The company produced and released films from through and was also involved in television production and syndication in the s and early s. It was one of the largest mini-major studios during its early years, when it worked with prominent directors such as Woody Allen , James Cameron , Jonathan Demme , and Oliver Stone.
Krim chairman , Eric Pleskow president and chief executive officer , and Robert Benjamin chairman of the finance committee βquit their jobs. Krim and Benjamin had headed UA since and subsequently turned around the then-flailing studio with a number of critical and commercial successes. Change had begun once Transamerica purchased UA in and, within a decade, a rift formed between Krim and Transamerica chairman John R. Beckett concerning the studio's operations. Krim suggested spinning off United Artists into a separate company which was rejected by Beckett.
The last straw came for Pleskow when he refused to collect and deliver the medical records of UA department heads to Transamerica's offices in San Francisco for the sake of confidentiality. The tensions only worsened when Fortune magazine reported an article on the clash between UA and TA in which Beckett had stated that, if the executives disliked the parent company's treatment of them, they should resign.
The week following the resignations, according to the website Reference for Business , 63 important Hollywood figures took out an advertisement in a trade paper warning Transamerica that it had made a fatal mistake in letting the five men leave.
The 'fatal mistake' came true following the box-office disaster of Heaven's Gate [ 6 ] in which led to Transamerica selling UA to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. In February , the five men forged a deal with Warner Bros. The new company intended only to finance projects, giving the filmmakers complete creative autonomy; this ideal had been successfully implemented at United Artists. Orion, however, was contractually given free rein over distribution and advertising as well as the number and type of films the executives chose to invest in.
