Hiram Abrams left school at the age of sixteen, sold newspapers, and eventually ended up managing several Portland film theaters.

Zukor and Lasky sold Hodkinson more of their film rights and, using that money, they purchased Paramount stock to, by 1916, gain a majority of it.

[5] Abrams and his new partner, Ben Schulberg, convinced Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, Charles Chaplin, and D. W. Griffith to break with their studios and form an independent distributing company;[6] the result was United Artists, set up on 5 February 1919.

The United Artists could not produce a continuous flow of films for theaters and suffered serious distribution problems caused by competing firms.

[10] Abram's involvement in United Artists, and his life, ended in Manhattan on 15 November 1926, from a sudden cardiac incident, aged 48.