AND LIBERTY FOR ALL
THE MOUSE HAS ROARED. THE SUCCESS STORY OF THE last few years in American popular picture-making has been the triumph of the Walt Disney Company under the stewardship of Bob Iger, the conspicuous financial windfall of which all competitors have sought to imitate. It was Iger, CEO of the company since Michael Eisner’s departure in 2005, who more than any other single individual reoriented Disney toward investment in intellectual properties (IP), guiding the company’s film division to a policy of producing fewer and more extravagant movies based on recognizable franchises and characters, ensuring an infinitely renewable store of such properties through the acquisition of Pixar in 2006, Marvel Entertainment in 2009, and Lucasfilm in 2012, as well as through cannibalizing Disney’s own back catalog of IP. There is a sense that Iger, a onetime Ithaca weatherman turned television executive turned mega-mogul, has finally cracked the long-believed-insoluble problem of the movie business’s volatility and precariousness, as Disney’s success under his tenure has prompted a land rush on IP, and rival studios scurry to construct their own cinematic universes while they still have the autonomy to do so.
It is the nature of things that today’s monolithic, Goliath-like megacorporation must spring from yesteryear’s plucky upstart David. The Disney brothers, Walt and Roy, had once upon a time been the prototypical long-shot outsiders, beginning their new Hollywood cartooning concern in 1923, following the bankruptcy of Walt’s short-lived Laugh-O-Gram Studios back in Kansas City. As independent operators, they were beholden to established distributors to put their product in front of audiences, and by 1932, when their ambitions for their enormously lucrative Silly Symphonies series far surpassed what was possible with the production advances being provided by current partner Columbia Pictures, it made too-perfect sense to turn to an organization that had become a bastion to independent producers, United Artists.
A hundred years old this year, United Artists had been conceived as both a business venture and a utopian artistic endeavor, formed in 1919 by a consortium made up of
