Richard A. Rowland
| Richard A. Rowland | |
|---|---|
Rowland in 1920
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| Born |
December 8, 1880 Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, U.S. |
| Died | May 12, 1947 (aged 66) New York City |
| Other names | R. A. Rowland |
| Occupation | Studio executive, film producer |
Richard A. Rowland (December 8, 1880 – May 12, 1947) was an American studio executive and film producer.
Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Rowland was the head of Metro Pictures Corporation from 1915 to 1920, a studio he founded in 1915 along with Louis B. Mayer. Mayer left in 1918 to form his own studio. Metro did most of its productions in Los Angeles and in New York City, where it occasionally leased facilities in Fort Lee, New Jersey. Among Metro's productions were: The Eternal Question (1916) with Olga Petrova, The Divorceé (1919) with Ethel Barrymore, and What People Will Say? (1915) directed by Alice Guy-Blache.
In 1919, when Charlie Chaplin, D.W. Griffith, Douglas Fairbanks, and Mary Pickford formed United Artists to protect their work and control their careers, Rowland, then head of Metro Studios, famously remarked that "the lunatics have taken over the asylum".
In 1920, Rowland sold Metro to Marcus Loew, and subsequently became an executive at Fox Film Corporation. Loew was acquiring studios to help supply product to his theater chain. A few years later, Loew merged Metro with recently acquired Goldwyn Pictures Corporation to form Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM).
Rowland played a key role in the setting of standards and improving the speed of movie projection to improve the quality of the experience as a member of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers, later the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE).
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