United States Pictures

History[edit]

Sperling was a highly experienced screenwriter and producer with 20th Century Fox and other studios who had just returned from his World War II service in the U.S. Marine Corps Photographic Unit. Warner Bros. offered Sperling an independent production company that would use Warner Bros. studio resources and financing to make motion pictures that would be released by the studio. In the post World War II era, the Hollywood major studios were beginning to find the idea of purchasing completed motion pictures from independent film production companies more economical than producing the films themselves (although United Artists had done this decades earlier, acting as a distributor for independent films since its establishment in 1919).^[1]


Beginning with Fritz Lang's Cloak and Dagger (1946), followed by Raoul Walsh's Pursued (1947), Sperling's United States Pictures made a total of 14 films. The last two, Samuel Fuller's Merrill's Marauders (1962) and Ken Annakin's Battle of the Bulge (1965) were filmed in the Philippines and Spain respectively. Sperling found that the Filipino and Spanish governments and film companies thought they were dealing with a branch of the United States Government due to the name of the company and provided superb cooperation.