Douglas Fairbanks was expelled from a Denver high school for cutting the strings on a piano, bluffed his way into a Wall Street clerking job by claiming a Harvard education, and went on to invent the swashbuckler, co-found United Artists, and serve as the first president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. This episode follows the restless kid born in Denver in 1883, whose father abandoned the family and whose mother changed his surname, through his 1915 arrival in Los Angeles, his clash with D.W. Griffith, who told him he belonged in a circus, and the breezy comedies that made him a symbol of American optimism during World War I.

The discussion covers the 1917 war bond tour with Charlie Chaplin and Mary Pickford that revealed how badly the studios needed their stars, the block-booking tactic that United Artists was formed t ...