie industry was anything but proven. In 1923 he created a motion-picture loan division and helped Mary Pickford, Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks and D.W. Griffith start United Artists. When Walt Disney ran $2 million over budget on Snow White, Giannini stepped in with a loan...
...Chaplin is still here. In a 1995 worldwide survey of film critics, Chaplin was voted the greatest actor in movie history. He was the first, and to date the last, person to control every aspect of the filmmaking process--founding his own studio, United Artists, with Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford and D.W. Griffith, and producing, casting, directing, writing, scoring and editing the movies he starred in. In the first decades of the 20th century, when weekly moviegoing was a national habit, Chaplin more or less invented global recognizability and helped turn an industry into an art. In 1916, his third...
...Hollywood's most popular male actor, outranking Charlie Chaplin; the top female was Mary Pickford, the cagey gamin called America's Sweetheart. A year later, the three stars and Griffith started their own company, United Artists. And in 1920 Fairbanks married Pickford. His Majesty the American...
...talkies had taken over; Fairbanks sounded flutey and looked older in them. In 1933 he and Pickford separated. The swashbuckler was 50; another Roosevelt with a big smile was giving America a Fairbanksian jolt of optimism, and Doug was disconsolate. He told his son Douglas Jr. (by then a film star himself), "I've done everything--twice." Not just two Zorro movies and two D'Artagnans, but two careers, two marriages, too much work and play. He said he wanted to die quickly...
This pairing is signaled in the novel's opening pages. In the late spring of 1910, in Paterson, New Jersey, D.W. Griffith is directing a film titled The Call to Arms. Just at the moment the leading lady, Mary Pickford, faints from the unseasonable heat, a few blocks away Presbyterian minister Clarence Arthur Wilmot loses his belief in the Divinity: "the God of the Pentateuch was an absurd bully, barbarically thundering through a cosmos entirely misconceived. There is no such God, nor should there...