Motion Picture Directors Association

The Motion Picture Directors Association (MPDA) was an American non-profit fraternal organization formed by twenty-six film directors on June 18, 1915 in Los Angeles, California.

Its articles of incorporation stated as that the organization existed to:

  1. To maintain the honor and dignity of the profession of motion picture directors;
  2. To cultivate the usefulness and exert every influence to improve the moral, social and intellectual standing of all persons connected with the motion picture producing business;
  3. To cultivate social intercourse among its members;
  4. To aid and assist all worthy distressed members of this association, their wives, widows and orphans.

The following year MPDA members helped their fellow directors working in New York City to form their own branch association. It was officially incorporated in January 1917 with Allan Dwan elected as its first head.

Lois Weber (1879-1939) was the only woman granted membership in the Motion Picture Directors Association.

The organization lasted until 1936 when members of the MPDA helped create the Screen Directors Guild, an official craft union.

Some of the founders and early members of the MPDA were:

  • William C. DeMille
  • Allan Dwan
  • John Ford
  • Charles Giblyn
  • Joe De Grasse
  • Eddie Lyons
  • Harry L. Franklin
  • George Melford
  • Sidney Olcott
  • William Desmond Taylor
  • Maurice Tourneur
  • Laurence Trimble


Famous quotes containing the words motion picture, motion, picture and/or association:

    “The motion picture made in Hollywood, if it is to create art at all, must do so within such strangling limitations of subject and treatment that it is a blind wonder it ever achieves any distinction beyond the purely mechanical slickness of a glass and chromium bathroom.”
    —Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)

    “Speech belongs half to the speaker, half to the listener. The latter must prepare to receive it according to the motion it takes.”
    —Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)

    “One classic American landscape haunts all of American literature. It is a picture of Eden, perceived at the instant of history when corruption has just begun to set in. The serpent has shown his scaly head in the undergrowth. The apple gleams on the tree. The old drama of the Fall is ready to start all over again.”
    —Jonathan Raban (b. 1942)

    “With all their faults, trade-unions have done more for humanity than any other organization of men that ever existed. They have done more for decency, for honesty, for education, for the betterment of the race, for the developing of character in man, than any other association of men.”
    —Clarence Darrow (1857–1938)