Leaders All — I. E. Chadwick, Leader of Independents (1924) 🇺🇸

Leaders All — I. E. Chadwick

Because he entered upon his business career finely equipped from an educational viewpoint; because in his fourteen years’ membership in the film industry his services always have been at the command of his competitors in any movement looking to the betterment of the business of which he is so important a part: because not only is he a clear thinker but also is a forceful public speaker

Fourteen years active experience and ten of these active in one independent exchange is an unusual record. It is but one of the “qualifying rounds” in the career of I. E. Chadwick for the leadership of the Independent Motion Picture Producers and Distributors, the new organization which gives promise of so much usefulness to the industry as a whole.

But let’s begin at the beginning in this story of the independent chieftain, which was in London, England, in 1884. Three years later the Chadwick family removed to Brooklyn.

Young Chadwick was graduated from Boys’ High School in that borough in 1901 and from Cornell in 1905, with the degrees of A B. and LL.B.

In order that he might have a better background for a business career he had studied both arts and law. He was admitted to practice in 1906. He is in full standing in the State and Federal courts and the United States Supreme Court.

Mr. Chadwick was at one time associated in the practice of law with Reuben L. Haskell, now county judge in Brooklyn and leader of the Liberal Republicans in that borough, and General Horatio C. King.

One of his first experiences as an attorney was on the opposite side of a case in which the chief party in interest was a man he later was to know very well — William A. Brady.

Mr. Brady was suing the New York Transportation Company for damages resulting from an accident and Mr. Chadwick was attorney for the defendant. The stage and picture producer recovered a verdict of several thousand dollars.

Mr. Chadwick’s first contact with the motion picture business was as legal representative for Kurt W. Linn, managing director of the Eclectic Film Company, an American branch of Pathé.

The lawyer at that time became intimately acquainted with some of the phases of a crusade in which the new independent organization Just now is actively engaged.

Much trouble was caused by the material expenditure of time, efforts and money necessary to recover prints which had been leased in Paris or London ostensibly for some remote Far Eastern country or South America and then brought to this country and exhibited under the same title or a spurious title in competition with those who had purchased territory in good faith.

Through this work of prosecuting pirates Mr. Chadwick became interested in the pleasanter side of motion pictures. In 1910 he made an investment in Exclusive Pictures, Inc., an independent or state rights exchange.

In 1914 he formed the Merit Film Corporation, of which he is today still the head. Offices were opened in New York, Buffalo and Albany, covering the territory of New York State and Northern New Jersey.

That means for ten years Mr. Chadwick has been continuously in independent distribution in which his organization has undergone no change in identity. In November, 1914, he made his first investment in a producing company. The outbreak of the Great War had stopped the importations of foreign films on which many of the independent exchanges leaned for their new releases.

Mr. Chadwick purchased a controlling interest in the Ivan Film Productions, Inc., the forerunner of the present Chadwick Pictures Corporation. In 1917 the exchangeman purchased the remaining stock interest from Mr. Abramson [Ivan Abramson], who formed another company.

Mr. Chadwick’s present activities include the Merit Film Corporation, which distributes in the New York territory all of the Arrow product and also open market material generally.

On the production side there are three units contributing features to Chadwick Pictures during the coming year.

Hunt Stromberg is making four specials. The John Gorman unit will produce a series, first of which is The Painted Flapper. Another production unit on which Mr. Chadwick is banking heavily is one starring Lionel Barrymore and being made under the supervision of Mr. Abramson [Transcriber’s Note: The movie in question is probably I am the Man (1924)].

The Jimmy Aubrey comedies are being distributed through the Selznick Pictures Corporation.

Nine years ago Mr. Chadwick was one of the founders of the F. I. L. M. Club, and for the first five years served as its president.

He instituted and put in work in that body the arbitration system upon which is based the present workings of the organization. He wrote the first arbitration agreement of the Theatre Owners of New York State and of the Chamber of Commerce.

In the course of his film career Mr. Chadwick has been called upon by his fellows to draft many rules seeking the betterment of the distributing side of the industry. Where these have had to do with the independent division their contents plainly have shown that their author’s aim has been to demand and receive not preference or favor but equality — equality of opportunity.

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Collection: Exhibitors Trade Review, 29 March 1924

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