When the movies were young

Just off Union Square, New York City, there is a stately old brownstone house on which future generations some day may place a tablet to commemorate the place where David W. Gri...

It was a night in the summer of 1904 in my dear and fascinating old San Francisco, before the life we all knew and loved had been broken in two, never to be mended, by the disas...

When the Melbourne MacDowell repertory season closed, the stranded actors of the “Miss Petticoats” Company were again on the loose. While San Francisco supported two good stock...

After two months on the road we received our two weeks’ notice. For half Mr. Griffith’s salary, Mr. Dixon had engaged another leading man, who, he felt, would adequately serve t...

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 u...

We called him “Old Man McCutcheon,” the genial, generous person who at this time directed the movies at the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company. Why “Old Man” I do not know,...

Considering the chaotic condition of things in the studio as a result of Mr. McCutcheon’s illness, it was a propitious time to take heed and get on to the tricks of this movie b...

“We’re working at a place--they call it a studio--acting in little plays--dramas, and comedies--a camera takes pictures while we act, and the pictures are shown in those five- a...

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 adverti...

The “Jones” pictures became very popular. Many persons well known in the movies to-day, played “bits” in them. Jeanie Macpherson, author of “The Ten Commandments” was “principal...

One of our regular “extra” people was Mack Sennett. He quietly dubbed along like the rest, only he grouched. He never approved whole-heartedly of anything we did, nor how we did...

Before the first winter drove us indoors there had been screened a number of Mexican and Indian pictures. There was one thriller, “The Greaser’s Gauntlet,” in which Wilfred Luca...

This story must now take itself indoors. We are terribly excited over Tolstoy’s “Resurrection.” So even though it be May, we must to the studio where the carpenters and scene pa...

David Griffith had found his place; found it long before he knew it. In ways, it was a congenial berth. Mr. Marvin, once he saw how the wind blew, seldom came into the studio. H...

It was a bright May morning in 1909. When I came off the scene, I noticed a little girl sitting quietly in a corner near the door. She looked about fourteen. I afterwards learne...

Through conflicting emotions and varying decisions and an ever-increasing interest and faith in the new work, Biograph’s first movie actors stuck. With Mary Pickford pictures wi...

I was not one of the select few who made the first trip to Cuddebackville, New York. I had been slated for a visit to my husband’s folks in Louisville, Kentucky, and while there...

There was a frictional feeling in our return to prosaic studio life after the glorious freedom of the country. But the new “projections”--the pictures that had been printed and...

One thing was sure--the pictures were making money. The percentage told that story. What a thrill we got at the first peek at the royalty check each month. Made us nervous. Wher...

After shivering through one Eastern winter, trying to get the necessary outdoor scenes for our pictures, we concluded that it would be to our advantage to pack up the wardrobe,...

We would not have been true to the traditions of the Golden State had we not used a Mission in our first picture. We meant to do our very best right off and send back a knock-out.

Now we must pack up our troubles in our little black bag and go home. They must be lonesome for us at 11 East Fourteenth, for the studio has been dark and silent in our absence....

There were no social engagements during these Biograph years. Our dinner parties, which were concerned with nourishment mostly, were with our co-workers. As we never knew when w...

Though the licensed picture companies--The General Film Group--kept a watchful eye on one another, each had pride in its own trademark and was satisfied with the little company...

We fell to the lure of the Bret Harte story this winter. We advanced to the romances of the hardy Argonauts, and the “pretty ladies” of the mining towns. What a wealth of pictur...

The serious students of the motion picture, for they had arrived, were at this time writing many and various articles in the trade papers. Epes Winthrop Sargent was a-saying this:

It was being hinted in the spring of 1913 that Biograph was having a change of heart about the secrecy regarding their players, and that they might end it. Contrary to the polic...

From the old Biograph Stock Company they graduated, scenario writers as well as actors; and here and there they went, filling bigger jobs in other companies, as actors, director...

Late in the summer of 1912 the Kinemacolor Company of America, a subsidiary of the English company, started the production of movies in color at a studio in Whitestone, Long Isl...