One hundred years ago this month, Grace Kingsley interviewed writer/director Lewis H. Moomaw, who was in town to preview his film, Chechakos*. Named after the indigenous people’s word for newcomers, it was the first feature film shot entirely in Alaska, and Kingsley’s description includes why people are still interested in the movie:
If you want to see the genuine Alaska, several thousand square miles of it, you may do so in Chechakos…Chechakos promises a wide appeal, inasmuch as it not only has a thrilling story, but it also reveals the actual life, industries, pleasures, occupations, beauties and resources of this great Territory.
Nine months were spent in making the picture, while some two years were spent beforehand in preparation and research, location hunting, and engaging the aid of various government officials and chambers of commerce. Remote places in Alaska, like the Childs Glacier, on which human beings never before had ventured, were photographed. The pictures were taken within 300 yards of where the glacier was breaking up and pouring over a precipice.
After the box-office success of Nanook of the North, it made sense that someone would want to capitalize on audience’s interest in the North with a fiction film. Chechakos told the story of Baby Ruth, who is saved by two Alaskans, Dexter and Riley, after a boiler explosion on a steamer. Her mother, believing that her child drowned, becomes a singer in a gambling house. Years later Ruth’s rescuers learn where her mother is and they visit to plan a reunion. The evil gambling boss ties Dexter to a chair, sets the house on fire and runs away. Dexter and Riley escape and chase him to collapsing glacier, where the bad guy dies. Ruth and her mother are reunited, and she marries Dexter.
Moomaw didn’t sell his film to a distributor on his trip to Los Angeles, so he went to New York City in January. There he sold it to Associated Exhibitors, a company that released independent productions including Harold Lloyd’s early features and Mabel Norman’s The Extra Girl.
Associated really worked hard to promote the film. Moving Picture World said that to lure the industry to a screening at the Ritz-Carton Hotel:
the wide-awake publicity department of Associated devised a clever and effective exploitation stunt. A messenger, garbed as an Alaskan miner and leading a genuine malamute dog, visited the offices of the press and scores of prominent exhibitors and presented them with an envelope which contained tickets for the showing, dancing and supper…Did this stunt prove effective? We’ll say so, for everyone along Film Row is now talking about The Chechakos.
Perhaps film people were a bit less hard-bitten then, if a nice visit from a doggie could get them to a screening! When they arrived at the hotel on May 1st, they were greeted with an impressive show, according to Exhibitors’ Trade Review:
The staging at the Ritz-Carlton was masterly. One entered the grand ballroom reception foyer to be met by a weaving ray of multi-colored lights, all of a cold tone. Three beautiful white silk drops were hung at the stage end of the ballroom. Three flood-lights with specially painted lenses threw on these drops in varied colors scenes from the production. As the Paul Whiteman Orchestra started the house lights were slowly dimmed down and the lights on the drops intensified. The overture ended, a singer rendered the stirring Johnson number “The Mush-On.” Then the center curtain slowly parted and an introductory reel showed scenes of President Harding’s visit to Alaska and to the location of The Chechakos company. The final scene showed the company arriving on location in a government train. This shot dissolved into the main title of the feature.
Unfortunately, the reviews that were the results of the screening were pretty bad. Adele Whitley Fletcher in Motion Picture Magazine had no patience with the movie:
“We cannot, for the very life of us, understand why the producers of this picture went to such lengths in the name of such a cheap and melodramatic story…Nor are the characters portrayed by capable actors and actresses…However, we think the burden of the poor story would have been heavy, even for an exceptional cast.”
She did find some redeeming qualities: “the star of this production is the glacier formations, those walls of ice and snow, slow-moving, ever in the direction of some river or sea into which they crash, terrifying and awe-inspiring masses of white.”
Film Daily agreed with her: “it is to be regretted that the producer or director failed in developing the opportunity. This might easily have been a very big picture.” Furthermore, “the story needs a lot of editing to whip it into better shape and make it first-class in audience appeal.” However, they did think up one good way to sell it: they recommended showing it during the summer, because “this is one of the best snow pictures of the season.”
George Blaisdell in Exhibitors’ Trade Review was much more kind, but he might have been influenced by the multi-page ad for the film that ran in the same issue. He said:
The Chechakos is more than a motion picture and an interesting one at that. It is a most vivid record of the days of the Alaska gold rush in 1897 and 1898. But the historical phase of the subject is submerged in its genuinely dramatic quality and its remarkable series of massive scenic backgrounds.
He addressed the problem with the acting with some faint praise: “The players are new to the screen, but they are competent.”
The anonymous reviewer for the New York Times waited until it was playing at the Cameo Theater and then complained about it:
While some of the scenes of snow and ice are of interest and the race between dog teams across the white desert is thrilling, the actual story of Chechakos is by no means a masterpiece. It is like a Bowery melodrama with arctic settings…It is merely an excuse to show some beautiful Alaskan snow scenes; perhaps if one can look upon it as a bloodthirsty melodrama of the snows, it may be mildly diverting.
It opened in Los Angeles on June 28th, but the L.A. Times didn’t review it. It had a respectable two-week run at the California, then it moved to a smaller theater, Miller’s. By late August it was playing in smaller markets like San Pedro, along with vaudeville acts. I couldn’t find box office figures, but it looks like it had an ordinary run and it continued to make money for a long time. It was still being shown in March 1926, as part of a kid’s show at the Strand Theater in Santa Rosa, California.
In 1923, Moomaw told Kingsley, “everybody in Alaska was much interested in the picture, and about 3000 Alaskans appear in it,” and people in Alaska are still interested in it. A copy found its way to the library at University of Alaska in Fairbanks and they restored it in 2000. In 2003 it was added to the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry, and you can see it on the National Film Preservation Foundation’s website.
Chechakos was the most enduring film by its director. Lewis H.** Moomaw was born in Baker, Oregon on May 5, 1889 and he grew up there. He told the story of how he got started in film to Grace Kingsley in 1925:
It was in 1907, and the sheriff of our town, Baker, Oregon, had been killed—dynamited at his home by some of his enemies. I had made myself a camera out of an old Edison motion-picture machine, which I afterward patented.*** I was going to high school, and the drama of the Sheriff’s death appealed to me. I thought I would make a movie of it! I got into the premises of the Sherriff’s home while the family was a church one Sunday morning, about a week after the Sherriff’s death, and managed a very good reproduction of the accident. I thought I had done a lot for art, but when the local acting Sherriff put on his uniform and came to high school to arrest me, the thing took on another aspect. It was ordered that the picture be burned. So I gave them the positive film. Dramatically it was hurled into the air-tight stove in the courtroom—and naturally the celluloid film exploded! That did give the simple village folk a thrill! However, I kept the negative, and I did afterward show the picture.
Yikes! I’m amazed he told that story about himself. Still in Baker, in 1908 he started a film production company, World Film Manufacturing, and they made comedies like The Amateur Bicyclist and The Man with a Big Mouth and dramas like A Desperate Chance.Later that year the company moved to Portland, but they went out of business in 1910 after a fire destroyed the studio.
Undaunted, Moomaw started a new company in Portland, the American Lifeograph Company. They made films like the documentary Where Cowboy is King (1915). This lead to him getting a job in 1916 with the Burton Holmes Lecture Company and he shot films for their lectures and travelogues in Canada. In January 1917 he applied for a passport to visit Alaska, Canada, Fiji, New Zealand, Australia, China, Korea, Japan to gather more material, but he got sick in March and canceled it. He went back to Portland where he continued to work for American Lifeograph, and he wrote and directed The Golden Trail (1920), another Alaska-set melodrama shot in the Lower 48. He married Irene Simpson in November 1920.
So he was ready to be hired when George A. Lewis formed the Alaska Moving Picture Corporation, a stock company with 500 shareholders, to make the first big production to be filmed there. The article in Variety about it said: “They are tired up north of Alaska pictures made in California and have organized to give the world at least one real Alaska picture.” On March 7, 1923 Moomaw and 18 cast and crew members left Seattle on a steamship to do just that.
After Chechakos, Moomaw signed a contract with the film’s distributor to make four more films, but he completed only two, Under the Rouge (1925) and Flames (1926). After that he occasionally appeared in the trades with plans to move his studio to Hollywood and projects that fell through, but his directing career ended and he became a camera designer.
He went to work for the Stewart-Warner Company, who was mostly known for manufacturing gauges and instruments for cars as well as scoreboards for sporting events. In the late 1920s they decided to expand their line to film cameras for amateurs that would be sold through radio stores, according to International Photographer. Lewis Moomaw designed the “Hollywood Model” 16 mm camera and they built the initial run of 500 under his supervision in a factory on Santa Monica Blvd. They retailed for $50.00. The company moved the plant to Chicago in February 1931 and Moomaw, his wife and son David moved along with it. Unfortunately the Great Depression affected sales, and the company discontinued making it in 1933.
However, he continued to have a successful career in designing cameras. He went to work for Bell and Howell in Chicago and he was granted thirteen patents between 1934-1952 for equipment including cameras, projectors, film feed devices and a rewind mechanism. He retired and, according to his biography on Find a Grave, he became a rancher in San Diego where he died on August 22, 1980.
*There were several different spellings of the title, including Cheechacos and Chechahcos. Arbitrarily I settled on the shortest one, Chechakos, so I’ve used that throughout.
**When he was born, his middle name was Hembree (his mother’s maiden name). Later he changed it to Herman, but his death record changed it back to Hembree.
***There’s no record of him patenting a camera this early.
“Associated Will Issue First Picture of Alaska,” Exhibitors’ Trade Review, March 29, 1924, p. 11.
“Associated Gets Rights to Chechakos,” Motion Picture News, March 29, 1924, p.1426.
George Blaisdell, “The Chechakos is Entertaining Drama,” Exhibitor’s Trade Review, May 17, 1924, p. 30
“The Chechakos,” Film Daily, May 18, 1924, p. 10.
“The Chechakos Has Notable Preview,” Exhibitors’ Trade Review, May 17, 1924, p. 23.
“Chechakos Shows, Los Angeles Times, June 27, 1924.
Adele Whitley Fletcher, “Across the Silversheet,” Motion Picture Magazine, August 1924, p.57.
“A Gold Rush Thriller,” New York Times, May 13, 1924.
“Heard on Film Row,” Moving Picture World, March 25, 1917, p. 1976.
“Home Equipment for Radio Stores,” International Photographer, April 1931, p. 25.
Grace Kingsley, “Director Signs,” Los Angeles Times, August 19, 1925.
Grace Kingsley, “Moomaw to Make Mormon Film,” Los Angeles Times, August 14, 1928.
“Moomaw in Los Angeles, to Make Four for A.E.,” Exhibitors’ Herald, September 5, 1925, p. 40.
“Moomaw to Build New Plant,” Film Daily, March 29, 1926, p.1
“Moomaw to Transfer Unit Here,” Los Angeles Times, January 4, 1926.
“New Company Plans Alaskan Picture,” Moving Picture World, March 31, 1923, p. 568.
“Plans to Produce in the Orient,” Los Angeles Times, January 25, 1926.
“Real Alaskan Picture Will Be Made There,” Variety, March 8, 1923, pp. 1, 27.
“Six Veritable Gold Mines in Chechakos Tie-Ups.” Exhibitors’ Trade Review, May 17, 1924, pp. 41-42.
“Snappy Stunt for The Chechakcos,” Moving Picture World, May 10, 1924, p. 209.
“Title of Alaskan Film is Changed,” Los Angeles Times, May 20, 1923.
“Tomorrow’s Cabrillo Film Shows Big Alaska Ice Slide, Also Vaudeville,” San Pedro News Pilot, August 21, 1924.
“Tourist Influx Predicted,” Los Angeles Times, August 17, 1926.
“Working in Portland, Ore., Film Daily, October 29, 1924, p. 9.
“World Film Mfg. Co.,” Moving Picture World, September 19, 1908, p. 217.
Grace Kingsley's Hollywood 