"Look, ma, I'm a corporation!": United Artists and Kirk Douglas' Bryna Productions, 1955-1959

Kirk Douglas was one of the most powerful and popular actors in Hollywood in the 1950s and his box office appeal led him to set up his own production company, Bryna Productions, in 1949. The company entered active production in 1955 after Douglas signed a six-picture contract with United Artists. The deal reportedly gave Bryna a significant degree of autonomy and exemplified the rapid industrial changes taking place in Hollywood, with UA leading the way in signing up numerous independent companies that were being formed by actors, directors and producers at that time.

This chapter makes use of business papers and correspondence from the Kirk Douglas Papers to present a case study of Douglas’s management of Bryna Productions. Douglas’s professed motivations behind the formation of Bryna were to make a greater profit and to gain legal authority over the way his films were made. The chapter surveys Bryna’s relationship with UA and considers the extent to which the distributor actually granted independent producers creative and business control. Focus is given to issues of publicity and distribution, an area that Bryna felt UA should allow the production company greater autonomy over, and a lack of which contributed to a demise in the working relationship between the two companies. and which arguably contributed to the ultimate demise of their working relationship with the distributor.