‘The lunatics have taken over the asylum’: Scarlett Johansson’s row with Disney is a familiar Hollywood story

carlett Johansson may not look or behave like a lunatic but she is now regarded as one in certain quarters of Hollywood. “So the lunatics have taken charge of the asylum,” a senior studio executive commented in 1919 when he discovered that the three leading movie stars of the day – Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks – together with the top director, DW Griffith, had founded their own breakaway company, United Artists.