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- Writer
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Friedrich Schiller was born on Nov. 10, 1759, in Marbach, Germany. His father was an army doctor. Growing up in a very poor environment, Schiller eventually managed to get the support of a wealthy duke that enabled him to study medicine. He served as a military doctor first, but through the efforts of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe he finally went to Jena and Weimar, where he died on the May 9, 1805.
Schiller is an important German author of his time, most famous for his stage plays. They were highly acclaimed--and mostly forbidden, because of their contents. His first big work, "Die Räuber", dealt with the revolt of sons against their parents and environment, a very modern topic for the time and one that was not accepted in many regions of Germany. Overall, though, he is underrated as an author due to the fact that he lived and wrote in the same time as Goethe: Schiller is considered to be a good writer, but not as brilliant as Goethe.- Music Department
- Writer
- Composer
Hector Berlioz was born on December 11, 1803, into the family of Dr. Louis Berlioz and Marie-Antoinette-Josephine. Hector was the first of six children, three of whom died. He took music lessons at home from a visiting teacher and played flute and guitar. By age 16 he wrote a song for voice and guitar that was later reused for his "Symphonie Fantastique."
In 1821 Berlioz went to Paris to study medicine. His impressions of the Paris Opera performance of "Iphigenie en Tauride" by Christoph Willibald Gluck turned him on music forever. He spent more days at the Paris Conservatory than at the medical school. In 1823 he started writing articles on music for "Le Corsaire". He abandoned medicine for music and successfully performed his "Messe Solennelle" in 1825. After being "cursed" by his mother for abandoning medicine, his allowance from his father was reduced, and was forced to take such jobs as a choir singer to support himself. In 1828 he heard the 3rd and 5th Symphonies by Ludwig van Beethoven and with that impression he read "Faust" by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. With such inspiration he started composing "La Damnation de Faust."
Berlios fell in love with Irish actress Harriet Smithson and became so inspired that he finished the "Symphonie Fantastique." He premiered the work and met Franz Liszt at the premiere. They became good friends and Liszt transcribed the "Symphonie Fantastique" for piano. In 1830, after being rejected by Harriett Smithson, Berlioz became engaged to pianist Camille Moke. He went to Rome as the Prix de Rome Laureate and met Felix Mendelssohn and the Russian Mikhail Glinka. All three became friends for many years. At that time Berlioz received a letter from his fiancée that she had decided to marry M. Camille Pleyel, a wealthy piano maker in Paris. He decided to return to Paris and kill his fiancée, Mr. Playel and himself, but the long trip cooled him down. He stopped in Nice and composed "Le Roi Lear," inspired by William Shakespeare's play "King Lear".
Back in Paris he became friends with Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas, Niccolò Paganini, Frédéric Chopin and George Sand. He met writer Ernest Legouve and they became lifelong friends. In 1833 he finally married Harriet Smithson, with Liszt himself as one of his witnesses. Their son was born in 1834. Later he had a mistress, singer Marie Recio, whom he married after the death of Hariet Smithson in 1852.
Berlioz was an influential music critic. He wrote about Giacomo Meyerbeer, Mikhail Glinka, Paganini, Liszt and other musicians. From 1834-38 he completed the opera "Benvenuto Cellini". In 1938 his "Harold en Italie" was performed at the Paris Conservatoire. His friend Paganini was so impressed by that performance that he gave Berlioz 20,000 francs.
In the 1840s Berlioz toured in Europe and strengthened his friendship with Mendelssohn-Bartholdy', Richard Wagner, Giacomo Meyerbeer and Robert Schumann. After extensive concertizing in Belgium and Germany, Berlioz returned to Paris. There his friend Mikhail Glinka, who lived in Paris for over a year, came up with the idea of concerts in Russia. Berlioz's joke "If the Emperor of Russia wants me, then I am up for sale" was taken seriously. Having Mikhail Glinka as a convert, Berlioz was invited to Russia twice, and each tour brought him financial gain beyond his expectation. His deep debts in Paris were all covered many times over after his first concert tour of Russia in 1847. Back in Paris he was having difficulties in funding performances of his massive works and lived on his witty critical publications. His second tour of Russia in 1867 was so much more attractive that Berlioz turned down an offer of $100,000 from American Steinway to perform in New York. In St. Petersburg Berlioz took special pleasure in performing with the first-rate orchestra of the St. Petersburg Conservatory.
His second Russian concert tour was a successful finale to his career and life. Berlioz never performed again. He died on March 8, 1869, and was laid to rest at the Cimetiere de Montmartre with his two wives.- A fearsome Apache Indian warrior and medicine man of mythic stature, Geronimo was born about 1829 on the upper reaches of the Gila River (near the present-day mining town of Clifton, AZ). He belonged to the Be-don-ko-he band of the southern Chiricahua Apaches. He was known as Goyathlay or Goyaklay, meaning "one who yawns." It's not clear how he came to be called Geronimo, but conventional wisdom is that it was bestowed upon him by Mexicans during his many raids into that country.
Few specifics are known of his early life, but he emerged as a leader of the Chiricahuas in 1858 in the wake of personal tragedy. According to Geronimo, he had gone in the company of other Apaches and their families to trade peacefully with settlers around the Mexican military post at Janos in northern Chihuahua. While he and other adult males were away, a troop of Mexican soldiers from the neighboring state of Sonora swooped down on the family encampment and slaughtered most of the Apaches there, including Geronimo's mother, wife and three children. As a result, Geronimo swore revenge on Mexicans. Soon after the massacre at Janos, Geronimo received a spirit's voice that told him to fight the Mexicans. In the ensuing forays Geronimo was wounded many times but always recovered, and as late as 1897 he was still boasting to those who would listen that no bullet could kill him. Indeed, foes and followers alike thought that Geronimo was endowed with supernatural powers. Eyewitnesses declared him clairvoyant; according to them, he could interpret signs, explain the unknowable and predict the future.
In line with its uncertain and fluctuating policy, the US government tried to "civilize" the Apaches by shifting them from one reservation to another in Arizona and New Mexico. Although they would "settle down" for a spell on reservation land, sooner or later one or more bands would break out and go on the warpath, and the resulting plundering, burning and killing terrorized the civilian populace from Arizona down into Mexico. Geronimo himself often led these warring factions. Several times he was captured or forced to surrender and was returned to a reservation for a period of time (although other Apaches might be on the warpath), but he eventually would break out again. In May 1885 he fled the reservation with 35 men, 8 boys and 101 women. Ten months later he again surrendered to the American military in northern Sonora (a treaty between the US and Mexico allowed security forces from each nation to cross the border in pursuit of hostile Indians) only to bolt for freedom one more time. With 5,000 American soldiers and 500 Apache scouts and police in pursuit, Geronimo--with 16 warriors, 14 women and 6 children--surrendered to the US Army for the last time on September 3, 1886, at Skeleton Canyon in southern Arizona.
Thus ended an epoch called "The Apacheria", a period of almost constant warfare involving whites, Mexicans and Apaches that lasted for nearly two centuries. Geronimo was exiled to Florida but was promised that afterwards he and his followers would be allowed to return to Arizona--a promise that was not kept. They were placed under military confinement and later scattered among various reservations, with Geronimo and some of his people being sent to Oklahoma. He later became a farmer there and adopted Christianity. He dictated his autobiography, "Geronimo: His Own Story", published in 1906. In February 1909 the 85-year-old warrior fell off of his horse and remained in a ditch until the next day. He caught pneumonia and died a few days later. He was buried in the Indian cemetery at Fort Sill, OK. - Director
- Cinematographer
- Producer
Eadweard Muybridge was born in Kingston upon Thames, England, to John and Susanna Muggeridge. At the age of 20 he immigrated to the United States as a bookseller, first to New York City, then to San Francisco. In 1860, he planned a return trip to Europe, but suffered serious head injuries en route in a stagecoach crash in Texas. He spent the next few years recuperating in Kingston upon Thames, where he took up professional photography, learned the wet-plate collodion process, and secured at least two British patents for his inventions. He returned to San Francisco in 1867, a man with a markedly changed personality. In 1868, he exhibited large photographs of Yosemite Valley, and began selling popular stereographs of his work. His great breakthrough came in 1872 when he was hired by wealthy American businessman and former California governor Leland Stanford, who later founded Stanford University. Stanford was interested in whether horses lifted all legs off the ground at once during trotting, and Muybridge was engaged to take photographs to settle the point. Although the experiment proved inconclusive at the time, Muybridge was re-engaged for further photographic studies in 1878. Using a battery of 12 cameras set side by side and a specially marked fence along the racetrack to pinpoint the horse's precise movements, Muybridge effectively created the first true study of motion. By January 1880 he invented zoopraxiscope to project his famous chronophotographic pictures in motion and thus prove that these were authentic. The projector used glass disks onto which Muybridge had an unidentified artist paint the sequences as silhouettes. Later, his more-detailed images were hand-coloured and marketed commercially. A device he developed was later regarded as an early movie projector, and the process was an intermediate stage toward motion pictures or cinematography. From 1883 to 1886, he entered a very productive period at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, producing over 100,000 images of animals and humans in motion. In his later years, Muybridge gave many public lectures and demonstrations of his photography and early motion picture sequences, travelling frequently in England and Europe to publicise his work in cities such as London and Paris. He also edited and published compilations of his work (some of which are still in print today), which greatly influenced visual artists and the developing fields of scientific and industrial photography. He retired to his native England permanently in 1894. In 1904, the year of his death, the Kingston Museum opened in his hometown, and continues to house a substantial collection of his works in a dedicated gallery.- Emile Gaboriau has been described both as the father of the detective novel and the Edgar Allan Poe of France. His fictional detective, Monsieur Lecoq, is thought to have been based on the "Mémoires" (1828-29) of Eugène-François Vidocq, a reformed petty criminal who helped establish the Police de Sûreté in Paris. Lecoq is considered a precursor of Sherlock Holmes. Gaboriau wrote 21 novels altogether.
- Music Department
- Writer
- Composer
In 1856 Moussorgsky joined the Russian army where he met the piano player and composer 'Balakirev' who taught him composition. As he could not finish his studies in music, Moussorgsky did not know all stylistic means of composition perfectly and thus had to follow his instinct in his works becoming the pathmaker of the musical impressionism as well as expressionism: He was the first to compose realistic pictures, e.g. "Pictures at an Exhibition". Having no success during his lifetime Moussorgsky spent all of his fortune ending up a poor man addicted to alcohol.- Frederick Warde was born in England in 1851, and became a popular Shakespearean actor in the 1870s in New York. By the 1910s his general popularity was in decline, though he was still considered a leading authority on Shakespearean acting. He appeared in Richard III (1912) at age 61 and often performed live in the theater where the film was being shown. Warde would lecture on the topic of William Shakespeare and deliver monologues and recitations between reels of the film.
- H.H. Asquith, considered the founder of the British welfare state, was the prime minister of the United Kingdom who led the British Empire into the monumental debacle that was World War I.
The son of a cloth merchant, Henry Herbert Asquith was born in Morley, Leeds, West Yorkshire, England and attended Balliol College, Oxford, Oxfordshire, England. After graduation he became a barrister and was called to the bar in 1876. He married Helen Kelsall Melland, the daughter of a Manchester physician, in 1877. By the early 1880s he had become financially well-off from his law practice, enough so to consider politics (members of Parliament were not paid a real salary until the 1970s). He was first elected to Parliament in 1886, standing as the Liberal candidate for East Fife, Scotland.
His first wife gave him four sons and one daughter before dying from typhoid in 1891. He remarried in 1894, taking Margot Tennant, the daughter of Sir Charles Tennant, 1st Baronet, as his second wife. She bore several children, but only a son and daughter survived into adulthood. Asquith was called Herbert by his family, but his second wife called him Henry, and those who called him by his Christian name made the switch. However, in public he was addressed only as H.H. Asquith.
In 1892 he became Home Secretary during William Gladstone's last government (as Home Secretary Asquith signed the arrest order for Oscar Wilde, who was eventually incarcerated for lewd behavior). Three years after the Liberals went out of power in 1895, he was offered the party leadership but turned it down. After the Liberals' landslide victory in the 1906 general election, he became Chancellor of the Exchequer under Campbell Bannerman, a post in which he proved a stalwart proponent of free trade. Bannerman resigned the premiership due to illness in April 1908 and Asquith succeeded him, becoming the first member of the professional middle class to serve as Prime Minister.
His first government launched a guns-and-butter legislative programme, building up the British Navy in an arms race with Germany while introducing social welfare programmes. Asquith can be considered the father of the British welfare state, as his government introduced government pensions in 1908. The programme was fiercely resisted by the Tories, which provoked a constitutional crisis in 1909 when the Conservative majority in the House of Lords rejected the government's "People's Budget." Traditionally finance was the province of the House of Commons, and the resulting constitutional crisis forced a general election in January 1910. Though the Liberals were returned to government with a majority, their numbers in the Commons were much reduced, and the crisis continued.
King Edward VII consented to filling the House of Lords with freshly-minted Liberal peers, who would override the Lords' veto, if Asquith agreed to hold another general election, after which he would act if the impasse continued. However, Edward VII died in May 1910, before the second general election. Asquith had to use his considerable powers of persuasion to get Edward's successor, King George V, to agree to the plan. The new king was hesitant, as packing the Lords would undermine the power of the hereditary aristocracy. Before the December 1910 general election (the last held for eight years), Asquith's persuasion paid off, and George V agreed to pack the House of Lords. The Liberals won their second election of 1910, though the balance of power in the government rested with peers from Ireland, who demanded a Home Rule bill as the price of support for Asquith's third government.
The Parliament Act of 1911 circumscribed the legislative power of the House of Lords, as the upper chamber of Parliament was limited to delaying, but not defeating outright, any bill passed by the House of Commons. Asquith paid off the Irish block with the Third Irish Home Rule Bill, which achieved Royal Assent in late 1914, though implementation of the law was suspended for the duration of World War I, which the UK had become involved in due to a spider web of treaties. The Irish question remained a tinderbox, and while civil war in Ireland over the fate of Ulster was averted in 1914 by the outbreak of the war in Europe, simmering tensions would lead to the Easter Rebellion of 1916, which would prove to be one of the factors that contributed to Asquith's loss of power. The other was the war.
In May 1915 the Cabinet split over a scandal involving the dearth of munitions available at the front. Asquith ultimately was held responsible for the shortcomings in British war production. The "Shell Crisis" underscored the need for the British economy to be put on a wartime footing. Responding to the discord, Asquith formed a new government, creating a national coalition that included members of the Opposition (though an election should have been held in 1915, elections were suspended for the duration of the war). David Lloyd George, the most dynamic of the Liberal ministers from the old cabinet, was made minister of munitions.
The new coalition government did nothing to bolster Asquith's premiership. Both Liberals and Tories criticized his performance over the conduct of the war and assigned him some of the blame for the failed offensives at the Somme (in which Asquith's eldest son Raymond died) and Gallipoli (which led to the resignation of Winston Churchill, then a Liberal MP, as First Sea Lord). He was also blamed for his handling of the armed Easter Rebellion of Irish Catholics in Dublin in April 1916 and the resulting civil war. The Machiavellian Lloyd George undermined Asquith by splitting the Liberal Party into pro- and anti-Asquith factions. The result was that Asquith resigned as prime minister on December 5, 1916, and was succeeded by Lloyd George.
After resigning, Asquith continued in his post as Liberal Party leader, even after losing his seat in the 1918 elections. He returned to the House of Commons in a 1920 by-election and played a key role in helping the Labour Party form a minority in 1924, which gave Ramsay MacDonald his first--though short-lived--premiership.
The minority Labour government fell in 1924, and in the subsequent election won by the Tories, Asquith lost his seat in the Commons. He was raised to the hereditary peerage as Viscount Asquith, of Morley in the West Riding of the County of York, and Earl of Oxford and Asquith in 1925. Asquith moved over to the House of Lords and finally resigned the Liberal Party leadership in 1926. He died in 1928.
Violet Bonham Carter (maiden name Violet Asquith), Asquith's only daughter by his first wife, was a successful writer who was made a Life Peeress in her own right (she is the grandmother of Oscar-nominated actress Helena Bonham Carter). His son Cyril became a Law Lord, and two other sons married well, one being the poet Herbert Asquith. His two children by Margot were Elizabeth (later Princess Antoine Bibesco), a writer, and Anthony Asquith, a well-regarded film director. - Actor
- Director
- Writer
Born in London, England, in 1853, prolific actor/director (300+ credits) Tom Ricketts is mostly forgotten today, but his chief claim to fame is that he directed the first motion picture shot in Hollywood.
Ricketts began his show-business career as an actor on the London stage, and gained a reputation as one of the best Shakespearean actors of his day. Ricketts never seemed to rest, working up until a few days before his death in 1939. He left for work one day with a bad cold, which quickly developed into pneumonia. His health went downhill rapidly and he died only a few days later. His wife, the actress Josephine Ditt (aka Josephine Ditt), was not notified of his death at the time; she was still suffering from the effects of a stroke that she had in December of 1938.- Novelist and dramatist Hall Caine, though largely forgotten now, was a hugely popular writer in the late Victorian and Edwardian eras. Born Thomas Henry Hall Caine on May 14, 1853, in Runcorn, Cheshire, England, his father was a Manx Man who moved to Liverpool, where he apprenticed as a ship's smith. After Hall's birth (he hated the name Thomas and never used it, even after he was knighted), the family moved back to Liverpool, where young Hall grew up. Hall Caine frequently took many trips to visit the Caine family on the Isle of Man.
He was apprenticed to an architect and surveyor and plied his trade as a surveyor while self-educating himself through wide reading. He became a lecturer and theatrical critic, which introduced him to some influential people such as actor Sir Henry Irving and author Bram Stoker, who dedicated Dracula (1931) to him. He became the secretary, factotum and nurse to Dante Gabriel Rossetti in the last years of the great poet's life.
Aside from a memoir of Rossetti that sold well, Caine's early endeavors in serious literature met with little success. However, when he abandoned literary criticism for romantic fiction (in the Walter Scott vein), he became popular. "Shadow of a Crime", an 1885 novel featuring a love triangle, was a best-seller. In 1887 he published a critical book about Samuel Taylor Coleridge that failed, but his return to fiction that same year with The Deemster (1917), a romance set in the Isle of Man, was a hit (a deemster is a judge on the Isle of Man).
In all, he published 15 romantic novels over 40 years. Many had themes influenced by his Christian socialist political sympathies. His popularity was immense, and his 1897 novel "The Christian" (later made into a film, The Christian (1915)) was the first novel to sell over a million copies in the United Kingdom. In August 1902, when King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra visited the Isle of Man, Caine was invited on board the royal yacht as the royal couple toured the island (the queen was a fan). He was a major celebrity in his own right, as well as a celebrated author.
During World War One he wrote propaganda articles urging the United States to join the fight against Germany and her allies. He declined a baronetcy in 1917 but accepted a knighthood, insisting he be styled Sir Caine Hall. After the Great War his popularity began to decline, as his style was considered old-fashioned. His return to fiction in 1921 with "The Master of Man: The Story of a Sin", another romance set in the Isle of Man, did not reach the level of popular success he was accustomed to and was poorly received by critics. He was derided as Victorian.
Many of his novels were made into movies during the silent era. "The Manxman" was turned into The Manxman (1929), directed by Alfred Hitchcock. The last film made from a Hall Caine property was The Bondman (1929), also released in 1929. Such was the decline of his reputation and popularity that no sound film has ever been made from his works.
Caine is little remembered today, as his novels are considered badly written; the characterizations are fuzzy and one plot is much like the other. In 1931 G.K. Chesterton wrote his literary epitaph: "Bad story writing is not a crime. Mr. Hall Caine walks the streets openly, and cannot be put in prison for an anticlimax."
He died on August 31, 1931, at the age of 78, the same year that Chesterton dismissed him as a bad writer. He was the father of Sir Derwent Hall Caine, 1st Baronet (1891-1971), actor, publisher and Labour politician. - Writer
- Actor
Handsome American actor, playwright and stage director/producer William Gillette was born in Hartford, CT, in 1853. His father Francis was a former United States Senator and crusader for women's suffrage and the abolition of slavery; his mother Elisabeth Daggett Hooker is a descendant of Rev. Thomas Hooker, who either wrote or inspired the first written constitution in history to form a government.
In 1873 William left Hartford to begin his apprenticeship as an actor, briefly working for a stock theatre company in New Orleans and then returning to New England. He made his debut at the Globe Theatre in Boston with Mark Twain's play "The Guilded Age" in 1875. His first major Civil War drama, "Hold by the Enemy", was a major step forward to modern theatre in that it abandoned many crude devices of Victorian melodrama and introduced realism into the sets, props, costumes, sound effects and performances; it was a critical and commercial success in America and Britain.
Gillette is probably best remembered, however, as the first actor to be universally acclaimed for portraying Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's famed detective Sherlock Holmes, playing the role first on stage in 1899 and continuing for more than 35 years. He also wrote many stage versions from Doyle's Sherlock Holmes novels and even starred in the film version, Sherlock Holmes (1916), directed by Arthur Berthelet for the Essanay Film Co. He had previously appeared in two other films, his debut being in J.P. McGowan's The Battle at Fort Laramie (1913) and the following year he played support as Jack Lane in The Delayed Special (1914), both of which starred Helen Holmes and were made for the Kalem Film Co. Gillette also became popular on radio, performing the first radio serial version of Sherlock Holmes in 1930 and in 1935. His last stage appearance was in Austin Strong's "Three Wise Fools" in 1936. He wrote 13 original plays, seven adaptations and some collaborations, encompassing farce, melodrama and novel adaptation. He also wrote two pieces based on the US Civil War, "Held by the Ememy" and "Secret Service", which were highly acclaimed. In 1882 he married Helen Nichols, who died in 1888 from peritonitis; he never remarried.
Gillette died from pulmonary hemorrhage in Connecticut in 1937 at age 83.- Writer
- Additional Crew
- Soundtrack
A gifted poet, playwright and wit, Oscar Wilde was a phenomenon in 19th-century England. He was illustrious for preaching the importance of style in life and art, and of attacking Victorian narrow-mindedness.
Wilde was born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1854. He studied at Trinity College in Dublin before leaving the country to study at Oxford University in England when he was in his early 20s. His prodigious literary talent was recognized when he received the Newdegate Prize for his outstanding poem "Ravenna". After leaving college his first volume of poetry, "Patience", was published in 1881, followed by a play, "The Duchess of Padua", two years later. It was around this time that Wilde sparked a sensation.
On his arrival to America he stirred the nation with his flamboyant personality: wearing long silk stockings--an unusual mode of dress--long, flowing hair that gave the impression to many of an effeminate and a general air of wittiness, sophistication and eccentricity. He was an instant celebrity, but his works did not find recognition until the publication of "The Happy Prince and Other Tales" in 1888. His other noted work was his only novel, was "The Picture of Dorian Gray" (1890), which caused controversy as the book evidently attacked the hypocrisy of England. It was later used as incriminating evidence at Wilde's trial, on the basis of its obvious homosexual content.
Wilde was a married man with children, but his private life was as a homosexual. He had an affair with a young snobbish aristocrat named Lord Alfred Douglas. Douglas' father, the Marquess of Queensberry, did not approve of his son's relationship with the distinguished writer, and when he accused Wilde of sodomy, Wilde sued the Marquess in court. However, his case was dismissed when his homosexuality--which at the time was outlawed in England--was exposed. He was sentenced to two years hard labor in prison. On his release he was a penniless, dejected man and soon died in Paris. He was 46.
Wilde is immortalized through his works, and the stories he wrote for children, such as "The Happy Prince" and "The Selfish Giant", are still vibrant in the imagination of the public, especially "The Picture of Dorian Gray", the story of a young handsome man who sells his soul to a picture to have eternal youth and beauty, only to face the hideousness of his own portrait as it ages, which entails his evil nature and degradation. The book has been interpreted on stage, films and television.- Additional Crew
- Producer
Many people today know the names of George M. Cohan and Florenz Ziegfeld Jr., but Charles Frohman, though lesser known, reigned supreme in the theatrical world for over a generation. From a young age Frohman's heart and soul belonged in the theatre. His lower-middle-class family moved from Sandusky, Ohio, to New York City in 1874 and he landed a job as a night clerk for the New York Graphic. In 1876 the paper sent him to Philadelphia to expand its circulation during the Centennial Exposition, and it was there he first demonstrated his entrepreneurial talents by organizing newsboys to more efficiently exploit the market. He then moved over briefly to the New York Tribune and moonlighted by selling theatre tickets at night, soaking in everything he could learn about the theatrical business. In 1880, at the age of 20 with 50 cents to his name after paying for a seat for the hit play "Shenandoah", he successfully schmoozed its producers into selling him its road-show rights. From this point onward there was no stopping Charles Frohman in his desire to conquer the entertainment business, which at the time was headquartered in New York City with the Broadway theater district its nerve center.
He began by leasing an unprofitable house named Proctor's Theatre and gradually created a stock production company. In the early 1890s he built his own theatre, the Empire. He, younger brother Gustave Frohman and older brother Daniel Frohman became the leading theatre impresarios of the Gilded Age. By the turn of the century Charles Frohman was the #1 theatrical producer in the world. He solidified his position by creating a theatrical monopoly with a handful of Broadway and regional theatre owners, known as the Theatrical Syndicate, which would come to dominate virtually every aspect of theatrical production through its proprietary booking network. His syndicate controlled not only first-run and revival Broadway shows, but dozens of road-show companies that continuously traversed the US and Canada, in addition to a number of productions that almost always illuminated London and Paris.
Despite his titular status within his company, however, Frohman was always detail-oriented. He believed that a large degree of his success was due to his actors and paid an unusual amount of attention to their development (or non-development), billing, promotion, costumes, etc., down to the tiniest booking details. In brief, he was a hands-on producer and he held a seemingly hypnotic hold over his troupes (no less a legend than Ethel Barrymore idolized him). He also worked extensively in London and formed a separate stage company to fill his five leased theatres there. By the outbreak of World War I, he could claim to have produced over 700 plays and employed a staff that exceeded 1,000 on both sides of the Atlantic.
Back in the States he owned or leased six theatres on Broadway and some 200 across the country, and had dozens of road-show companies traversing the nation by rail at any given time. Oddly, he rarely attended opening nights at any of his theatres, preferring to keep tabs on audience reactions by employing dozens of runners who kept him informed at intermissions and final curtains. Few of his business associates knew him intimately; he was shy and steadfastly avoided socializing, preferring to remain ensconced inside his suite at the Knickerbocker Hotel whenever in New York City. By modern definition, Frohman would be considered moderately neurotic and perhaps mildly obsessive-compulsive. He was occasionally practically agoraphobic, had an intense fear of darkness and rigidly held to theatrical superstitions, all rolled into a shroud of secrecy surrounding his private life (accused of being a homosexual by his detractors, he was also rumored to be secretly married to Maude Adams, a stage actress who would be termed a "superstar" today). In business Frohman was considered cold and calculating, often ruthlessly crushing competitors to the extent that lesser producers only survived on Broadway because he let them. He suffered a debilitating fall while at his home in White Plains, New York, in 1912 and the resulting arthritis proved so painful that he required use of a cane. Back in the Knickerbocker Hotel, Frohman became a virtual invalid.
In 1915 he opted to make a European trip to check on the crop of productions in London with playwright Charles Klein and his valet. Unfortunately he chose passage on the Lusitania, then the fastest ship to London. His friends and associates were aghast at his decision and tried to dissuade him from making the voyage. The German Embassy had issued a proclamation declaring the Lusitania a military target; Frohman reacted by dictating his company's entire 1916 season in advance and dismissed their fears for his safety, telling his friend Al Hayman, "If you want to write to me, just address the letter care of the German Submarine U-4." By eyewitness accounts, Frohman remained characteristically calm after the torpedoing of the ship, dismissing offers of assistance and offering his life belt to a female passenger. Among his last reported words was a line from J.M. Barrie's "Peter Pan": "Why fear death? It is the most beautiful adventure in life."
Frohman's body was recovered and arrived in New York on May 24, 1915. He was given two funerals (John Barrymore was one of the pallbearers), with simultaneous memorial services across the US and in London. Maude Adams retired from acting upon his death. By the following year, Frohman's all-powerful theatrical syndicate would be broken by the Shubert Brothers.- Josephine Crowell was a Canadian-born character actress. She appeared in vaudeville as early as 1879. On screen, she is best remembered for her dramatic portrayal of the mother in D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915), her comedic performances in Harold Lloyd's Speedy (1928) and Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy's Wrong Again (1929). She also played a succession of queens and princesses in such films as Main Street (1923), Mantrap (1926), The King of Kings (1927) and The Man Who Laughs (1928).
- Considered to be the first American serial killer and possibly the most prolific, he was also a con-man and bigamist. He was a doctor who studied medicine at Ann Arbor, MI. He then moved to New York where he practiced briefly. His first brush with the law occurred there when some corpses were found in his possession. He fled to Chicago where he worked for a drug company. The owner mysteriously disappeared and he became the owner. Over the next few years several people who crossed his path also mysteriously disappeared. In 1891 he began construction of a hotel at the corner of 63rd St. in Chicago. It was constructed by several builders over time and had a labyrinthine network of passages that would become his "torture chambers". It was during the Chicago World Fair of 1893 that he did most of his killings when his victims checked into his hotel. They were mainly young attractive women. Holmes would drug them, have sex with their bodies and then drop them down a chute into a gas chamber. There he would watch through a glass panel as they slowly choked to death. Then he would dissect their bodies and dispose of them in acid baths, furnaces or by using quicklime. However, it was because of insurance fraud in Texas that he was brought to the attention of the authorities again. Detective Geyer followed his trail through Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts. The bodies of the Pietzel family were found in an Indianapolis boarding house and Holmes was arrested. On 11/30/1895 he received the death sentence. Holmes wrote in his memoirs that he had killed 27 people; however, when he was taken to the gallows he retracted his confession saying that he had done it just for a publicity stunt. Over 200 bodies were found in his Chicago death house, known as "'Holmes' Torture Castle".
- The son of a sea captain, Theodore Roberts was a veteran stage actor, making his first appearance in 1880. Often referred to as the "Grand Duke of Hollywood," Roberts was a regular on the Cecil B. DeMille team and appeared in 23 of DeMille's films. He is best remembered for his role as Moses in DeMille's The Ten Commandments (1923). A well-known and well-loved actor, his funeral in Westlake Park (he died from uremic poisoning) was attended by nearly 2,000 people. However, Roberts felt so much bitterness in his heart for his immediate relatives that he bequeathed his estate to a nephew (a commercial illustrator) in New York. The estate was valued at nearly $20,000, including a yacht valued at $10,000. Several of Roberts' personal items were left to his friends William C. de Mille and his brother Cecil. Roberts claimed that during the worst times of his life, no one in his family offered a word of sympathy or any help at all. His only request was that he be laid to rest next to his beloved wife Florence Smythe, who passed away in 1925.
- Sir Gilbert Parker--the popular Canadian novelist, short-story writer and poet who rose from backwoods obscurity to the seats of the mighty in the British Empire--was born on November 23, 1862, in Camden East, Addington, Ontario, to Royal Army Capt. J. Parker and his wife. After attending school in Ottawa and matriculating at Toronto's Trinity University, Parker moved to Australia in 1886, serving as an associate editor on the Sydney Morning Herald newspaper. His travels took him throughout the Pacific. Subsequently, after his return to Canada, he extensively journeyed through northern Canada
Parker was a contemporary of the poet and short story writer Sir Charles G.D. Roberts, the first writer to express the new nationalism that resulted from the confederation of Britain's North American provinces into Canada in 1867. Roberts' work inspired a nationalist school of Canadian poets in the late 19th century.
Parker's works typically dealt with Canadian history, and later with England and the British Empire. Moving to England in 1889, he made his literary reputation with romantic novels and short stories "aboot" Canada, and with historical novels such as his 1896 depiction of the court of King Louis XV, "The Seats of the Mighty" (made into a film in 1914, The Seats of the Mighty (1914), starring Lionel Barrymore)). His finest works deal with French-Canadian life and history, such as "Pierre and His People" (1892) (dramatized on Broadway by Edgar Selwyn, and filmed in 1914 as Pierre of the Plains (1914), remade in 1942 as Pierre of the Plains (1942))). Though he wrote of England and the Empire, starting in 1898 with "The Battle of the Strong," it is for his Canadian stories that he is still remembered into the 21st century, due to their high quality, fine descriptions and gripping drama. The short story collection published in 1900, "The Lane that had no Turning," contains some of his finest work, including the title story.
In 1895 Parker married a wealthy American heiress of New York's Van Tine family. His politics were strongly imperial, and in 1900 he was elected to Parliament as a Conservative member for Gravesend on the Unionist ticket. Parker was knighted in 1902, and although he still kept writing, most of his energies became absorbed by politics. A champion of Imperial Preference Trade and Tariff Reform, his power in the House of Commons began to wax, and by 1910 he was a figure to be reckoned with. He was, according to political observers, one of the most powerful Unionist politicians not serving in the government. He would serve a total of 18 years in Parliament, being re-elected in 1906 and again in 1910.
The quality of his literary output suffered from devoting so much energy to politics, but he was influential by investing the Imperialist movement with a great deal of enthusiasm. Parker cracked the top 10 best sellers list in the U.S. after becoming an M.P., with "The Weavers", which ranked #2 in 1907 and #10 in 1908, and "The Judgement House," which made it to #7 in 1913. His contemporaries on the list included Winston Churchill (the American writer, not the English politician-writer who became Prime Minister in 1940), Edna Ferber and Booth Tarkington.
Sir Gilbert Parker died in his native Canada, of a heart attack, on September 6, 1932, in London, Ontario. - Producer
- Director
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Auguste Lumière was a French engineer, industrialist, biologist, and illusionist, born in Besançon, France. He attended the Martinière Technical School and worked as a manager at the photographic company of his father, Antoine Lumière. Although it is his brother Louis Lumière who is generally acclaimed as the "father of the cinema", Auguste also made a major contribution towards the development of the medium, first by helping with the invention and construction of the cinematographe (the world's first camera and projection mechanism), and second by appearing as a subject in many of the films shot by Louis. Along with his brother, he is also credited with giving the world's first public film screening on December 28, 1895. However, according to Louis, Auguste lost interest in the cinematographe as soon as construction had been completed, and thereafter showed no further interest in the film medium. After his work on the cinematograph he began focusing on the biomedical field, becoming a pioneer in the use of X-rays to examine fractures. He also contributed to innovations in military aircraft, producing a catalytic heater to allow cold-weather engine starts.- Writer
- Cinematographer
Maurice Leblanc was a prolific French author born in Rouen on November 11, 1864. He had studied law, but abandoned that for a career in writing. He initially wrote for various periodicals, with "Une Femme" being his first published work in 1887. He gained fame in France and abroad after starting his Arsène Lupin series of novels. Lupin was a gentleman-thief who was a master of disguise and made his first appearance in 1905 in "L'arrestation d'Arséne Lupin". In 1908 LeBlanc pitted Lupin against Sherlock Holmes in "Arsène Lupin Versus Holmlock Shears". Leblanc would eventually produce 20 volumes worth of Lupin's adventures. On November 6, 1941, Leblanc died in Perpignan, France, at the age of 76.- Producer
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The roots of Universal Pictures can rightfully be traced back to 1906 when Carl Laemmle returned home to Chicago after a stint as a bookkeeper in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, and opened up a chain of nickelodeons. This in turn led to the ambitious 39-year-old organizing a film exchange network he boldly called the Laemmle Film Service, which expanded west and north into Canada. Although he was an original member of the Edison Patents Company, he bristled at the idea of paying royalties to move to the next level: film production. Laemmle founded IMP (Independent Motion Picture Company) in New York in 1909 and for the next three years produced a number of economical multi-reel films while Edison's agents did their best to shut him down. Thomas Edison's General Film Company (known as "The Trust") filed incessant claims of patent infringement on those companies that refused to pay. Many of these independents (which included such future film moguls as Adolph Zukor and Jesse L. Lasky) pulled up stakes and left for California. As for Laemmle, he doggedly fought 289 legal actions brought about by GFC from 1909-12 and was ultimately victorious. IMP reformed in 1912 as Universal, filming two final productions in New York, The Dawn of Netta (1912) and a one-reeler, The Nurse (1912), before relocating his company to Los Angeles. From 1912-14 Universal operated two California studios, one in Hollywood and the Universal "Oak Crest Ranch" in the San Fernando Valley. The two operations were move to the new Universal City ("Taylor Ranch") in 1914 For a short time in 1912, the New York Film Company battled with Universal over the ownership of the Bison Motion Picture properties at Evendale and Santa Monica. New York Film Company wins the right to withdraw from Universal. Universal/Bison Evendale plant was returned to the New York Film Company. Universal was given the rights to trade names "Bison" and 101 Bison" Universal/Bison brand began production at the Providencia Ranch ( Universal Oak Crest ranch- the first Universal City) in 1912.
Universal began newsreel production in 1913 under Jack Cohn. In 1914 Laemmle acquired the Taylor Ranch on the north side of the Hollywood Hills and set about building Universal City. Damon and Pythias (1914) was Universal's first film completed there, just prior to the studio's official opening in March 1915 and, until 1925, Universal City would be the largest and most prolific studio in the world (eventually supplanted by MGM soon after its inception). Organized studio tours began in 1915 (they were discontinued in 1928 with the arrival of talkies, but resumed in 1964), which proved highly profitable. Laemmle, lacking a theater network, instituted a three-tiered branding system to market Universal's releases: Red Feather (low-budget), Bluebird (mainstream/medium budget) and Jewell (prestige releases, often roadshow attractions commanding premium prices). Heavy emphasis was placed on one-, two- and three-reel productions.
Universal became known as the most paternalistic of all the Hollywood studios. Virtually all of "Uncle" Carl's relatives (including his son Carl Laemmle Jr. and his vastly more talented nephew, William Wyler, were employed there). The studio enjoyed enormous hits during the 1920s, especially Lon Chaney's The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923) and The Phantom of the Opera (1925) before the actor was lured away to MGM. Lacking a theater network, Universal concentrated on independent rural theatrical houses, offering affordable exhibitor's packages which allowed them to change bills numerous times per week. This marketing strategy largely concentrated on product that would appeal to rural theaters through 1930. During the 1920s Europe also became a major source of revenue, with Universal actively involved in co-productions overseas. Sound productions became the norm by 1929 and Universal responded by increasing the number of quality productions, scoring its first Academy Award for Best Picture with All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) the following year. The studio became famous for popularizing the monster craze, beginning with Dracula (1931), that remained strong into 1935. Unfortunately, the studio's other product was proving less successful as the ravages of the Depression took hold. Laemmle's emphasis on quality productions misfired in the mid-'30s and he was forced to take an unfavorable $750,000 loan from Standard Capital which, after cost overruns on the production of Show Boat (1936), resulted in his ouster from the studio. He was forcibly retired from the movie industry in 1936 and sold Universal to Standard Capital Company, headed by Charles R. Rogers, who instituted drastic cost-cutting measures that coincided with the signing of Deanna Durbin, whose popularity virtually single-handedly saved the studio from financial disaster from 1937-40, until other popular stars (notably the comedy team of Bud Abbott and Lou Costello) were added to the studio's roster by a later management team headed by J. Cheever Cowdin. Universal was also--briefly--home to displaced low-budget veteran producers Trem Carr and W. Ray Johnston, who worked there in 1936 while reforming Monogram Pictures after breaking off from an unhappy association with Republic Pictures.
While many contemporary observers disliked Rogers' handling of the so-called "New" Universal, the undeniable fact is that he saved the studio at a critical point in its history. Carl Laemmle died in 1939 of a heart attack in Los Angeles at age 72. As with most Hollywood studios, production boomed during WW2, and by 1945 the studio was averaging a release of one feature film per week. Universal merged with International Pictures, an independent studio headed by ex-20th Century-Fox executives William Goetz and Leo Spitz in 1946 and renamed Universal-International Pictures (reverted to Universal in 1963). Since the company had consciously avoided building a proprietary theater chain it was unaffected by the 1949 Supreme Court theater anti-trust decision. Indeed, the studio was actually better positioned than the other majors as it's revenue stream continued unabated. Universal was purchased by and merged with Decca Records in 1952.
While not a pioneer in television production (most majors, with the notable exception of Columbia, initially stonewalled it), the medium became a huge part of Universal City in the late 1950s. In 1962 Universal was purchased by and merged with The Music Corporation of America (MCA) and became MCA Universal. MCA's television production company, Revue Televsion Productions with its Leave It to Beaver (1957) unit, would relocate to the sprawling Universal lot. Matsushita Electrical Industrial Co. purchased MCA in 1991. The Seagram Co. purchased MCA in 1995 and MCA Universal was renamed Universal Studios. In 1998 Universal purchased the USA television network. The company merged with a French global media company, Vivendi Media Group, and became Vivendi Universal in 2000. In April 2004 Vivendi Universal was purchased by and merged with the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) and became NBC Universal.- Producer
- Cinematographer
Herman Casler was co-founder of the partnership called the KMCD Syndicate, along with William K.L. Dickson, Elias Koopman and Harry Marvin, which was eventually incorporated into the American Mutoscope Company in 1895. After Dickson, who was part of Thomas A. Edison's company, left there, Casler, though the American Mutoscope Company, invented and marketed the "Mutoscope", which was a nickelodeon machine that viewed short films through flip-cards, unlike Edison's Kinetograph machine, in which films were viewed through actual 35mm film. The Mutoscope was ready for showing in 1894, be in competition with Edison's Kinetograph. In June of 1895, the prototype Mutoscope was completed, which became as popular in Nickeliodeon theaters as the Kinetograph. However, projected films were being tested and going to be exhibited. Casler then designed the Biograph Projector which was driven by an electric motor, using a wide-gauge film. The wide gauge film was primarily used to avoid conflicts with Edison's patents on motion picture film. the company name was changed to American Mutoscope & Biograph[us] in 1899. Both the Mutoscope and Biograph had great success. It was also Casler's patents for security that funded the international expansion in the 1890s. Like many great early film pioneers, in later years Casler faded into obscurity and died in 1939.- Actor
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A noted stage actor at the turn of the 20th century, Robert Edeson began his film career working with Cecil B. DeMille on The Call of the North (1914), then moved on to Vitagraph where he remained for the rest of the teens. In the 1920s he returned to work for De Mille, playing the man-of-the-world type roles. Married to actress Mary Newcomb, Edeson died of heart failure.- Director
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Edgar Lewis began his career as a stage actor and entered the film industry in 1911 as an actor, making his directorial debut two years later. Specializing in action-adventure films and westerns, he directed dozens of pictures between 1913 and 1930, when he left directing and returned to his first love, acting. Most of his films during the sound era were in bit parts or uncredited roles. He appeared in his final film, Riding Wild (1935), in 1935 and retired. He died in Los Angeles in 1938.- Additional Crew
- Producer
Lewis J. Selznick, one of the pioneers of studio film production and the father of Oscar-winning Gone with the Wind (1939) producer David O. Selznick, was born Lewis Zeleznik in Kiev, Ukraine, Russian Empire, into a poor Jewish family with 18 children. Selznick migrated to London at the age of 12, and then to the US, eventually winding up as a small-time jeweler in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Fate intervened in Selznick's life in the guise of John P. Harris, who opened up the first dedicated cinema in Pittsburgh in 1905 (Pennsylvania officials claim that Harris' nickelodeon was the country's first, but there were dedicated theaters in the US for at least three years before Harris' theater--a dedicated cinema had opened in Los Angeles in 1902). Harris called his new theater, which he opened with a 20-minute, one-reel film from Lumiere, a "nickel-odeon," even though his admission price was ten cents ("odeon" is the Greek word for "theater," and "melodeon" had been a name given to music halls), which raises doubts over his claim to have invented the word, as well as the concept. Before the nickelodeon, movies had been shown in makeshift auditoriums and between variety acts in vaudeville houses as "chasers"--they were shown in order to chase lingering patrons out of the theaters to make room for paying customers for the next show. Two merchants with shops near Harris' nickelodeon became intrigued with the potential of the new industry--Harry Warner and Selznick. Both would go on to be the founders of major studios.
"Time" magazine, in a story about his son David in its July 1, 1935 issue, claimed that Lewis became a producer by walking into the headquarters of Universal Film Manufacturing in 1917, commandeering an abandoned desk and putting a sign labeled "General Manager" over it. The truth may be more mundane, but it is nonetheless fascinating and elucidates the evolution of the motion picture industry.
Selznick became general manager of the East Coast Universal Film Exchange, and eventually started Equitable Pictures with financial backing from Chicago mail-order magnate Arthur Spiegel and a Wall Street investment firm. In a familiar pattern of that time, Selznick created Equitable with the aim of raiding Vitagraph for Clara Kimball Young, a huge draw at the box office. Selznick was one of the investors behind World Pictures, headquartered in Ft. Lee, NJ, the first American movie capital. World had been created in 1914 to import foreign-made features and to distribute the movies of several newly established feature-film companies, including Selznick's Equitable Pictures. Selznick then merged his company with Shubert Pictures, which was the movie production arm of Shubert Theatrical Co., and Peerless Pictures, the movie production company created by motion picture raw film stock magnate Jules Brulatour.
World Pictures, now under the effective control of Selznick, released movies produced by Equitable, Peerless and Shubert Pictures, as well as those produced by independent companies, including the California Motion Picture Corp. of San Francisco. Movie production was centered at the Peerless Studio in Fort Lee, which had been built by Brulatour in 1914, and at the Paragon Studio, which was built in 1916. Gradually World Pictures began to dominate the companies whose movies it distributed. World Film Corp. was incorporated in February 1915, with Arthur Spiegel as president and Selznick as vice president and general manager.
"Photoplay" Magazine reported in 1915 that World Film was a large feature film company, both producing and distributing movies through its own exchanges. Its market capitalization totaled $2 million in stock--with a per-share value of $5.00--of which approximately $1.5 million was outstanding. For the fiscal year ending June 27, 1915, World Film reported a net profit of $329,000, equivalent to return of a little over 20% on the outstanding stock. At the time of the Photoplay article World Film had yet to pay a dividend, and its stock was active on the New York Curb Market at prices both above and below its par value.
World Film's market staples were traditional romances, comedies and dramas, starring the likes of Lillian Russell, Alice Brady, Marie Dressler and Lew Fields. Maurice Tourneur, who came over from Éclair America, proved to be World's top filmmaker. Other World Film employees who went on to greater careers included Josef von Sternberg, who worked as a film cutter, and Frances Marion, the future Oscar-winning screenwriter. Famed Broadway caricaturist Al Hirschfeld was appointed head of the art department by Selznick when he was still in his teens.
Lewis Selznick was ousted as general manager of World Film in 1916. Three years later he left World, taking Clara Kimball Young with him, and formed his own production company, the Clara Kimball Young Film Corp. The company leased studios from the Solax Co., which had been founded in Fort Lee by 'Alice Guy Blache' and her husband, Herbert Blaché (Alice Blanche was not only one of the first women movie executives but one of the first women directors as well). Selznick's company also released movies produced by the Schenck brothers, Joseph M. Schenck and Nicholas Schenck, who were partners with theater-owner Marcus Loew in his chain of movie houses, as well as in the Palisades Amusement Park in the Fort Lee/Cliffside Park area.
The early days of the film studios saw a constant spate of mergers and acquisitions as the industry underwent consolidation, and individual moguls jockeyed for position. Samuel Goldfish was ousted from two companies he co-founded in the 1910s, Famous Players-Lasky and Goldwyn Pictures (from which he took his name, being forever known as independent producer Samuel Goldwyn). Selznick merged with Adolph Zukor's Famous Players Pictures in 1917, creating Select Pictures, later reorganized as Selznick Film Co. Selzlnick eventually bought out Zukor and merged his two companies into Selznick-Select, then acquired World Pictures' film exchanges, which he renamed Republic Distributing Corp. He shifted his operation to California, completing the move in 1920, where he again linked up with Zukor and Jesse L. Lasky's Paramount-Artcraft, the successor to Famous Players-Lasky.
Colorful and flamboyant, a quote of Selznick's became one of the most famous aphorisms about the motion picture industry: "There's no business in the world in which a man needs so little brains as in the movies." He also showed a wicked sense of humor. As a Jew growing up in Czarist Russia, a land famous for its anti-Semitic pogroms, Selznick suffered persecution before he emigrated to England. When Tsar Nicholas II was overthrown in the Bolshevik Revolution of November 1917, Selznick sent a cable to him: "When I was a poor boy in Kiev some of your policemen were not kind to me and my people stop I came to America and prospered stop Now hear with regret you are out of a job over there stop Feel no ill will what your policemen did so if you will come New York can give you fine position acting in pictures stop Salary no object stop Reply my expense stop Regards you and family".
Unlike most of the other moguls, Lewis J. Selznick didn't take the movie business too seriously. The other magnates were outraged by his cavalier attitude toward the industry and the moguls themselves. Among the immigrant businessmen who created Hollywood and the American motion picture industry, it was the cultured and introspective ones who failed. Selznick had a self-deprecating cynicism that eventually diluted his ambition. It was said in the early 1920s that Selznick would rather stay at home surrounded by his ojects d'art. Apparently, he eschewed schmoozing with other industry insiders at their favorite haunts, the track, the polo grounds, the skeet range, and the speakeasies. Lacking their tastes and world view, Selznick wound up distrusted by the other movie magnates.
When Lewis J. Selznick Production, Inc., became financially troubled during the production glut of 1923 that roiled the industry, he had no one to turn to. His company went bankrupt in 1923 due to overexpansion, done in by the machinations of a vengeful Zukor. He never produced another movie, or as he'd prefer it, his days as a "presenter" were through (Lewis J. Selznick Productions' pictures were opened with a title card that read: "Selznick Presents." The slogan "Selznick Pictures Make Happy Hours" was, by the end of the second decade of the new 20th century, the best-known slogan in the entertainment industry).
His son David learned the ropes as a young man at Lewis J. Selznick Productions. As an independent producer, David later surpassed Lewis J., winning back-to-back Oscars for "Gone with the Wind" and Rebecca (1940). After his father went bankrupt, David quit Columbia and moved to California to get back into the industry without any help from his father. getting a proofreader's job at MGM. Famous for his facility with words and his writing ability, David quickly worked his way up to story editor, then became an assistant producer in producer Harry Rapf's unit. He began a secret romance with Irene Mayer, daughter of MGM boss Louis B. Mayer, and he eventually decided to quit and take a lower-paying job with better prospects at Paramount.
When he became betrothed to Irene L.B. was skeptical due to Selznick's being a "traitor" by leaving MGM. Actually, he respected David for striking out on his own and avoiding charges of nepotism. Mayer's real objection, it seemed, was rooted in his hatred of David's dad, a renegade who had tried to horn in on the original Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (1925), claiming he had rights to the stage play. David apologized for his father, admitting it wasn't right for Lewis to have pulled such a con, and the two healed their rift, with David eventually working for his father-in-law after the death of Mayer's right-hand man Irving Thalberg (the news of the elevation of David to supervising producer at MGM was the source of the famous newspaper headline, "The Son-in-Law Also Rises.")
Lewis J. Selznick died on January 25, 1933, in Los Angeles, California. World Film and Lewis J. Selznick Productions Inc. no longer exist, and many of the films he produced are lost or forgotten, so his son David's output of great motion pictures remains Lewis J.'s Hollywood legacy. For it was at World Film Corp. that the banner "Quality Not Quantity" had first been unfurled.- Fannie Ward was a star of light comedies on Broadway and in vaudeville. Internationally famous, she was at the height of her career in the first decade of the 20th century. She debuted on Broadway at 19 in "Pippino" (1890). She went on to starring roles in "The Marriage of William Ashe", "Madam President" and "The Shop Girl". Although she was a good deal older than ideal for the role of the young spendthrift wife of a Wall Street tycoon, she made her screen debut in Cecil B. DeMille's production of The Cheat (1915). The film is a spectacular DeMille morality tale and features a shocking scene in which Ward's character is branded and nearly raped by a dapper but sinister Japanese ivory baron played by Sessue Hayakawa. She went on to star in several successful melodramas, the plots of most of which revolved around her near loss of virtue to a selection of nefarious characters. She was married to actor Jack Dean, who also appeared in at least 15 of her 26 films. Known as "The Youth Girl," she was continually cast in roles that were 20 to 30 years younger than her actual age. By the time she retired from the screen in 1920, she was just too old to carry it off anymore, and "The Youth Girl" sobriquet had become more of a joke than an honest tribute. After retiring from the screen, she opened a beauty palace in Paris called "The Fountain of Youth."
- Ellaline Terriss was a leading musical comedy star in the late Victorian Era, throughout the Edwardian Era, and into the Modern Era. She was the daughter of one famous actor, William Terriss (born William Lewin, in 1847; murdered by a disgruntled actor, in 1897), and the wife of an even more famous and accomplished one, Sir Seymour Hicks, whom she was married to, from 1893 until his death in 1949.
She was born Ellaline Lewin on April 13, 1871, in Stanley, the capital of the British colony of the Falkland Islands, when her father, then called William Lewin, was a sheep farmer. Lewin was an adventurous sort of chap, and had been a sailor and tea farmer, as well as an actor, before raising sheep in the South Atlantic. Eventually, he decided to give acting another chance, and returned to England with his family. He became a great success under the stage name "William Terriss." He was a swashbuckling type, nicknamed "Breezy Billy". He was murdered in 1897 as he was arriving to give a performance at the theater when his daughter was becoming a major star.
Ellaline made her debut in 1888 and was soon a critical and popular ingenue. She became a musical-comedy star in London in the 1890s, co-starring with Hicks in such productions as "The Shop Girl" (1894), "The Circus Girl" (1896) and "A Runaway Girl" (1898). In 1900 they appeared in the French farce "My Daughter-in-Law," on Broadway, Ellaline's only appearance on the Great White Way (Hicks had earlier appeared on Broadway in "The Shop Girl").
Hicks became an actor-impresario and, after the turn of the 20th century, began writing musical comedies and light comedies, in which he and his wife appeared. These efforts met with great success. With the earnings from his successful career, he built the Aldwych Theatre, in 1905, and the Seymour Hicks Theatre, in 1906 (the Hicks was renamed the Globe Theatre, in 1909, and eventually the Gielgud Theatre, in 1994).
The couple toured South Africa in 1911, and she retired from the stage in 1917. She did make a return to tread the boards in one play in the 1925-26 season, "The Man in Dress Clothes," which co-starred not only her husband but their daughter Betty Hicks, who was making her stage debut.
Ellaline first appeared in the movies in 1907, in two films made by director Arthur Gilbert, My Indian Anna (1907) and Glow Little Glow Worm, Glow (1907). In 1913, she appeared in three films with her husband, in which he reprized two of his greatest stage roles, Ebenezer Scrooge in Old Scrooge (1913) and the title role in David Garrick (1908). She appeared in a baker's dozen more films from 1914 to 1939, acting with both her husband and other luminaries such as Sir Johnston Forbes-Robertson and George Arliss.
Seymour Hicks was knighted in 1934, which made Ellaline "Lady Hicks." He died on April 6, 1949, in Hampshire, England. She followed him on June 16, 1971, at the age of 100. - Writer
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Emmett Dalton was the youngest of the three Dalton brothers, part of a bandit gang notorious for robbing trains and banks in the Midwest during the late 1890s (interestingly, the brothers started their life of crime with a failed attempt at breaking into the safe on a Southern Pacific Railroad train in 1891 near San Luis Obispo, California). Emmett was shot several times and nearly died in the gang's infamous--and, as it turned out, futile--attempt to rob two banks simultaneously on October 5, 1892, in his hometown of Coffeyville, Kansas. Sentenced to life in prison, he served almost 15 years before being pardoned in 1907, in part because while in prison he found religion and rehabilitated himself to the satisfaction of prison authorities. Upon his release he married his childhood sweetheart and set out to rehabilitate the world--at least what he perceived as the world's proclivity to elevate outlaws to the status of heroes. Eventually his message came to Hollywood, where he acted in and consulted on several films about the "Wild West", at least two of them about his own folly as an outlaw. He also wrote the book "When the Daltons Rode," which was the basis of the western film When the Daltons Rode (1940). His exploits in life also include adventures in selling real estate and in advocating and campaigning for prison reform. He died in 1937 in Los Angeles, not too far from where Wyatt Earp (who had also found a place for himself in Hollywood) had also lived and died.- Director
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- Writer
Segundo de Chomón became involved in film through his wife, who was an actress in Pathé films. In 1902 he became a concessionary for Pathé in Barcelona, distributing its product in Spanish-speaking countries and managing a factory for the coloring of Pathé films. He began shooting footage of Spanish locations for the company, then in 1905 moved to Paris where he became a trick film specialist. The body of work he created over five years was outstanding. Films such as The Red Spectre (1907), Kiri-Kis (1907), The Invisible Thief (1909) and A Panicky Picnic (1909) are among the most imaginative and technically accomplished of their age.
De Chomón created fantastical narratives embellished with ingenious effects, gorgeous color, innovative hand-drawn and puppet animation, tricks of the eye that surprise and delight, and startling turns of surreal imagination. It is curious why he is not generally known as one of the early cinema masters, except among the cognoscenti in the field. Perhaps it is because there is a smaller body of work than that created by Georges Méliès (his works can perhaps be described as a cross between that of Méliès and another who combined trickery with animation, Émile Cohl); perhaps it's because he was a Spaniard working in France for the key part of his film career that has meant that neither side has championed him as much as they might have done. De Chomón carried on as a filmmaker, specializing in trick effects, working for Pathé, Itala and others, and contributing effects work to two of the most notable films of the silent era, Giovanni Pastrone's Cabiria (1914) and Abel Gance's Napoleon (1927).- Stephen Crane was the 14th child of parents who were both writers. Descended from a line of soldiers and clergymen (his father, Rev. Jonathan T. Crane, was a Methodist minister), Crane inherited from his forebearers the obsessive subject of war, stoical compassion and, particularly in his poetry, a Biblical style. His short, phenomenal literary career, which began in 1891 when he quit Syracuse University as a freshman, yielded the novels "The Red Badge of Courage" (1895), "The Open Boat" (1898) and "The Blue Hotel" (1899), as well as two volumes of poetry. His novel "Maggie: A Girl of the Streets", reputed to have been written in two days in 1891, is often credited with starting the naturalistic tradition in American fiction. He worked as a reporter in New York and later as a foreign correspondent following the wars. During his brief residence in England he befriended Henry James, Joseph Conrad, H.G. Wells and F.M. Ford, who all recognized Crane's ruthless literary talent. His emergence as a fiction writer and poet was cut short when he died of tuberculosis at the tragically premature age of 28.
- Additional Crew
- Writer
Sam Harris was an extremely prolific and successful Broadway theatrical producer (active from 1904 until his death in 1941) and theater owner, first in partnership with the legendary George M. Cohan. He bitterly broke with Cohan over the issue of signing the Actors Equity contract (there are several seemingly deliberate gross factual inaccuracies in the characterization of him in Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), portrayed by Richard Whorf--not in the least that he'd died the year before!). He produced numerous historically important productions with The Marx Brothers in conjunction with George S. Kaufman, Moss Hart and Morrie Ryskind in their original Broadway productions. Not to be confused with his notorious contemporary Jed Harris.- A legendary stage actress and character player in early films, Lucille La Verne is one of those forgotten legends who seem to fade as the years go on. However, at her prime she was one of the most acclaimed actresses of her generation.
Lucille La Verne Mitchum was born in Nashville, Tennessee, on November 7, 1872. Little is known about her family. She made her stage debut at the local summer stock theater in 1876. The production was called "Centennial" in honor of America's 100th birthday, and the three-year old Lucille was among a handful of child extras in the play. In 1878 she returned to play another child part. She continued to return every summer, sort of becoming the playhouse's resident child star. She quickly proved herself a talented actress, and as she got older she was given better parts. She won great acclaim when during the summer of 1887 she played both Juliet and Lady Macbeth--at only 14 years of age.
On the night of her 16th birthday in 1888, made her Broadway debut with a supporting role in "La Tosca". The play closed after four weeks. In the fall of 1889 she performed with a stock company in Washington, DC, where she played May in "May Blossom" and Chrissy Rogers in "The Governess". She also toured as Ethel in "Judge Not". Her breakthrough performance was a limited-run Broadway revival of "As You Like It" with an all-female cast in March 1894, and she won much acclaim for her performance as "Corin". In the 1894-95 season, she played Patsy in Frank Mayo's Broadway production of Mark Twain's "Pudd'nhead Wilson". She also scored great success by playing the female lead roles in three different acclaimed touring productions over the next three years: "Notre Dame" (1895-96), "Uncle Tom's Cabin" (1897-98) and "Lady Windermere's Fan" (1897-98). In 1898 La Verne was made manager and director of the newly built Empire Theater in Richmond, VA. She staged five shows every season, and received mostly rave reviews. She played everything from leading roles in "Hedda Gabbler" and "Antigone" to character parts such as "Ma Frochard" in "The Two Orphans." She also wrote an adaptation of Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol", which she first staged in 1900, and her version was used by several other theaters in the early 1900s. She received much acclaim for her work at the Empire, and even received the Woman of the Year Award from the Virginia Women's Society in 1901.
She stepped down from the Empire Theater at the end of the 1903-04 season to make her London debut in a comic supporting role in the play "Clarice". She again received acclaim and repeated her success in the Broadway production three months later. She remained a staple of the Broadway stage for the next several years, specializing in character parts. She also returned on occasion to stock theaters to act and direct. She made her film debut in 1914 in Butterflies and Orange Blossoms (1914). From then on she would divide her time between film and the stage. She was used in film frequently by D.W. Griffith for various character parts. While she was a versatile actress, her most memorable parts in film were always those of vengeful women.
Her greatest stage triumph was the creation of the Widow Caggle role in the original Broadway production of "Sun Up". After the Broadway engagement she directed, as well as continued to perform, in the US and European tours of the play. She also recreated her role for the film version (Sun-Up (1925)). In 1927 Broadway's Princess Theater was renamed the Lucille La Verne Theater in her honor, and she was named manager and director. For her first outing as a Broadway producer and director she chose an original play called "Hot Water", giving herself the role of Jessica Dale. The play received mixed reviews and closed rather quickly. Later that same season she launched a revival of "Sun Up" repeating her Widow Caggle role, but it also closed quickly. Since the theater had lost money, she was let go as manager and the name reverted to being the Princess Theater. Upset, she moved to California for the time being to make more movies.
By 1928 she had already established herself as a good character actress in silent films and made the transition easily to talkies. As with her stage career, however, she tended to get typecast as unlikable women, despite her acclaim on Broadway for being able to play almost any character type. She did not abandon the stage entirely, however, and appeared frequently in regional productions in Los Angeles and San Francisco. In 1936 she returned to Broadway in the lead role of the thriller "Black Widow". Despite the rave reviews she received, the play itself got mixed reviews and closed after just a few performances. It would be her last stage production. La Verne quickly returned to Hollywood to take on her most famous role. She voiced both the Wicked Queen and her alter ego, the Old Hag in Walt Disney's first animated feature film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937). She also worked as a live-action model for the artists.
After working on "Snow White", Lucille La Verne retired from acting and became co-owner of a successful nightclub. She died at age 72 of cancer on March 4, 1945, in Culver City, CA. - Producer
- Additional Crew
David Horsley was born on March 11, 1873, in a small coal mine village called West Stanley, County of Durham, England. This village was owned and operated by the West Stanley Coal Co., which operated three coal mines with an average output of 1,500 tons of coal per day. The miners' houses comprising the village were all owned by the coal company. David's paternal grandfather William Horsley was general manager of the company while his father, Robert, was a master mechanic and chief blacksmith for the mines, which used ponies to bring the coal to the surface. His maternal grandfather, John Chaytor, was the company's saddler and harness maker. On January 18, 1884, while on an errand for his mother, young David was struck down by a coal train locomotive as he crossed the tracks and lost three fingers, severed by the train wheels. Ultimately, his arm was amputated two inches below the elbow so as to forestall the onset of gangrene.
His mother, realizing that there was no future in the town for her disabled son, decided the family should emigrate to America. On October 17, 1884, the Horsley family arrived in New York and moved to New Jersey, eventually settling in Bayonne. The young Horsely helped support the family by selling newspapers, later working as a Western Union messenger boy. When he was approximately 16 years old, J.T.R. Proctor, the owner of the Bayonne Times, became his benefactor, paying for David to attend night school, where he studied bookkeeping and shorthand. His education enabled him to be hired by the Tidewater Oil Works as a timekeeper.
When he was 19 Horsley opened up a bicycle shop, hand-making bicycles despite his handicap. In 1903 he bought a piece of land and built a pool hall in Bayonne. Unfortunately, his business was wiped out by the Panic (or recession) of 1907. He and one of his regular customers, Charles Gorman, decided to try their hand in the movie business. Gorman had been a scenic artist at the Biograph Motion Picture Co. in New York, but had lost his job during the recession. Gorman had the know-how about the movie industry, and Horsely had the land for a primitive studio and possessed the mechanical skills to build a movie camera from the parts of an old projector. The rear yard of the pool hall was covered with a wooden platform and muslin was hung overhead to diffuse the light. They decided to call their enterprise the Centaur Film Co., as it was a name that was half "horse" (from Horsely) and half "man" (from Gorman).
The Centaur Film Co. struggled during the first three years of its existence, subsisting on money borrowed from relatives. It faced a monumental crisis at the end of its first year of operation when the Patents Company was created in 1908 to pool motion picture equipment patents, including the Lanham loop that was necessary for film to be fed correctly into a movie camera. The Patents Co. refused to give Centaur a license to operate; it considered Centaur a fly-by-night operation and turned down Horsley's application for a license three times, figuring that denying the company a license would drive it out of business. The Patents Co., which became known as "The Trust," intended to completely control the manufacture, distribution and exhibition of films.
The Trust created the General Film Co. to deal with film exchanges and to rent films to the exhibitors. General collected a weekly licensing fee of $2 on every projector in the US for the use of the Lanham loop, a situation that was deeply resented by exhibitors. Exhibitors who refused to pay the $2 license fee were denied films, and thus were deprived of their livelihood. General Film opened its own film exchanges to rent films, and it cut off the supply of films to other film exchanges. Eastman Kodak Co. refused to sell Horsely raw film stock to make his one-reel pictures, as its contract with the Patents Co. and General Film had them boycott non-Trust filmmakers. Horsley thus had to import his raw film stock from the Austin Edwards Co. in England.
When film exchange executives converged on New York to challenge the monopoly implemented by the Trust, they were directed to meet David Horsley, whose Centaur Film was holding up under the challenge. In order to improve his ability to compete successfully against the Patents Co. and General Film, Horsely decided to help the film exchange people become producers of movies, as he knew he wouldn't be able to survive for long against The Trust without some help.
Carl Laemmle and R.H. Cochrane formed the Independent Motion Picture Co. and opened a studio in New York producing one-reel movies called IMPS, while Edwin S. Porter started up Rex Pictures and Edwin Thanhouser opened a studio at New Rochelle, New York, while Pat Powers created Powers Pictures. Other companies formed by film exchange personnel to ensure that they received product were Bison, Champion and Reliance. By 1910 there were as many independent film companies making pictures as there were companies that were part of The Trust. It was difficult for indies to obtain cameras and film, as domestically-made cameras and film stock were covered by the Patent Co.'s patents and thus would not be sold to filmmakers outside The Trust. Producers were forced to go abroad to get the English Prestwich or Williamson camera, or to France to get a camera from DeBrie, Gaumont, Pathe or Prevost. They could also follow the example of Horsely in the US or Léo-Ernest Ouimet in Canada and create their own equipment.
To fight The Trust legally, the indies banded together as the Sales Co., headquartered at 14th Street in New York City. The Sales Co. operated as a central exchange, with producers delivering their one-reel films to 14th St., from whence its product was shipped C.O.D. to buyers at the cost of $100 per reel. The Sales Co. remitted $95 per reel to the filmmaker and kept a $5-per-reel fee in order to finance the fight against The Trust. Horsely's Centaur Co. was making one western, one drama and one Mutt & Jeff comedy per week, all one-reelers, for an output of 120 prints per week. This meant it was remitting $600 per week to the Sales Co., which had an income of about $5,000 to $7,500 per week from all the independent production companies. With these funds the Sales Co. retained first-rate patent attorneys to sue the Patents Co. and put an end to its attempt at monopolizing the motion picture business. The indies eventually won, and even the $2-per-week royalty on each projector was terminated by the courts.
The Trust, which had concentrated on technology rather than on the quality of films, had failed to keep up with the development of the crowd-pleasing narrative film, continuing to churn out simple-minded pictorial essays that found little favor with the maturing movie-going audience. Eventually all the production companies that had dominated the industry before the rise of the indies went out of business, including Edison, Biograph and Essanay. The last remaining Trust member, Vitagraph, was acquired by Warner Bros.
Due to bad weather conditions in the summer and early fall of 1911, making motion pictures in the New York City area became difficult. In response, Horsely moved Centaur to California, opening the first motion picture studio in Hollywood at the corner of Sunset Boulevard and Gower Street on October 27, 1911. The film was developed after dark and shipped to Centaur's Bayonne office to the laboratory for printing. Al Christie--a Canadian who went on to found his own film company, the Nestor Motion Picture Co.--managed the comedy operation of the studio in both Bayonne and Los Angeles. Westerns were produced by Milton J. Fahrney and dramas were produced by Tom Ricketts. All three producers were responsible for one one-reel picture per week.
On May 20, 1912, the Universal Film Manufacturing Co. was formed and absorbed many independent film companies in exchange for stock, including Horsely's Centaur. For the Hollywood studio, New Jersey laboratory and other assets, Horsely received $175,000 in preferred stock and $204,000 in common stock in Universal shares. He was such a respected member of the film community by that point that he was appointed Universal treasurer at the salary of $200 per week. Soon after the formation of the company, a battle for control of Universal started as Carl Laemmle and his faction took on Pat Powers of Powers Pictures for control. Horsely held the balance of power due to his stake, and in the summer of 1913 he sold his stock to Laemmle for a substantial sum, including a first payment of $197,000 and the balance paid off at a monthly rate of $5,000 in notes. Now rich beyond his dreams, Horsely took his family on a trip back to the United Kingdom, then toured Europe, eventually resigning as treasurer of Universal.
Horsely was in Europe when war broke out in August 1914. The Bostock Animal and Jungle Show was evicted from its London exhibition rooms due to military necessity. The manager of the Jungle Show sold it to Horsely for $40,000, approximately a tenth of his fortune from the sale of his Universal stock. Horsely transported the show's assets to the US by ship. From the docks of Brooklyn, Horsely shipped the menagerie, which included 58 lions and two elephants, to Los Angeles. Altogether it cost him a total of $15,000 to freight the animals from England to L.A. He spent a further $47,500 to create a new park for his show, including grandstands, arenas, cages, and a concrete fence on a property at Washington and Main that rented for $600 per month.
After he opened the show in 1915 he was facing a daily overhead of $225, though the most tickets the show ever sold in a day was $165, while on a bad day the show took in as little as $1.25. To make the show pay, Horsely built a film studio at the site that he called the Bostock Jungle Films Co., which included its own film processing lab. Horsely began turning out movies, many of which used the wild animals as background. His new studio made five-reel dramas with Crane Wilbur, "Stanley in Africa" pictures, and approximately 200 comedies with George Ovey. By the fall of 1918 his movie-making venture was through, and when he filed for bankruptcy in 1919, the once-rich Horsely was $38,000 in debt.
The loss of his company, his exotic animal show and his fortune broke David Horsely. He died on February 23, 1933, a forgotten man, barely remembered as one of the men who saved the film industry from The Trust and pioneered Hollywood as a filmmaking center. Horsely was interred in Hollywood Cemetery, now known as Hollywood Forever Cemetery, reduced to a footnote in American cinema history.- Stewart Edward White, the son of Thomas Stewart White, successful lumberman, and Mary E. Daniell, was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan. In 1895 he received a B.A. in Philosophy and in 1903 an M.A. from Columbia University. He married Elizabeth (Betty) Grant of Rhode Island in 1904, and they were married until her death in 1939.
Early on White worked as a lumberjack and was a lifelong avid outdoorsman. He was a close friend to Theodore Roosevelt, who called White "the kind of young American who is making our new literature." He was included with the likes of Jack London and Rex Beach.
After enlisting in World War I, and rose to the rank of major with the 144th Artillery. One of the first white men to explore German East Africa (now Tanzania), he mapped the area in 1913, for which he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. He was also a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters and of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
White wrote many books, mostly westerns, his first book being "The Westerners" (1901). Other early books included "The Claim Jumpers" (1901), "The Blazed Trail" (1902), "The Forest" (1904), "The Mountains" (1904), "The Pass, Camp and Trail", "The Silent Places" (1907), "Arizona Nights" (1907) and "The Riverman" (1908). "The Rediscovered Country" (1915) was about his experiences on Africa's Serengeti plains.
White wrote many fiction and non-fiction works based on the history of California, including "Gold" (1913), "The Gray Dawn" (1915) and "The Rose Dawn" (1920). "The Cabin" (1922) followed, along with "Daniel Boone, Wilderness Scout" (1926). His autobiographical books included "Dog Days" (1930) and "Speaking for Myself" (1943).
Following an episode with a Ouija board in 1918, Stewart and Betty White became part of a small group who regularly contacted entities on "the other side," with White transcribing what "came through" and the discussion it engendered. This eventually led to White writing "The Betty Book" (1937), followed by "Across the Unknown" (1939). Betty died in 1939, and afterward she was the one contacted for the book, "The Unobstructed Universe" (1940), which describes the events. "The Betty Book" and "The Unobstructed Universe" are recognized classics in the genre. Another book on this theme was added, "The Stars Are Still There" (1946), and finally a posthumous volume, "With Folded Wings" {1947). An unpublished compilation "The Gaelic Manuscripts" was mimeographed (only 200 copies) and distributed to friends and is now online. - Writer
- Music Department
- Actor
Otto Harbach was a songwriter ("I Won't Dance", "Yesterdays", "The Touch of Your Hand") and author, educated at Knox College (BA, MA, DHL, and an honorary member of the Board of Trustees) and Columbia University. At Whitman College he was a professor of English between 1895 and 1901, then a newspaper writer in New York between 1902 and 1903 and an advertising-agency employee into 1910. His Broadway stage scores include "Three Twins" and "Madame Sherry" (for which he was also librettist), "The Firefly", "High Jinks", "Katinka", "Going Up", "Tumble In", "The Little Whopper", "The Cat and the Fiddle" and "Roberta". He was also the co-librettist for "You're In Love", "Tickle Me!", "Mary", "The O'Brien Girl", "The Blue Kitten", "Molly Darling", "Wildflower", "Rose-Marie", "No, No, Nanete", "Sunny", "Song of he Flame", "Criss-Cross", "The Desert Song" and "Golden Dawn". He was librettist for "The Crinoline Girl" and "Nina Rosa", and co-librettist for "Kid Boots", "Kitty's Kisses", "Oh, Please!" and "Good Boy". He co-authored the play "Up in Mabel's Room". He was a charter member (and director, 1920-1963) of ASCAP in 1914, and his chief musical collaborators included Herbert Stothart, Rudolf Friml, Vincent Youmans, Karl Hoschna, Jerome Kern, Louis Hirsch, George Gershwin, Sigmund Romberg and Oscar Hammerstein II (co-lyricist). His other popular songs include "Cuddle Up a Little Closer, Lovey Mine", "Every Little Movement Has a Meaning All Its Own", "Giannina Mia", "When a Maid Comes Knocking at Your Heart", "Love Is Like a Firefly", "Sympathy", "Something Seems Tingle-ing-eling", "Katinka", "Not Now But Later", "Allah's Holiday", "Rackety Koo", "The Tickle Toe", "Going Up", "The Love Nest", "Mary", "Cutie", "Wildflower", "Bambalina", "Rose-Marie", "The Mounties", "Indian Love Call", "Totem Tom-Tom", "No, No, Nanette", "I've Confessed to the Breeze", "Sunny", "Who?", "Two Little Bluebirds", "D'Ye Love Me?", "Cossack Love Song", "Song of the Flame", "Riff Song", "Romance", "The Desert Song", "One Alone", "One Flower Grows Alone in Your Garden", "The Night Was Made for Love", "She Didn't Say 'Yes'", "One Moment Alone", "Try to Forget", "A New Love Is Old", "I Watch the Love Parade", "You're Devastating", "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes" and "Your Dream".- Writer
- Actor
- Composer
Frederick (or Frederic) Chapin had two careers: he was the composer who wrote the score for L. Frank Baum's 1905 stage musical "The Woggle-Bug" and a number of other shows in that era, including "The Storks" (1902), "Pussy in a Corner" (1904), "The Forbidden Land" (1904), "The American Girl" (1906) and "The Maid and the Millionaire" (1907). For the last of these, Chapin wrote the book and lyrics as well as the music--an expansion from music to words that would mark his later career as Hollywood screenwriter, although he returned to composing music in 1938 for the nudist romance Unashamed: A Romance (1938). In 1938, he took up stand-in work using the name Fred Fuller (cf. New York Post, Feb 8, 1938).- Stockdale, a very good friend of Mary Miles Minter's mother, Charlotte Shelby, claimed on the witness stand that he was with Mrs. Shelby when movie director William Desmond Taylor--Minter's lover--was murdered, therefore Charlotte could not have killed him. Stockdale said that he suspected Taylor's former chauffeur, a man named Sands, was responsible for the murder. However, after many different investigations of the murder over the years by authors, private detectives and even director King Vidor, most sources familiar with the case say the evidence points to Mrs. Shelby as Taylor's killer.
- Director
- Writer
- Cinematographer
Arthur Melbourne Cooper was born in St. Albans, England, in 1874. He was one of the founders of the British film industry and the creator of the world's first animation films (or "trick" films, as he called them). Matches: An Appeal (1899) was made for a government advertising campaign to invite public donations of matches for soldiers fighting in the Boer War. Prior to 1900, Melbourne Cooper worked with pioneer cinematographer Birt Acres. Although specializing in animation (Dolly's Toys (1902), he also produced fiction and live action movies.
He established Alpha Trading Company in St. Albans in 1904, and wrote and directed films under contract for other organizations. From 1904-1909 he co-directed with Robert W. Paul, experimenting with movies that combined live-action footage with model animation and fantasy story lines. These included Toy Maker and Good Fairy (1904), The Fairy Godmother (1906), Dreams of Toyland (1908) and Tale of the Ark (1909). After Paul's retirement in 1910, Melbourne Cooper continued to produce and direct, such as Cinderella (1912), Wooden Athletes (1912) The Toymaker's Dream (1910). Alpha was a surprisingly early example of a vertically integrated production, distribution and exhibition company. The company's office were adjacent to the studio site which, which covered nearly two acres and included a restaurant, hairdressing salon, shops, public baths and a single-screen theater, a forerunner of the concept popularized by recent multiplex operators. Renamed the Poly, and still under the management of Cooper, it was re-opened as the Regent with a Palais de Dance in the basement in 1926. Unfortunately, the site was destroyed by fire in 1927.
Arthur Melbourne Cooper died in Barnet, Hertfordshire, in 1961.- Writer
- Actor
Prolific English poet, novelist, essayist G (ilbert) K(eith) Chesterton was born in London on 29 May 1874. He was traditional, extolling the virtues of the 'little man', and the romantic, pre-modern past. He rejected the experimental in art as well as life, and distrusted the state and the modern world. His _Father Brown series of detective novels center around a humble but clever Anglican Catholic priest; Chesterton converted to Catholicism at the age of 48. He was considered somewhat eccentric, idiosyncratic, and was fiercely opinionated. George Bernard Shaw disliked his work, calling him "a freak of French nature", and various men and women of letters disdained the comparative gaudiness of his thought and his work, and his unfashionable political conservatism. Nonetheless he was popular, and beloved by many. He died on 14 June 1936, the same year his autobiography was published.- Mary Marvin Heaton was born in New York City on October 11, 1874, the daughter of Hiram and Ellen Cordelia Blackman Heaton. Her father was a private teacher who taught English literature. Her mother had been married to a wealthy merchant before he died and he left her a fortune and five children (interestingly, Mary's middle name was the surname of her mother's first husband). Mary spent much of her youth abroad with her family. She was educated at schools in France and Germany and, at times, by her father. As a young woman she studied to be a painter at art schools in Paris and New York.
On October 26, 1898, she married Albert White Vorse (1866-1910) at Amherst, Massachusetts. He was a Harvard graduate, journalist and future author. In 1892 he had worked as a journalist on the Peary Relief Expedition in Greenland. Mary and Albert had two children: Heaton Vorse (1901) and Mary White Vorse (1907). Albert died of a cerebral hemorrhage on June 14, 1910, at Staten Island, New York, while Mary and her children were on an ocean liner returning home from Europe. At the time of his death, the couple had been estranged for some months. Sadly, Mary's mother died that very same day of a heart attack at her home in Amherst. Coincidentally, 56 years later, Mary also died on the 14th of June.
Though Mary had started writing several years before Albert's death, circumstances now forced her into writing full time. After her mother had passed away Mary learned that she had been written out of her will. Ellen Heaton had disliked Albert and disapproved of their lifestyle.
During her long career Mary Heaton Vorse wrote 16 books, two plays and scores of articles for newspapers, magazines and periodicals. An example of some of her more well known works are: "The Heart of the House" (1906), "The Breaking-In of a Yachtsman's Wife" (1908), "The Very Little Person" (1911), "The Autobiography of an Elderly Woman" (1911), "Standardizing Jimmy" (1913), "The Heart's Country" (1913), "The Prestons" (1918), "I've Come to Stay" (1919), "Growing Up" (1920), "The Ninth Man" (1920), "Men and Steel" (1921), "Fraycar's Fist" (1923), "Weisbord's Farewell to Passaic" (1926), "The Battle of Passaic" (1926), "School for Bums" (1931), "How Scottsboro Happened" (1933), "A Footnote to Folly" (1935), "Lawrence Strike" (1935), "Labor's New Millions" (1938) and "Time and the Town: A Provincetown Chronicle" (1942).
In 1911 she witnessed the Triangle Shirtwaist fire in New York City, in which 146 garment workers (mostly women) had perished--the factory doors had been locked shut by the owners and many workers had been forced by the fire to jump to their deaths. As a journalist, Mary would spend much of the remainder of her career as an advocate of worker's rights. On June 19, 1937, Mary's forehead was grazed by a stray bullet after a labor dispute she was covering at a steel plant in Youngstown, Ohio, turned into riot.
In 1912 she married freelance journalist and labor activist Joe O'Brien. The couple shared a common concern over the plight of the ordinary working man. Earlier that year Mary and Joe had covered together a labor strike that involved immigrant textile workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts. On October 27, 1915, Joe died suddenly in New York City after battling stomach cancer for several months. Joel, their only child together, was born the previous year. Around 1921 she married Robert Minor (1884-1952), a newspaper cartoonist and founding member of the American Communist Party. Minor left her in 1922 shortly after she had suffered a miscarriage. Her brief flirtation with communism ended after observing it up close while visiting Russia under the Joseph Stalin regime. She still remained a strong advocate of many left-wing causes, however. She became a pacifist after, as a journalist, witnessing the carnage of the First World War and remained so throughout the Second World War. She had also been an early campaigner for the equality of women.
Mary's writings covered a wide range of subjects. In 2002 Jesica Amands Salmonson published a collection of seven supernatural stories by Mary Heaton Vorse, entitled "Sinister Romance": Collected Ghost Stories.
Mary Heaton Vorse died on June 14, 1966, at her home in Provincetown. She was survived by all three of her children. - Director
- Writer
- Producer
David Wark Griffith was born in rural Kentucky to Jacob "Roaring Jake" Griffith, a former Confederate Army colonel and Civil War veteran. Young Griffith grew up with his father's romantic war stories and melodramatic nineteenth-century literature that were to eventually shape his movies. In 1897 Griffith set out to pursue a career both acting and writing for the theater, but for the most part was unsuccessful. Reluctantly, he agreed to act in the new motion picture medium for Edwin S. Porter at the Edison Company. Griffith was eventually offered a job at the financially struggling American Mutoscope & Biograph Co., where he directed over four hundred and fifty short films, experimenting with the story-telling techniques he would later perfect in his epic The Birth of a Nation (1915).
Griffith and his personal cinematographer G.W. Bitzer collaborated to create and perfect such cinematic devices as the flashback, the iris shot, the mask and cross-cutting. In the years following "Birth", Griffith never again saw the same monumental success as his signature film and, in 1931, his increasing failures forced his retirement. Though hailed for his vision in narrative film-making, he was similarly criticized for his blatant racism. Griffith died in Los Angeles in 1948, one of the most dichotomous figures in film history.- Rafael Sabatini was born near the Adriatic seaport of Ancona, Italy to Anna Trafford, an Englishwoman, and Italian Vincenzo Sabatini, both of whom were well known opera singers. With their careers still in full swing and included much traveling, so baby Rafael was sent to her parents near Liverpool for a stable home life. After seven years they retired from opera and turned to being voice teachers and the boy rejoined them, first in Portugal where they set up their first music school, then back to Italy, where they settled in Milan.
By early adolescence Rafael had already been a voracious reader, with a particular fondness for romantic historical novels. He was schooled at Zug, Switzerland, but by 17 years of age he was well versed in some six languages and decided it was time to make his way in the world. His father stepped in and determined that Rafael's linguistic skill was best served in international commerce, so he was sent back to Liverpool in 1892--a logical decision, since he had family there and the city was Great Britain's largest commercial port. His knowledge of Portuguese came in especially useful in his company's dealings in Brazil, but after four years of business, Rafael's interest in writing was bubbling to the top. He was writing his own romance stories, which he believed to be more interesting than just reading the works of others. All of this work was in English, as he considered the best literature of the world to be in that language. Some of his work was submitted by an acquaintance to an editor and, and wound up being accepted and published by a Liverpool publisher. By 1899 he was selling short stories regularly to prominent magazines: Person's, London, and Royal. He also had a translation job as well, and by 1905 with two novels published, he decided to devote full time to writing. That same year he married Ruth Goad Dixon, the daughter of a Liverpool paper merchant. At that point Sabatini moved to London, the publishing hub of Britain.
Rafael produced, in addition to about a novel a year, a steady stream of short stories. By the time he published his first really interesting swashbuckler, "The Sea Hawk", in 1915 he had completed 12 novels and, although comfortable in his new living, he was not the success he had envisioned. Though he had a modest and loyal following and his historical research was of a high degree, Sabatini's earlier work could be rather uneven in subject matter, of special interest to him but not the public. For instance, his supposed illegitimacy may have led to his half-dozen books dealing with the illegitimate despot Cesare Borgia of early 16th-century Italy. He also sometimes hampered himself with heavy-handed historical constraints, dragged out with extraneous philosophizing, as well as stilted dialog--but some of these faults were characteristic of 19th- and early 20th-century novel writing style. He managed another novel for 1917, but through most of World War I he was working in as a translator for the British intelligence service--evidently of great import to the war effort (he had finally become a British citizen, due in no small part to Italy's continued threats to conscript him into the army).
Sabatini returned to his writing after the war but nothing was forthcoming until 1921. He had been writing professionally for nearly 25 years when he finished "Scaramouche" and tried, but failed, to interest several American publishers in it. It was, however, picked up in England for publishing, and then in America as well. The story of Andre Moreau in the period of the French Revolution became a runaway best-seller internationally. After the success of "Scaramouche", Sabatini was ready with a second to his 1-2 punch. In 1922 "Captain Blood" was published, to even greater success. Suddenly his earlier works were being rushed into reprints, the most popular being "The Sea Hawk". Although the growing silent-film industry had already used six of his stories for films, they quickly started optioning the new best sellers for production. "Scaramouche" was turned into Scaramouche (1923) and followed by The Sea Hawk (1924) which hewed to the book's many turns, something the 1940 Errol Flynn version didn't do, opting for pretty much an entirely new screenplay, but was nonetheless extremely popular. The 1935 remake of "Captain Blood", also starring Flynn (Captain Blood (1935)), stuck the novel's story and was just as popular. The "Scaramouche" remake (Scaramouche (1952)) starred Stewart Granger and was a big hit.
By 1925 Sabatini had achieved his dream of success--he was rich and still filled with ideas and the will to write still more novels. There was time to rest, especially in his much beloved Wales--fishing was one of his favorite pastimes--but he also loved to ski. There was tragedy ahead, however. The Sabatinis' only son Rafael-Angelo (born in 1909 and nicknamed Binkie), busy with college, was given a new car by his parents in 1927. They were all due to go north to Scotland for a vacation, when the son and his mother went for a drive and the car was involved in an accident. Ruth Sabatini was thrown from the vehicle and knocked unconscious and was unable to remember what had happened, but Rafael-Angelo was fatally injured. Sabatini, returning from taking a friend to the railway station in Gloucester, happened on the accident and found his wife and son lying by the side of the road. The son died after arrival back at their rented estate of Brockweir House. The parents were devastated, and Sabatini went into a depression that stopped all writing. He started again a year later, and it would provide him enough to enable him to complete another novel, "The Hounds of God". Thereafter the novel-a-year work ethic would continue until 1941. However, his relationship with his wife was already strained by the time of their son's death, and they divorced in 1931. That year he also did a sequel to "Scaramouche"--"Scaramouche the Kingmaker". Sabatini turned to a new domesticated tranquility, having finally moved to Wales near Hay-on-Wye and refurbishing a fine old home called Clock Mill, complete with its own stream and stocked with trout.
In 1935 he married the sculptress Christine Goad, the wife of his first wife's brother. They were a happy couple, spending each January in Adelboden, Switzerland, for skiing. He finished a two-volume set of stories centering on his Captain Blood character called "Chivalry" in 1935. By the late 1930s the clouds of war in Europe especially disturbed Sabatini. He suffered through yet another tragedy when his new wife's son, Lancelot, flew over their house the day he received his RAF pilot's wings. The plane went out of control and crashed in flames across the Wye in a field right before their eyes. Sabatini wrote no more novels until 1944, for by this time he was developing what appeared to be stomach cancer. He managed one more novel in 1949, his 31st. He died on one last trip to Adelboden in 1950 and was buried there. On his headstone his wife had written the first lines from Scaramouche: "He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad." It made a very fitting epitaph. There have been 21 adaptations of his works for the screen, both in film and on TV. His writings also included eight collections of short novels/stories, six non-fiction books and many short stories, some of which are lost. - Carl Gustav Jung was born in Kessewil, Switzerland, on July 26, 1875. His father Paul was a rural preacher, and began to teach his son Latin when Carl was six years old, stoking his interest in language and literature (Jung was later able to read most European languages and several ancient ones, such as Sanskrit). He was not a particularly good student because he did not like the regimentation of school and was especially averse to competition (at boarding school in Basel he developed a habit of fainting under pressure).
After graduating he attended the University of Basel intending to major in archeology, but developed an interest in medicine and studied under renowned neurologist Richard von Krafft-Ebing. As a result, he decided on a career in psychiatry. Upon graduation from the university, he took a job in a Zurich mental hospital and began to specialize in the study and treatment of schizophrenia. He began to teach classes at the University of Zurich, and in addition started his own private practice. It was during this time that he developed what is known today as the system of word association.
Jung had long been an admirer of the famed Sigmund Freud, and in 1907 the two met in Vienna. They connected from the beginning, and Freud came away from the meeting convinced that Jung was at the top of the field in psychoanalysis and his "heir apparent". Jung, however, was not entirely convinced that Freud's theories were correct, and it wasn't long before matters came to a head. During a 1909 trip to the United States, things soured and Freud broke off their relationship.
The era of World War I was a painful one for Jung personally, but his professional career flowered and it was during this period that he developed his famous theory of personality. After the war he traveled extensively throughout the world, spending much time among primitive tribal societies in Africa and India and visiting and studying many Native American tribes in the U.S.
Jung retired in 1946, and after the death of his wife in 1955 he became somewhat reclusive. He died in Zurich, Switzerland, on June 6, 1961. - Writer
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Marion Fairfax, movie screenwriter and Broadway playwright, was born Marion Neiswanger in Richmond, Virginia, on October 25, 1875. After graduating from Chicago's South Division High School she went on to Emerson College in Boston. She went on the boards briefly as an actress before focusing her theatrical ambitions on writing.
In 1899 Fairfax married actor Tully Marshall, who was born Tully Marshall Phillips. Although she was known as Mrs. Tully Marshall and Marion Fairfax Marshall Phillips, she wrote under the name Marion Fairfax. She made her Broadway debut as an actress at the Criterion Theatre in "The Triumph of Love," which opened and closed on February 8, 1904, after one performance. Her first produced Broadway play was "The Builders," which was produced by her husband's Tully Marshall Company and featured him in the cast. It opened at the Astor Theatre on May 20, 1907, and ran a total of 16 performances.
Her next play, "The Chaperon", was more successful. It opened at Maxine Elliott's Theatre on December 30, 1908, and racked up a total of 62 performances. Her next play, "The Talker", was more successful still, with more than twice as many performance as her previous effort. Marion herself directed "The Talker", which featured her husband in the cast. Opening at the Harris Theatre on January 8, 1912, the play had a run of 144 performances.
Her next play, "A Modern Girl", written in collaboration with Ruth C. Mitchell and produced by the Messrs. Shubert (Lee and J. J.), was a flop, closing after 17 performances after opening at the Comedy Theatre on September 12, 1914. Her next play would duplicate the run of of its predecessor, as well as the venue: "Mrs. Boltay's Daughters" lasted but 17 performances at the Comedy after opening on Oct 23, 1915.
Fairfax moved to California and became a screenwriter at the Jesse L. Lasky Feature Play Co. The first movie made from script of hers appeared in 1915, The Chorus Lady (1915), and was followed that year by two others made from her scenarios, Mr. Grex of Monte Carlo (1915) and The Immigrant (1915). In 1916 she began a short collaboration with director William C. de Mille with The Blacklist (1916), which he co-wrote with Fairfax as well as directed. From 1916 through 1918 they collaborated on nine other films.
In 1917 Fairfax wrote the screenplay for the Jack Pickford picture Freckles (1917), directed by Marshall Neilan. Three years later she left Lasky after writing the Wallace Reid vehicle The Valley of the Giants (1919) and hooked up again with Neilan, working on his The River's End (1920). The movie was made by Neilan's own production company, and released through First National. They followed it up with another six films in 1920 and 1921, including Don't Ever Marry (1920) and The Lotus Eater (1921) starring John Barrymore. Their last film together was Fools First (1922).
After helping adapt William Gillette's play based on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's stories for Sherlock Holmes (1922) for Goldwyn Pictures, with John Barrymore playing the famed detective, Fairfax directed her first and only film, from her own script, The Lying Truth (1922), starring husband Tully Marhsall. The movie was produced by her own Marion Fairfax Productions, of which she was president, for the Eagle Producing Co. and it was distributed by American Releasing Co.
Her greatest accomplishment as a screenwriter was the script for the classic The Lost World (1925), adapted from the novel by Arthur Conan Doyle. She adapted her own Broadway play The Talker (1925) for First National. Her last credited screenplay was for the romance The Blonde Saint (1926), directed by Maurice Tourneur and starring Lewis Stone, who headlined four other of her First National pictures.
Tully Marshall passed away on March 10, 1943. Marion Fairfax died on Otober 2, 1970, and was laid to rest in a grave next to her husband at Hollywood Forever Cemetery in Hollywood, California.- Director
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Screenwriter and director Maurice Tourneur was born Maurice Thomas in the Parisian suburb of Belleville on February 2, 1873, the son of a jewelry merchant. He was trained and employed as a graphic designer and a magazine illustrator as a young man. After serving in a French artillery unit in northern Africa, he became an assistant to sculptor Auguste Rodin and later to muralist Amélie Puvis de Chavanne before deciding to change his life along with the changing century and make a new life in the theater.
Tourneur's younger siblings were part of the theatrical establishment--his sister was an actress and his brother a theater manager--so it was not as preposterous a shift in avocation as it might seem. After haunting the theaters of Paris, paying for cheap seats to soak up as much theater as he could, Tourneur became an actor in 1900 with a small troupe on the outskirts of Paris. His salary was 90 francs a month, the equivalent of about $15. Now a professional, he took the stage name "Maurice Tourneur". After learning the stage ropes, he joined the company of the great tragedienne Rejane for a South American tour. He later was a member of stage director Andre Antoine's company.
He married Fernande Petit in 1904, and they had a son, Jacques Tourneur (1904-1977), who would, like his father, become a film director of note. Maurice eventually worked as an actor and set designer for the Theatre de la Renaissance in Paris. In 1911, after having acted in and directed over 400 stage productions, he left the theater for the film industry, following his friend Emile Chautard into the new medium. Starting as an assistant to Chautard, Tourneur had visual arts experience surpassed by few in the nascent "7th Art," the cinema. After working as an assistant director at Societe Francaise des Films et Cinematographes Éclair, he was quickly promoted to director and made films with leading French stars. The subject of his first French silent films was often a gamin or orphan seeking love and shelter.
He had a good command of English from touring in the UK as an actor, and in 1914 the film company Éclair, intent on expanding its US market share, transferred Tourneur to America to manage its studio at Fort Lee, NJ, after a March 17, 1914, fire destroyed the main studio building and the company's negatives. Éclair American Co. went into business in Fort Lee, America's first "Hollywood", in 1911 with a studio designed by Éclair's French architects that incorporated the most modern theories of movie studio design. The studio complex consisted of glass-covered shooting stages with administrative offices, a development laboratory, workshops, scenery storage facilities and dressing rooms. Éclair American signed a distribution deal with the new New Jersey-based Universal Film Manufacturing Co. of Carl Laemmle, whose future production chief, Irving Thalberg, would later clash with Tourneur at MGM. Éclair American mostly produced shorts, but increasingly moved into feature production, keeping in line with the general evolution of the industry, and since Tourneur had experience in directing features, it was only natural that the company hired him.
In 1915 Tourneur moved over to World Film, also headquartered in Ft. Lee. World had been established the year before to import foreign-made features, which dominated American screens until the middle of the 1910s, and to distribute the movies of the newly established feature-film companies associated with producer Lewis J. Selznick, David O. Selznick's father. In a familiar pattern of that time, Selznick created Equitable Pictures and signed Vitagraph star Clara Kimball Young to his company. Selznick then merged with Shubert Pictures--Shubert Theatrical Co.'s movie production company--and Peerless Pictures, the movie production company created by motion picture raw-film-stock magnate Jules Brulatour.
World Pictures, now under Selznick's control, released movies produced by Equitable, Peerless, Shubert Pictures and other independent companies. Movie production was centered at the Peerless Studio in Ft. Lee, built in 1914, and at the Paragon Studio, built in 1916. Gradually World began to dominate the companies whose movies it distributed. Tourneur was the best filmmaker on the lot, whose other employees included Josef von Sternberg (who worked as a film cutter) and Frances Marion, the future Oscar-winning screenwriter.
Tourneur quickly rose to become a major director in the American movie industry, proving to be one of the more innovative pioneers in the development of the narrative film. Adept at using the latest technology to give his pictures a greater visual appeal, he earned critical acclaim and popular success. Tourneur was credited with bringing "stylization" to the American screen through his mastery of set design and lighting. His primary concern, however, was story: "Show the people anything, but show them something," he declared in a May 1920 interview with "Motion Picture Magazine". "This can be either funny or dramatic, but there must be something."
Tourneur opposed the new star system because he felt that a good story could not be told through one character; he also believed that the ideal of the "gleaming personality" of the star promulgated by motion pictures was false, a perversion of life as it actually is lived. Tourneur was more interested in developing a means to convey psychological effects than emphasizing physical action. In this he was opposed to the then-dominant pre-Konstantin Stanislavski acting theories, rooted in the theater, that held that dialogue must be accompanied by an appropriate physical gesture of the hands to underscore the feeling being conveyed by the actor in a scene. Physical action itself, the theory went, conveyed psychological meaning and emotion. It was said that film was born as a form of entertainment for the illiterate masses, and this style constituted a "universal language" that the talkies not only made obsolete, but absurd (one example of this style is the placement of the left-hand on the right forearm, a gesture that can be seen in silent films and was carried on by Harry Carey in his sound films. This was an elocutory gesture that signified fortitude, and would be understood by the silent film audience). Tourneur believed that this telegraphic shorthand needed to be replaced. The new Soviet cinema would show the way towards a greater psychological realism with the development of montage.
Tourneur's film production unit had coalesced by 1915, and included Clarence Brown, the future six-time Oscar-nominated director who served as his assistant director and editor; director of photography John van den Broek and art director Ben Carré. The Tourneur unit produced a series of popular movies that successfully utilized both the new language of film--including close-ups and parallel action--and new technology, such as tracking shots and special effects. While Tourneur's work spanned many genres, a leitmotif in his oeuvre was the romantic skullduggery women were the victim of, or sometimes the perpetrator of, in the pursuit of love and happiness. Today we'd call the women victims of sexual harassment; in the 1910s, underhanded or unscrupulous predatory behavior was generally considered part of the exigencies of love, though Tourneur saw through the obfuscating facade. Reportedly, among directors, only the pictures of D.W. Griffith and Thomas H. Ince were more popular than the films of Maurice Tourneur. In an interview published in the July 3, 1915, issue of "The New York Clipper", Tourneur expressed the opinion that Griffith was supreme among movie directors. He also believed that the motion picture was the most significant development for education since the invention of the printing press. Still, he was obsessed with story--he stated that "nearly everything worthwhile in the pictures is an adaptation of a book, a play, a poem." Tourneur believed that the cinema needed to develop a new kind of author, a writer who would more naturalistically portray human nature and move the movies away from the simplistic Manichean machinations of plot towards a portrayal of human motivations and interactions that more closely caught the true balance of good and bad in human beings. He stated that "nearly everything worth while in the pictures is an adaptation of a book, a play, a poem."
The Tourneur oeuvre consistently displayed first-rate visuals that compensated for some of the dramatic weaknesses of the early narrative film, hampered as it was by dialogue constrained by the limitations of intertitles, and by a certain overwrought telegraphic performance style closer to elocution than what we now appreciate as acting. In many early films the narrative can be unintelligible to a modern audience, due to a lack of intertitles, as this style was expected to, and did, convey information to the contemporary audience, an audience more experienced with pantomime due to the need of performers and filmmakers to reach an audience that spoke a babble of languages. However, the demands of movies for this kind of signaling hampered its development as a mature medium of artistic expression. When Tourneur tried to bring the sophistication of Henrik Ibsen to the screen with A Doll's House (1918), it proved an aesthetic and box-office failure. As one critic noted, the felicities of Ibsen's drama could only be conveyed by language itself and the modulations of the human voice, not by stage business.
In the July 1918 edition of "Photoplay Magazine", Tourneur stated his contrary credo: "There is an odious fallacy that a great many people still believe, in regard to the moving picture. It is almost as widespread as that the cinema is in its infancy [Tourneur dated the invention of the motion picture to Eadweard Muybridge's experiments with multiple-exposure photography in 1878]. By that I mean the belief that we must give the public what it wants. To me, that is absurd. As absurd as if the fashion dictators should attempt to suit women's wishes in costumes. In reality, the opposite is the case, is it not?" Tourneur believed that the filmmaker's taste and preferences were essential to the creation of a motion picture, just as in the legitimate theater, the craft and art the director and actors applied to a written play infused it with life and meaning. The play was not the thing, Tourneur stated; one can always sit at home and read a play. It is the staging of the play that creates meaning, and it is the director's control over the photoplay that makes it an art rather than just a piece of commerce.
Tourneur rebelled against the prevalent attitude in the movie industry that the audience would automatically reject more poetic works. He believed that what was then called The Great War had infused the mass audience with a certain spirituality. Tourneur had faith that the audience would accept higher-quality, more intellectual works, and that the mass-market lowest-common-denominator paradigm of the film industry was false. However, he could make exceptions to his opposition to pandering to the audience; in an earlier interview published in the May 18, 1918, edition of "Exhibitors Trade Review", he believed that filmmakers had a patriotic duty to soothe the anxieties of the wartime audience.
"It is part of our duty as purveyors of entertainment to the great majority, to see to it that the public gets wholesome, optimistic and, if possible, amusing entertainment. It is up to the screen to sustain the spirits of the nation. Let us keep away from the morbid and gruesome and throw the tremendous power of the photoplay into the civilized world's war for democracy." But of course, this was parcel to his opinion that the motion picture had a great didactic function, and could be used to educate an audience (a generation later Tourneur would be confronted with the anxieties of quite a different audience, that of Occupied France).
"Directing motion pictures is merely capturing life," Tourneur stated in a piece he wrote on the art of directing for "Variety" (December 27, 1918). A director, as auteur, was born, not made. A movie director could not be trained, as a successful director had been born with the instincts to create a photoplay (a contemporary term Tourneur despised and urged the industry to jettison in favor of something new and more accurate to describe the motion picture). "Directing a picture presupposes the possession of dramatic instinct and artistic perception in the man entrusted with the transfer to the screen of the play of an author," he wrote.
The photoplay had developed into quite a different form from the staged play of the legitimate theater, and thus a different set of narrative tools was required to make a successful movie. The director had to work within the limits of movies, which were short in length, thus limiting his options for both creating and presenting drama. A director had to be an expert in finding, and using, some detail, that in the short period of time allowed him, would elucidate the characters, the conflicts, and themes of his film. Thus, the director had to be a great observer of human nature and character in order to master his medium.
Optimistic about the future, and relishing the opportunity to define the new medium, Tourneur created his own production company in 1918. He felt that American silent film actors were superior to their European counterparts. He believed that "America's Sweetheart," Mary Pickford, the Toronto native whom he directed in two hit films in 1917, was the world's best screen actress. He also touted stage actress Elsie Ferguson, his Nora Helmer, as a brilliant artist; they made four films together in 1917 and 1918. For her part Ferguson, who hated movies and had to be coaxed into them by generous offers from Paramount-Artcraft head Jesse L. Lasky, said that Tourneur was her favorite director, and that she was lucky to have had him direct her first film.
Tourneur became increasingly antagonistic to the star system that was becoming more important to the industry, and he resisted studio efforts to rein in directors (and their profligate spending) by the imposition of the central production system, in which formerly dominant directors had to answer to producers over aesthetic choices as well as budgets. At this point in his career his success at the box office gave him leeway to push the frontiers of his art. In addition to making popular movies, Tourneur became one of the most respected directors in America, but he experienced some trouble when he began to become more aesthetically enthusiastic.
Tourneur's heavily stylized The Blue Bird (1918), which featured unusual sets and costumes, was a precursor of the expressionist German cinema, such as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) (the Rejane company had put on the first production of "L'oisueau bleu" in 1911, the year its author, Maurice Maeterlinck, won the Nobel Prize and Tourneur left the legitimate stage for the soundstage. In 1924 Tourneur wrote an article about the superiority of film to the theater. "[M]otion pictures have reached greater artistic heights than the stage and will continue on--years in advance of the stage," he wrote). Another heavily stylized film, Prunella (1918), was as critically acclaimed as "The Blue Bird," but both failed at the box office, as the movie industry was not as able to support artistic visions as was the theater. Due to these economic considerations, Tourneur went back to a naturalistic style.
Tourneur scorned what he called "machine-made" commercial pictures, but he had to acknowledge the tyranny of the box-office. He believed that the failure of "Prunella" was the result of its rejection by provincial exhibitors, who did not believe their audiences would go for such "high-brow" fare. Lacking an advertising budget and marketing monies that would enable it to be showcased with a first-rate orchestral accompaniment, the picture failed, cold-bloodedly murdered by the philistine exhibitors. Tourneur believed that Griffith's hit Broken Blossoms (1919) would have failed, too, if he had not been backed by advertising and marketing muscle. He also believed that Cecil B. DeMille's Male and Female (1919), his adaptation of J.M. Barrie's play "The Admirable Crichton," would have flopped it he hadn't vulgarized it. He also scored Griffith for giving in to the exigencies of the marketplace by pandering to the audience and turning his back on art.
It was around this time that he gave up on his idea that movies should be used to educate the masses. In an interview published in November 1920, Tourneur told Truman B. Handy of "Motion Picture" that the forte of film was amusement: "I do not believe in using the screen as a way of teaching; we have the pulpit and the college. It may be a means of propaganda, but I do not intend to use it as such. Never!" His faith would be sorely tested under the Nazis 20 years later.
"I would rather starve and make good pictures," he wrote in 1920, "if I knew they were going to be shown, but to starve and make pictures which are thrown in the ashcan is above anybody's strength. As long as the public taste will oblige us to make what is very justly called machine-made stories, we can only bow and give them what they want."
Story, again, was essential if one was to subvert the exhibitors' and distributors' expectations of the box office and create something better than the "machine-made" moving picture. Tourneur had an affinity for literary adaptations, and his career collection of adaptations included Joseph Conrad's Victory (1919), Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island (1920), James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans (1920) and R.D. Blackmore's Lorna Doone (1922). He would later make a French version of Ben Jonson's play Volpone (1941).
By 1922 he came to the opinion that the future of the American film industry lay in Hollywood, not New York, though not without regret. In a February 1922 "Photoplay" article weighing the merits of California versus New York as a production locale, Tourneur came out in favor of California, since artistry was no longer a part of the moviemaking equation. To be intellectually stimulated and remain artistically fresh, New York would be the preferable production center, Tourneur declared. New York, like London, Paris and Vienna, stimulated the filmmaker toward developing fresh ideas and more ambitious projects. However, "[f]rom the material standpoint of facilities, costs, climate and the like there is no comparison; Los Angeles is vastly superior."
The next year he shot The Christian (1923), an adaptation of Hall Caine's novel, in Hollywood for Samuel Goldwyn, but within a few years he decided not to share his future with that of the West Coast. Though he apparently had no problems with the mercurial Goldwyn (who would bedevil William Wyler a decade later), the American movie industry had evolved into a business of which he disapproved. It was in Hollywood, under such men as Irving Thalberg, Darryl F. Zanuck and Hal B. Wallis, that the central producer and production chief became the dominant force in the film industry from the mid-'20s through the early 1950s. Hollywood became a place where directors were often pulled off one picture in the middle of a shoot to shoot scenes in another picture, shuffled around like the hired hands that they had become in the increasingly centralized industry.
Tourneur denounced the industry's reliance on realism in a February 4, 1923, interview with "The New York Telegraph" in a plea for a more artistic, impressionistic approach to making motion pictures. He felt that film finally had had succeeded in being able to convey psychological effects, and had even surpassed the stage in that respect, as it could use picture and montage to quickly convey a mental state that it would take "countless words" to put over in the theater. Tourneur believed that due to the literalness of the camera lens, which did not have the mediating eye of the visual artist, the movies had been too focused on action. However, film could be made into a plastic art that was manipulated by the director to bring out "the psychology of the drama--the mental action of the characters."
He elaborated: "The screen is a better medium than the dramatic stage for getting over psychological effects. We can drive ideas across. For instance, what better way is there to express corruption than to show a close-up of the check with which a man has bribed . . . The Goldwyn company agreed with me that you can get more to the spectators by showing a banging shutter, by indicating the howling of the wind, or the shrieking of a woman, than by numberless words. Motion pictures, first of all, should be impressionistic."
Later that year, in the July 1st edition of the same newspaper, Tourneur declared that the great motion pictures would be produced by the next generation, now that the pioneers had developed a new mode of expression. He stated his belief that the director, and not the producer, should be fully responsible for a motion picture production. "To relieve him of any of these responsibilities and to compel him to confine his efforts to adapting himself to the ideas of a half-dozen 'experts' will strike at the very foundation of successful pictures." He predicted that the meddling of producers would doom motion pictures' popularity with the mass audience as it would result in inferior movies that the movie-goers would reject.
It was just the type of interference that Tourneur warned about in 1923 that led to his quitting the American film industry. The last film he directed in the US was The Mysterious Island (1929), which he abandoned soon after the commencement of principal photography. Tourneur would not work under MGM's assigned production supervisor, so he quit the picture and repatriated himself to his native France in 1926, to make movies there and in Germany.
Tourneur was not welcomed back to France, since he was viewed as a draft dodger by many in a country in which 11% of the population had been killed or wounded in The Great War (Charles Chaplin had been similarly criticized by British hawks). During a visit to his homeland in 1921, some French journalists demanded that Tourneur not be allowed to return to the US. Jean-Louis Crozet of the periodical "Comoedia" denounced Tourneur for having spent 1914-18 in America, and thus avoiding military service in World War I, which claimed the lives of approximately 1.4 million French soldiers. Crozet accused the director of cowardice for having emigrated to America to "[save] his life, while so many of his compatriots lost theirs."
Tourneur made his second movie in Germany after leaving the US, The Ship of Lost Men (1929) ("Ship of Lost Men"), which starred Marlene Dietrich in one of her first important roles. His son Jacques--who would go on to become an important director in the US in the 1940s--served as Tourneur's assistant and editor on the film. Jacques would continue to assist his father on his shoots until the mid-'30s.
Divorced from his first wife in 1923, Maurice married actress Louise Lagrange (1898-1979), whom he met while shooting L'homme mystérieux (1933). During the Nazi occupation of France (1940-44) times were tough for French filmmakers who wouldn't collaborate with the Germans, and things were no different for Tourneur, the man who vowed in 1920 that he would never make propaganda films. Even the "sitzkrieg", or Phony War, period of September 1, 1939, to May 9, 1940, disrupted the cinema as actors and craftsmen were called up for military service. Tourneur's shooting of "Volpone" was interrupted, and did not resume production until March 23, 1940, less than two months before the Nazi invasion of May 10th. On June 22nd the brief Battle of France came to an end when World War I hero Marshal Philippe Pétain asked the Germans for an armistice. Part of the peace accord mandated the partition of France, with the northern part to remain under German domination and the capital of the new government, headed by Petain, to be in Vichy. Vichy France, as the collaborationist government was known, also was to obey Germany in matters of cultural and racial policy.
On November 2, 1940, new regulations for the French movie industry were issued. All movie professionals were required to carry an identity card, except for Jews, who were not allowed one. At the end of the year 'Jean Renoir' (I)' emigrated to the US and was given a contract by 20th Century-Fox. The great actor Jean Gabin also made it to America and a contract with Universal, appearing in his first American film, Moontide (1942), opposite Ida Lupino in 1942.
French movie theaters were required to show Nazi propaganda movies, in accordance with Germany's policies towards all occupied countries. In 1940 Nazi filmmaker Veit Harlan turned Lion Feuchtwanger's novel "Jew Suss" into a vicious anti-Semitic German-language film, the notorious Jud Süß (1940), the climax of which justifies pogroms against the Jewish people. When the film was released in Paris on February 14, 1941, the reaction of the French audience was very positive. On June 30 of that year the great French filmmaker Abel Gance was arraigned before the head of the French movie industry for the "crime" of being Jewish, and was required to prove his Aryan origins. He fled to Spain, not returning from exile until late 1945.
In September 1941 German censorship was enforced over French movies, and on the last day of the year, the Propaganda Division issued six new statutes, one of which banned Jews from the movie industry. The power to "green-light" French movies was reserved for the German High Command, and a new studio was created, Continental Productions, which was a subsidiary of Germany's state-owned UFA, headed by the German Alfred Greven and financed by French capital. The company, a.k.a. Continental Films, became the most important French movie production company during the Occupation.
By January 1942 film receipts were up by 68% over the previous year. A month later Jews and foreigners were forbidden from working in the film industry under a pseudonym, and on October 15th all American and English films were banned in France. French cartoons began to become popular early that year, possibly a sign of escapism, or of the indigenous industry's desire not to make propaganda for the enemy, and of the audience's desire not to be exposed to it. In 1943, fearing an Allied invasion from England, the Germans banned the filming of movies on the French coast. On January 15, 1944, reacting to the release of Vautrin the Thief (1943), the newspaper "Le Pilori" denounced beloved French character actor Michel Simon as a Jew, and wrote, "The cinema has condemned us to seeing the base, disgusting, revolting face that Michel Simon gives to 'Vautrin'." However, the mood in France, as the Allied invasion grew more imminent, began to change.
The Committee for the Liberation of the Cinema was an active element of the Maquis, which was the name given to the Resistance, publishing an underground newspaper, "L'Ecran francais". The Committee organized resistance within the film industry controlled by the Nazis and their collaborators, and coordinated insurrections and the "liberation" of many filmmaking facilities during the time of the Allied invasion of France, which began on June 6th. On July 18, 1944, "L'Ecran francais" published an article "Toward a Cinema with Clean Hands", declaring that collaborators with the Germans would not be tolerated in the liberated French film industry (in 1946 actor Robert Le Vigan was sentenced to 10 years at hard labor, and all his belongings were confiscated, for openly collaborating with the Germans and broadcasting anti-Semitic propaganda on the radio. The French made a distinction between those who had to cooperate with the Germans due to economic considerations and those who intellectually cooperated with the Nazis and propagated their ideology).
Paris was liberated on August 25, 1944, three days after film curator and cinema buff Henri Langlois held the first showing of Gone with the Wind (1939) in Paris at his Cinematheque française. The movie theaters of Paris had not yet been opened, but that didn't stop Langlois; at that point, his regular exhibition of movies had been suspended for a year. Marcel Carné's classic Children of Paradise (1945), shot during the Occupation, had its gala premiere on March 9, 1945. It originally had been scheduled to be shot at the Victorine studios in Nice in mid-August 1943, but the production was interrupted when the company was ordered back to Paris after the Allied invasion of Sicily. On April 14, 1945, all the theaters and entertainment venues in Paris were shut for the day to pay respect to the late US President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had died two days earlier.
During the Occupation the Germans had encouraged French filmmakers to maintain their high production standards in order to create more effective propaganda and to create superior product to soothe the anxieties of French movie-goers. However, those who were less cooperative had to get along with less. While Tourneur continued to direct under the Occupation, he was forced to use the ends of reels of raw film stock to shoot his pictures.
Maurice Tourneur is a character in Bertrand Tavernier's 2002 film about the French film industry under Vichy, Safe Conduct (2002) ("Safe Conduct"), the title of which refers both to the after-curfew pass filmmakers were issued due to the odd shooting hours of the film industry and also to the movie business' laissez-faire atmosphere during the occupation, which included hiding and utilizing Jewish film professionals who, of course, could not be credited. The film's story deals with French screenwriter Jean Aurenche, a rogue who did not want to work for the Nazis, and Jean Devaivre, an assistant director involved with the Resistance. Tavernier was inspired to make his three-hour epic by the experiences of his father René Tavernier, an editor and screenwriter confronted with the same dilemma as Jean Aurenche, characterized by his son as, "[W]hat can you write in a period of such censorship under a regime you despise?"
Tavernier believes that Americans can understand the dilemma if they equate French filmmakers during the Nazi occupation with American filmmakers under McCarthyism. Of the question, "'[H]ow can you work for a German company without compromising yourself?' It's very simple. I say to the American critic, just replace the German element with Senator McCarthy [Red-baiting Wisconsin Republican Sen. Joseph McCarthy] and everything will be clear!"
The great paradox of the French film industry under the Occupation, which thrived despite the wartime shortages and terror directed by the Nazis towards the French population, is that French filmmakers working for the German-financed and -controlled Continental, the most powerful studio in France, maintained a good deal of independence. Unlike newspapers and book publishing and radio broadcasting, which were tightly controlled, the Germans allowed French filmmakers more latitude in order to create entertaining movies to distract the French populace. Thus, many French filmmakers were able to incorporate allegories and parables alluding to the Occupation. According to Tavernier, of the approximately 30 feature films made at Continental between 1940 and 1944, most have a kind of integrity that belies their ostensible ends as Nazi and Pétainist propaganda. "That's the first act of resistance," he claims.
Aurenche and René Tavernier hated Vichy and the indigenous intellectual collaborators with the regime, and Aurenche allegedly used coding in his Continental screenplays to defy the Nazis (director Martin Scorsese, citing the American directors of the 1940s and 1950s, calls this process "smuggling," introducing themes on the sly beneath the ken of studio owners and censors). Bernard Tavernier believes it was the directors, and not the screenwriters, who should be blamed for the sins of the Vichy cinema and the postwar, pre-Nouvelle vague bourgeois cinema, although that statement seems to indicate some kind of counter-Oedipal complex. His argument about McCarthyism smacks of a relevance that many Americans might find dismaying, as the French screenwriters of Vichy he lionizes were defying a foreign power, whereas many of the American screenwriters initially persecuted by McCarthyism were secret members of the Communist Party, accused of putting in coded messages for a foreign power with which the United States was locked in a Cold War.
Actually, the real nexus of the two groups' experiences can be summed up by the dilemma that Robert Sklar, in his book "Movie-Made America: A Cultural History of the American Movies," posits as a struggle "over issues that had agitated American culture ever since movies first appeared: Whom makes the product? Who runs the show? Who decides what the show should say?" It was a battle Tourneur joined in America, and then quit in 1926 when the machine-made movie philistines won the war.
Maurice Tourneur and other cine-artists in America, wanting a more artistic, expressionistic type of film that would offer something beyond the simple lowest-common-denominator cultural dualities of good and evil that the money-men insisted was all that the box office could bear, had to resort to "smuggling" in their own themes, their own bits of telling detail that would illuminate the psychological motivations of characters and audience alike. Vichy France and McCarthyite America were no different in kind (if not degree) in that the money-men, the producers, had always constrained the creative people, who resulted to subterfuges to make the films they wanted, whether in Paris or Hollywood. Even Sergei Eisenstein, the great Soviet filmmaker, survived the terrors of Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union only to have his soul crushed again and again by a tyranny that makes the regimes of the classic Hollywood mogul much lamented by the creative talent laughable in comparison.
In Vichy France a filmmaker could be tortured or shot for not hewing to the Nazi line; while it is true that many an uncooperative leftist wound up in jail for defying the notorious House Un-American Activities Committee, the damage for those who did not defy but did not cooperate was mostly limited to the loss of high-paying jobs and the psychological torment of being abandoned by friends and losing one's career. However, the challenge to both Vichy screenwriter and Hollywood screenwriter in what Lillian Hellman called the "Scoundrel Time" was the same: If one could not compromise, if one could not tailor one's beliefs to fit the fashion of the times, one could not work. So, in this sense, there is a similarity as suggested by Tavernier, but like many paradoxes of Anglo-French relations, Tavernier's argument doesn't completely add up; it does, however, help elucidate the tough spot and paradoxical milieu that movie-makers like Maurice Tourneur found themselves in. The Devaivre character, in Tavernier's film, has to take over directing a movie from Tourneur when the director goes into shock upon hearing that his wife has been taken prisoner by the Germans.
In 1942 Maurice Tourneur directed his first French horror film, a genre in which his son Jacques thrived in the US during the war. Carnival of Sinners (1943) (released as "Carnival of Sinners" in the US and "The Devil's Hand" in the UK) is an adaptation of Gérard de Nerval's 1832 short story "La main enchantée" ("The Enchanted Hand"). The film is about a failed artist's pact with the Devil, a Faustian dilemma that would have resonated with audiences in Occupied France. The artist, Roland, buys the severed though-still-alive left hand of a man, a grisly talisman owned by the Devil himself, from the restaurateur Mélisse, who informs Roland that in the future, he can only sell off the charm at a loss.
Under the threat of eternal damnation, Roland seals his Faust-pact, with the proviso from the Devil that Roland can return the charm--at a price. The catch is, the longer he keeps the charm, the higher the price is, as it doubles each day. Tourneur cast a frail and harmless-looking actor as his Mephistopheles, a man who looks like a small-town bailiff and effectively doubles as a Vichy civil servant. Despite the unprepossessing look of the Devil, Tourneur created a sense of fear by emphasizing the consequences of the Faust-pact rather than the Devil's power. Tourneur had become a master of psychological filmmaking.
Roland becomes a great success, but at the cost of his individual identity as the charm makes him a different person. In a meeting with previous "owners" of the hand, Roland discovers that he is the last in a succession of men who took advantage of the charm, which links him to a history that ostensibly is not his own, but in fact is. The hand binds him to the first owner, a monk who refused to use his artistic talents for the glory of god, and it is under the monk's name, Maximus Léo, that Roland creates the art that ensures his fame and fortune, with the caveat that the expression of the hand is not his own.
He is done in by the vanity and greed of his mistress, when she purloins money from his safe to buy herself a luxury, money that he intended to use to payoff the Devil. He no longer will be able to buy his way out of the Faust-pact, and save his soul. At the end of the story, he is the one who now owns the hand and must pay the debt for all the previous owners who attempted to profit from it. Although he resents his fate, he must bear the responsibility for his collaboration with the Devil, and for the collaborations of the others who came before him. (Vichy government propaganda held that the French people brought on the Occupation themselves to make them accept it as their just desserts.)
Despite the travails of Occupied France and the German-dominated industry, Tourneur managed to create a classic psychological horror film. If Martin Scorsese and Tavernier's theme of smuggling is correct, then "La Main du diable" and other horror films made during the Occupation used the genre to smuggle unacceptable themes past the censors. French films made during the Occupation never directly refer to the military and political situation, but they do convey the anxiety and paranoia, indeed, the horror and fear of losing one's soul via collaboration, felt by the Occupied French.
In the July 3, 1915. "New York Clipper" interview, it was reported that "M. Tourneur's ambition is to produce strong and appealing detective stories. He believes they interest the greatest number of people." Tourneur's movie-making career continued until 1949, when he lost a leg in a car accident. His interests were painting in oils and watercolors and reading. After his forced retirement from the cinema due to his disability, he occupied himself by translating English-language detective novels into French.
Maurice Tourneur died on August 4, 1961, in Paris, and was interred in the City of Lights' Père Lachaise Cemetery. As a filmmaker, posterity has praised Tourneur for the subtlety and lingering moods of his movies, particularly those in the mystery and fantasy genres. He was one of the few American directors to create a new aesthetic, which exerted a strong influence on Josef von Sternberg. His use of rectangular compositions in Alias Jimmy Valentine (1915) inspired Fritz Lang's The Spiders - Episode 1: The Golden Sea (1919), and may also have influenced the Japanese director Yasujirô Ozu.
Hollywood director Clarence Brown, who graduated from the University of Tennessee at age 19 with a double degree in engineering, credited Tourneur with making him a filmmaker. Within a few months of being hired, he was editing Tourneur's films, and by 1917 he was shooting parts of Tourneur's films (uncredited) himself. He learned from his mentor the power of lighting and composition, although he developed a more sympathetic approach to directing actors than his teacher. Brown told cinema historian Kevin Brownlow, "Tourneur was my God. I owe him every thing I've got in the world. For me, he was the greatest man who ever lived. If it hadn't been for him, I'd still be fixing automobiles." Brownlow reported that Brown had tears in his eyes when he made this confession.
The United States Library of Congress' National Film Registry, established to help preserve American films deemed "culturally significant," has two Tourneur films on its list, The Poor Little Rich Girl (1917) and The Last of the Mohicans (1920).- Additional Crew
- Producer
People liked Joseph M. Schenck. Anyone who knew both him and his brother Nicholas Schenck would comment on how different they were. He came to New York in 1893 and, with his younger brother, built a drugstore business. They risked some profits and made more money in amusement parks. Marcus Loew bought one of their parks in 1907, then made the Schencks partners in Consolidated Enterprises, his theater and movie house chain in 1912. The brothers' personalities were quite different; Joe was affable and enjoyed keeping a deal together by finding common ground between business associates that often despised each other. His brother Nick was a cold, driven, hard-nosed businessman who thoroughly enjoyed keeping people on short leashes. In short, people were drawn to Joe and feared Nick.
Joe booked films, which gave him the opportunity to meet movie stars, among them Norma Talmadge, who became his wife in 1916. He was fascinated by Hollywood and wanted to get involved with movie production, whereas Nick was quietly managing Loew's burgeoning theatrical empire. Joe was far more enamored by the Hollywood lifestyle than his brother and wanted to take a much more active role in the production rather than the high finance end of the business. He saw his opportunity in 1917 to produce Roscoe 'Fatty' Arbuckle, Buster Keaton and the later D.W. Griffith films. At this point the brothers' lives took separate paths; Joe left Consolidated while Nick remained and soon became Marcus Loew's #2 man, assisting him in his dream of combining Metro Pictures with Goldwyn Pictures in order to provide the expanding theater chain with a steady flow of quality films (morphing into MGM, after bringing Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg on board in 1924), later ascending to the presidency of Loew's Incorporated's--MGM's parent company--after Marcus Loew's sudden death (quietly becoming the most powerful man in the motion picture industry) in late 1926. Joe became chairman of United Artists (which, somewhat ironically, lacked a theater chain--a factor that would ultimately cripple his brother's studio in the 1950s after the Supreme Court's anti-trust decision required theatrical divestment) in 1924, then its president in 1927.
In 1933 he helped Darryl F. Zanuck establish 20th Century Pictures, which merged with the ailing Fox Film Corp. in 1935, with Schenck as chairman of the renamed 20th Century-Fox. Organized crime had coveted Hollywood from a distance for years, but had been unable to make serious inroads into the area thanks to the brutally effective work of the Los Angeles Police Department's so-called "hat squad," which was tasked with keeping the city Mafia-free. The studio's weak link was through the growing thorns in their collective sides: the unions, whose membership and collectives spanned across state lines. In 1936 Willie Morris Bioff, a Chicago mobster out of the remnants of the Al Capone gang who ran the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees & Moving Picture Machine Operators behind the scenes, told the studios they could avoid strikes (along with the implied work slowdowns and spontaneous theater fires) for $2 million. All agreed to pay, but Schenck made one of the payoffs with a personal check, which came to the attention of U.S. Internal Revenue Service agents. Thanks to the paper trail, Schenck was indicted for income tax evasion. With some applied pressure and soul-searching, Joe testified against Bioff and the titular union president, George E. Browne, in 1941 as part of a plea bargain. In 1946 he began to serve a one-year sentence for tax irregularities and bribery (of the union officials) but was pardoned by President Harry Truman after having served only four months.
After leaving prison he immediately returned to Fox as head of production. Marilyn Monroe became friendly with him in 1947 and was known as one of his "girlfriends", although she said the relationship was platonic. He was helpful in her career in any case, getting her a very small part in Fox's Scudda Hoo! Scudda Hay! (1948) and convincing Harry Cohn at Columbia to give her a contract after Fox dropped her.
AMPAS awarded Schenck a special Oscar for services to the film industry in 1952. In 1953 he co-founded the Magna Corp. with Mike Todd to market the Todd-AO wide-screen system, which was wildly profitable (and remains a technological force in the movie industry to this day). Shortly after he retired in 1957, Schenck had a stroke and never fully recovered.- Director
- Writer
- Cinematographer
J. Searle Dawley, the man who considered himself "the first motion picture director", was born James Searle Dawley on 5/13/1877 in Del Norte, CO. He was educated in Denver, and after graduating in 1895 became an actor with Louis Morrison's stock theatrical company. The tour he was hired for was canceled, however, and he returned to Denver. In 1897 he rejoined Morrison's company, where he plied his trade as a thespian and stage manager for three years. He left to enter the vaudeville circuit as a performer and writer, then in 1902 joined the Spooner Stock Company as an actor, stage manager and writer. In May 1907 he was hired by Edison Co. director Edwin S. Porter specifically to direct The Nine Lives of a Cat (1907), so arguably he WAS the first professional movie director in the US. Dawley based his claim on the assertion that until he was hired by Porter, "The cameraman was in full charge." Dawley oversaw acting and dramatic continuity rather than just supervising action sequences shot by the cameraman.
At Edison he directed D.W. Griffith in his film acting debut in Rescued from an Eagle's Nest (1908), as a woodsman who saves his child from the clutches of an eagle. The film features some of the earliest special effects, as the eagle is a stuffed bird with movable wings (the creature seems to puzzle rather than scare his captive, the child who will be wrestled away from the clutches of this taxidermist's nightmare by the man who would soon achieve fame as the father of the narrative film). While primitive, the special effect proved potent with nickelodeon audiences. In 1910 Dawley moved to California to establish a West Coast presence for the Edison Co. On the way West, he took a camera and photographed Canada as he made his trip to California via train. In southern Caliiforni, he established a studio in Long Beach, attracted by the cheap land and sunny seaside climate. Building a facility downtown at the corner of what is now Sixth St. and Alamitos Ave., he named it Balboa Studio after Spanish conquistador and explorer Vasco Nunez de Balboa. Dawley's new studio employed Henry King and William Desmond Taylor as directors. Eventually, Balboa's facilities consisted of 20 buildings on eight acres, plus an outdoor shooting area of 11 acres in Signal Hill, a separate town within the Long Beach city limits. Reportedly he directed over 200 one-reel films at the Edison company. Among the more notable of these include the first adaptations of Frankenstein (1910) and The Charge of the Light Brigade (1912).
When Porter signed on with Adolph Zukor's Famous Players in 1912, he again hired Dawley. Starting with Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1913) Dawley directed 14 pictures for Famous Players, then he left to start his own company, Dyreda, in 1913. Dyreda was bought out by Metro Pictures after being in existence for slightly more than a year. Dawley's Always in the Way (1915), starring "Sweet Young Thing" specialist Mary Miles Minter (who would one day be implicated in the scandal surrounding the murder of director William Desmond Taylor), was released by Metro. Dawley then returned to Famous Players-Lasky (which increasingly became known by the name of its distribution arm, Paramount Pictures Corp.). He directed the first full-length (six reels) live-action version of Snow White (1916) for Famous Players-Lasky (Paramount Pictures Corp.), starring Marguerite Clark as Snow White. As a boy, Walt Disney would see and be influenced by the film. Dawley also directed a version of Uncle Tom's Cabin (1918).
He left Paramount in 1918 to get married and freelanced for several years before joining Fox Films in 1921. The last feature he directed was Broadway Broke (1923), which was released by Lewis J. Selznick's Selznick Distributing Corp. His final work commanding from behind the camera were two sound shorts for Lee De Forest, Abraham Lincoln (1924) and Love's Old Sweet Song (1923), which were released in 1924.
After retiring from the movie industry, Dawley tried several lines of work before making a new career in radio from the late 1920s through the mid-1930s. One of Dawley's lasting legacies was his role in forming an organization for directors that eventually would morph into the Directors Guild of America. According to Dawley, eight Hollywood directors "met secretly one night in a mountain resort" to discuss the creation of an organization for directors to promote their interests in an industry dominated by producers and to do something about the "decadence" that already was rampant. The eight directors were interested in cleaning up the industry and putting an end to the sexual exploitation of "girls who have ambitions but [are] weak on the side of resisting flattering offers by certain executives." The directors were offended because "directors were often forced to use girls in their casts whose only qualification" was being the producer's girlfriend . . . This sort of thing had to stop, and eight directors decided to do something about it." The June 1, 1918, issue of "The Exhibitor's Trade Review" contained an article in which Charles Giblyn claimed he was at the first meeting as "nine" directors, and that the turnout was limited because of a driving rain. The meeting was held because "envy and malice" had engendered "a wave of slander" directed against the movie industry that threatened its viability, as the studios were under investigation. Considered "cesspools" and "habitats of criminals and vagrants" by the public and the Establishment, one studio already was under investigation by the Los Angeles district attorney. Apart from their moral concerns, Giblyn said the group was interested in promoting camaraderie amongst directors and removing competition between directors at rival studios. Before they came together, directors did all they could to impede the shoots of other directors, particularly by claiming rights to shooting locations. Dawley became the "Scenarist," with the job of secretary, of the fraternal organization that resulted from that meeting. The Motion Picture Directors Association (MPDA), which was neither a union or a guild, was incorporated in Los Angeles on 6/18/1915 as a nonprofit social organization to "maintain the honor and dignity of the profession of motion picture directors." Other aims of the MPDA, according to the articles of organization, were to promote the motion picture as a vehicle for uplifting the morals and "social and intellectual standing of all persons connected with the motion picture producing business," and to promote "social intercourse among its members." Like most fraternal organizations, the MPDA pledged itself to aiding and assisting "all worthy distressed members of this association, their wives, widows and orphans." In addition to Dawley, 25 other members were listed on the articles. On 11/14/1916 , a New York chapter was created for directors on the East Coast, which was still the center of motion picture production in the US. Allan Dwan was elected "Director" or president on 1/2/1917. The bylaws of the MPDA were modeled after those of the Masons, and their rising sun logo was adopted by the MPDA. Dawley wrote that both branches helped foster an atmosphere of cooperation, and during World War One the MPDA helped finance funerals for members killed during the war. In the 1/17/1917 issue of "Motography," the MPDA was described as being motivated by self-protection rather than having an aggressive stance towards producers. "Wid's Yearbook" of 1920-21 stated that the MPDA provided movie directors with a forum for new ideas and saw itself as an organization that could improve conditions and lobby for directors. As an entity that distinctly recognized directors, the MPDA promoted their profession in an era when cameramen were still considered mechanics. Ater the April 1917 declaration of war against Germany, the MPDA decided to speaking for movie directors with one voice, sending President Woodrow Wilson a telegram pledging its "loyalty and allegiance in this hour of national peril." The MPDA offered its services to help win the war effort by using the movies as a propaganda vehicle; the New York chapter voted to help the federal government with military recruiting via the medium of the movies. The MPDA's annual ball, held to raise money for disabled veterans and medical care for motion picture personnel, became THE social event of the year in Hollywood. In 1921 the MPDA made plans to build a $200,000 four-story building on Highland Ave. to serve as its lodge, but the plans were never realized. William Desmond Taylor became MPDA Director/President in 1919. Before becoming Director, he had been the MPDA's most outspoken and passionate member. He proved a dynamic leader, working hard on matters affecting directors such as censorship, runaway production and the producers' promotion of technology over meaningful content. He was also concerned with improving conditions for other members of the industry. Taylor promoted cooperation among other industry fraternal organizations, such as the Assistant Directors Association. In a letter lobbying the ADA, Taylor called for a "Central Committee of Western Motion Picture Organizations...for the purpose of protecting ourselves from all enemies and furthering our common interests." Public outcry over Hollywood's decadence and "objectionable" content in movies had led to calls for state and local censorship of motion pictures, and there was also a national movement to ban the showing of movies on the Sabbath (Boston already banned certain movies from being shown on Sunday). The MPDA was prepared to fight "legislative menaces of censorship and so-called Blue Laws." Film distributor W.W. Hodkinson, one of the founders of Paramount Pictures Corp., was invited by Taylor to address the MPDA. Appearing at an MPDA meeting on Feb. 24, 1921, Hodkinson called for self-censorship to forestall efforts to have content restrictions imposed by local and state governments. Hodkinson told the directors that their "influence is more potent than that of the schoolteacher" and urged them to uphold "certain standards of cleanliness and decency . . . that you want to preserve in your home and in society generally." Taylor became the vice chairman of the Affiliated Picture Interests (API), an organization that embraced members from all sectors of the industry, which intended to become a political lobby for members of the motion picture industry. API members launched a voter registration drive people to vote and lobbied the Los Angeles Cty Council to repeal censorship. The industry had faced fierce foreign competition in the early days, and as the industry became more settled, producers began moving production abroad in order to reduce their costs. Taylor was opposed to runaway production as it hurt the people who made their living in the domestic industry. In his capacity as MPDA Director, he lobbied the Senate Finance Committee to help end the practice, sending a telegram at the end of January 1922. On February 1, 1922, William Desmond Taylor was shot to death at his Los Angeles home. The MPDA arranged the funeral, which was attended by an estimated 10,000 mourners, the biggest crowd to turn out for a private citizen in Los Angeles history up until that time. Taylor was succeed as Director of the Hollywood Branch by David Hartford, who in turn was followed by Fred Niblo, Roy Clements, William Beaudine, John Ford, Reginald Barker and Henry Otto. Republican politician Will Hays, President Warren G. Harding's Postmaster General, who came from a notoriously corrupt administration but nonetheless had a reputation as a reformer, was appointed movie industry czar in 1922. As head of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, the man who called directors "the key men of the industry" would become the front-man for the industry's efforts at self-censorship and governmental lobbying. On March 16, 1922, Hays addressed the MPDA's New York chapter at a dinner held at the Astor Hotel. The dinner was attended by 1,100 people, including William Randolph Hearst, Actors Equity President John Emerson (who wanted to organize movie industry actors), and Famous Players-Lasky boss Adolph Zukor. Hays reminded the movie-makers in the audience that they had a great potential to influence public morals and education, and thus their responsibility was great. By 1924 the MPDA had approximately 100 members in Hollywood and 40 in New York. It began publishing a plush monthly periodical called "The Director" that year, which was renamed "The Motion Picture Director" a year later. The lavish monthly featured book reviews, short fiction, and serialized novels, but mostly, it existed to promote a sense of unity among the MPDA membership. Articles addressed issues concerning directors, promoted networking column, and even included editorials. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer sachem Louis B. Mayer, the man who eventually would indirectly cause the MPDA's demise, published an article in the magazine called "The Importance of the Director." Directors wrote articles, such as Albert S. Rogell's denouncing producers for limiting directors to a single genre. The periodical stopped publication in 1927, as the strength of the MPDA waned. John Ford served as MPDA Director in 1927, the year that Louis B. Mayer had the idea of creating the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences to serve as a company union in order to forestall unionization in the industry. AMPAS originally had five branches, including one for directors, which served as a clearinghouse for directors' concerns and served as the directors' arbiter with the studios. With much of its raison d'etre usurped by AMPAS, and lacking a dynamic William Desmond Taylor-like figure to take it in other directions such as politics, lobbying, or creating an industry-wide union, the MPDA underwent a precipitous decline. By 1930, there were few members left, and by 1931 there were no members at all in Hollywood and only a few in the New York branch. J. Searle Dawley blamed the producers for killing off the MPDA. He claimed that the directors had secured capital from a San Francisco bank to finance their own production companies. The move into independent production was opposed by the studios, and at a powwow between top producers and members of the MPDA's Hollywood branch, the directors were threatened with "being blacklisted from the industry forever should they go through with the plan." Because of the threat, Dawley wrote, "today the MPDA is dead as a doornail." While AMPAS initially gave movie directors some clout in the industry, with the coming of the Depression, the major studios used AMPAS as Louis B. Mayer had intended: a company union. AMPAS helped implement across-the-board wage cuts and layoffs, and its use by the producers to advance their interests led eventually to the screenwriters (always the most radical part of the industry) founding the first craft union, the Screen Writers Guild. The directors followed shortly thereafter, when 12 directors, including five former MPDA members, met at former MPDA member King Vidor's house to form the Screen Directors Guild on December 23, 1935, The other four MPDA members who founded the SDG were Frank Borzage, John Ford, Henry King and Rowland V. Lee. The SDG was incorporated on January 16, 1936, and the ranks of the SDG soon swelled to 40. All resigned from AMPAS. Ford later said, "All of us in that room realized the need to band together to protect the integrity of motion picture direction." It was a sentiment found in the Articles of Incorporation of the MPDA, and a sentiment shared by J. Searle Dawley, the self-described "first" professional movie director.- Producer
- Director
- Writer
Aleksandr Khanzhonkov was the world's first maker of a cartoon film, the first maker of a full-time feature film in Russia and the founder of the first Russian film studio.
He was born Aleksandr Alekseevich Khanzhonkov on August 8, 1877, in the village of Khanzhonkovo, Donetsk province, Russian Empire (now Donetsk, Ukraine). His father, Aleksei Khanzhonkov, was a landlord of Don Cossack ancestry. In 1896 Aleksandr graduated from Novocherkassk Cossack Cadet School, then was promoted to junior officer in the privileged Don Cossack unit in Moscow. Khanzhonkov fought in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904 and was decorated for bravery. In 1905 he received an honorable discharge and a veteran officer's package of 5,000 rubles.
In 1905 he bought the film production company Gomon i Siversen in Moscow. He also brought new equipment from Pathe and started his own filmmaking business. In 1905-06 he shot his first documentaries. By the beginning of 1906 he invested all of his money in his filmmaking business, and obtained registration for filmmaking in Moscow. In the spring of 1906 he showed imported French films, as well as his own documentaries from his company, now named A. Khanzhonkov & Co., which initially was registered as a trade business. In 1907 Khanzhonkov produced his first film, "Palochkin i Galochkin", but it was not completed and he decided not to release it.
In 1908 Khanzhonkov released his first feature film, Drama v tabore podmoskovnykh tsygan (1908). At that time he hired actors and directors from the Vvedensky Narodny Dom Theatre Company, including such actors as Aleksandra Goncharova, Andrei Gromov, Pyotr Chardynin and Ivan Mozzhukhin. Between 1909 and 1919 he produced about 100 films. He was the biggest film producer in Russia, and made more films than all other Russian film studios combined. He produced 12 films in 1912 and 20 in 1913 alone. By 1914 his net annual profit surpassed 150,000 rubles, which in 2012 would be comparable to $50 million.
In 1911 Khanzhonkov produced the first full-length feature film in Russia, Defense of Sevastopol (1911), about the siege of the city of Sebastopol during the Crimean War of 1854-55. The production was sponsored by Tsar Nicholas II. Khanzhonkov made a painstaking effort and produced a really advanced period film epic. He found many surviving veterans of the Crimean war, and used the same locations where the historic battle took place. The Tsar issued orders that Khanzhonkov was given temporary right to command and direct the movements of several regiments of the Imperial Army and Navy that were used in the massive battle scenes. Khanzhonkov became the first director in the world to use two cameras. The premiere of the 100-minute film took place at the Livadia palace in Yalta, before the the tsar and his court, and with the cast and crew of more than 100 in attendance. Khanzhonkov was awarded and decorated for the film. He was also commissioned by the tsar to make several documentaries and feature films about various official events in Russia, such as Votsareniye doma Romanovykh (1913).
During the early years of Russian cinema, Khanzhonkov collaborated with theatrical directors, such as Vasili Goncharov and Yevgeny Bauer. His works with Bauer were considered among the highest achievements of the silent film era in Russia. Khanzhonkov also played an important role in the formation of the Russian film industry during the 1910s. In 1910 he started the first Russian film magazine, "Vestnik cinematografii", a comprehensive quarterly publication about emerging film culture and film business. In 1912 he produced the world's first cartoon, _Prekrasnaya Lukanida, ili Voina usachei s rogachami (1912)_, directed by Wladyslaw Starewicz.
In 1916 Khanzhonkov bought land on the Black Sea coast in Yalta, Crimea, and built the new Khanzhonkovs Studio there. In the spring of 1917 he moved his Moscow studio, with actors and staff, to the new location in Yalta. There, from 1917-20, he produced about 15 films. In 1920, after the defeat of the Russian White army of Gen. Vrangel in Crimea, Khanzhonkov's studio and his land were nationalized by the Communist government. At the same time Khanzhonkov's Film Factory in Zamoskvotrechye in Moscow was also confiscated and nationalized by the Communist government, then renamed Goskino (the first location of Goskino was on Zhitnaya St.). Khanzhonkov left the country, together with his best actors, directors and cinematographers. In 1922 he started a film studio in Baden, Austria.
In 1923 Khanzhonkov was invited to come back to Russia by the newly founded "Rusfilm" company. The invitation was sponsored by Soviet Culture Commissar Anatoli Lunacharsky, who sent an official welcome telegram to Khanzhonkov. In 1923 Khanzhonkov returned to Russia, but the "Rusfilm" company suddenly folded. He was hired by Goskino as production consultant, then worked for Proletkino Studios. In 1926 he was falsely accused of embezzlement and arrested. Although he was later cleared of all charges, he was left penniless. His health declined and he moved from Moscow to Yalta and never worked again.
By 1934, Khanzhonkov, aged 56, was disabled and jobless. He wrote a passionate letter to the government which took all his wealth and made him poor, and he was eventually granted a pension from the Russian government. In 1937 he published a book of memoirs titled "Pervye gody Russkoi kinematografii" ("The First Years of Russian Cinema"). By that time he was living in the glorious past. His first wife, writer Antonina Khanzhonkova, died in emigration and the couple's two children were grown up. Back in Russia Khanzhonkov married his assistant, Vera Dmitrievna Popova-Khanzhonkova, who cared for him for the rest of his life while he suffered from rheumatoid arthritis and was using a wheelchair due to his disability. He survived the Nazi occupation of Yalta during World War II. He died on September 26, 1945, in Yalta, Crimea, Soviet Union (now Ukraine).
Khanzhonkov's films were edited to remove any pro-monarchist elements during the regime of Joseph Stalin. In 1956 the cultural "thaw" was initiated by Nikita Khrushchev, the ban on Khanzhonkov's films was ended and many of his movies were shown on public television as well as in theaters.- Actor
- Soundtrack
There are very few character actors from the 1930s, '40s or '50s who rose to the rank of stardom. Only a rare man or woman reached the level of renown and admiration, and had enough audience appeal, to be the first name in a cast's billing, a name that got marquee posting. Charles Coburn comes to mind, but there aren't many others. However, one who made it was Edmund Gwenn.
Gwenn was born Edmund Kellaway in Wandsworth, London, on September 26, 1877. He was the oldest boy in the family, which at that time meant he was the only one who really mattered. His father was a British civil servant, and he groomed Edmund to take a position of power in the Empire. However, early on, the boy had a mind of his own. For a while, his inclination was to go to sea, but that ended when one of his forebear's in the Queen's Navy was court-martialed for exceeding his "wine bill". In addition to that, Edmund had poor eyesight and perhaps most importantly, he was his mother's darling, and she kept having visions of shipwrecks and desert island strandings. As for the civil service, to the boy it seemed like a "continent of unexplored boredom".
He attended St. Olaf's College and would attend King's College in London as well. Surprisingly, he excelled at rugby and amateur boxing. Meanwhile, he developed a strong inclination to the stage, partly because of his admiration for the great English actor, Henry Irving. A major roadblock to that ambition, however, was his father, who, at that time, was stationed in Ireland. When Edmund broke the news to his father that he had chosen acting as a career, there followed "a scene without parallel in Victorian melodrama." His father called the theatre "that sink of iniquity." He predicted that, if Edmund went into theatre, he would end up in the gutter, and then literally "showed him the door." Years later his father would admit he had been wrong, but that didn't help the young man during an all-night crossing from Dublin to England during which he had time to reflect. He was penniless. His experience consisted of a few performances in amateur productions, and he knew that if he failed, there was no going back home.
However, in 1895, at the age of eighteen, he made his first appearance on the English stage with a group of amateurs just turned professional, playing two roles, "Dodo Twinkle" and "Damper", in "Rogue and Vagabond". For a long time afterward, he refused to go on stage without a false beard or some other disguise, fearing someone would recognize him and tell his father (it's a bit ironic, by the way, that Edmund's younger brother Arthur would also become an actor using the name of Arthur Chesney). During the next few years, roles were hard to come by but, by 1899, he made his first appearance on the West End in London in "A Jealous Mistake". This was followed by ten years in the hinterlands acting with stock and touring companies, gradually working his way up from small parts to juicier roles. While with Edmund Tearle's Repertory Company, which toured the provinces, he played a different role each night. It was excellent training, in that he acted in everything from William Shakespeare to old melodrama.
About this time, he married Minnie Terry, niece of the more famous actress Ellen Terry, a marriage that evidently was short-lived. Most sources list it as beginning and ending in 1901, perhaps only for a matter of days or even hours. From that point, Gwenn would remain a bachelor for the rest of his life. He seems to have preferred not going into any details about the marriage and divorce, and Minnie Terry, who outlived Gwenn, apparently never mentioned what happened, at least not publicly. That same year, however, he went to Australia and acted there for three years, not returning to London until 1904. There, he took a small part in "In the Hospital", which led to his receiving a postcard from George Bernard Shaw, offering him a leading role as "Straker", the Cockney chauffeur, in "Man and Superman". Gwenn accepted (by this time he was Edmund Gwenn) and the play was a success. Shaw became a sort of professional godfather for him. He appeared in "John Bull's Island", "Major Barbara", "You Never Can Tell", "Captain Brassbound's Conversion" and "The Devil's Disciple", all by Shaw. He spent three years in Shaw's company, years which he called "the happiest I've ever had in the theatre".
From 1908 until 1915, he performed in new plays by noted playwrights of the time, including John Masefield's "The Campden Wonder", 'John Galsworthy''s "Justice" and "The Skin Game", J.M. Barrie's "What Every Woman Knows" and "The Twelve Pound Look", as well as Henrik Ibsen's "The Wild Duck" and Harley Granville-Barker's "The Voysey Inheritance". By this time, World War I had started and Gwenn, despite his poor eyesight, was conscripted into the British Army. Most of his time during "The Great War" was spent drawing supplies up to the front lines, while under fire. He was so successful at this task that, after a year as a private, he received a steady stream of promotions until eventually becoming a captain.
After the War, he returned to the stage and, in 1921, made his first appearance in the US in "A Voice from the Minaret" and "Fedora". He would return to America in 1928 to replace his friend, Dennis Eadie, who had died while in rehearsal for "The House of Arrows", but for most of this time, he was in England doing more stage roles and two dozen British films.
His first appearance on screen was in a British short, The Real Thing at Last (1916) in 1916, while he was still in the army. His next film roles were in Shaw's How He Lied to Her Husband (1931) and J.B. Priestley's The Good Companions (1933). He was also in Unmarried (1920) in 1920 and a silent version of "The Skin Game" (The Skin Game (1921)) as "Hornblower", a role he would reprise in 1931 for a talking version (The Skin Game (1931)) directed by Alfred Hitchcock. From then on, Gwenn was to work steadily until the end of his life. He appeared in English stage plays and films, eventually doing more and more on Broadway and in Hollywood. For example, he played the amiable counterfeiter in "Laburnum Grove" in 1933 (later to become the film Laburnum Grove (1936) in which he would star) and then with the entire British company brought it to New York. He was also a huge success in "The Wookey" in 1942, playing a Cockney tugboat captain. That same year, he appeared as "Chebutykin" in Anton Chekhov's "The Three Sisters", with Katharine Cornell, Ruth Gordon and Judith Anderson. In such illustrious company, Gwenn was hailed by critics as "magnificent" and "superlatively good".
In 1935, RKO summoned him to Hollywood to portray Katharine Hepburn's father in Sylvia Scarlett (1935). From then on, he was much in demand, appearing in Anthony Adverse (1936), All American Chump (1936), Parnell (1937), and A Yank at Oxford (1938). In 1940, he was the delightful "Mr. Bennet" in Pride and Prejudice (1940), then made a 180-degree turn by playing a folksy assassin in Alfred Hitchcock's Foreign Correspondent (1940). The year 1941 brought Cheers for Miss Bishop (1941), One Night in Lisbon (1941), The Devil and Miss Jones (1941) and Scotland Yard (1941). Then came Charley's Aunt (1941), in which he romanced Jack Benny, masquerading as a woman. Other important films included A Yank at Eton (1942), The Meanest Man in the World (1943), The Keys of the Kingdom (1944) and Between Two Worlds (1944).
In 1945, he played villain "Albert Richard Kingby" in Dangerous Partners (1945). There is a peculiar scene in this film, which makes one wonder what director Edward L. Cahn was thinking. James Craig and Signe Hasso, the hero and heroine, are being held by the villainous Gwenn in a room, when Gwenn comes in to interrogate them. In the midst of this, the 33-year-old, 6'2" Craig punches the 68-year-old, 5'5" Gwenn in the belly and then forces the doubled-over Gwenn to release them. Admittedly, Craig and Hasso must escape, and Gwenn's character is pretty evil, but knocking the wind out of the old man makes Craig seem like a bully and far less sympathetic.
After "Dangerous Partners", Gwenn was in Bewitched (1945), She Went to the Races (1945), Of Human Bondage (1946), Undercurrent (1946), Life with Father (1947), Green Dolphin Street (1947) and Apartment for Peggy (1948). In Thunder in the Valley (1947), he played one of his most unlikable characters, a father who beats his son, smashes his violin and shoots his dog.
Then in 1947, he struck it rich. Twentieth Century-Fox was planning Miracle on 34th Street (1947). It had offered the role of "Kris Kringle" to Gwenn's cousin, the well-known character actor Cecil Kellaway, but he had turned it down with the observation that "Americans don't like whimsy". Fox then offered it to Gwenn, who pounced on it. His performance was to earn him an Academy Award as Best Supporting Actor (at age 71) and, because it is rerun every Christmas season, he would become for many their all-time favorite screen Santa. Accepting the award, Gwenn said, "Now I know there is a Santa Claus". He beat out some stiff competition: Charles Bickford (The Farmer's Daughter (1947)), Thomas Gomez (Ride the Pink Horse (1947)), Robert Ryan (Crossfire (1947)) and Richard Widmark (Kiss of Death (1947)). As soon as he got the part, Gwenn went to work turning himself into Santa Claus. Though rotund, Gwenn didn't feel he was rotund enough to look like the jolly old elf most people expected after having read Clement Moore's "The Night before Christmas", in which Santa "had a broad face and a little round belly / That shook when he laughed like a bowlful of jelly." He could of course wear padding, but he resisted that as too artificial. So he put on almost 30 pounds for the role, a fair amount for a man of his short stature, and added nearly five inches to his waistline. The problem was that after the film was finished, Gwenn found it hard to lose the extra weight. "I've been stocky all my adult life," he said, "but now I must accept the fact that I'm fat." As was his nature, he didn't get upset, and instead was able to laugh about it. Six years later, when playing an elderly professor in The Student Prince (1954), he had a scene in which he entered the Prince's chamber, struggling with the buttons of a ceremonial uniform. The line he was given was, "I'm too old to wear a uniform," but Gwenn suggested a change which stayed in the finished film, "I'm too old and fat to wear a uniform."
Gwenn had lost his hair early on, and had no more concern about it than he did about his portliness. In a fair number of films, such as Pride and Prejudice (1940), he appears bald, but he also played many roles with a toupee if he felt that worked better for the character. He would select a hairpiece that helped achieve the look he was after for the role. As regards the rest of his appearance, Gwenn is commonly listed as 5'6" tall, which may have been accurate when he was a younger man, but by the time he was a Hollywood regular he appears to be at least two inches shorter. Plagued by weak eyesight since his youth, Gwenn wore a pince-nez for a while, and then glasses, off-screen and sometimes on. Though he enjoyed fine clothes, he does not seem to have been in the least bit vain about any physical shortcomings he may have had. He looked a bit like a benign clergyman, perhaps of the Anglican faith, an image enhanced by his soft, almost soothing voice. He once said he was "always short and stocky, and not a particularly handsome thing. I could never play romantic leads." After "Miracle on 34th Street," however, Gwenn was a star and constantly in demand, especially when the role called for a kindly eccentric.
Gwenn remained a British subject all his life. When he first moved to Hollywood, he lived at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel in Beverly Hills. His home in London had been reduced to rubble during the bombings by the Luftwaffe in World War II. Only the fireplace survived. What Gwenn regretted most was the loss of the memorabilia he had collected of the famous actor Henry Irving. Eventually Gwenn bought a house at 617 North Bedford Drive in Beverly Hills, which he was to share with his secretary and "confidential man", Ernest C. Bach, and later with former Olympic athlete Rodney Soher.
The year 1950 brought a pair of interesting films. In Louisa (1950) he and Charles Coburn were romantic rivals for the hand of Spring Byington. In one scene Gwenn socks Coburn in the jaw, though Coburn later bests him in arm wrestling. Gwenn wins Byington's hand in the end. He was also delightful in Mister 880 (1950) as a kindly counterfeiter. Gwenn received his second Oscar nomination for his performance, though this time he lost out to George Sanders in All About Eve (1950) He did, however, win the Golden Globe Award.
In 1952 he appeared in Sally and Saint Anne (1952) as Grandpa Patrick Ryan, affecting an Irish brogue for the role. He played football coach Pop Doyle, teamed up with a chimpanzee, in Bonzo Goes to College (1952). "The Student Prince" followed in 1954, as did the science-fiction classic Them! (1954). This film raises an interesting observation. The year before, Cecil Kellaway had appeared in another sci-fi classic, The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953). Watch the two films together and you'll see that the two cousins are playing essentially the same role, that of an elderly scientist with a lovely daughter who is able to provide the hero, and the audience, with some scholarly background on the dangers they face. The two actors could easily have switched roles. "Them!" is noteworthy, too, in that it was a particularly physically painful part for Gwenn. By this time he was 77 and suffering from advanced arthritis. Several scenes in the movie were filmed in the desert, where the temperature often reached 110 degrees. The costumer had outfitted him in a wool suit for some of the early scenes. Joan Weldon, who played his daughter, has noted that Gwenn was in great discomfort and almost certainly could not have continued without the help of his valet, Ernest.
The next year Gwenn was in It's a Dog's Life (1955) and The Trouble with Harry (1955). His film work has some interesting patterns. "Dog's Life" was at least the third time Gwenn made a film centered on a dog. He had already co-starred with Pal as Lassie in Lassie Come Home (1943) and Challenge to Lassie (1949). "Harry" was Gwenn's fourth picture directed by Alfred Hitchcock, the others being "The Skin Game", Strauss' Great Waltz (1934) and "Foreign Correspondent". Gwenn's last feature film was The Rocket from Calabuch (1956), shot in Spain and released in 1958, when he was 81. As for TV, his most memorable role may have been as a snowman that comes to life in a Christmas night telecast on The Ford Television Theatre (1952) from a story by Nathaniel Hawthorne, "Heart of Gold".
Gwenn's final days were spent at the Motion Picture Home in Woodland Hills, California. Having endured terrible arthritis for many years, he had suffered a stroke, and then contracted pneumonia, from which he died at age 81 on September 6, 1959. His body was cremated, and his ashes were originally stored in a private vault at the Chapel of the Pines Crematory in Los Angeles. In March 2023, Gwenn's misplaced urn was found in the vault by Hollywood Graveyard creator Arthur Dark and researcher Jessical Wahl. Dark and Wahl created a GoFundMe campaign to fund moving Gwenn's urn to a publicly accessible location and, on December 3, 2023, Gwenn's urn was reinurned in the Cathedral Mausoleum at Hollywood Forever Cemetery.
Gwenn had appointed Rodney Soher as the executor of his will, in which he had left Minnie Terry one-third of his estate, his sister Elsie Kellaway a third, and Ernest Bach a third, in addition to his clothes, shoes, linens, ties and luggage. However, for some reason, while he was spending his last days at the Motion Picture Home, Gwenn signed a codicil to his will, in which he said he had given Bach the lump sum of $5000, and that was all he was to receive. After Gwenn's death, Bach challenged the codicil, claiming that Gwenn was not of sound mind while in the Home and that some unnamed person--possibly referring to Soher--had unduly influenced Gwenn to change his will. The outcome is not known. There is a story that has been around for years that shortly before he died a visitor observed, "It must be hard [to die]", to which Gwenn replied, "Dying is easy. Comedy is hard". The story and the wording vary somewhat from teller to teller. Gwenn may indeed have said it, but he may have been repeating someone else. The quotation has also been ascribed to several earlier wits, including his mentor George Bernard Shaw and the famous actor Edward Keane. Gwenn's star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame can be found at 1751 Vine Street.- Archibald "Arch" Selwyn, the theater impresario who was one of the founders of the Goldwyn Studios, was born Archibald Simon in 1877. As a child he and his family, including older brother Edgar Selwyn, lived in Toronto, Ontario, before moving to Selma, Alabama, where his parents died. Arch followed his brother to New York in the 1890s, where Edgar was establishing himself as an actor.
Arch used his brother's theatrical connections to go into business with a loan from theatrical literary agent Elisabeth Marbury. He had acquired the rights to operate a Coney Island concession that required the purchase of a penny-slot-weighing machine, which he did with Marbury's money. After much frustration with the rusting machine, Arch and his partner garnered 1,300 pennies in one day from a Coney Island crowd mindful of their waists. The two partners promptly lost their loot, which was wrapped in a blanket, although they did recover it from a restaurant trash can. It was time for a new career for Arch.
In 1914 Edgar, Arch and future Broadway producer-director Crosby Gaige launched Selwyn & Company, Inc., a theatrical production company and play brokerage. In addition to producing plays, the company owned and operated Broadway theaters. The Selwyn Theater, which was built in 1918 on 42nd St. behind their six-floor New York City office building, was inaugurated on Oct 2, 1918, with the play "Information Please". The money for constructing the theater, which was re-christened the American Airlines Theater in the year 2000, was obtained by Arch from gambler 'Arnold Rothstein' (qv, the man who fixed the 1919 World Series (one of the inspirations for the character of Meyer Wolfsheim in F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby," Rothstein pioneered New York's narcotics trade, in addition to being a gangster, swindler and political fixer. He financed the first of George White's "Scandals" in 1918. His henchman Nicky Arnstein was the husband of Fanny Brice, who appeared in the rival Ziegfeld Follies). Rothstein, who liked to date Broadway showgirls, relied on his gal pals to steer patrons to his gambling parlors.
The most popular play to appear at the Selwyn was Edna Ferber and George S. Kaufman's "The Royal Family," which burlesqued the Barrymore family. Opening on December 28, 1927, the play, which was produced by Broadway legend Jed Harris, ran for 345 performances. The Selwyns also built the Times Square Theater on 42nd Street in 1920. The theater opened with Edgar's own play, "The Mirage," which turned out to be a hit that ran for six months. The second play at the theater, Avery Hopwood's "The Demi-Virgin," ran for eight months. Eight of the 23 plays that followed these two inaugural hits were successful, and its boards were tread by the likes of Beatrice Lillie, Tallulah Bankhead and Robert Cummings. Gertrude Lawrence co-starred with the young Laurence Olivier and Noël Coward in Coward's 1931 hit comedy "Private Lives" at the theater. Other famous productions at the theater were "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes" in the 1926-27 season, "The Front Page" in 1928 and "Strike Up the Band" in 1930.
The Times Square Theater's exterior featured an open-colonnaded limestone facade that had an entrance for the Selwyn's Apollo Theater. Built in 1919 as a movie-cum-vaudeville house named The Bryant, it was taken over by the Selwyns in 1920 and rebuilt. The renamed Apollo was converted to a legitimate theater showcasing plays and musicals, sharing a single marquee with the Times Square Theater. The Apollo didn't have its first hit until 1923's "Poppy," starring W.C. Fields. The theater then was taken over exclusively for George White's "Scandals," a Ziegfeld Follies-like show that ran annually from 1924-31. The "Scandals" was famous for its chorus line of undressed showgirls.
This was the Jazz Age, a period that saw the maturation of the American theater. The first great American playwright, Eugene O'Neill, made his mark in the era. Many of the musicals and popular songs launched in the 1920s are still with us, though, ironically, most of the popular playwrights of the era, like Avery Hopwood (who once had five hits running simultaneously on Broadway) have been forgotten. It was the time of Damon Runyon's "Bloodhounds of Broadway," when men like Rothstein and the swindler Julius "Nicky" Arnstein, the real-life models for Runyon's Nathan Detroit and Sky Masterson, strutted their stuff in the theater district amongst the other Guys & Dolls. Flush with money from securities swindles and other dubious endeavors, they were anxious to launder their dirty money as well as rubs shoulders with the showgirls and well-heeled sheep they were born to fleece. Silent partners putting up the capital for the construction of theaters or the production of shows, they embodied a Promethean race of theatrical angels who stole the light of heaven and gifted it to Broadway, making it shine. The Jazz Babies were ecstatic, and the box office boomed. The apogee of the Great White Way, so called due to the proliferation of white light given off by the plethora of uncolored light bulbs on theater marquees, was the Broadway season of 1927-28, when Broadway featured over 250 productions in over 70 legitimate theaters. Broadway was the heart of popular culture, as the shows that debuted there would segue to neighborhood theaters in metropolitan New York, and then work their way out to the stock companies in the hinterlands, even penetrating to the sticks populated by hicks before the advent of the sound flicks. According to the book "Broadway" (1974) by "New York Times" drama critic Brooks Atkinson (for whom the Richard Mansfield Theatre was renamed in 1960), the traffic in the Times Square area was so intense, due to the conglomeration of taxis and trolley cars, that most people out for a night at the theater walked. The theaters were built close together in the district to create a kind of entertainment bazaar, enabling theatergoers to shop for a show to attend, much as modern moviegoers mull their choices at a multiplex. Walking from theater to theater, this crowd in evening dress provided audiences for less-popular works, as many shows had sold out. Theaters still holding empty seats sent batches of tickets to broker Joe Leblang to be sold at half price. Producers of hit shows often resorted to the practice of "icing," hoarding tickets and selling them through scalpers at a higher price, then splitting the profits. When Lee Shubert, the head of the Shubert theatrical empire, died in 1953, his safe unexpectedly held several million dollars ($1 million in 1953 is equivalent to approximately $6.6 million in 2003 dollars), likely the profits from icing. Broadway was hit hard by the Great Depression that came after the 1929 stock market crash. Attendance dropped off sharply in the 1930s (just as movie attendance would drop off sharply in the late 1940s and early 1950s, due to the inroads of television), and there were fewer productions mounted. The Chanin Brothers went bankrupt in 1933 and lost everything. The Shubert Theater Corp., the premier Broadway theater operator, went bankrupt in 1934, though the canny Lee Shubert proved to be the only bidder when the organization's theaters were auctioned worth, outfoxing his brother J.J.
As a new decade dawned, many theaters that once were home to legitimate productions converted to movie houses or retail space, while others were torn down. The Shuberts did manage to preserve many of Broadway's most significant theaters, but other impresarios like the Selwyns exited the business. The Apollo closed as a legitimate theater after the musical "Blackbirds of 1933" flopped. It then began showing movies, until it was acquired by the Minskys, who turned it into a burlesque theater from 1934-37. In 1938 it transformed itself into a movie theater specializing in foreign films, then evolved into a Times Square grindhouse, closing in 1978. It was reopened as a legitimate house with "On Golden Pond" in 1979, but now is just an empty shell.
In 1933 the Times Square Theater ceased to be a legitimate theater after the closing of the play "Forsaking All Others," starring Tallulhah Bankhead. Produced by Arch, the play opened on March 1, 1933, and closed after 110 performances. The theater was refitted as a movie house in 1934, as was The Selwyn that same year, before being converted into a retail store in 1940. The Selwyn degenerated into one of Times Squares' many double-feature grindhouses before being reclaimed as a theater in the 1990s, when the Wooster Group staged Eugene O'Neill's "The Hairy Ape" there in 1997.
The source of the Selwyn family's fortune wasn't solely the theater. To capitalize on Edgar's popularity as a Broadway actor and playwright, the Selwyn brothers started producing movies in 1912 through their All Star Feature Films Corp. Arch produced a film of Upton Sinclair's sensational expose "The Jungle" in 1914--The Jungle (1914))--with a script based on his sister-in-law Virginia Mayo's dramatization of Sinclair's novel. Mayo was a successful actress-playwright herself, who also wrote novels.
In December 1916 the Selwyns merged their movie company with that of producer Samuel Goldfish, creating the Goldwyn Pictures Corp. The symbol of the new company was a reclining lion, surrounded by a banner made from a strip of celluloid film, reading, in Latin, "Ars Gratia Artis" ("Art for Art's Sake"). Designed by advertising-publicity man Howard Dietz, who later became a Broadway lyricist and movie executive, it adorned the front gate of the studio's Culver City, California, production facilities, which ranked with the finest in Hollywood (the inspiration for the original "Leo the Lion" likely were the stone lions fronting the New York Public Library on 44th St., which was across from the All Star Feature Corp.'s offices).
Margaret Mayo and Broadway impresario Arthur Hopkins also were partners in the deal, but the dominant figure at Goldwyn Pictures and Goldwyn Distributing was Sam Goldfish. Goldfish, a founding partner of the Jesse L. Lasky Feature Film Co. in 1914, was forced out of the company in early 1916 when Jesse Lasky more closely integrated his production company with Adolph Zukor's Famous Players Film Co. The two firms would serve as the basis of Paramount Pictures. Goldfish, who had immigrated to Canada as Schmuel Gelbfisz before coming to the United States, liked the name of his new company so well, he adopted it as his surname, thus becoming Samuel Goldwyn.
Goldwyn Pictures rented studio space in Fort Lee, NJ, at the Solax studios, and then at the larger studios owned by the Universal Film Manufacturing Co. In September 1917, Goldwyn released its first movie, Polly of the Circus (1917), based on Margaret Mayo's 1907 play, starring Mae Marsh. In addition to Marsh, Goldwyn's stable of stars included Tallulah Bankhead, Marie Dressler, Mabel Normand, and Will Rogers. Its directors included Ralph Ince, Frank Lloyd and Raoul Walsh.
Sam Goldwyn dominated Goldwyn Pictures for three years, until he lost an ownership struggle in September 1920. He resigned and, tired of partners, became an independent producer for the rest of his career. Subsequently, the Goldwyn-less Goldwyn bought the Triangle Studios in Los Angeles and leased two more New York studios while ceasing operations in New Jersey. The company eventually was merged with Loew's Inc.'s Metro Pictures in 1924 through a stock swap, creating Metro-Goldwyn, which subsequently merged with Louis B. Mayer's Louis B. Mayer Productions. The Leo the Lion trademark would be adopted by MGM, and after being modified, would become one of the most famous and enduring trademarks in history. Under the guidance of Mayer and his central producer, former Universal production executive Irving Thalberg, MGM became the greatest studio in the world.
Arch's brother Edgar, who was the brother-in-law of MGM chief Nicholas Schenck through his second marriage to the former Ruth Wilcox, eventually became a producer at MGM and Mayer's editorial assistant. While Edgar concentrated on his career at MGM, Arch continued with his life in the theater, producing plays through 1939.
Between 1912 and 1942 Arch and Edgar, singularly and together, produced over 80 plays on Broadway and at least a score of motion pictures. Arch Selwyn died in Los Angeles on June 21, 1959, having outlived his brother and former business partner Edgar by 15 years. - Actor
- Writer
- Producer
Born in New York City to a Judge of Special Sessions who was also president of a sewing machine company. Grew up on City Island, New York. Attended Hamilton Military Academy and turned down an appointment to West Point to attend New York Law School, where his law school classmates included future New York City mayor James J. Walker. After a boating accident which led to pneumonia, Carey wrote a play while recuperating and toured the country in it for three years, earning a great deal of money, all of which evaporated after his next play was a failure. In 1911, his friend Henry B. Walthall introduced him to director D.W. Griffith, for whom Carey was to make many films. Carey married twice, the second time to actress Olive Fuller Golden (aka Olive Carey, who introduced him to future director John Ford. Carey influenced Universal Studios head Carl Laemmle to use Ford as a director, and a partnership was born that lasted until a rift in the friendship in 1921. During this time, Carey grew into one of the most popular Western stars of the early motion picture, occasionally writing and directing films as well. In the '30s he moved slowly into character roles and was nominated for an Oscar for one of them, the President of the Senate in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939). He worked once more with Ford, in The Prisoner of Shark Island (1936), and appeared once with his son, Harry Carey Jr., in Howard Hawks's Red River (1948). He died after a protracted bout with emphysema and cancer. Ford dedicated his remake of 3 Godfathers (1948) "To Harry Carey--Bright Star Of The Early Western Sky."