Week of August 26th, 1916

J. Warren Kerrigan

Harry Carey

Herbert Rawlinson

Dorothy Phillips

One hundred years ago this week, Grace Kingsley reported an unusually high number of accidents and injuries. The list included:

• J. Warren Kerrigan and the cast and crew of The Measure of a Man were in a boat crash when they were returning from filming scenes in Eureka. At one o’clock in the morning a lumber schooner struck their passenger boat and everyone was thrown from their beds. Luckily, both ships were able to get to San Francisco.
• Val Paul was rehearsing a scene on the shores of Catalina Island in which he saved a boy from a shark attack when a real shark attacked. He managed to grab the boy and escape by climbing onto a rock.
• Harry Carey, while “performing a perilous feat” in The Underling was thrown against a railroad track and his shoulder was severely injured.
• Herbert Rawlinson was hurt while filming a fight. He fell and tore the ligaments in his knee. However, they were working at the LA County Hospital at the time, so he saw a doctor right away.
• Dorothy Phillips was injured when she fell into a bear trap while filming on location in Bear Valley.

Working in film in 1916 was dangerous! Happily, everybody recovered from their trauma and injuries. J. Warren Kerrigan continued to be a leading man until he quit acting in 1924; The Measure of a Man was released in November and Moving Picture World thought it was wholesome, if a bit padded. Val Paul kept acting until the early 20’s, then he became a director, producer, and production manager. Harry Carey became a big star of Westerns, then a character actor and was nominated for an Oscar in 1940 for his role in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. The Underling was re-named The Conspiracy and Motion Picture News thought it was “an entirely satisfactory melodrama.” Herbert Rawlinson also had a long career, though he was less successful, moving from being a leading man in the silent era to doing bit parts in talkies and television. Dorothy Phillips’ career also prospered in the 20’s, then dwindled to occasional bit parts.

Finally, one accident might have gotten put to good use:

Last Monday Director [Hal] Roach’s car was hit and demolished by a truck while on its way to location, loaded with players. Bebe Daniels and Harold Lloyd were both sent to the hospital while Fred Jefferson and James Crosby suffered minor injuries. The car was completely wreaked, but the cameraman was on the job. Leaping from under the wreckage, he saw that the camera was uninjured, and at once set it up, calling meanwhile to the players the familiar phrase “Hold it!” He got a picture of the wreak, and it’s going to be used in a comedy. Well, some cameramen do have a sense of humor!

James Crosby

Crosby, the quick-thinking cameraman, had gotten his start in film working at the Selig-Polyscope lab in 1904. When the film industry contracted in 1918, he went back to lab management and in 1933 he invented an automatic film developer.

I can’t find out if they really did use the footage in a film because trade papers rarely reviewed shorts and only 14 of the 67 Lonesome Luke films survived, according to Annette D’Agostino Lloyd. But it seems plausible that it was in Luke the Chauffeur, released on October 29, 1916.

Kingsley particularly enjoyed The Weakness of Strength this week, saying it was

“the strongest and sincerest photodrama the Symphony [Theater] has shown in many a day…in vain one looks for the impossibly fortuitous circumstance, the villain who villains for the pure joy of villaining, the too-perfect hero…even the happy ending, for which one does not look early in the picture, is so adroitly evolved as to appear quite the natural outcome of events.”

The story involves a clerk who, desperate for money to care for his sick grandmother, embezzles money, but his boss ultimately forgives him (AFI Catalog). It’s a lost film. Now the only remarkable thing about the film is how unremarkable it was. All of the cast and crew had decent careers, but nobody was particularly famous. It’s the sort of movie that kept the entertainment industry running.

No old-style suits for these ladies.

Kingsley reported one patently absurd item unquestioningly: Mack Sennett ordered “the cutie Keystone bathing girls to return to the old-style bathing suits.” Of course, no such thing happened, and I have no idea why somebody thought that would be a useful bit of publicity.

 

Week of August 19th, 1916

Comic by Edmund Waller “Ted” Gale

One hundred years ago this week, Grace Kingsley scored an interview with Charlie Chaplin on the set of his new film, The Count. She rarely wrote up stand-alone interviews; instead she would incorporate them in her regular news column. But Chaplin was already such an important figure in film–only two years after his debut–that she made an exception.

She found a melancholy man who “takes life and himself seriously, and wants you to take them seriously, too.” She told of his impoverished beginnings, his working methods and the inspiration for his walk. She also demonstrated how well he could tell a story; one night he was gloomy, so he and Thomas Meighan went slumming at a saloon in San Pedro. The proprietor became suspicious of the two, and

…he openly voiced the opinion that we weren’t there for any good. Finally our evidence of overwhelming wealth – we had spent six bits by that time—caused him to decide that such reckless spenders must be from Alaska. After a while, though, he began to look at me closely. A look of amazement stole over his face. “You ain’t – it can’t be Charlie Chaplin,” he cried. “Pshaw,” I answered, “of course not, I’m a travelling man.” “I’ll bet you are Charlie Chaplin” he insisted. But when I coyly admitted I was indeed that very person –

“Aww, no you ain’t,” he veered around. “No man that made $670,000 a year would come to a dump like this!” And no amount of persuasion or proof could convince him.

The whole article was reprinted in Charlie Chaplin Interviews and the editor, Kevin Hayes, credits her with figuring out how to have a good interview with him: make it seem like a conversation, not an interview.

Clayton, Montague Love and Blackwell in A Woman’s Way

Kingsley’s favorite film this week was A Woman’s Way. She wrote:

it is perhaps the best high comedy of its class which the local screen has seen…That shades of dramatic feeling, that delicate finesse of the mind’s workings, that adroit play of wit on wit may be shown on the screen, is proven in this clever story of how a woman, about to lose her husband to a vampire, sets her wits to work and wins the battle.

It stared Ethel Clayton (“a through mistress of her art”) and Carlyle Blackwell (“the artist as always, and a handsome and magnetic one”). Clayton had the depressingly typical actress’s career: she was a leading lady until the mid-1920s, then she played mothers, then she took bit parts. Blackwell continued to get leading men parts until sound ended his film career.

Margaret I. MacDonald at Moving Picture World disagreed with Kingsley; she found it only “moderately entertaining…will no doubt please the average audience.” It’s not a lost film, and has been preserved at the Amsterdam Filmmuseum.

The most successful person involved with the film was its writer, Frances Marion. Adapted from a stage play, A Woman’s Way was one of her 20 (!) film credits for 1916. She was best know for her work with Mary Pickford (see the book Without Lying Down), as well as Stella Dallas and Son of the Sheik. Marion also won an Oscar for The Champ.

Mary Pickford, at work on the first film of her new contract, Pride of the Clan (1916)

Marion’s soon-to-be collaborator made some news this week:

Mary Pickford will head her own company hereafter, producing big features which will be released independent of any programme. It was formally announced yesterday that the Mary Pickford Film Corporation had been organized and offices opened in the Godfrey Building in New York. Miss Pickford personally is to direct and supervise every detail of her productions. It is announced that she will surround herself with the best brains and skill the motion picture field will yield.

Pickford was still working for Famous Players-Laksy, but she had signed a contract that her biographer Scott Eyman called “a small masterpiece of employee demand and employer humiliation.” Running for two years, in addition to full approval of directors and actors and independence from block booking, she got 50 percent of her films’ net profits and a private studio. She really did surround herself with the best brains and skill, hiring directors like Maurice Tourneur, Cecil B. DeMille and Marshall Neilan, cinematographer Charles Rosher, and of course Frances Marion.

D.W. Griffith’s publicity man earned his pay this week, keeping his boss’s not-yet released film in the news. Kingsley quoted W.E. Keefe, who had so successfully used fights with censors to publicize Birth of a Nation:

Intolerance seems to be just prejudice proof. Here I expected a nice, juicy lot of opposition from most everybody, and all the different sects come up and shake Griffith’s hand and tell him it’s fine. Today my last hope died. I got a message from the Mayor saying he’d like to see me privately. ‘Ha! Says I, ‘here’s where we start something!’ But all he wanted was that Mr. Griffith, Sir [Herbert Beerbohm] Tree and De Wolf Hopper should be guests of the city and go and look at the Greek Theater. What’s the use?

Intolerance was subjected to censorship in some markets (particularly the shots of seminude woman) but it was nothing compared to Birth. Russell Merrith found that “many of the censor brawls have the whiff of staged publicity stunts meant to draw attention both to the movie and to the naked women.” Keefe tried his best to drum up interest, but the film sold far fewer tickets than Birth. William Earl “Bill” Keefe was a former newspaper writer. He became a production manager at Griffith’s studio, and later worked for an advertising agency.

Kingsley delivered two pretty good one-liners this week. When describing Leah Herz’s dance act at the Orpheum, she wrote “it is a great novelty, and for those of us whose imaginations find it difficult to understand and interpret the gyrations of the ballet, and don’t know that two kicks this way means ‘I love you’ and that draping yourself over the fountain means ‘don’t bring your mother-in-law home for dinner,’ such an act is a godsend.” Who knew that going to vaudeville could be so much intellectual work!

She also mentioned that the California historical romance Daughter of the Don “continues to attract big crowds of loyal Angelinos, some of whom had been here all of a month.” Kingsley herself was a non-native – she didn’t arrive until 1879, when she was six.

 

Week of August 12th, 1916

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One hundred years ago this week, Grace Kingsley attended a private screening of Arctic explorer and documentary filmmaker Frank E. Kleinschmidt’s war films. She wrote:

Of all the movies taken of the great war, these are the most extraordinary thus far shown. The spectator sees soldiers fighting in the trenches; sees them crumple up and die. You see wounded men living with sick glazed eyes in the trenches waiting for the ambulance corps to pick them up. Battlefields with hundreds of dead men appear on the screen. Some of the most remarkable views are of aeroplanes. In one case you see scores of shells bursting around an Austrian airship that is sailing over Venice and is the target for hundreds of Italian guns.

Stephen Bush in Moving Picture World (April 1, 1916) agreed completely, writing, “the horrible and yet sublime tragedy of war is brought fearfully close to us by means of these films.” Kleinschmidt got such amazing footage because he’d been given permission to shoot by the Archduke Field Marshall Fredrick, the highest commanding officer – of Austria. That’s what doomed the commercial value of the films. Lewis Selznick bought the rights to distribute a six-reel version called War on Three Fronts. It was released in April 1917, the same month that the United States declared war. On April 21^st Moving Picture World disavowed their earlier support and on April 28^th Motography wrote “it is undeniable that these pictures are against the sentiment of our country, and it seems that the exhibitor might do well to think twice before he books them.”

However, that wasn’t the last of the film. According to American Cinematographers in the Great War, D.W. Griffith was given a print when he was working on Hearts of the World, and he used a few shots from it. In a letter, Kleinschmidt said he was disappointed that more wasn’t used. The book’s authors have more information about War on Three Fronts at First World War on Film.

Kleinschmidt went back to exploring the Arctic and he made another film in Alaska, Primitive Love (1927).

The Bugle Call

Kingsley’s favorite film of the week was The Bugle Call. She was impressed by the fourteen-year-old who was making his film debut, saying “if Willie Collier Jr. keeps on he’ll be the best motion picture actor in the world some day.” She continued “we have something new to the screen in this photoplay – a real, human, breathing boy, as real and fascinating as any boy of action.” Collier played Billy Andrews, who lives on a Western army outpost with his father and new stepmother, whom he doesn’t like. Billy saves the outpost and his stepmother from an attack by sounding his bugle, according to the AFI Catalog. The film was re-made by Edward Sedgewick in 1927 with Jackie Coogan in Collier’s role. Both films are lost.

While William “Buster” Collier didn’t become the best actor in the world, he had a long career in entertainment. He acted until 1933, making the transition from child actor to romantic lead as well as from silent films to sound, appearing in over 80 films. Then he became a film and television producer.

Chaplin’s One A.M. continued to draw crowds, but the new accompanying feature The House of Mirrors had a “melodramatic, absurd and machine-made story.”

Molly Malone

Kingsley heard a heroic story about a young actress, Molly Malone, from her director, George Cochrane. On location at Crater Canyon, he, cameraman Bob Walters and Miss Malone had just climbed over a big boulder when she gave a startled cry. “The next instant he heard the crash of a rock and turning, saw a writing snake. Miss Malone had thrown the rock, and her aim had been so accurate that it had broken the back of the reptile, which had been about to strike Cochrane. Miss Malone has the eight rattles and the button of the snake as a souvenir of her bravery.”

Molly Malone appeared in Westerns and comedies until 1929. Her most famous film is Backstage with Roscoe Arbuckle and Buster Keaton; you can see it at the Internet Archive.

Kingsley reported that while Hal Roach was in New York, Rolin studio manager Dwight Whiting took over and directed a Lonesome Luke film with Harold Lloyd and Bebe Daniels. Unlike many other people, it didn’t inspire him to stick with it. Two years later, he abandoned the entertainment business entirely and went to work for Union Oil where he was a director for 36 years. In 1934, he helped found the Santa Anita Racetrack. So there is life after Hollywood.

Edmund Lowe

It seems that some fans have always been odd. Kingsley reported “Eddie Lowe was separated from an ingrowing toenail the other day. And right in the class with the ladies who carry flowers to murderers in jail, was the feminine admirer who wrote and begged the popular young actor to give her the subtracted toenail as a souvenir.” One hundred years later, that’s still horrifying.

At this point in his career, Edmund Lowe was primarily a stage actor, but he went on to a long career in film and television, starring in What Price Glory (1926) and Dinner at Eight (1933).

 

Happy Birthday, Grace Kingsley!

Grace Kingsley was born in Lansing, Michigan on this day in 1873. Happy birthday to the journalist who made this blog possible!

Week of August 5th, 1916

One hundred years ago this week, Grace Kingsley reported on ambitious plans for a big new film studio. The Success Film Producing Company, with a capitalization of 7.5 million dollars, had been incorporated in New York the week before and they wanted to open a studio in Los Angeles by the end of August. They had bought film rights to several properties and had an option on a theater in New York, and they planned to buy more throughout the country. An article in Motion Picture News on September 2nd sounded much more suspicious of the enterprise, calling the reports rumors without forthcoming details. They also couldn’t find published records of the real estate deal for the theater. Like so many other projects, not much came of it and the company soon disappeared from the press. Motography did announce that Success hired Constance Collier as the lead in The Eternal Magdalene but they never made that film. Collier went on to a six-decade long career in the theater and film. The Eternal Magdalene was filmed in 1917 by a different brand-new production company: Goldwyn Pictures, a company that’s still around as part of M.G.M Studios. In the film business, you never know what will last and what won’t.

Not up the stairs yet

Kingsley’s favorite film of the week was Charlie Chaplin’s “One A.M.” She said:

the screen comedian has the magic power, as everybody know, of turning everything he touches into the gold of laughter. So that in One A.M. it is Chaplin as the star with the furniture as supporting company. The taxi speedometer is a veritable burlesque artist, the revolving table is a comedian of rare gift…even the poor old siphon bottle is a funster with finesse, and the trick bed is a clown. Besides, Chaplin has invented all the ways there are of not getting upstairs.

If you want to see what she’s talking about, it’s available on the Internet Archive.

Filming Love’s Lariat

She also liked the feature that played with it, Love’s Lariat, starring Harry Carey, calling it “quite the most delightful, crisp little comedy we have had in many a day…more power to whoever wrote this play.” According to the AFI Catalog, the plot involved a cowboy who had to live in the East for a year as a condition of an inheritance and the writers were William Blaine Pearson and co-director (with Carey) George E. Marshall. Pearson worked on a few more Westerns and died in November, 1918 (an unverifiable source said it was pneumonia), but Marshall had much better luck. This was his first feature-length film as a director; his last was a Jerry Lewis vehicle Hook Line and Sinker in 1969. Along the way he directed over 80 features including Destry Rides Again (1939) and several Bob Hope comedies. Love’s Lariat is a lost film.

Mae Marsh in Intolerance

Kingsley was much less impressed by The Marriage of Molly-O, saying that the piffling superficialities of the screenplay weren’t worthy of its star, Mae Marsh. That screenplay writer was D.W. Griffith, writing under a pseudonym.

Griffith got much better press farther along in the same August 7^th column, when Kingsley mentioned that Intolerance was test-screened at the Orpheum Theater in Riverside under the title The Downfall of All Nations. She quoted some favorable reviews that called the film “soul-gripping,” and “a stupendous production.” Griffith and several of the stars, including Miss Marsh, Lillian Gish, Constance Talmadge and Robert Harron attended the screening. Two days later she reported that New York would get to see it before Los Angeles because Griffith had signed a deal to take over the Liberty Theater there for the 1916-1917 season.

Otherwise, it was a slow week for film news. Kingsley mentioned that William S. Hart had a particularly strenuous week of stunts, including falling from the back of a horse and rolling 500 feet down an embankment, but Hart said that now nothing short of eating a locomotive worried him. However, he was planning a vacation through Utah, Colorado and the Grand Canyon after the film was finished.