And now, inside the hotel lobby: four waiters, young and graceful and excited. They were rolling a giant oak tabletop down the length of the hotel. Seconds later, they were met by another team of waiters carrying its heavy base, which they attached with quick spins of bolts onto threads.

“What’s going on?” asked one executive.

“They’re building a table,” announced another.

The table was being set up on the million-dollar carpet. Out came a linen cloth, white and clean, catching the air and billowing like a sail before settling, and then the crew of waiters rapidly set out place mats, knives, spoons, forks, plates, coffee cups, and glasses. For five. A hubbub outside now on the sidewalk, men jostling to see better, as, inside, smiling and joking, walking arm in arm across the carpet, toward the table, toward the crowd outside helplessly watching the table, came Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, and D. W. Griffith. Behind them, a fifth person, whom no one except Zukor recognized. It was Bill McAdoo.

The three most famous movie stars on earth and the world’s most famous director and the former treasury secretary sat down to breakfast, snapping their napkins out of their rings.

Chaplin, Pickford, Fairbanks, and Griffith had decided to form their own corporation to distribute their productions. There was even a manifesto—

We believe that this step is positively and absolutely necessary to protect the great motion picture public from threatening combinations and trusts that would force upon them mediocre productions and machine-made entertainment…

—and so on. Their general counsel would be McAdoo, who was curious whether his theories about the power of stardom would hold up in financial practice. If it turned out that there was some spectral force more important than money, he wanted it. To show both solidarity among their bickering personalities, and the value they placed on their chief assets— themselves—the company would be called United Artists.

But the announcement of the name, the theories, the breast-beating, the new competition, and in fact the wet firecracker of Zukor’s trust idea (over before it started, for now), were all for later. For now, on the sidewalks of the Alexandria, peering into the windows and gossiping like washerwomen on the Liffey, the many executives jostled for position, fighting for a chance to watch how natural and ordinary the stars looked.

Inside the hotel, the bell captain ordered the pins taken out of the doors so they could be flung back. At the table, McAdoo looked at the others, waiting so he could nod with parental concern and tell them they would be fine. But no one was looking his way. Instead, Pickford, Fairbanks, Griffith, and Chaplin, coffee cups raised, halfway through buttering toast, holding a section of grapefruit, watched their audience about to approach. In the air, the feeling was like that of an alpine village about to meet an avalanche.