CHAPTER VTHE MOVIES TEMPT
Winterpassed. Spring came.
On the Rialto’s hard pavements, day in and day out, Mr. Griffith, his ear to the ground, was wearing out good shoe leather. But nothing like a job materialized, until, meeting up with an old acquaintance, Max Davidson, he heard about moving pictures. Since youthful days in a Louisville stock company these two had not met. And the simple confidences they exchanged this day brought results that were most significant, not only to David Griffith, but to millions of unsuspecting people the world over.
Mr. Davidson had been going down to a place on 11 East Fourteenth Street and doing some kind of weird acting before a camera—little plays, he explained, of which a camera took pictures.
“You’ve heard of moving pictures, haven’t you?”
“Why, I don’t know; suppose I have, but I’ve never seen one. Why?”
“I work in them during the summer; make five dollars some days when I play a leading part, but usually it’s three. Keeps you going, and you get time to call on managers too. Now you could write the little stories for the pictures. They pay fifteen dollars sometimes for good ones. Don’t feel offended at the suggestion. It’s not half bad, really. We spend lots of days working out in the country. Latelywe’ve been doing pictures where they use horses, and it’s just like getting paid for enjoying a nice horseback ride. Anybody can ride well enough for the pictures. Just manage to stay on the horse, that’s all.”
“Ye gods,” said the tempted one, “some of my friends might see me. Then I would be done for. Where do they show these pictures? I’ll go see one first.”
“Oh, nobody’ll ever see you—don’t worry about that.”
“Well, that does make it different. I’ll think it over. Where’s the place, you said?”
“Eleven East Fourteenth Street.”
“Thanks awfully. I’ll look in—so long.”
* * * * *
The elder Mr. McCutcheon was the director when David applied for a job at the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company and got it.
There were no preliminaries. He was told to go “below” and put on a little make-up. So he went “below”—to the dressing-room, but he didn’t put on a “little make-up.” He took a great deal of trouble with it although it was largely experimental, being very different from the conventional stage make-up. The only instruction he was given was to leave off the “red” which would photograph black, thus putting hollows in his cheeks. And he didn’t need hollows in his cheeks.
When he came up to the studio floor—his dressing and make-up finished—the director, and the actors especially, looked at him as though he were not quite in his right mind. “Poor boob,” they thought, to take such trouble with a “make-up” for a moving picture, a moving picture that no one who counted for anything would ever see.
After a short rehearsal, an explanation of “foreground”and instructions about keeping “inside the lines” and “outside the lines,” the camera opened up, ground away for about twenty feet, and the ordeal was over.
When work was finished for the day, Mr. McCutcheon paid his new actor five dollars and told him to call on the morrow. So the next morning there was an early start to the studio. They were to work outside, and there were to be horses!
I shall never forget the sadly amused expression my husband brought home with him, the evening of that second day. Nor his comments: “It’s not so bad, you know, five dollars for simply riding a horse in the wilds of Fort Lee on a cool spring day. I think it wouldn’t be a bad idea for you to go down and see what you can do. Don’t tell them who you are, I mean, don’t tell them you’re my wife. I think it is better business not to.”
So a few days later, I dolled up for a visit to the studio. After I had waited an hour or so, Mr. McCutcheon turned to me and said, “All right, just put a little make-up on; this isn’t very important.” There was no coaching for the acting; only one thing mattered, and that was, not to appear as though hunting frantically for the lines on the floor that marked your stage, while the scenes were being taken.
Mr. Griffith and I “listened in” on all the stories and experiences the actors at the studio had to tell. We would have all the information we could get on the subject of moving pictures, those tawdry and cheap moving pictures, the existence of which we had hitherto been aware of only through the lurid posters in front of the motion picture places—those terrible moving picture places where we wouldn’t be caught dead. But we could find use for as many of those little “fives” as might come our way.
Humiliating as the work was, no one took the interest in it that David Griffith did, or worked as hard. This Mr. McCutcheon must have divined right off, for he used him quite regularly and bought whatever stories he wrote.
Only a few days were needed to get a line on the place. It was a conglomerate mess of people that hung about the studio. Among the flotsam and jetsam appeared occasionally a few real actors and actresses. They would work a few days and disappear. They had found a job on the stage again. The better they were, the quicker they got out. A motion picture surely was something not to be taken seriously.
Those running the place were not a bit annoyed by this attitude. The thing to do was to drop in at about nine in the morning, hang around a while, see if there was anything for you, and if not, to beat it up town quick, to the agents. If you were engaged for a part in a picture and had to see a theatrical agent at eleven and told Mr. McCutcheon so, he would genially say, “That’s O. K. I’ll fix it so you can get off.” You were much more desirable if you made such requests. It meant theatrical agents were seeking you for the legitimate drama, so you must begood!
Would it be better to affiliate with only one studio or take them all in? There was Edison, way out in the Bronx; Vitagraph in the wilds of Flatbush; Kalem, like Biograph, was conveniently in town; Lubin was in Philadelphia, and Essanay in Chicago. Melies was out West. It would be much nicer, of course, if one could get in “right” at the Biograph.
Some of the actors did the rounds. Ambitious Florence Auer did and so became identified with a different line of parts at each studio. At Biograph, character comedy; atVitagraph, Shakespeare—for “King Lear” and “Richard the Third” with Thomas H. Ince in attendance, were screened as long ago as this; at Edison, religious drama. There she rode the biblical jackass.
The Kalem studio was in the loft of a building on West Twenty-third Street. You took the elevator to where it didn’t run any further and then you climbed a ladder up to a place where furniture and household goods were stored.
Bob Vignola could be seen here dusting off a clear place for the camera and another place where the actors could be seated the while they waited until Sidney Olcott, the director, got on the day’s job.
Sidney Olcott was an experienced man in the movies even in those early days, for had he not played a star part in the old Biograph in the spring of 1904? As theVillage Cut-upin the movie of the same name we read this about him in the old Biograph bulletin:
Every country cross-corners has its “Cut-up,” the real devilish young man who has been to the “city” at some stage of his career, and having spent thirty cents looking at the Mutoscope, or a dollar on the Bowery at Coney, thinks he is the real thing. The most common evidence of his mental unbalance is the playing of practical jokes, which are usually very disagreeable to the victim....
Every country cross-corners has its “Cut-up,” the real devilish young man who has been to the “city” at some stage of his career, and having spent thirty cents looking at the Mutoscope, or a dollar on the Bowery at Coney, thinks he is the real thing. The most common evidence of his mental unbalance is the playing of practical jokes, which are usually very disagreeable to the victim....
In a few years Mr. Olcott had evolved from the “village cut-up” at Biograph to director at Kalem.
Here he engaged Miss Auer for society parts and adventuresses. Stopped her on the Rialto one day. “I know you are an actress,” said Mr. Olcott, “and that beautiful gray silk dress you have on would photograph so wonderfully, I’ll give you ten dollars if you’ll wear it in a scene—it’s a society part.” For a dress that wasgray, andsilktoo, was a most valuable property and a rare specimen of wardrobe in the movies in those days.
It came as pleasant news that a tabloid version of “When Knighthood Was in Flower” to be called “When Knights Were Bold” was to be screened at Biograph. There were four, or perhaps five, persons in the cast of this première “Knighthood” picture. My husband was one; so was I. The picture commemorates our only joint movie appearance.
I recall only one scene in this movie, a back-drop picturing landscape, with a prop tree, a wooden bench, and a few mangy grass mats, but there was one other set representing an inn. I never saw the picture and couldn’t tell much about it from the few scenes in which I played.
A one-reeler, of course—nine hundred and five feet. Now whether the cost of Biograph pictures was then being figured at a dollar a foot, I do not know. But that was the dizzy average a very short time later. Anyhow, our “Flowering Knighthood” was cheap enough compared with what Mr. Hearst spent thirteen years later on his Cosmopolitan production, which cost him $1,221,491.20, and was completed in the remarkably short time of one hundred sixty working days.
Mr. Hearst’s “Knighthood” had a remarkable cast of eighteen principal characters representing the biggest names in the theatrical and motion picture world, and the supporting company counted three thousand extra persons and thirty-three horses.
Miss Marion Davies as Princess Mary Tudor was assisted by Lyn Harding, the English actor-manager; Pedro De Cordoba, Arthur Forrest (the original Petronius of “Quo Vadis”), Theresa Maxwell Conover, Ernest Glendenning,(of “Little Old New York”), Ruth Shepley (star of “Adam and Eva”), Johnny Dooley, (celebrated eccentric dancer), George Nash, Gustav von Seyfertitz (for years director and star of the old Irving Place Theatre), Macy Harlam, Arthur Donaldson, Mortimer Snow, William Morris (of “Maytime” fame).
A few other names of world-famous people must be mentioned in connection with this picture, for Joseph Urban was the man of the “sets”; Gidding & Company made the gowns; Sir Joseph Duveen and P. W. French & Company supplied Gothic draperies; and Cartier, antique jewelry.
There were only two old movie pioneers connected with the production: Flora Finch, who back in old Vitagraph days co-starred with John Bunny and after his death held her place alone as an eccentric comedienne; and the director, Robert G. Vignola, who back in the days of our “Knighthood” was the young chap who dusted off the benches and furniture in the old Kalem loft.
But Robert Vignola, who came of humble Italian parentage, had a brain in his young head, and was ambitious. Realizing the limitations of Albany, his home town, he had set out for New York and landed a job in a motion picture studio. Young Vignola represented at the Kalem organization, in the early days, what Bobbie Harron did at Biograph. But the Biograph, from ranking the last in quality of picture production, grew to occupy first place, while Kalem continued on a rather more even way. But Bob Vignola didn’t, as the years have shown.
Indeed, many big names have appeared in movies called “When Knighthood Was in Flower,” but David Griffith’s is not the biggest, nor was it the first, for before the end of the year 1902, in Marienbad, Germany, a film thirty-onefeet long was produced and given the title “When Knighthood Was in Flower.” The descriptive line in the Biograph catalogue of 1902 (for it was a Biograph production) reads:
Emperor William of Germany and noblemen of the Order of St. John. The Emperor is the last in the procession.
Emperor William of Germany and noblemen of the Order of St. John. The Emperor is the last in the procession.
So you see the Ex-Kaiser beat them all to it, even D. W. Griffith and W. R. Hearst, though I’ll say that Mr. Hearst’s is the best of the “Flowering Knighthoods” to date, and will probably continue so. The story has now been done often enough to be allowed a rest.
But it was Mr. Griffith’s big dream, very early in his movie career, along in 1911, to screen some day a great and wonderful movie of the Charles Major play that launched Julia Marlowe on her brilliant career. And in this play which he had decided could be produced nowhere but in England, no less a person than E. H. Sothern was to appear as Charles Brandon, and she who is writing this was to be Mary Tudor.
Dreams and dreams we had long ago, but this was one of the best dreams that did not come true.