CHAPTER IXFIRST PUBLICITY AND EARLY SCENARIOS

InBiograph’s story, quite a few who stuck to the ship in these first days are big names in the movies to-day.

In the town of Erie, Pa., in the early nineteen hundreds flourished a little newspaper, on the staff of which was Frank Woods. Besides reporting “news,” Frank Woods sold advertising. Erie, Pa., not long satisfying his ambitions, Mr. Woods set out for the journalistic marts of New York City, and shortly after found himself selling advertising for theNew York Dramatic Mirror. The idea of getting ads from the picture people came to him when he noticed that pictures were not mentioned in theDramatic Mirror. Writers on the paper were told that any reference to the movies would be promptly blue-penciled.

Mr. Woods figured that if he could interest the movie people he might get ads from them and theDramatic Mirrorwouldn’t mind that. But the picture people turned deaf ears. Why pay money for an ad in a paper that was all too ready to crush them? Besides, theMirrordidn’t circulate among the exhibitors and those interested in the movies. The movie people would stick to the more friendlyBillboard—thank you kindly—it could have their ads.

Another idea came to Frank Woods. How about pictures being reviewed? He put the plan before Lee Dougherty, for Lee was always genial and had time to listen. Lee said: “Fine, give us real serious reviews—tellus where we are wrong—but don’t expect an ad for your effort.”

The result of this conversation was that three reviews appeared in theNew York Dramatic Mirror, June, 1908. On a rear end page captioned “The Spectator,” Frank E. Woods dissertated through some columns on the merits and demerits of the movies, and thus became their first real critic. We were very grateful for the few paragraphs. It meant recognition—the beginning. How gladly we parted with our ten cents weekly to see what “Spec” had to say about us.

But Mr. Woods didn’t get an ad from the Biograph. So he had another heart-to-heart talk with Mr. Dougherty, and Doc said: “Never mind, keep it up—but as I told you, the reviews aren’t going to influence us about ads.”

But in August the Company came across and bought a quarter-page ad for the Biograph movies.

The active mind of Frank Woods was not going to stop with critical comments on moving pictures. His new duties necessitated his seeing pictures; and, looking them over and analyzing them for his reviews, he said to himself; “Oh, they’re terrible—I could do better myself—such stories!” So he wrote three “suggestions”—that’s all they were—and that’s what they were then called. With great aplomb, he took them to Mr. Dougherty, and to his amazement Mr. Dougherty turned the whole three down. Sorry, but he didn’t think them up to scratch. But Mr. Woods would not be fazed by a turn-down like that. He wrote three more “suggestions.”

The studio had a sort of nominal supervisor, a Mr. Wake, whose job was to O. K. little expenditures in the studio and to pass on the purchase of scenarios. One day,not long after our A. B. affiliation, just as I was entering the main foyer, Mr. Griffith coming from the projection room seemed more than usually light-hearted. So I said, “You’re feeling good—picture nice?”

“Oh, yes, all right, but”—this in a whisper—“Wake’s been fired.”

I wondered how I could wait all that day, until evening, to hear what had happened. But I did, and learned that Mr. Wake with Biograph money had purchased silk stockings for Mutoscope girls, and then had given the girls the stockings for their own.

However, during a temporary absence from the studio before Mr. Wake’s dismissal, Frank Woods came down with three more suggestions which were shown to Mr. Griffith direct. He bought the whole bunch, three at fifteen dollars apiece,nine five-dollar bills, forty-five dollars.

Around theDramatic Mirroroffices Mr. Woods was already jocularly being called “M. P. Woods.” And this day that he disposed of his three “suggestions,” Moving Picture Woods with much bravado entered theMirror’soffice, went over to the desk, brushed aside some papers, cleared a place on the counter, and in a row laid his nine five-dollar bills.

In the office at the time were George Terwilliger (how many scenarios he afterwards wrote), Al Trahern (Al continued with his stock companies and featuring his wife Jessie Mae Hall), and Jake Gerhardt, now in the business end of the movies. The trio looked—and gasped—and looked—and in unison spoke:

“Wheredid you get all that?”

“Moving Pictures!”

“Moving Pictures? For heaven’s sake, tell us about it.”

“How did you do it?” queried George Terwilliger. “Forty-five dollars for three stories, good Lord, and they gave you the money right off, like that.”

So Mr. Woods told his little story, and as the conversation ended, George Terwilliger reached for paper and pencil, for five-dollar bills were beckoning from every direction. Maybe he could put it over, too. He did—he sold lots and lots of “suggestions.” Frank Woods wrote thirty movies for Biograph.

Frank Woods now set about to criticise the pictures with the same seriousness with which he would have criticised the theatre. He bought books about Indians and let the producers know there was a difference between the Hopi and the Apache and the Navajo. With a critical eye, he picked out errors and wrote of them frankly, and his influence in the betterment of the movies has been a bigger one than is generally known outside the movie world. Mr. Woods is really responsible for research. And Mr. Dougherty gives him credit for turning in the first “continuity.” The picture that has that honor is a version of Tennyson’s “Enoch Arden,” called “After Many Years.”

Scenarios that reached the Biograph offices, due to lack of organization, were sometimes weeks in reaching the proper department, but Mr. Griffith got first chance at “After Many Years.” Both he and Mr. Dougherty thought it pretty good stuff, but the obvious emotional acting that had prevailed somewhere in every picture so far, was here entirely lacking. Quiet suppressed emotion only, this one had. But Doc said he’d eat the positive if it wouldn’t make a good picture. So it was purchased.

But “After Many Years,” although it had no “action,” and some of us sat in the projection room at its first showingwith heavy hearts, proved to write more history than any picture ever filmed and it brought an entirely new technique to the making of films.

It was the first movie without a chase. That was something, for those days, a movie without a chase was not a movie. How could a movie be made without a chase? How could there be suspense? How action? “After Many Years” was also the first picture to have adramaticclose-up—the first picture to have a cut-back. When Mr. Griffith suggested a scene showing Annie Lee waiting for her husband’s return to be followed by a scene of Enoch cast away on a desert island, it was altogether too distracting. “How can you tell a story jumping about like that? The people won’t know what it’s about.”

“Well,” said Mr. Griffith, “doesn’t Dickens write that way?”

“Yes, but that’s Dickens; that’s novel writing; that’s different.”

“Oh, not so much, these are picture stories: not so different.”

So he went his lonely way and did it; did “After Many Years” contrary to all the old established rules of the game. The Biograph Company was very much worried—the picture was so unusual—how could it succeed?

It was the first picture to be recognized by foreign markets. When one recalls the high class of moving pictures that Pathé and Gaumont were then putting out, such as “The Assassination of the Duc de Guise,” this foreign recognition meant something.

“After Many Years” made a change in the studio. All “suggestions” now came directly to Mr. Dougherty’s office. He selected the doubtful ones and the sure bets and withMr. Griffith read them over the second time. They threshed out their differences in friendly argument. So Lee Dougherty became the first scenario editor.

And of the sad letters and grateful ones his editing jobs brought him, this letter from a newspaper man on a Dayton, Ohio, paper, now dead, he prizes most highly:

L. E. Dougherty, Editor,Kinemacolor Company,Los Angeles, Calif.Dear Sir:Excuse me, but I can’t help it. When I cashed the $25 check for “Too Much Susette,” the scenario of mine which you accepted, I took $5 of the money and put it on “Just Red” who won at Louisville at the juicy price of 30 to 1. I hope the film will bring your company as much luck as the script has brought me.Yours very truly,George Groeber.

L. E. Dougherty, Editor,Kinemacolor Company,Los Angeles, Calif.

Dear Sir:

Excuse me, but I can’t help it. When I cashed the $25 check for “Too Much Susette,” the scenario of mine which you accepted, I took $5 of the money and put it on “Just Red” who won at Louisville at the juicy price of 30 to 1. I hope the film will bring your company as much luck as the script has brought me.

Yours very truly,George Groeber.

“Doc” was Mr. Griffith’s friendly appellation for “the man in the front office,” Lee Dougherty. It was going some for Mr. Griffith to give any one a nickname. He never was a “hail fellow well met.” It was Mr. So-and-so from Mr. Griffith and to Mr. Griffith with very few exceptions. Never once during all the Biograph years did he ever publicly call even his own wife by any other name than “Miss Arvidson.” Only in general conversation about the movies, and in his absence, was he familiarly referred to as “Griff,” or “D. W.,” or the “Governor.”

Mr. Dougherty was the one man at 11 East Fourteenth Street before the Griffith régime who had more than a speaking acquaintance with the movies. In the summer of 1896 as stage manager of the old Boston Museum, he installedthere the first projection machine of American manufacture, the Eidoloscope. When the season at the Boston Museum was over, Mr. Dougherty, who had become quite fascinated with this new idea in entertainment, went to New York City. The Biograph Company along about 1897 had just finished a moving picture of Pope Leo XIII taken at the Vatican. Pictures of the late Pope Benedict XV were announced as the first pictures made of a Pope, “approved by His Holiness.” While they may be the first approved ones, Captain Varges of the International News Reel, who claims the honor, brought the third motion picture camera into the Vatican grounds. The second film—Pope Pius X in the Vatican, and gardens, and the Eucharistic Congress, was released in 1912.

Well, anyhow, Mr. Dougherty took a set of Biograph’s Pope Leo XIII pictures to exhibit in the towns and cities of New Jersey and Pennsylvania on the old Biograph projection machine—one vastly superior to the Eidoloscope. The company exhibiting the picture consisted of an operator on the machine and Mr. Dougherty who lectured. And when he began his little talk (there was no titling or printed matter in the picture), the small boys in the gallery would yell “spit it out, we want to see the picture.” Numbers of motion picture directors to-day might well heed the sentiments of those small boys.

From exhibiting Pope Leo XIII’s picture, Mr. Dougherty became stage director of One Minute Comedies for the Biograph which at this time had a stage on the roof of a building at 841 Broadway. And sometimes in the midst of a scene the weather would pick up scenery and props and deposit them in Broadway. So came about experimentswith electric lights, satisfactory results first being obtained with the Jeffries-Sharkey prize fight.

The One Minute Comedies finally were given up, but the Mutoscopes, being Biograph’s biggest source of revenue, were continued. The Mutoscopes were brief film playlets that were viewed in the penny-in-the-slot machines.

One day, before Mutoscopes ended, my husband asked me to run over to Wanamaker’s with him and help choose some pretty undies for the Mutoscope girls—photographically effective stuff—so we selected some very elegant heavy black silk embroidered stockings and embroidered pink Italian silk vests and knickers—last-word lingeries for that time.

I felt rather ill about it. “Oh dear,” I thought, “this issomebusiness, but I’ll be brave, I will, even though I die.” Well, the parcel being wrapped, David took it and then handed it to me, and I thought, “Why should I carry the bundle?” So we reached Fourteenth Street. David started to the left without his parcel; I was continuing up Broadway, so handed it to him. But the lingerie wasn’t for Mutoscopes at all—but for me—just a little surprise. So then with a light and happy heart, I took my way home to admire my beautiful present.

After the Biograph had engaged David, Mr. Dougherty did not want them to make any more Mutoscopes. Mr. Griffith directed possibly six. In order to influence Biograph to cut out the Mutoscopes, Doc got very cocky, and he said to Mr. Kennedy and Mr. Marvin, “You wait, you’ll see pictures on Broadway some day, like you do plays.” But they gave him the laugh. “Yes,” Doc added, “and they will accord them the same dignified attention that JohnDrew receives.” They laughed some more at this, and said, “Pictures will always be a mountebank form of amusement.”

From “Edgar Allan Poe,” with Barry O’Moore (Herbert Yost) and Linda Griffith.(Seep. 90)

From “Edgar Allan Poe,” with Barry O’Moore (Herbert Yost) and Linda Griffith.

(Seep. 90)

Herbert Pryor, Linda Griffith, Violet Mersereau and Owen Moore in “The Cricket on the Hearth.”(Seep. 92)

Herbert Pryor, Linda Griffith, Violet Mersereau and Owen Moore in “The Cricket on the Hearth.”

(Seep. 92)

But Doc’s prophesy came true.

And David did no more Mutoscopes.

“Little Mary,” portraying the type of heroine that won her a legion of admirers.(Seep. 104)

“Little Mary,” portraying the type of heroine that won her a legion of admirers.

(Seep. 104)

(Seep. 119)

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