United Artists Investments Inc history

Chaplin vetoed this proposal as well, with the result that in June 1926 Schenck and his UA partners on their own formed the United Artists Theatre Circuit, a publicly-held company, separate from United Artists, which went on to construct or acquire first-run theaters in the major metropolitan areas.

1930: Edwards Theatres opens for business.

A German emigré, Wilder got his break in 1936 and was hired as a screen writer at Paramount, which paired him with Charles Brackett, the former drama critic for The New Yorker.

Chaplin's Monsieur Verdoux (1947) was controversial for entirely separate reasons.

The threat of bankruptcy in 1951 convinced Mary Pickford and Charles Chaplin, the two remaining stockholders in the company, to turn over operating control of United Artists to a management team headed by two young lawyers, Arthur B. Krim and Robert S. Benjamin.

The Krim-Benjamin team turned a profit in its first year and within a few years bought out Chaplin and Pickford to own the company outright by 1955.

The company went public in 1957 and continued to grow.

Wilder catapulted the Mirisch company into the forefront of the independent producer ranks with Some Like It Hot (1959), a screwball farce starring Monroe, Tony Curtis, and Jack Lemmon.

Wilder's career peaked in 1960, when he won the best director, best screenplay, and best picture Oscars® for The Apartment to become the first person to win three Academy Awards® in a year.

Anschutz earned a finance degree in 1961 from the University of Kansas and prepared for a career in law, but just before he was scheduled to attend law school at the University of Virginia he balked.

Its British investment paid off big with Tony Richardson's production of Tom Jones (1963), a movie version of Henry Fielding's ribald and Hogarthian novel of the same name starring Albert Finney.

The picture was The Greatest Story Ever Told (George Stevens, 1965), a drama of the life of Christ based on the best-selling Fulton Oursler novel.

No longer the smallest of the majors, United Artists grew to become the largest producer-distributor of motion pictures in the world by 1966.

In 1967, not long after leaving his father's company, Anschutz received a telephone call informing him one of his exploratory wells had exploded.

Anschutz took a look where others had already explored and discovered a billion-barrel pocket of oil one mile down, a find that ranked as one of the largest United States oil discoveries since Prudhoe Bay in Alaska in 1968.

United Artists turned itself around by 1974 and reestablished ties to the creative community.

The following year, the Robert Chartoff-Irwin Winkler production of Rocky (John G. Alvidsen, 1976) won the Oscar® for best picture, the second time in a row for a UA picture.

And in 1977, Woody Allen's Annie Hall won the Oscar® for best picture, the third time in a row for a UA picture and an industry record.

In January 1978, UA chairman Arthur Krim and top executives resigned from the company.

UA once again fell on hard times, thanks to the Orion fracture as well as a bad investment in the legendarily expensive and dismal 1980 film Heaven's Gate.

In 1982, just before oil prices collapsed, Anschutz sold half his stake in the northern Utah field to Mobil Oil, gaining $500 million from the sale.

MGM purchased UA in 1983.

Anschutz opted for railroads, acquiring Denver & Rio Grande Western railroad in 1984.

1989: Regal Cinemas is founded.

Krim and his partners went on to form Orion Pictures, a boutique production-distribution company that struggled for most of its life until it finally filed for bankruptcy in 1991.

The company was then purchased by Credit Lyonnais, a French bank, in 1992.

In 1995, a year before selling Southern Pacific, Anschutz separated SP Telecom from the railroad and merged it with another company, a Dallas-based digital microwave company named Qwest, acquired by Anschutz in 1995.

Southern Pacific, which remained with Anschutz until 1996, had a small division named SP Telecom that installed fiber optic cable along its track for itself and other telephone companies.

In 1998, the company was taken private again in a $1.05 billion leveraged buyout led by Kohlberg, Kravis, Roberts & Co. and Hicks, Muse, Tate & Furst.

He also demonstrated his penchant for diversifying his business interests--"Phil had a philosophy that you had to have a lot going on, because not all things would work out," a colleague noted in a September 6, 1999 interview with Fortune.

When Qwest merged with United States West in 2000, the transaction increased Anschutz's net worth to an estimated $16.5 billion.