1. Moving Picture World, June 21, 1913, p. 1233.
2. Moving Picture World, June 19, 1920, p. 1604.
3. Mary Grey Peck of the Motion Picture Committee of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, quoted in Photoplay, February 1917, p. 57.
4. Motion Picture Magazine, March 1929, p. 114.
5. Robert Sklar, Movie Made America (New York: Random House, 1975), p. 123.
6. Russell Merritt, “Nickelodeon Theatres 1905–14,” in American Film Industry, ed. Tino Balio (Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1976), p. 63. No motion picture theater was allowed within 200 feet of a church, Motion Picture World, March 1, 1913, p. 864.
7. The World Today, October 1908, quoted in Balio, p. 51.
8. William O’Neill, Everyone Was Brave (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1969), p. 261.
9. William Drew, D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance: Its Genesis and Its Vision (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Co., 1986), p. 10.
10. Social Hygiene 5 (1919), p. 27. Quoted in Martin S. Pernick, “Edison’s Tuberculosis Films,” Hastings Center Report 8 (June 1978), p. 27.
11. The Reformers (which was written by Frank Woods) was filmed on location in the little town of Hollywood.
12. Lewis Jacobs, The Rise of the American Film (New York: Teachers College Press, Columbia, 1968), p. 271. When C. B. DeMille held a contest for film ideas in 1929, he complained that “prosperity has cut down the number of suggestions dealing with social problems,” Screen Book, August 1929, p. 61.
13. New York Dramatic Mirror, December 4, 1915.
14. At this period the term “feature” referred to dramatic films of any length. Eventually, it came to mean films of four or more reels.
15. Sam Ornitz, author of Haunch, Paunch and Jowl, a novel of Jewish life, later appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee as one of the Hollywood Ten.
16. Jan and Cora Gordon, Stardust in Hollywood (London: George C. Harrap, 1939), pp. 121–22.
17. Gordon and Gordon, pp. 121–22.
18. Moving Picture World, January 13, 1912, p. 112.
19. Q. David Bowers, in his forthcoming study of the Thanhouser Film Company, points out that Moving Picture World’s reviews—apart from their simple synopses—were as positive as possible, and the forthcoming announcements were transcripts of studio handouts. The magazine was a promoter of the moving picture. Good or bad, however, the attitudes included in the review is what makes them valuable in the context of this book. Bowers selects the New York Dramatic Mirror as the only trade journal which printed reviews worthy of the name. I am indebted to William Drew for searching through microfilms of this magazine and sending me the reviews of social films.
20. Motion Picture News, July 12, 1913, p. 19.
21. Carolyn Lowrey, The First One Hundred Noted Men and Women of the Screen (New York: Moffat, Yard & Co., 1920), p. 190.
22. Moving Picture World, August 9, 1913, p. 640.
23. Photoplay, June 1915, p. 42.
24. Phillips Smalley acknowledged the influence of director Edwin S. Porter, with whom the Smalleys worked at Rex, and he may even have worked on this film with them, Moving Picture World, January 24, 1914, p. 399. Suspense included split screen, unusual angles, and a startling use of close-ups.
25. Moving Picture World, August 9, 1913, p. 638.
26. Motion Picture News, May 1, 1915, p. 54. Part of the film survives in the Library of Congress.
27. Variety, February 4, 1916, p. 29.
28. Motion Picture Magazine, May 1918, p. 6.
29. Wid’s (A Magazine by Wid Gunning), June 15, 1916, p. 647. The story was written by Stella Wynne Herron. Universal turned it into a comedy short in 1932 with the kind of commentary made popular by Pete Smith—“she needed new bootsies for her tootsies”—and in this form it survives in the Library of Congress as The Unshod Maiden (one reel).
30. Variety, April 6, 1917, p. 22.
31. Variety, May 18, 1917, p. 26.
32. Photoplay, May 1930, p. 126.
33. Mrs. Wallace Reid to Sue McConachy, “Hollywood” TV series, 1976 (research interview).
34. Colleen Moore to author, “Hollywood,” a thirteen-part series on the silent era, written, produced, and directed by Kevin Brownlow and David Gill (1980).
35. Photoplay, October 1928, p. 122.
36. Lester Friedman, Hollywood’s Image of the Jew (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1982), p. 46.
1. Edward de Grazia and Roger K. Newman, Banned Films (New York: R. R. Bowker, 1982), p. 21.
2. R. A. Liston, The Right to Know: Censorship in America (New York: Franklin Watts, 1973), p. 23.
3. Terry Ramsaye, A Million and One Nights, 1926. (Reprinted, London: Frank Cass & Co., 1964), p. 473. Jane Addams introduced a resolution which prevented the nickelodeons from being closed, and had them subject to supervision, Moving Picture World, May 11, 1907, pp. 147–8.
4. Moving Picture World, May 25, 1907, p. 180.
5. Moving Picture World, May 25, 1907, p. 180.
6. Robert Fisher, “Film Censorship and Progressive Reform,” Journal of the Popular Film 4 (1975), p. 144.
7. De Grazia and Newman, p. 14. A judge who proved particularly friendly was William Gaynor, later mayor of New York himself and a supporter of the freedom of the screen. Gaynor grew tougher in 1912 and brought in stricter and more extensive licensing laws.
8. De Grazia and Newman, p. 14.
9. Professor Charles Sprague Smith was an educator, lecturer, and writer. Who Was Who in America does not mention his film connection. Besides his work for the board, he directed scenes for a history film for the New York Board of Education.
10. The Charity Organization Society, The Children’s Aid Society, City Vigilance League, League for Political Education, Neighborhood Workers Association, Public Education Association, Society for the Prevention of Crime, Women’s Municipal League. The Children’s Aid Society and the Women’s Municipal League withdrew their support after 1910, demanding tougher measures. Robert Fisher, “Film Censorship and Progressive Reform: The National Board of Censorship and Motion Pictures, 1909–1922,” Journal of Popular Film 4 (1975), pp. 145–46.
11. Lary May, Screening Out the Past (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 204.
12. Moving Picture World, March 26, 1927, p. 349. The board’s findings were published in its bulletin and circulated to exhibitors as well as to boards of education and police departments.
13. Moving Picture World, July 13, 1915, p. 324.
14. Moving Picture World, March 8, 1913, p. 973.
15. Moving Picture World, February 8, 1913, p. 549.
16. Moving Picture World, February 8, 1913, p. 549. The title “Passed by the National Board of Review” was not a mark of approval, it merely indicated that the film would not corrupt anyone’s morals. (Some exhibitors spliced it on to films which had not been passed.) The board had no legal powers and claimed it wanted none. In theory at least, local authorities had power enough to punish exhibitors who showed films condemned by the board by revoking their licenses.
17. William H. Short, A Generation of Moving Pictures (New York: The National Committee for Study of Social Values in Motion Pictures, 1928, reprinted New York: Garland Publishing, 1978), p. 291.
18. Moving Picture World, July 4, 1914, p. 43.
19. Fisher, p. 149.
20. Ibid.
21. Charles Feldman, National Board of Censorship (Review) of Motion Pictures (New York: Arno, 1977), p. 112.
22. Despite its opposition to censorship, the footage eliminated by the board in 1916 alone amounted to 46,990 feet and the sales value of the film kept off the market was $156,465, Motion Picture Magazine, September 1917, p. 41.
23. Drew, p. 48.
24. Fisher, p. 151.
25. Ruth A. Inglis, Freedom of the Movies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1947), p. 78.
26. Short, p. 327.
27. Short, p. 311.
28. Southern Convention of Baptists, Washington, D.C., 1920, quoted in Variety, May 14, 1920, p. 35.
29. Inglis, p. 82.
30. Inglis, p. 89.
31. Short, p. 317. Wilton Barrett succeeded John Collier.
32. Motion Picture Weekly, November 1915, p. 118. Quoted in D. C. Wenden, Birth of the Movies, p. 118. Carl Laemmle’s pronouncements were usually written for him by Robert Cochrane.
33. Moving Picture World, March 26, 1927, p. 423.
34. Photoplay, March 1916, p. 69.
35. Photoplay, May 1917, p. 99.
36. Photoplay, March 1916, p. 63.
37. Photoplay, October 1922, p. 39.
38. Mutual Film Corporation v. Industrial Commission of Ohio 236 U.S. 230 (1915), quoted in “National Board of Censorship (Review),” notes.
39. William de Mille, Hollywood Saga (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1939), pp. 253–54.
40. Robert E. Sherwood, Best Moving Pictures of 1922–23 (Boston: Small Maynard & Co., 1923), p. 136.
41. De Grazia and Newman, p. 28.
42. De Mille, p. 252.
43. Variety, March 7, 1928, quoted in Short, p. 340. Garth Jowett, Film: The Democratic Art (Boston: Little, Brown, 1976), p. 114, quotes a survey putting the number of cities at less than 100.
44. Inglis, p. 87.
45. John Collier, p. 426, quoted in Thomas Brandon manuscript, Museum of Modern Art, New York.
46. Variety, May 31, 1918, p. 37.
47. Moving Picture World, May 3, 1914, p. 473.
48. Moving Picture World, September 15, 1917, p. 166.
49. De Grazia and Newman, p. 37.
50. The Portland (Oregon) Chamber of Commerce decided life in the studios of Los Angeles was immoral and sent William G. Harrington to investigate, with police powers and a corps of investigators, Motion Picture Magazine, October 1917, p. 67; Motion Picture Magazine, November 1917, p. 71.
51. Inglis, p. 66.
52. Quoted by Donald R. Young, Motion Pictures: A Study in Social Legislation (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1922), p. 22 in Inglis, p. 63.
53. Inglis, p. 95.
54. Inglis, p. 87.
55. Ibid.
56. Short, p. 341.
57. The Supreme Court of Nevada sustained the divorce in May 1922; by that time she and Douglas Fairbanks had been married two years. Their popularity survived the storm.
58. Rumors abounded that Olive Thomas killed herself because she discovered she had been infected with syphilis—this rumor led Michael Arlen to adapt the situation for The Green Hat.
59. Variety, August 26, 1921, p. 37; Variety, September 9, 1921, p. 43.
60. Variety, February 18, 1921, p. 46. These Fourteen Points banned nakedness, manhandling during love scenes, stories concerned with vice and crime, gamblers, drunkards, and the “morally feeble.” Villains should not be identified as holders of any particular religious belief.
61. Moving Picture World, May 18, 1917, p. 1099.
62. In 1928 it was revealed that Will Hays had accepted a $75,000 gift and $185,000 loan, representing illegal contributions to Republican party funds, from oil man Harry Sinclair, one of the perpetrators of the Teapot Dome scandal, in gratitude for putting Harding in the White House. Hays was not prosecuted, Sklar, Movie Made America, p. 83.
63. Short, p. 332.
64. Raymond Moley, The Hays Office (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1945), p. 54. For a full account of this campaign, see Jowett, p. 167.
65. Will Hays, Memoirs (New York: Doubleday, 1955), p. 333.
66. Hays, p. 344.
67. David A. Yallop, The Day the Laughter Stopped (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1975), p. 259.
68. Photoplay, March 1923, p. 27.
69. Short, p. 50. Paul Kelly, an actor jailed for homicide, was allowed to return to the screen.
70. Hays, p. 361.
71. Agreement, December 11, 1928, between Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and John Gilbert. Courtesy Leatrice Gilbert Fountain. See also Motion Picture Magazine, December 1927, p. 81. Film companies proclaimed their virtue in their very names: “The Wholesome Film Corporation,” “The John Golden Unit of Clean American Pictures, Inc.” (set up by Fox).
72. Hays, p. 436.
73. Variety, July 9, 1924, p. 17.
74. Variety, July 30, 1924, p. 25. A form of cheating he would indulge in was his agreement with the Authors’ League. (See note 91, below, for more detail.)
75. Short, p, 94.
76. De Grazia and Newman, p. 27.
77. Hays, p. 430.
78. Released as Lily of the Dust.
79. Mrs. Robbins Gilman, Chairman, Motion Picture Committee, National Council of Women, USA, Report, International Council of Women, Geneva, 1927, quoted in Short, p. 356.
80. Short, p. 339.
81. Hays, p. 436.
82. Gloria Swanson, Swanson on Swanson (New York: Random House, 1980), p. 298.
83. Hays, p. 436. The Production Code was introduced on February 17, 1930, and it specifically banned films about white slavery, drug trafficking, and venereal diseases. Not until the Legion of Decency stepped in, however, in 1934, was it backed up with any degree of power.
84. Ramsaye, p. 484. The film was Lady of the Night (1925). The producers couldn’t get away with it scot-free. As Gwen Lee dusts powder on to her feet, Norma Shearer is given a title: “Stop walking back from auto rides.”
85. Philip French, The Movie Moguls (London: Penguin, 1969), p. 98.
86. Hays had Mary Van Kleeck of the Russell Sage Foundation conduct a survey, and this was one of her recommendations. Film extras who found there was no money stormed one of these employment agencies and several were shot by the guard, Variety, March 22, 1923, p. 23.
87. Hays, p. 431.
88. Swanson, p. 298.
89. Swanson, p. 322.
90. Film Spectator, December 10, 1927.
91. In 1927 Hays came to an agreement with the Authors’ League that books unacceptable in their original form could be accepted if rewritten and made unobjectionable. The Green Hat was notorious as a novel, as it dealt with such things as syphilis. The film altered this, changed the story, even the names of the characters, and finally the title; The Green Hat became A Woman of Affairs.
92. Life, August 18, 1927.
1. Margaret Sanger, An Autobiography (New York: W. W. Norton, 1938, reprinted Dover, 1971), p. 28.
2. “What Films Are Doing to Young America,” address before the National Motion Picture Conference, February 11, 1926, quoted in Short, A Generation, p. 214.
3. “What Films Are Doing,” Short, p. 215.
4. Short, pp. 313–14.
5. Morris Ernst and Pare Lorentz, Censored—The Private Life of the Movie (New York: Harrison Smith, 1930), pp. 7–8.
6. Ernst and Lorentz, pp. 7–8.
7. Variety, August 25, 1926.
8. A collection of these, now in the National Film Archive, London, was discovered in an old air raid shelter along with a hand grenade!
9. Variety, August 8, 1919, p. 52.
10. Variety, January 6, 1922, p. 45.
11. Moving Picture World, June 21, 1919, p. 1768.
12. Motion Picture Magazine, August 1921, p. 68. His Naughty Night, Don’t Blame the Stork, and Up In Betty’s Bedroom do not appear in the AFI catalogues and may be short subjects.
13. Motion Picture Magazine, August 1921, p. 68.
14. Clifford G. Twombley, in Christian Century, April 13, 1932, p. 480, quoted in Jowett, p. 190.
15. Short, p. 152.
16. Variety, March 22, 1918, p. 57. For an excellent study of the vamp cycle, see Alexander Walker, The Celluloid Sacrifice (London: Michael Joseph, 1966).
17. Mary MacLane, The Story of Mary MacLane by Herself (Chicago: Herbert Stone and Co., 1902, reprinted Jonathan Cape).
18. Montana Magazine, July 1977, p. 26. Harold Lloyd parodied MacLane, in Girl Shy (1924), playing a young man, terrified of girls, who writes a steamy guide to love—“by the author who knows and knows and knows.”
19. Quoted in MacLane synopsis by Michael Yocum, p. 1.
20. Published by Frederick A. Stokes, New York, 1917.
21. Book News 35 (May 1917), p. 335, quoted in Yocum, p. 1.
22. MacLane, p. 5.
23. Moving Picture World, January 5, 1918, p. 107.
24. November 11, 1917, quoted in Montana Magazine, July 1977, p. 32.
25. Wid’s, January 17, 1918.
26. Ibid.
27. The picture reminded Wid Gunning of a C. Gardner Sullivan story for Thomas Ince, The Hater of Men, with Bessie Barriscale: “That had the same general delicacy that handicaps this,” Wid’s, January 17, 1918.
28. Variety, February 7, 1918, p. 45.
29. Montana Magazine, July 1977, p. 32.
30. Moving Picture World, January 26, 1918, p. 525.
31. Montana Magazine, July 1977, p. 33. The reference to “kimono” and the opulent surroundings would have been understood by readers of the yellow press as hints that Mary MacLane had turned to prostitution.
32. Quoted in Yocum, p. 3.
33. New York Dramatic Mirror, March 17, 1917.
34. Upton Sinclair, Autobiography of Upton Sinclair (London: W. H. Allen, 1963), p. 186.
35. Robert S. and Helen Merrell Lynd, Middletown (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1929), p. 114.
36. Lynd and Lynd, p. 121.
37. Judge Ben Lindsey and Rube Borough, The Dangerous Life (London: Bodley Head, 1931), p. 216.
38. Lindsey and Borough, p. 259.
39. Variety, June 7, 1918.
40. Jim Sleeper, Great Films Shot in Orange County (Trabuco Canyon, Cal.: California Classics, 1980), p. 151.
41. Variety, November 17, 1916, p. 23.
42. Photoplay, February 1917, p. 77.
43. Anthony Slide, The Kindergarten of the Movies (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1980), p. 88.
44. New York Dramatic Mirror, December 1, 1917.
45. Variety, November 30, 1917.
46. Motion Picture News, April 20, 1918, p. 2388.
47. New York Dramatic Mirror, April 20, 1918, p. 560.
48. Motion Picture News, April 20, 1918, p. 2388.
49. Motion Picture News, April 27, 1918, p. 2564.
50. Photoplay, July 1918, p. 96.
51. Motion Picture News, April 27, 1918, p. 2536.
52. Kenneth W. Munden, editor. American Film Institute Catalogue of Motion Pictures Produced in the United States. Feature Films 1921–1930 (New York: R. R. Bowker Co. 1971). Credit and Subject Indexes, pp. 1515–1516.
53. Variety, January 6, 1922, p. 43.
54. Ibid.
55. Ibid.
56. The film is not known to exist.
57. Variety, January 6, 1922, p. 44.
58. Variety, January 27, 1922, p. 3.
59. Adapted by Olga Printzlau and Sada Cowan. William spelled his name with a small “d,” as did Cecil, nonprofessionally. The film was to have been directed by William, featuring Elliott Dexter.
60. Frank Case, Do Not Disturb (New York: Garden City Publishing Company, 1943), p. 311.
61. The film cost $129,349.31 and grossed $1,016,245.87. (Schedule of costs and gross receipts, January 31, 1931, DeMille Estate.)
62. Charles Higham, Cecil B. DeMille (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1973), p. 67.
63. Picture Play, June 1920, p. 76.
64. Motion Picture Classic, April-May 1920, p. 50.
65. Photoplay, May 1920, p. 64.
66. Picture Play, September 1925, p. 58.
67. Program notes of the Theodore Huff Memorial Film Society, November 24, 1964.
68. By Judge Lindsey and Wainwright Evans.
69. Lindsey and Borough, pp. 255, 263, 273.
70. Lindsey and Borough, p. 246.
71. Olive Carey to author, Carpinteria, California, June 1980. Her father, Joseph Fuller Golden, wrote the song.
72. AFI Catalogue, 1921–1930, p. 142.
73. Photoplay, October 1928, p. 126.
74. AFI Catalogue, 1921–1930, p. 493.
75. Patsy Ruth Miller to author, Connecticut 1964, 1988, and letter to author, January 19, 1988.
76. Picture Play, February 1929, p. 100.
77. Unidentified New York paper in Patsy Ruth Miller scrapbook.
78. Sanger, p. 28.
79. Ibid.
80. Sanger, p. 194.
81. Sanger, p. 89.
82. Sanger, p. 92.
83. Sanger, p. 252.
84. Variety, March 30, 1917, pp. 27–28. The Message Feature Film Corporation was a unit of the B. S. Moss Motion Picture Corporation.
85. Variety, March 30, 1917.
86. Variety, April 13, 1917, p. 25.
87. Ibid.
88. Moving Picture World, April 21, 1917, p. 51; De Grazia and Newman, Banned Films, p. 188.
89. Variety, April 6, 1917, p. 21.
90. Variety, May 11, 1917, p. 32.
91. Sanger, p. 252.
92. De Grazia and Newman, p. 187.
93. Moving Picture World, May 19, 1917, p. 1098.
94. De Grazia and Newman, p. 188.
95. Sanger, p. 252.
96. De Grazia and Newman, p. 17. When, around 1916, Alice Guy Blaché proposed a birth control film to Lewis Selznick, he laughed in her face, Roberta and Simone Blaché, trans., The Memoirs of Alice Guy Blaché, ed. Anthony Slide (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1986), p. 88. Silent films opposed to birth control included Valley of Decision (1916) with Richard Bennett. Clifford Howard, who had written the nudist drama Purity, wrote the story, and it was directed by Rea Berger and produced by American Film Co. All three Bennett daughters appeared in it, together with Bennett’s sister Blanche Hanson. (Joan Bennett and Lois Kibbee, The Bennett Playbill [New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970], p. 52.) The curious thing was that Richard Bennett approved of birth control, despite his large family. When Charles G. Norris’s Seed was filmed in 1931, with Lois Wilson, the birth control aspect was left out.
97. Story by Lucy Payton and Franklyn Hall, scenario by Lois Weber and Phillips Smalley.
98. From the print in the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. See also Katherine Karr, “The Long Square-Up: Exploitation Trends in the Silent Film,” Journal of the Popular Film, Vol. III, No. 2, Spring 1974, pp. 107–28. The original title of the film was The Illborn, AFI Catalogue, 1911–1920, p. 1021.
99. Wid’s, April 20, 1916, p. 524.
100. It followed into the Globe The Dumb Girl of Portici (1916), the Smalleys’ lavish film with Anna Pavlova.
101. Variety, April 21, 1916, p. 25.
102. Moving Picture World, May 20, 1916, p. 1321.
103. Moving Picture World, April 29, 1916, p. 818.
104. Moving Picture World, April 29, 1916, p. 818.
105. Motion Picture News, October 7, 1916, quoted in Karr, p. 126.
106. Variety, July 7, 1916, p. 22.
107. Variety, September 22, 1916, p. 32.
108. Variety, July 7, 1916, p. 22.
109. This European version was distributed in neutral Holland, the country which had pioneered birth control and where the print was found. A new sequence had been added to the beginning—mothers bring their children to a health clinic, where the authorities ensure they are well cared for.
110. Pall Mall Gazette, November 8, 1916, quoted in The Bioscope, January 17, 1918, p. 75.
111. The Bioscope, November 16, 1916, p. 631.
112. The Bioscope, January 17, 1918, p. 75.
113. The Bioscope, November 8, 1917, p. 122. A picture called The Unborn (1916) was adjusted to cash in on the success of the Smalleys’ film. It started as conventional melodrama and suddenly turned into a preachment against abortion. The abortionist’s name was Dr. Ahlbad! Variety, June 23, 1916. See also American Film Institute Catalogue 1911–1920, p. 963, for an account of the legal test case.
114. Wid’s May 31, 1917, p. 349. The film’s original title was Is a Woman a Person? Richard Koszarski letter to author, December 8, 1983. The script, which is reprinted in Film History, Vol. I, No. 4, pp. 343–66, has a different opening than the released version.
115. New York Dramatic Mirror, May 26, 1917.
116. Wid’s, May 31, 1917, pp. 349–50.
117. De Grazia and Newman, p. 190.
118. Variety, May 18, 1917.
119. Lloyd Morris, Postscript to Yesterday (New York: Random House, 1947), p. 274.
120. Lynd and Lynd, p. 145.
121. Moving Picture World, December 30, 1911, p. 1052.
122. Motion Picture Magazine, April 1916, p. 181. The film is preserved in the Library of Congress.
123. Issue of October 1915.
124. Vachel Lindsay, The Art of the Moving Picture (New York: MacMillan Co., 1915, reprinted by Liveright, 1970), p. 184. The picture was a box-office failure and another Ibsen film, Pillars of Society, directed by Raoul Walsh with a similar cast, was held back for more than a year.
125. Bennett and Kibbee, pp. 44–45.
126. Bennett and Kibbee, pp. 47–48. A student named Walter Wanger approached Bennett for permission to produce the play at Dartmouth, p. 48.
127. Moving Picture World, October 2, 1915, p. 90. A novel was also adapted from the play by Upton Sinclair.
128. Ramsaye, p. 619. Thomas Ricketts was a former opera director. Harry Pollard made Motherhood, a one-reel birth control picture, in 1914.
129. Bennett and Kibbee, p. 51.
130. Variety, October 1, 1915, p. 18.
131. Mrs. Richard Bennett and the mother of the future stars Constance, Barbara, and Joan.
132. This ending was apparently removed before release; reviewers referred to the way he meets his end as “a mystery.”
133. Bennett and Kibbee, p. 57.
134. The Times, quoted in Harold Dunham, “Research on the Career of G. B. Samuelson,” unpublished ms.
135. The Bioscope, December 25, 1919, p. 61.
136. The Kinematograph Weekly, December 25, 1919, p. 367.
137. The film was reissued in March 1923.
138. Variety, March 26, 1920, p. 56.
139. National Vigilance Association Collection, Fawcett Library, courtesy Annette Kuhn, ref. S1 (3).
140. Moving Picture World, August 12, 1919, p. 164. These titles do not appear in the incomplete version at the Historical Health Film Collection, University of Michigan. Courtesy of Martin Pernick.
141. And in several other V.D. films. Neither Raymond McKee nor Edward H. Griffith would agree to be interviewed by me, despite my repeated attempts.
142. Wid’s. April 13, 1919, p. 5.
143. Ibid.
144. Variety, April 11, 1919, p. 62.
145. Variety, May 9, 1919, p. 57.
146. Variety, July 4, 1919, p. 48.
147. Wid’s, July 11, 1919, p. 1. Lieutenant Colonel William F. Snow was associated with Silverman, and the AFI Catalogue, 1911–1920, p. 287, credits him with planning the whole series. Patricia King Hanson, editor. American Film Institute Catalogue of Motion Pictures Produced in the United States. Feature Films 1911–1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988).
148. Variety, July 4, 1919.
149. Karl S. Lashley, Ph.D. and John B. Watson, Ph.D., “A Psychological Study of Motion Pictures in Relation to Venereal Disease Campaigns,” in Social Hygiene VII, no. 2 (April 1921), pp. 181–219. Courtesy Martin Pernick.
150. Lashley and Watson, p. 199.
151. “Notes by Joseph Best,” January 14, 1949, courtesy Rachel Low and partly printed in her History of the British Film, 1914–1918 (London: Allen & Unwin, 1950), p. 149.
152. The Cinema, Report of the Cinema Commission of Inquiry (London: Williams and Norgate, 1917), p. 84.
153. Wid’s, February 29, 1918, p. 14.
154. Variety, July 4, 1919, p. 42. Ben Lyon played in this film.
155. Variety, July 4, 1919.
156. Ibid.
157. Davis was Director of the Section on Women’s Work of the Social Hygiene Division of the War Department Commission on Training Camp Activities (of which Raymond B. Fosdick was the head).
158. Helen Ferguson to author, Palm Springs, California, 1970.
159. Ibid.
160. National Vigilance Collection, Fawcett Library, ref. S1.
161. Wid’s, October 13, 1919. The film was owned by the American Social Hygiene Association of New York and was part of the Public Health Service Campaign, Wid’s, April 13, 1919, p. 5. It was distributed by Public Health Films, New York, headed by Isaac Silverman and Lieutenant Colonel William F. Snow.
162. Moving Picture World, January 4, 1919, p. 100.
163. Variety, February 21, 1919, p. 71.
164. Variety, July 18, 1919, p. 46.
165. Vivian Van Damm, Tonight and Every Night (London: Stanley Paul & Co., 1952), p. 48. Courtesy of Nick Hiley.
166. Dr. Bagley to Parliamentary enquiry “Report of the Joint Select Committee on the Criminal Law Amendment Bill, P.P.,” VI, 1920, ques. 2,325, 2,333 quoted in Edward J. Bristow, Vice and Vigilance (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1977), p. 151. Another sex education film which perpetuated fear was The Solitary Sin (1919), directed by Fred Sullivan and featuring Jack Mulhall, Helene Chadwick, and Pauline Curley. It was banned by New York and in several states, and few periodicals could bring themselves to review it. Yet Variety said, “It is so delicately produced that no one could possibly object to any scene in it.” Variety, May 30, 1919, p. 79. One of the characters goes insane.
167. Pearson’s, December 1921, p. 244.
168. Ibid.
169. Jane Addams, A New Conscience and an Ancient Evil (New York: Macmillan, 1912), p. 3.
170. The use of the word “traffic” in the title of Traffic in Souls so upset actress Jane Gail that she pleaded for it to be changed, Moving Picture World, December 20, 1913, p. 1420. Jane Gail played a drug addict in the stage play Dope, Karr, p. 113.
171. Justin Kaplan, Lincoln Steffens (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1974), p. 68. One of Parkhurst’s investigators was Frederic Howe, future head of the National Board of Review. And Parkhurst himself later joined the board, May, p. 47.
172. Kaplan, p. 206. Nominal head of the Lexow Committee was Clarence Lexow, state senator from Yonkers. One of its members was William Travers Jerome, Andy Logan, Against the Evidence (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1970), p. 85.
173. Lincoln Steffens, Shame of the Cities (New York: McClure, Phillips, 1904, reprinted by Hill and Wang, 1957), p. 203.
174. An episode of The Downward Path, the first five-scene film to be copyrighted. Made by the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company, it was intended primarily for peep-show Mutoscope machines and was typical of the risqué films supplied to arcades, or “electric vaudeville.” A print is in the Library of Congress.
175. Joseph Mayer, The Regulation of Commercialized Vice (New York: Columbia University Press, 1922), p. 43.
176. Variety, August 29, 1913, p. 10. The Lure was filmed in 1914 by Alice Guy Blaché, The Memoirs, p. 85. The Fight was filmed (by George Lederer) in 1915, The Battle, as The Money Master, also in 1915. The House of Bondage had been filmed in 1914.
177. Jane Addams, The Second Twenty Years at Hull-House (New York: Macmillan, 1930), p. 324.
178. Ramsaye, p. 613.
179. Ramsaye, p. 615.
180. One reason that he left, Tucker said, was that he had produced a picture he did not like—Traffic: “I soon would open up the way to an avalanche of this type of picture.” He felt he had to flee the temptation of easy money through more such films, Motion Picture News, January 13, 1917, p. 228.
181. Ramsaye, p. 616.
182. I. G. Edmonds, The Big U (South Brunswick, N.J., and New York: A. S. Barnes, 1977), p. 35. The minutes of the board of directors’ meetings at Universal in December 1913 make it clear that the Shuberts had a 33 1/3 percent interest, although it is not apparent whether it was obtained before or after production, Koszarski letter, December 8, 1983.
183. Edmonds, p. 35.
184. Mark Langer letter to author, September 28, 1984. They did become more involved through various Shubert offshoots and World Film.
185. Jack Lodge, “The Miracle Men,” Griffithiana 37, December 1989, p. 41.
186. Thomas Monroe Pitkin, Keepers of the Gate (New York: New York University Press, 1975), p. 104.
187. Jenks’s report was later published, in that significant year of 1913, as The Immigrant Problem.
188. Not until 1917 was the first immigration bill requiring a literacy test passed.
189. Moving Picture World, February 26, 1916, p. 1275. MacNamara was later responsible for writing and directing a nationalist film, Ireland a Nation, which caused riots in New York. See Moving Picture World, August 29, 1914, p. 1245.
190. A two-reeler with King Baggot and Jane Gail and almost certainly directed by George Loane Tucker, Lodge, p. 40.
191. The Edison Business Phonograph dated from 1907, and the Dictophone Company was organized in 1908.
192. In April 1912 the Selig Polyscope Company released Exposed by the Dictograph, and in 1913 detective William J. Burns was shown setting a trap with a Dictograph in Exposure of the Land Swindlers (Kalem, 3 reels). The Big Boss (May 1913) also captured a Dictograph trap. Big Tim Sullivan spoke in whispers at the end of his life, believing there were dictagraphs in the walls, Logan, p. 232.
193. The duty list in the police precinct set contains the names of Tucker, MacNamara and even Stern (for Julius Stern, absent studio manager). Cohn has been Anglicized to Cowan.
194. Minutes of Universal Board of Directors, October 28, 1913, courtesy Richard Koszarski.
195. Quoted in Ramsaye, p. 617.
196. Mrs. O. H. P. Belmont and Harriot Stanton Blatch later commended it. Kay Sloan, The Loud Silents: Origins of the Social Problem Film (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1988), p. 83.
197. Edmonds, p. 36.
198. Variety, December 19, 1913, p. 12.
199. A subplot of the entrapment of a country girl shows signs of the censoring—her beating is removed in toto.
200. Charles Feldman, National Board of Censorship (Review) of Motion Pictures (New York: Arno Press, 1977), p. 65.
201. Moving Picture World, August 29, 1914, p. 14.
202. New York Times, December 9, 1913, 8:3.
203. Variety, November 28, 1913, p. 12.
204. Motion Picture News, January 31, 1914, p. 27. Belasco’s attorney must have thought this up; no one seriously considered the motion picture to be on a level with the stage in 1913.
205. Moving Picture World, March 21, 1914, p. 1593; Ramsaye, p. 619.
206. Robert C. Allen, Sight and Sound (Winter 74/75), p. 50.
207. Motion Picture Story Magazine, December 1914, p. 89. Lars Lindstrom found a reference in a Scandinavian newspaper of 1910 to a Dane arrested in Chicago as he was about to deliver two eighteen-year-old Swedish girls to a brothel on South Clark Street. He had met the girls in Copenhagen, provided them with good positions with a Chicago family, and taken them across the Atlantic in a German steamer, letter to author, March 12, 1985.
208. The final raid was not filmed in New York City. The thought of a mass police raid and shootout in the middle of somewhere like Hell’s Kitchen evidently deterred the company. Judging by the un-paved streets, it was probably filmed near the studios at Fort Lee, with a larger New Jersey town providing the roofscape.
209. Picture Play, September 1916, p. 43.
210. “Ball, Eustace Hale, Traffic in Souls; a novel of crime and its cure; based in part upon the scenario of the photo-drama of the same name written by Walter MacNamara, with illustrations from the scenes in the photoplay. C. Dillingham Co (1914) 289p. illus.” But MacNamara earned nothing from the picture’s success, apart from his salary and “a trifling Christmas present.” (Variety, January 23, 1914, p. 14.)
211. Moving Picture World, November 1, 1913, p. 500, November 9, 1913, p. 613.
212. Original title Human Cargoes.
213. Motion Picture Story Magazine, December 1914, p. 93. I suspect they showed only parts of Traffic in Souls.
214. Variety, December 12, 1913, p. 12.
215. Motion Picture News, December 20, 1913, p. 31.
216. Ibid.
217. Ibid.
218. Leo Katcher, The Big Bankroll (New York: Cardinal, 1961), p. 21. It was also known as “Jewish faro.”
219. Night courts had been established in 1907 by magistrate Charles Whitman (later D.A. in New York) to deal with prostitution and were also known as the morals court, Logan, p. 143. On Record (1917) showed that girls could be placed “on record” in the night court through no fault of their own, New York Dramatic Mirror, May 3, 1917, p. 17.
220. Variety, December 12, 1913, p. 12.
221. Herbert Asbury, The French Quarter (New York: Knopf, 1936), p. 446.
222. Variety, December 12, 1913, p. 12.
223. Variety, December 26, 1913, p. 13.
224. Variety, January 2, 1914, p. 14.
225. This was probably a 1910 Danish film, The White Slave Trade, itself a remake of an earlier Danish film on prostitution.
226. Moving Picture World, January 31, 1914, p. 530.
227. Moving Picture World, January 3, 1914, p. 53.
228. Moving Picture World, January 10, 1914, p. 155.
229. Variety, January 2, 1914, p. 15.
230. Moving Picture World, January 10, 1914, p. 156.
231. Variety, January 16, 1914, p. 15.
232. Variety, March 13, 1914, p. 23. This was not the end of London’s association with motion pictures. In 1918 he wrote Her Moment (also copyrighted as Why Blame Me?). It was the story of how one typical victim ‘struggled to find her way to the light.’ London once more based the story on incidents from his days as investigator. Anna Luther played the immigrant victim, Motion Picture News, June 19, 1918, p. 3903.
233. Quoted in Karr, p. 116.
234. Moving Picture World, January 17, 1914, p. 276.
235. New York Dramatic Mirror, January 14, 1914.
236. Moving Picture World, January 17, 1914, p. 276.
237. Ibid.
238. Variety, February 27, 1914, p. 21.
239. Moving Picture World, February 7, 1914, p. 653.
240. Hampton, p. 42.
241. Herbert Asbury, The Barbary Coast (New York: Knopf, 1933), p. 287.
242. Geoffrey Bell letter to author, September 28, 1985.
243. Sid Grauman and Ephie Asher were also involved.
244. Asbury, The Barbary Coast, p. 289.
245. Hal Mohr to author, Hollywood, 1969. See also Bernard Rosenberg and Harry Silverstein, The Real Tinsel (New York: MacMillan, 1970), and Leonard Maltin, The Art of the Cinematographer (New York: Dover Publications, 1978), chapters on Hal Mohr.
246. Moving Picture World, November 1, 1913, p. 546.
247. Moving Picture World, November 1, 1913, p. 474.
248. Geoffrey Bell, The Golden Gate and the Silver Screen (Cranbury, N.J.: Associated University Presses, 1984), p. 107.
249. Motion Picture News, June 22, 1918.
250. Variety, November 22, 1923, p. 22.
251. Photoplay, July 1917, p. 113.
252. Journal of the Popular Film, 1973; Karr, Journal of the Popular Film, Vol. III, No. 2, Spring 1974, pp. 107–28.
253. Richard Koszarski, letter to author, May 1985. Koszarski, who has a copy of the script, says the film cuts back every few shots to a minister in a pulpit delivering a sermon on the white slave evil.
254. Variety, September 1, 1916, p. 20.
255. Wid’s, September 21, 1916, p. 982.
256. Moving Picture World, June 30, 1917, p. 2116.
257. Ibid.
258. Ibid.
259. New York Dramatic Mirror, June 23, 1917. Evelyn Brent played Betty Hamlin.
260. The Penalty (1920).
261. The Toll Gate (1920).
262. In 1920 a bill adding “lewd and lascivious” motion pictures to the list of articles prohibited from interstate commerce was passed by the House of Representatives without debate, Moving Picture World, February 7, 1920, p. 878.
263. Motion Picture Magazine, May 1925, p. 129.
264. Photoplay. June 1925, p. 110.
265. Classic Film Collector, 38, p. 17.
266. Mrs. Wallace Reid to Sue McConachy, Hollywood TV series, 1976.
267. Asbury, The French Quarter, p. 430.
268. Asbury, The French Quarter, p. 452. Storyville was closed when the secretary of war issued an order forbidding open prostitution within five miles of an army cantonment, and a similar ruling was made for naval establishments. It was the navy who insisted in this case.
269. Priscilla Bonner played the blind girl in The Strong Man (1926) with Harry Langdon.
270. Priscilla Bonner letter to author, October 19, 1980.
271. Picture Play, February 1926, p. 66. Mrs. Reid said she never regarded herself as a good actress, so while she codirected, she only appeared in the prologue.
272. Carl Miller played in Chaplin’s A Woman of Paris (1923).
273. This sequence was placed earlier in the picture.
274. A reference to The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne; the A is for Adulteress.
275. Magill’s Survey of Cinema, Vol. 3, ed. Frank N. Magill (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Salem Press, 1982), p. 906.
276. Short, p. 67.
277. Variety, February 3, 1926.
278. New York Times, February 3, 1926.
279. Bonner letter to author, October 19, 1980. See also Anthony Slide, Idols of Silence (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1976), p. 72.
1. Dope, scenario by C. Gardner Sullivan, author’s collection.
2. Troy Duster, The Legislation of Morality (New York: The Free Press, 1970), p. 3.
3. Duster, p. 7.
4. Harry J. Anslinger, U.S. Commissioner of Narcotics, quoted in Katcher, p. 291.
5. Duster, p. 8.
6. William Dufty, Sugar Blues (New York: Warner Books, 1975), p. 165.
7. The Dope Chronicles, ed. Gary Silver (New York: Harper & Row, 1979), p. 53.
8. The Biograph Bulletins 1908–12, ed. Eileen Bowser (New York: Octagon, 1973). These bulletins were the work of Lee Dougherty.
9. Variety, October 24, 1913.
10. Variety, February 27, 1914, p. 23.
11. The Lubin Film Company scrapbooks, courtesy Linda Kowall.
12. Ibid.
13. Variety, February 27, 1914, p. 23.
14. Variety, June 5, 1914, p. 17.
15. Variety, The film broke attendance records elsewhere, according to Lubin historian Linda Kowall. It was shown at the Tombs, New York, and many other prisons. Special screenings were arranged for Jane Addams at Hull-House and for physicians at Johns Hopkins.
16. Moving Picture World, April 4, 1914, pp. 113–14.
17. New York Dramatic Mirror, November 13, 1915, p. 32. Frank Reicher made a film with a similar story in 1921, Idle Hands.
18. New York Dramatic Mirror, December 18, 1915.
19. New York Dramatic Mirror, January 1, 1916, p. 30.
20. Variety, June 18, 1915, p. 19.
21. Variety, December 8, 1916, p. 29. The film was held up for a year—usually the sign that distributors have no faith in it. The attempted suicide was based on the case of the wife of actor Edward Morgan, who was addicted to morphine and tried to kill herself in this manner. Courtesy of John Delph.
22. Wid’s, December 14, 1916, p. 1174. Motion Picture News liked it.
23. Variety, July 28, 1916, p. 24.
24. Wid’s, July 20, 1916, p. 733, and synopsis in the Library of Congress of 1923 reissue.
25. Variety, July 28, 1916.
26. Katharine Karr, “The Long Square-Up,” p. 119.
27. Bessie Love’s diary.
28. Arthur Lennig, The Silent Voice, Faculty-Student Association of the State University of New York at Albany, Inc. 1966, p. 45.
29. Variety, June 8, 1916, p. 627.
30. Ibid.
31. New York Dramatic Mirror, June 10, 1916, p. 31.
32. Wid’s, April 12, 1917, p. 236. Miss Fischer removed the Teutonic “c” from her name during World War I. Only a short version of this film survives.
33. Paul Armstrong, who had died in 1915, had been the husband of the star of the film, Catherine Calvert.
34. Mutual Defense League Magazine, quoted in Motion Picture News, May 4, 1918, p. 2700. A remake of A Romance of the Underworld by Irving Cummings in 1929 dispensed entirely with the drug aspect.
35. Duster, p. 15.
36. Duster, p. 19.
37. Silver, p. 81.
38. Dr. Ellis Paxson Oberholtzer, The Morals of the Movie, quoted in Gerald Mast, ed., The Movies in Our Midst (Chi cago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 198.
39. Oberholtzer, in Mast, p. 81.
40. Picture Play, February 1921, p. 97.
41. Photoplay, January 1923, p. 84.
42. Photoplay, March 1923, p. 36.
43. Photoplay, May 1923, p. 26.
44. Charles “Buddy” Post, Motion Picture Magazine, January 1924, p. 21.
45. Los Angeles Herald, March 25, 1919. Courtesy Bruce Long.
46. Alice Terry to author, Hollywood, 1971. In the film, Wallace Reid plays a man who builds a railroad.
47. Los Angeles Herald, December 19, 1922.
48. Karl Brown to author, “Hollywood,” a thirteen-part series on the silent era, written, produced, and directed by Kevin Brownlow and David Gill (1980).
49. Brown to author, 1976.
50. Variety, September 9, 1921. Forever was premiered in October 1921. While this may not refer to Reid, all the indications are that it does. The reference to peddlers, however, suggests the studio doctor was not his sole supplier, as Mrs. Reid maintained later.
51. Douglas Whitton, “Murder of a Movie Director,” unpublished ms. (p. 221).
52. Picture Play, January 1923, p. 8.
53. Films in Review, April 1966, p. 217.
54. Photoplay, January 1923, p. 84.
55. Los Angeles Herald, December 19, 1922.
56. Variety, January 25, 1923, p. 10. The Devil’s Needle was reissued in 1923 to cash in on Reid’s death.
57. Photoplay, April 1923, p. 76.
58. Bessie Love to author, London, 1978.
59. Variety, May 17, 1923.
60. Films in Review, April 1966, p. 216.
61. Human Wreckage pressbook, courtesy Dr. Güttinger.
62. The film also featured Martha Nelson McCan, Los Angeles Park Commissioner; Mrs. Chester Ashley; John P. Carter, former U.S. Internal Revenue Collector; Charles F. Gray, of the Parent-Teachers Association; Dr. L. M. Powers, Health Commissioner, City of Los Angeles; Brigadier C. R. Boyd, Salvation Army, AFI Catalogue, 1921–1930, p. 368.
63. Photoplay, August 1923, pp. 85–86.
64. Claire McDowell and Mrs. Reid (née Dorothy Davenport) were cousins.
65. Mothers at this period calmed their babies with syrups spiked with opium, which could be bought at any pharmacy, Whitton, p. 222.
66. Variety, July 4, 1923. Variety also pointed out an error—morphine was used by MacFarland as a stimulant, but the review declared it deadened rather than exhilarated. They were only partly right. “Despite the fact that it is primarily a depressant it has some ability to act simultaneously as a stimulant,” Duster, p. 32.
67. Motion Picture Classic, October 1923, p. 11.
68. Ibid.
69. Quoted in Variety, June 28, 1923, p. 23.
70. Home Office file 45/1159, Public Records Office, London. Courtesy Annette Kuhn.
71. Motion Picture Magazine, October 1923, p. 114. In her old age, Mrs. Reid remained an intelligent and lively woman, but so strong were the defenses she had built up against the wounds of memory that she was unable to recall anything more than headlines about the events. “I don’t know whether keeping everything sharp and alive is kind,” she said. When asked directly about the Wallace Reid affair, she paused for thought and then said, “Isn’t it dreadful? Greatest tragedy of my life, of course. I think it’s one of those things that’s so bitter for you, you just keep the lovely things. I can’t offer you a legitimate excuse for not having more detail except loss of memory. But not,” she added, “a loss of love,” Mrs. Wallace Reid to Sue McConachy, “Hollywood” TV series, 1976.
72. Al Rogell to author, November 1986.
73. Rogell to author, 1986.
74. AFI Catalogue, 1921–1930, p. 315.
75. Al Rogell to Bob Birchard, interviews for Directors Guild of America, 1977, and for Kevin Brownlow, 1986.
76. Rogell to author, 1986. The film was made at the old Fine Arts Studio, where Intolerance had been shot.
77. William O. Walker III, Drug Control in the Americas (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1981), pp. 67, 70.
78. Michael Starks, Cocaine Fiends and Reefer Madness (East Brunswick, N.J.: Cornwall Books, 1982), p. 45.
79. Photoplay, February 1929, p.76.
1. Wichita Daily Eagle, December 28, 1900. The defense held that she was not responsible for her actions, and the charge was dismissed. Shortly afterward, she wrecked two more saloons, Wichita Daily Eagle. January 22, 1901. Courtesy J. B. Kaufman.
2. A calendar in one scene says Thursday, November 23 which occurred in 1905 and 1911, letter from Library of Congress to author, October 13, 1977.
3. Sinclair, Upton Sinclair Presents William Fox, published by the author, Los Angeles, 1933, pp. 2–3.
4. Edison Catalogue, quoted in Lewis Jacobs, The Rise of the American Film, p. 19.
5. Jack S. Blocker, Jr., Retreat from Reform (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1976), p. 15.
6. May, Screening Out the Past, p. 14.
7. Moving Picture World, June 29, 1912, p. 1217.
8. Addams, The Second Twenty Years at Hull-House, p. 222.
9. Blocker, Jr., p. 199.
10. Lindsay, The Art of the Moving Picture, p. 235.
11. Martin Short, Crime Inc. (London: Thames Methuen, 1984), p. 60.
12. Thomas Dixon, Southern Horizons (Alexandria, Va.: IWV Publishing, 1984), copyright Raymond Rohauer, p. 234.
13. Photoplay, May 1916, p. 27.
14. Moving Picture World, January 24, 1920, p. 553.
15. Hampton, The History of the American Film Industry, p. 424. Garth Jowett in Film: The Democratic Art (p. 90) thinks it doubtful that many people permanently deserted the public bar for the picture theatre.
16. New York Dramatic Mirror, November 6, 1915.
17. New York Dramatic Mirror, March 10, 1917, p. 27. The Southern scenes were shot on the Gulf Coast near New Orleans, AFI Catalogue, 1911–1920, p. 113.
18. New York Dramatic Mirror, March 10, 1917, p. 27.
19. New York Dramatic Mirror, June 9, 1917, p. 28.
20. Ibid.
21. Moving Picture World, August 23, 1913, p. 848. The secretary and third partner of the Bosworth Company was H. T. Rudisill. Garbutt was also a celebrated sportsman.
22. Kalton Lahue, Motion Picture Pioneer (South Brunswick, N.J., and New York: A. S. Barnes, 1973), pp. 14, 77.
23. Mrs. Bosworth was recently persuaded by Paul Spehr to donate such prints as she possessed to the Library of Congress.
24. Moving Picture World, January 10, 1914, p. 156.
25. Moving Picture World, July 18, 1914, p. 406.
26. Ibid.
27. Sinclair, Autobiography of Upton Sinclair, p. 50.
28. AFI Catalogue, 1911–1930, p. 475.
29. Moving Picture World, August 1, 1914, p. 707.
30. Ibid.
31. Harry Reichenbach, Phantom Fame (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1931), p. 225.
32. Variety, April 23, 1915, p. 18.
33. Ibid.
34. Ibid.
35. Motion Picture News, April 17, 1915, p. 68.
36. Ibid.
37. Motion Picture News, May 15, 1915, p. 56.
38. Ibid.
39. San Jose Mercury-Herald, October 19, 1916, quoted in Drew, D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance, p. 131.
40. Variety, June 17, 1919, p. 1.
41. 1919 Wid’s Year Book, p. 104.
42. The Dry Decade, p. 51.
43. 1919 Wid’s Year Book, p. 104.
44. 1919 Wid’s Year Book, p. 110.
45. 1920 Wid’s Year Book, p. 233.
46. 1920 Wid’s Year Book, p. 235.
47. Ibid.
48. Variety, October 24, 1919, p. 61.
49. New York Times, June 2, 1920, p. 1, col. 3; June 3, 1920, p.9, col. 1; June 4, 1920, p. 10, col. 1; June 14, 1920, p. 10, col. 1. Courtesy J. B. Kaufman.
50. The term originated in the Southern states when a moonshiner avoided paying tax on manufactured distilled spirits by delivering bottles concealed in the leg of his boots, George E. Mowry, The Twenties (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1963), p. 94.
51. Donald Ogden Stewart, By a Stroke of Luck (London: Paddington Press, 1975), p. 149.
52. Short, Crime Inc., p. 145.
53. Variety, May 20, 1921, p. 46.
54. Variety, November 4, 1921, p. 46. She was also arrested for abducting a fourteen-year-old boy who had left home to follow her, Cinemagazine, January 5, 1923, p. 23.
55. Morris, Postscript to Yesterday, p. 73.
56. Picture Play, October 1925, p. 55. Texas was also portrayed, thinly disguised, in films like Lois Weber’s Angel of Broadway (1927).
57. Picture Play, January 1929, p. 55.
58. Allen F. Davis, Spearheads for Reform (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), p. 237.
59. Motion Picture Magazine, September 1929, p. 53.
60. Frank Thompson, William Wellman (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1983), p. 50. The sequence appears in Robert Youngson’s MGM’s Big Parade of Comedy. (1964).
61. Variety, August 19, 1925, p. 27.
62. It is almost certain to have been acquired by Warner Bros. when they remade it in 1930.
63. Photoplay, August 1924, p. 48.
64. Ince Corporation agreements, August 25, 1923. Courtesy Steven Higgins. George Kibbe Turner was eventually credited with the story, Hillyer and Arthur Statter with the adaptation.
65. Ince Silversheet, no date.
66. Ince Silversheet.
67. Variety, July 2, 1924.
68. Letter from Wilbur D. Finch to the Ince Corporation, July 29, 1924. Courtesy Steven Higgins.
69. Laurence Reid, Motion Picture Classic, September 1924, p. 94.
70. Picture Play, September 1924, p. 56.
71. Motion Picture Magazine, September 1924, p. 85.
72. Letter Ingle Carpenter to Ben M. Goldman, July 29, 1925. Courtesy Steven Higgins and J. B. Kaufman.
73. Santa Ana Daily Evening Register, August 7, 1924, quoted in Sleeper, Great Films Shot in Orange County, p. 106.
74. Santa Ana Daily Evening Register, September 4, 1924.
75. A Chicago playwright and later MGM producer (The Great Ziegfeld). Reviewers noted the influence of What Price Glory? on this film, about two tough men and their misuse of women.
76. Charles Merz, The Dry Decade (New York: Doubleday, 1930, reprinted by the University of Washington Press, 1969), p. 114.
77. Life, August 18, 1927, quoted in original uncut ms. of Dark Star by Leatrice Gilbert Fountain.
78. Photoplay, August 1927, p. 92.
79. MGM press book Theatre Arts Collection, Lincoln Center, Courtesy of George Geltzer.
80. Los Angeles Times, July 14, 1927, quoted in Dark Star original uncut ms.
81. Film Spectator, September 3, 1927, p. 12.
82. Photoplay, September 1927, p. 55.
83. New York Times, July 26, 1927, p. 17, quoted in Leatrice Gilbert Fountain, Dark Star (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985), p. 139.
84. Photoplay, December 1927, p. 27.
85. The People’s Chronology, James Trager, ed. (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1979), p. 846.
86. People’s Chronology, p. 854.
87. William E. Leuchtenburg, Perils of Prosperity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), p. 215.
1. A similarity was noted between this and Augustus Thomas’s The Witching Hour (1907), also filmed in 1916.
2. Photoplay, November 1916, p. 57.
3. Photoplay, November 1916, p. 86.
4. New York Dramatic Mirror, August 26, 1916.
5. J. B. Kaufman letter to author, February 27, 1985.
6. Evelyn Nesbit, The Story of My Life (London: J. Long, 1914), p. 50.
7. Evelyn Nesbit, The Untold Story (London: J. Long, 1934), p. 51.
8. Jay Robert Nash, Murder, America (London: Harrap, 1981), p. 384. A film called Evidence (1918, Triangle) had a man kill his unfaithful wife. “But so blameless is his past reputation and so powerful the influence of his friends, that he is declared insane and sentenced to an asylum for a brief period,” New York Dramatic Mirror, January 19, 1918.
9. The Unwritten Law is in the National Film Archive, London; a short reenactment called The Thaw-White Tragedy (1906) is in the Library of Congress. It was photographed by Billy Bitzer two days after the event primarily for the amusement arcades and was banned in some cities.
10. Jay Robert Nash, Bloodletters and Badmen (New York: Warner Paperback, 1973), p. 373. Ziegfeld put Nesbit lookalike Lilian Lorraine on a swing, flying out over the Follies audience, to recall this incident, Frank Platt, Great Stars of Hollywood’s Golden Age (New York: New American Library, 1966), p. 123.
11. Nash, Bloodletters and Badmen, p. 374.
12. Nesbit, The Untold Story, p. 247.
13. Moving Picture World, May 23, 1907, p. 180.
14. Moving Picture World, July 13, 1907, p. 295.
15. Nash, Bloodletters and Badmen, p. 377.
16. Memorandum from Sidney E. Werner, attorney for Harry Thaw, June 17, 1947. Courtesy Lawrence Copley Thaw.
17. Variety, August 15, 1913, p. 4. Thanks to her, Hammerstein’s made a $100,000 profit during the summer months, “when anything excepting a loss is a Heavenly gift in vaudeville.” Variety, September 5, 1913, p. 4.
18. This may have been the film with Ethel Grandin in the Nesbit role, filmed at Madison Square Garden, using the very table where Thaw had shot White. Motion Picture Country Home Lodge Commentary, July 1971, p. 2.
19. Variety, September 19, 1913, p. 2.
20. Variety, September 26, 1913.
21. Jacobs, The Rise of the American Film, p. 155. Thaw was almost certainly unbalanced, and he was involved in many other newsworthy incidents—mostly brawls of one kind or another.
22. Variety, May 8, 1914, and May 15, 1914.
23. Nesbit, The Untold Story, p. 249.
24. Nesbit, The Untold Story, p. 257.
25. Variety, May 4, 1917, p. 28.
26. Wid’s, June 21, 1917.
27. Variety, May 25, 1917, p. 18.
28. Motion Picture Magazine, August 1917, p. 12.
29. The Bioscope, February 28, 1918, p. 38.
30. Moving Picture World, September 21, 1918, p. 1747. Portraits of Nesbit by Dana and Harrington Mann were shown in the film (AFI Catalogue, 1911–1920, p. 1062).
31. Wid’s, December 29, 1918, p. 9.
32. Photoplay, May 1919, p. 95.
33. Variety, January 31, 1919, p. 52. AFI Catalogue, 1911–1920, says she marries the millionaire, p. 1062.
34. Wid’s, June 15, 1919, p. 39.
35. Allan Dwan to author, “Hollywood” TV series, 1977.
36. Ibid.
37. Ibid.
38. Variety, January 6, 1926, p. 1.
39. Samson de Brier letter to author, November 28, 1983.
40. Motion Picture News, September 16, 1911, p. 11.
41. Motion Picture News, September 16, 1911, p. 14.
42. Ibid.
43. Motion Picture News, September 30, 1911, p. 18.
44. Motion Picture News, September 30, 1911, p. 22.
45. New York Times, November 25, 1911, 3:1.
46. Miriam Cooper, Dark Lady of the Silents (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1973), p. 146.
47. Cooper, p. 146.
48. Variety, March 15, 1918, p. 43.
49. Rumor had it that Rudolph Valentino was poisoned in 1926 by friends of Jack De Saulles, Alexander Walker, Valentino (London: Elm Tree Books, 1976), p. 113.
50. Photoplay, November 1921, p. 64.
51. John Ince was a director and a brother of Thomas H.
52. AFI Catalogue, 1921–1930, p. 233.
53. Variety, June 24, 1921, p. 38.
54. Variety, July 8, 1921, p. 29.
55. Variety, August 26, 1921, p. 39: 1921 Studio Directory.
56. Variety, July 1, 1925, p. 22, reported Clara Hamon divorced Gorman on grounds of mental cruelty.
57. Variety, September 2, 1921, p. 41.
58. Variety, September 28, 1921, p. 46.
59. Ibid.
60. Photoplay, November 1921, p. 64.
61. Photoplay, February 1922, p. 39.
62. Veronica and Paul King, Problems of Modern American Crime (London: Heath Cranton, 1926), p. 33.
63. Variety, February 24, 1922, p. 39.
64. Moving Picture World, March 9, 1907, p. 24.
65. When the New York Police Department changed its uniforms, Sennett’s New York office had sackloads sent to California for the Keystone Cops, Minta Durfee interview, 1963.
66. Variety, May 17, 1918; Variety, July 5, 1918, p. 34.
67. Motion Picture News, July 27, 1912, p. 2.
68. Variety, April 17, 1914, final page. “Lineup” meant watch bill or roster, listing men on and off duty; it also refers to identity parades.
69. Variety, May 15, 1914, p. 19.
70. Variety, April 17, 1914, final page.
71. Moving Picture World, November 7, 1914, p. 774.
72. Moving Picture World, October 1, 1920, p. 39.
73. Short, Crime Inc., p. 65.
74. Moving Picture World, April 11, 1914, p. 226. There was a Universal City before the grand opening of the ranch in 1915.
75. Variety. June 11, 1915, p. 19.
76. Ibid.
77. Film Index, p. 539; Moving Picture World, September 2, 1911, p. 633.
78. Moving Picture World, March 11, 1916, p. 1669.
79. Hal Roach to David Gill, Bel Air, 1988.
80. Moving Picture World, January 14, 1913, p. 1116.
81. Moving Picture World, January 5, 1914, p. 30.
82. Reichenbach, Phantom Fame, p. 176.
83. Graham Adams, Jr., The Age of Industrial Violence, 1910–1915 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1966), p. 197.
84. Moving Picture World, February 10, 1912, p. 486; Moving Picture World, March 29, 1913, p. 1351.
85. Moving Picture World, February 10, 1912, p. 486; Moving Picture World, March 29, 1913, p. 1351.
86. People’s Chronology, 1979, p. 607.
87. Moving Picture World, February 22, 1913, p. 759.
88. Ibid. See also rewritten story line in Motion Picture Story Magazine, April 1913, p. 85, with illustrations. A letter to the magazine assured readers that this was the only film in which William J. Burns appeared and the only one authorized by him. This statement was necessary because so many other filmmakers had made free with his name.
89. Moving Picture World, February 22, 1913, p. 759.
90. Moving Picture World, August 8, 1914, p. 843.
91. Variety, August 14, 1914, p. 21.
92. Moving Picture World, August 22, 1914, p. 1083.
93. Moving Picture World, August 22, 1914, p. 1083.
94. Moving Picture World, April 19, 1913, p. 289. The film was not released until 1914—it was probably delayed for legal reasons. The picture reminded Variety (August 14, 1914, p. 21) of Lasky’s The Little Gray Lady (1914), another story of counterfeiting. But far from pleasing the Secret Service, this outraged them. Major Metellus Funkhouser showed The Little Gray Lady to the head of the Service in Chicago, Captain Thomas I. Porter, who confiscated it. Among the scenes he objected to were shots of a government clerk tearing small portions from bills and then putting them together to form a hundred-dollar bill. But far worse was the scene of the clerk being arrested by a Secret Service man. A friend of the clerk bribes the officer, enabling the crooks to flee the country.
“This is the most objectionable picture I ever saw,” said Captain Porter. “It shows bribery of government officials, and also criminality, because of the fact that the alleged hero is shown making the money.”
Porter’s action was received with protests, since the story was based on Channing Pollock’s play, performed many times without complaint, Moving Picture World, August 8, 1914, p. 820.
95. Robert Grau, Theatre of Science (New York: Broadway Publishing, 1914), p. 88.
96. Motion Picture Magazine, June 1931, p. 103.
97. See also Kevin Brownlow, The War, the West and the Wilderness (New York: Knopf, 1978), p. 139.
98. Katcher, The Big Bankroll, pp. 53, 55. Mizner was coauthor with Paul Armstrong of the play Alias Jimmy Valentine and The Greyhound, underworld stories which became films. He appeared in Raoul Walsh’s Me, Gangster (1928).
99. Photoplay, May 1920, p. 110. The most famous name among all American detectives, that of Pinkerton, cropped up in a Selznick picture, A Man’s Home. Far from being flattered, W. A. “Bill” Pinkerton, son of the founder and himself principal of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, sued to have it removed from the subtitles. The judge threw the case out of court, Variety, March 17, 1922, p. 43. August Vollmer, chief of police, Berkeley, California, appeared in the serial Officer 444 (1926). Courtesy of William K. Everson.
100. Films in Review, September 1965, p. 586.
101. Kalton Lahue, Continued Next Week (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1954), p. 117.
102. Moving Picture World, August 2, 1924, advertisement section.
103. The Bioscope, November 13, 1924, p. 50.
104. Moving Picture Magazine, May 1926, p. 39.
105. Philadelphia Record quoted in Moving Picture World, June 8, 1912, p. 905.
106. Dr. D. P. Macmillan to Chicago Motion Picture Commission 1918, quoted in Short, A Generation, p. 37.
107. National Board of Censorship (Review), p. 294.
108. Reviewed in The Survey, April 15, 1926, quoted in Lynd and Lynd, Middletown, p. 268.
109. Jane Addams, The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets (New York: Macmillan, 1909), p. 75.
110. Addams, The Spirit of Youth, p. 92.
111. Addams, The Spirit of Youth, p. 93.
112. By Williams and Norgate, London. The Bishop of Birmingham was president of the commission, which included Lieutenant General Sir Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the Scout movement, the Rabbi Professor Gollancz, representing the Jewish community, T. P. O’Connor, the chief censor, a group of educational people and representatives of the industry, together with Dr. Marie Stopes, the advocate of birth control, Report of the Cinema Commission, p. xxi.
113. Report of the Cinema Commission, p. xlii.
114. Report of the Cinema Commission, p. xlv.
115. Report of the Cinema Commission, p. xliv.
116. Report of the Cinema Commission, p. 130.
117. Report of the Cinema Commission, p. 241.
118. Christian Advocate, July 16, 1925, p. 15, quoted in Jowett, Film: The Democratic Art, p. 145.
119. Moving Picture World, May 1915, p. 1290.
120. Lincoln Steffens, Upbuilders (New York: Doubleday, Page, 1909, reprinted by the University of Washington Press, Seattle, 1968), p. 96.
121. Ben Lindsey, “Problem of the Children,” quoted in Steffens, Upbuilders, p. 100.
122. Quoted in Steffens, Upbuilders, p. 100.
123. Morris, Postscript to Yesterday, p. 308.
124. Lindsey and Borough, The Dangerous Life, p. 113.
125. Steffens, Upbuilders, p. 238.
126. Lindsey and Borough, p. 79.
127. Eric F. Goldman, Rendezvous with Destiny (New York: Vintage Books, 1955), p. 177.
128. This was something that astonished the authorities, who assumed that somehow Lindsey hypnotized the boys.
129. Moving Picture World, August 9, 1913, p. 680.
130. Ramsaye, A Million and One Nights, p. 611.
131. He returned in 1914 to run the Colorado Motion Picture Company.
132. Moving Picture World, August 9, 1913, p. 643.
133. Ibid.
134. The Soul of Youth survives at the Library of Congress in an excellent 35mm print.
135. Moving Picture World, April 4, 1914, p. 126.
136. Moving Picture World, August 15, 1914, p. 965.
137. King Vidor, A Tree Is a Tree (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1953), p. 44.
138. Vidor, p. 46. Vidor’s Bud’s Recruit survives in the Library of Congress. See Brownlow, p. 134.
139. AFI Catalogue, 1921–1930, p. 93.
140. Picture Play, April 1925, p. 112.
141. Variety, January 21, 1924, p. 31: “Mrs. Wallace Reid in Person and New Picture Disappoint”—a report from Kansas City.
142. Picture Play, January 1925, p. 31.
143. Variety’s figures quoted in Norton Parker biography, p. 1. In the top 104 moneymakers of 1928, it was number 43, Exhibitors Herald, December 29, 1928, p. 34.
144. AFI Catalogue, 1921–1930, p. 659. The idea of a father about to attack his own daughter was also done in 1916 in It May Be Your Daughter.
145. Photoplay, May 1928, p. 114.
146. Ibid.
147. Such as Birmingham, Alabama, where an exhibitor took the matter to federal court and lost, de Grazia and Newman, Banned Films, p. 208.
148. Mrs. Norton S. Parker, letter to author, July 29, 1980. Grant Withers was later married to and divorced from Loretta Young.
149. Either censorship has struck and the climax to the strip poker scene has been removed, or it was never included in the final cut. I suspect the juvenile court people would have objected to any hint of nudity and the sequence would have been an early casualty.
150. Mrs. Norton S. Parker letter to author, July 29, 1980.
151. Letter to Cliff Broughton Productions, March 28, 1928, quoted in publicity.
152. Publicity material. Courtesy Mrs. Parker.
153. The House of Correction (1914) was a three-reeler released by Union Features about a reformatory run by a “philanthropic” magistrate where the boys are treated like animals. “Many of them lose their reason entirely, while others become so weak they can scarcely walk.” The newspapers expose the scandal when a youth escapes and dies as a result of brutality by the warders, Moving Picture World, April 4, 1914, p. 126. The picture did not exaggerate the conditions of the worst of these places.
154. Eddie Quillan to author, Hollywood, June 1986.
155. Motion Picture Magazine, May 1928, p. 28.
156. George Duryea was later known as Tom Keene. He had starred on Broadway in the play Abie’s Irish Rose.
157. Motion Picture Magazine, May 1928, p. 28.
158. Cecil B. DeMille, The Autobiography of Cecil B. DeMille (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1959), p. 263.
159. Motion Picture Magazine, May 1928, p. 28.
160. Eddie Quillan to author, Hollywood, June 1986.
161. Lina Basquette to author, Wheeling, West Virginia, June 1986.
162. Photoplay, July 1928, p. 54.
163. Picture Play, July 1929, pp. 92–94.
164. Schedule of costs and gross receipts of pictures personally directed by Cecil B. DeMille, 1913–1930, DeMille Estate. Courtesy Bob Birchard.
165. Lina Basquette to author, Wheeling, West Virginia, June 1986. See profile by Barry Paris in The New Yorker, February 13, 1989, p. 54–73.
166. John Hampton letter to author, July 1985.
167. DeMille, pp. 263–64.
168. Variety, April 3, 1929, p. II.
169. Herbert Asbury, The Gangs of New York (New York: Knopf, 1927), p. 29.
170. Owen Kildare, My Mamie Rose: The Story of My Regeneration (New York: The Baker and Taylor Company, 1903), p. 78.
171. Asbury, p. 333.
172. Asbury, p. 342.
173. The Biograph Bulletin, October 31, 1912.
174. The Biograph Bulletin (Bowser), p. 452.
175. Carlos Clarens, Crime Movies (New York: Norton, 1980), p. 16.
176. Lillian Gish to author, London 1984. The actor, Adolph Lestina, was an expert with beards.
177. Motion Picture News, May 31, 1913, p. 7. Bald Jack Rose had promoted fights and vaudeville shows. He became president of the Humanology Motion Picture Company after The Wages of Sin.
178. Moving Picture World, June 21, 1913, p. 1250.
179. Moving Picture World, June 14, 1913, p. 1116.
180. Ibid.
181. Moving Picture World, June 14, 1913, p. 1158.
182. Also known as The Gangsters. Lauritzen and Lundquist in their American Film Index, 1908–1915 (Stockholm: Film-Index, 1976) credit the direction of this to Christy Cabanne, but Variety (March 6, 1914) and other trade papers credit it to Kirkwood. Lauritzen and Lundquist also credit the story to Anita Loos, but she does not include it in her definitive list of credits in her book Kiss Hollywood Good-by (New York: Viking, 1974). AFI Catalogue credits Kirkwood with direction and suggests Kirkwood and Loos might have written it, p. 313.
183. Moving Picture World, February 21, 1914, p. 932.
184. Variety, March 13, 1914, p. 23.
185. Variety, March 13, 1914.
186. New York Dramatic Mirror, March 4, 1914, p. 42.
187. See Eugene Rosow, Born to Lose (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 80.
188. Published in 1903.
189. In 1911, Reliance had produced a very similar story as The Gangfighter (Motion Picture News, January 6, 1911, p. 29).
190. Herbert Asbury, Gangs of New York, p. 360.
191. Variety, August 20, 1915.
192. Raoul Walsh to author, Hollywood, 1967.
193. Raoul Walsh, Each Man in His Time (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1974), p. 116.
194. Walsh, p. 116.
195. Walsh, p. 118.
196. Logan, Against the Evidence, p. 59.
197. Sinclair, Upton Sinclair Presents William Fox, pp. 188–89. Sheehan became vice president in charge of production at Fox and general manager of the studios.
198. The man who became chief attorney for Fox (and who represented Chaplin and many other film people), Nathan Burkan, was a Tammany district leader.
199. Walsh, p. 118.
200. Charles Chaplin, in a taped conversation with Richard Meryman in 1966, revealed an unexpected knowledge of Sheehan’s life. He had been in New York at the time of the Rosenthal killing and became interested in the case. He got to know Sheehan during the war, when, together with Pickford and Fairbanks, the comedian brought the city of New York to a stop on the Third Liberty Bond drive. Sheehan, then with Fox, took him on a tour of the underworld and introduced him to many of the gangsters. “This little Irishman,” said Chaplin, “made a fortune with the whorehouses. He’d take a rake-off … He was a dear friend of mine. He left [the police] right after that because he was part of this whole outfit … Very clever, very astute.”
201. An event which occurred in 1904, when the excursion boat S.S. General Slocum caught fire on the Hudson while carrying 1,400 German-Americans from the Lower East Side on a picnic to Locust Grove on Long Island Sound. One thousand thirty died, and the disaster shattered the German community, many of whom moved uptown to Yorktown. The captain was found guilty of negligence and sentenced to ten years at Sing Sing, People’s Chronology, p. 698. In the film, the sequence ends with the reassuring title “All the kiddies were saved”—but there is no indication of how many adults perished. The scene was shot on the Hudson River near Nyack, AFI Catalogue, 1911–1920, p. 765.
202. Walsh, p. 119.
203. Cooper, Dark Lady of the Silents, p. 114.
204. Anna Q. Nilsson appeared in a two-reeler also called Regeneration in 1914—it was the story of a young prostitute attracted to a mission by the singing of hymns, who is taken as companion by a wealthy man’s wife. It was a blackmail story with many references to the underworld, New York Dramatic Mirror, May 6, 1914.
205. Moving Picture World, February 15, 1916, p. 363.
206. Picture Play, June 1924, p. 91.
207. AFI Catalogue, 1921–1930, p. 261.
208. Picture Play, May 1923, p. 58.
209. Photoplay, July 1921, p. 82.
210. Photoplay, February 1921, p. 66.
211. Ibid., and Variety, November 19, 1920; in the novel he was not shot, but married the girl and became a philanthropic force in the community. Robert G. Anderson, Faces, Forms, Films (New York: Castle Books, 1971), p. 66.
212. Picture Play, October 1920, p. 44.
213. Motion Picture Classic, February 1921, p. 96.
214. Brooklyn Daily Eagle, January 23, 1921, quoted in Short, A Generation, p. 169.
215. Short, A Generation, February 1924, p. 307.
216. Photoplay, February 1924, p. 27.
217. Photoplay, February 1924, p. 63 Big Brother was remade with Richard Dix as Young Donovan’s Kid (1931).
218. Sponsored by prominent criminologists and humanitarians.
219. Photoplay, April 1924, p. 52.
220. Variety, December 27, 1923, p. 26.
221. Allan Dwan to author, “Hollywood” TV series, 1977.
222. Variety, December 27, 1923, p. 26.
223. The complete film no longer survives, but an abridged version was once available on 9.5mm under the title The Bickel Affair.
224. Variety, January 12, 1927, p. 18.
225. Ibid.
226. Photoplay, March 1927, p. 94.
227. In Ben Hecht’s A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago, George Pratt letter to author, June 26, 1972.
228. Ben Hecht, A Child of the Century (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1954), quoted in Josef von Sternberg, Fun in a Chinese Laundry (New York: Macmillan, 1965), p. 215.
229. Von Sternberg, p. 215.
230. Hecht, A Child of the Century, p. 479.
231. Von Sternberg, p. 216.
232. Moving Picture World, August 28, 1927.
233. Josef von Sternberg to author, quoted in The Parade’s Gone By … (New York: Knopf, 1968), p. 202.
234. John Gunther in Harper’s Monthly Magazine, October 1929, p. 5.
235. Variety, December 7, 1927. Writing about The City Gone Wild is a painful experience for me. Part of a historian’s job—at least, this historian—is to try and find the film as well as the facts. And in 1971, I thought I had found this one. David Shepard, then with the American Film Institute’s archive program, had a list of 35mm nitrate prints held in a vault Paramount had forgotten it had. He asked me which title I would select, out of all of them, to look at right away. I said The City Gone Wild. He called Paramount to bring it out of the vaults for our collection that afternoon. The projectionist went to pick it up. “Oh, there was some powder on that,” said the vault keeper. “We threw it away.” The film had been unspooled into a tank of water (recommended procedure for decomposing nitrate). Shepard complained officially to Paramount, who promised it would not happen again. He tried to rescue it, even from its watery grave, but a salvage company had carted it off by the time he got there. Had we not been so eager, the film would have survived.
236. Katcher, p. 241.
237. Katcher, p. 234.
238. AFI Catalogue, 1921–1930, p. 252.
239. Harry Behn had collaborated on The Big Parade. Del Andrews was a friend of Milestone’s from the Ince days, when both were in the cutting room together.
240. Luciano J. Iorizzo and Salvatore Mondello, The Italian Americans (Boston: Twayne, 1980), p. 186.
241. Short, Crime Inc., p. 82.
242. Gerald M. Peary, The Racket, a “Lost” Gangster Classic, Velvet Light Trap 14 (Winter 75), Gerald Peary on gangster films, p. 7.
243. Variety, February 8, 1928, p. 45.
244. Peary, Velvet Light Trap, p. 7.
245. Short, Crime Inc., p. 84.
246. Variety (July 11, 1928) considered his career had been obliterated by “junk stories,” which was hard on some of the films, although their lack of box-office success cannot be denied.
247. Variety, July 11, 1928, p. 13.
248. Ibid.
249. Picture Play, December 1928, p. 32.
250. Photoplay, August 1928, p. 56.
251. Motion Picture Classic, December 1928, p. 63.
252. Ibid.
253. Ibid.
254. Ibid.
255. Motion Picture Classic, December 1928, p. 66.
256. Motion Picture Classic, December 1928, p. 63.
257. Judge, July 28, 1928, quoted in Pare Lorentz on Film (New York: Hopkinson and Blake, 1975), p. 16.
258. Variety, August 15, 1928, p. 24.
259. Variety, July 11, 1928, p. 13.
260. Picture Play, September 1929, p. 12. The Racket was remade in 1951 for Howard Hughes by director John Cromwell, who had played the police captain in the play. Hughes, Milestone, and Bartlett Cormack collaborated on another Chicago subject, The Front Page, in 1931, which attacked Big Bill Thompson even more strongly. Adapted from a play by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, it portrayed him “as a buffoon, heavy and crook,” Peary, p. 9.
1. New York Dramatic Mirror, June 24, 1914.
2. Alistair Cooke, America, BBC, 1973, p. 288.
3. Steffens, Shame of the Cities, p. 212.
4. Moving Picture World, April 4, 1914, p. 79.
5. It was on the Sullivan and Considine vaudeville circuit that Chaplin was playing when he was signed on for films. Sullivan ran it with Jim Considine.
6. Moving Picture World, April 4, 1914, p. 79.
7. Katcher, The Big Bankroll, p. 72.
8. Moving Picture World, April 4, 1914, p. 79.
9. Katcher, p. 27.
10. The trade press linked Rubinstein and “B. L. Thomas” to the film—the AFI Catalogue, 1911–1920 (p. 514) credits Benjamin R. Tolmas as copyright owner.
11. Moving Picture World, April 4, 1914, p. 79.
12. Moving Picture World, April 11, 1914, p. 275.
13. Moving Picture World, April 11, 1914, p. 222. The old East Side was also home territory to pugilist “Gentleman Jim” Corbett, the man who beat John L. Sullivan. Corbett starred in John Ford’s The Prince of Avenue A (1920), Ford’s first non-Western, a comedy romance with a political background. (Variety said “they’ll yell for more,” February 27, 1920), p. 47. An independent film called That Old Gang of Mine, directed by May Tully, starred veteran stage actor Maclyn Arbuckle. Made in 1925 as a five-reeler, it was suggested by the song of the same title. The song brings together bitter political opponents who return to their old neighborhood “and recall for each other the joys and sorrows of a Manhattan childhood,” AFI Catalogue, 1921–1930, p. 796.
14. Harold Wentworth and Stuart Berg Flexner, eds., Dictionary of American Slang (New York: Thomas Crowell, 1975), p. 226.
15. Moving Picture World, March 22, 1913, p. 1256.
16. Moving Picture World, May 17, 1913, pp. 712 and 740.
17. There are conflicts of opinion as to the exact number of authors; Kalton Lahue says fifteen, Lauritzen says sixteen, the trade papers list eighteen.
18. Moving Picture World, November 27, 1915, p. 1680.
19. Ibid.
20. New York Dramatic Mirror, February 4, 1914.
21. Motion Picture Classic, April 1921, p. 86.
22. Variety, January 26, 1921; AFI Catalogue, 1921–1930, p. 257.
23. Photoplay, April 1921, p. 78.
24. Steffens, p. 3.
25. Motion Picture Story Magazine, November 1911, p. 89. When franchise-grabbing corporations realize that an honest alderman is their only obstacle, they resort to blackmail in John Sterling, Alderman (1912), a one-reeler directed for Imp by King Baggot, who also played the lead. They investigate his past, discovering that as a youth in the slums he had turned to burglary. While robbing a house, he was caught by the owner, a humanitarian who helped him instead of turning him in. He became a good citizen, working his way up, and now faces ruin. His wife encourages him to turn the matter over to the district attorney; he does so and the D.A. brings the grafters to justice, Moving Picture World, October 26, 1912, p. 351.
26. Jacob Friedman, The Impeachment of Governor William Sulzer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939), p. 15.
27. Friedman, p. 18.
28. Friedman, p. 30.
29. Friedman, p. 36.
30. Friedman, p. 238.
31. Motion Picture News, November 8, 1913, p. 665.
32. Ibid.
33. Motion Picture News, November 15, 1913, p. 30.
34. He was defeated by former district attorney Charles Whitman, who had held an inquiry into Sulzer’s charges against Tammany. No disclosures of any note resulted, Friedman, p. 263.
35. Photoplay, August 1915, p. 77.
36. Variety, June 18, 1915, p. 17.
37. Ibid.
38. Moving Picture World, June 5, 1915, p. 1631.
39. Friedman, p. 266.
40. James Curtis, Between Flops (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982), p. 91.
41. Friedman, p. 270. Another victim of “invisible government” was Charles E. Sebastian, Mayor of Los Angeles. His resignation in 1917 was attributed to ill health. Fred H. Solomon, a dance-hall proprietor, put up the money for Downfall of a Mayor, which was said to cost $50,000. The director was H. G. Stafford. It was subtitled “An Exposé of Chemically Pure Los Angeles,” Variety, May 4, 1917 p. 22. Sebastian said it was an accurate account of the events which led to his resignation, and Variety thought it was the most sensational of any film, from a political exposé standpoint, Variety, April 27, 1917, p. 19. Sebastian played himself, and much of the footage was devoted to his heroism as a policeman, saving girls from white slave dens. See illustration on page 212.
1. New York Dramatic Mirror, January 15, 1916.
2. Eleanor Flexner, A Century of Struggle (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975), p. 258.
3. Moving Picture World, May 2, 1908, p. 401.
4. Ladies’ Home Journal, April 1905, quoted in People’s Chronology, p. 704.
5. The word “suffragette” was coined in 1906 by a writer on the London Daily Mail to describe Mrs. Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters.
6. Baltimore American, April 15, 1912, quoted in Flexner, A Century of Struggle, p. 268.
7. Moving Picture World, May 18, 1912, p. 617.
8. Ibid.
9. Moving Picture World, June 1, 1912, p. 811.
10. Moving Picture World. May 18, 1912, p. 617.
11. Moving Picture World. June 1, 1912, p. 811.
12. Kay Sloan, “Sexual Warfare in the Silent Cinema,” American Quarterly (Fall 1981), p. 426.
13. Motion Picture News. April 19, 1912, p. 11.
14. This was photographed in October 1913 at the Chelsea Studios on West Thirty-first Street, New York City, Moving Picture World. January 3, 1914, p. 34. There are gaps in the action where titles have been removed.
15. After Rheta Childe Dorr’s book What Eighty Million Women Want. (Small, Maynard, 1910). The original title was Eighty Million Women Want—and was produced by an outfit calling itself Uneek Films (not Unique, as the trades would have it) in cooperation with the Women’s Political Union.
16. Mrs. Ad Schulberg to author, London, 1965.
17. Sloan, p. 429.
18. Motography, November 29, 1913, p. 407.
19. Moving Picture World. November 15, 1913, p. 726.
20. Moving Picture World. January 3, 1914, p. 34.
21. Malwine Rennert, Rome, Bild und Film Heft 6 1913–1914, quoted Renate Seydel et al., in Asta Nielsen (Munich: Universitas Verlag, 1981).
22. Moving Picture World. January 17, 1914, p. 296.
23. Ibid.
24. New York Dramatic Mirror. May 27, 1914.
25. Moving Picture World. May 25, 1912. p. 714.
26. Moving Picture World. March 29, 1913, p. 1391; Flexner, p. 273.
27. Moving Picture World. September 26, 1914, p. 1782. Kay Sloan says the NAWSA had another film in preparation which had to be canceled when they learned of Mrs. McCormick’s work, Sloan, p. 431.
28. Moving Picture World. September 26, 1914, p. 1782.
29. Moving Picture World. November 7, 1914, p. 764.
30. Moving Picture World. November 7, 1914, p. 765.
31. Moving Picture World. November 7, 1914, p. 764.
32. New York Dramatic Mirror. December 30, 1914.
33. Moving Picture World. October 31, 1914, p. 621.
34. The picture attacked laws which would be changed once women had the vote: the lack of fire escape protection by greedy landlords and the right of a father to collect his children’s earnings through the child labor law, Moving Picture World. October 31, 1914, p. 620.
35. Sloan, p. 434.
36. Motion Picture News. December 9, 1916, p. 3654.
37. Moving Picture World. October 27, 1917, p. 523. The Woman’s Suffrage party and the National Woman’s party suggested the film be cut from eight to five reels and Robards did so, AFI Catalogue. 1911–1920. p. 640. Victor Fleming’s A Woman’s Place (1921) had Constance Talmadge as a flapper who ends up running a political machine, putting women in the key jobs.
38. According to Jon Tuska, Nat Levine acquired the film as a 2,300-foot programmer and padded it to feature length with 2,600 feet of titles. This suggests that he received it already cut down from the original five reels (around 4,700 feet). He paid $10,000 for it, and the film evidently grossed nearly $40,000, Jon Tuska, The Vanishing Legion: A History of Mascot Pictures, 1927–1935 (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Company, 1982), pp. 8, 9.
39. The Reid-Robards studio was at Santa Cruz, California.