About
Few people have influenced Hollywood history than
Douglas Fairbanks. And who better than his niece and Fairbanks family
historian, Letitia, to relate that story? On-screen and offscreen, he was a
force of nature, progressing in easy leaps and bounds from the Broadway
stage to silent movies when feature-length film was just a few years old.
His happy, healthy characters and acrobatic acting style brought a new
energy to the medium. But it was through his extraordinary success as a
producer that Fairbanks achieved the goal of all creative people: to run
his own show. This he did by co-founding United Artists in 1919 with his
soon-to-be wife Mary Pickford, Charles Chaplin, and D. W. Griffith. As
a producer, he showed visionary taste, collaborating with his directors
and designers to enact gallant tales in spectacular settings. Whether he
played a young man on the go or a swashbuckling hero in a fairy-tale
land, Fairbanks-one of the thirty-six founders of the Academy of Motion
Picture Arts and Sciences-put America's hopes and dreams on film. This
updated version of the original 1953 biography has been expanded by
the Fairbanks family with archival materials as well as never-before-seen
photographs from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences,
Margaret Herrick Library.
