1. King and King, Problems of Modern American Crime. p. 271.
2. Program for The Honor System. February 17, 1917. Lyric Theatre, New York.
3. Moving Picture World. June 22, 1912, p. 1159.
4. Ibid.
5. Moving Picture World. December 27, 1913, p. 1587. Probably photographed by Pliny Horne, it was filmed at Yuma, after it had closed.
6. Moving Picture World. December 27, 1913. p. 1587.
7. See Moving Picture World. August 17, 1912, p. 656.
8. Moving Picture World. Setember 7, 1912, p. 1000.
9. Moving Picture World. February 21, 1914, p. 932.
10. Moving Picture World, February 14, 1914, p. 811.
11. Moving Picture World, March 14, 1914, p. 1388.
12. Blake McKelvey, American Prisons (Montclair, N.J.: Paterson Smith, 1977), p. 262.
13. Who Was Who in America (Chicago: Marquis Who’s Who Inc., 1981), p. 921.
14. John Drinkwater, The Life and Adventures of Carl Laemmle (London: Heine-mann, 1931), p. 271.
15. AFI Catalogue, 1921–1930, p. 655. The Gray Brother did not appear until 1921 under the title The Right Way. It was reissued in 1927 by Standard Productions in a revised version with the title Within Prison Walls (the title of Osborne’s book on his days in prison). It was also reviewed as Making Good, AFI Catalogue, 1921–1930, p. 655.
16. Moving Picture World, April 11, 1914, p. 214. The film was also known as Joliet Prison, Joliet, Ill.
17. New York Dramatic Mirror, April 1, 1914.
18. Moving Picture World, March 11, 1916, p. 1871.
19. Moving Picture World, March 22, 1919, p. 1688.
20. Photoplay, June 1921, pp. 56, 81, 86. Eytinge’s opinion was shared by men in other prisons. One from Leavenworth referred to “the general moral uplift” of the movies which, Eytinge said, “is respectfully referred to our vexatious, vociferous and vixenish reformers”—who were objecting to spending tax money on showing movies to convicts.
21. Pearson’s Magazine, December 1921, pp. 242–45.
22. Ibid.
23. Motion Picture Classic, December 1928, p. 66.
24. Peter Milne, Motion Picture Direction (New York: Falk, 1922), p. 232.
25. Variety, April 8, 1921, p. 40; AFI Catalogue, 1921–1930, p. 129.
26. New York Herald, April 4, 1921, The New York Post said that Meighan had not allowed them to cut his hair, but then he was a privileged prisoner. The story was remade as Shadow of the Law (1930) with William Powell.
27. Motion Picture Magazine, January 1924, p. 40; Jay Robert Nash, in Murder, America, p. 392.
28. Moving Picture World, August 9, 1919.
29. Photoplay, June 1921, p. 56. Meighan returned to Sing Sing for The Man Who Found Himself (1925).
30. Photoplay, June 1921, p. 86.
31. Photoplay, June 1921, p. 56.
32. Motion Picture Magazine, August 1923, p. 55.
33. Moving Picture World, June 22, 1912, p. 1136.
34. Moving Picture World, February 17, 1912, p. 563.
35. Ibid.
36. McKelvey, p. 251.
37. Moving Picture World, May 11, 1912, p. 516.
38. Ibid.
39. Moving Picture World, August 9, 1913, p. 642.
40. McKelvey, p. 257.
41. Lubin Bulletin, courtesy Linda Kowall and undated clipping, Sloman scrapbook.
42. Moving Picture World, May 16, 1914, p. 1011.
43. Photoplay, February 1924, p. 90.
44. New York Times, February 13, 1917, 9:4.
45. Variety, February 16, 1917, p. 24.
46. New York Dramatic Mirror, February 17, 1917, p. 32.
47. Variety, March 16, 1917, p. 33.
48. Marcus, who played in Walsh’s Regeneration in 1915, was also an assistant director.
49. Picture Play, April 1917, pp. 200–212.
50. The synopsis is from the Brandon Collection, Museum of Modern Art, New York City. Governor Hunt appeared with Romaine Fielding in A Western Governor’s Humanity (1915).
51. Interview with Jean-Louis Noames, “Entrétien avec Raoul Walsh,” Cahiers du Cinema, April 1964, trans. by Walter Conley; see Walter Conley, Silent Picture (Winter 1970–1971), p. 6.
52. Walsh, Each Man in His Time, pp. 144–47. Walsh claims to have shot it in three and a half weeks, which, for a ten-reeler, beats even Traffic in Souls. It actually took twelve weeks.
53. Cooper, Dark Lady of the Silents, pp. 127, 134.
54. Raoul Walsh to author, Hollywood, 1967.
55. The Honor System program, Lyric Theatre, New York, February 17, 1917.
56. New York Times, February 13, 1917, 9:4.
57. Variety, February 16, 1917, p. 24.
58. The story in Picture Play. April 1917, pp. 200–212, retained the tragic ending.
59. Quoted in Moving Picture World, March 17, 1917, p. 1764.
60. Photoplay, July 1916, p. 99. The soloist was Henry I. MacMahan, AFI Catalogue. 1911–1921. p. 421.
61. Picture Play, January 1925, p. 25.
62. Films in Review, December 1971, p. 613.
63. Quoted in Cooper, p. 134.
64. Will Irwin, The House That Shadows Built (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday Doran, 1928), p. 126.
65. Moving Picture World, February 1, 1913, p. 440.
66. Moving Picture World, December 4, 1915, p. 1912.
67. Variety. March 13, 1914, p. 23.
68. Moving Picture World, April 25, 1914, p. 487.
69. Moving Picture World. December 5, 1914, p. 1396.
70. Karl Brown, Adventures with D. W. Griffith (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973), p. 117.
71. Brown, p. 118.
72. Brown, p. 120.
73. Variety, January 9, 1915, p. 24.
74. Photoplay, November 1916, pp. 27–40. The Stielow case had occurred too late for Griffith to use it in his film.
75. Richard Schickel, D. W. Griffith (London: Pavilion Books, 1984), p. 311.
76. New York Times, December 11, 1916, 7:3.
77. New York Dramatic Mirror, December 23, 1916.
78. Variety, December 15, 1916, p. 35.
79. Moving Picture Weekly, April 28, 1916, pp. 18–19, quoted in Sloan, The Loud Silents, p. 141.
80. New York Dramatic Mirror, April 14, 1915.
81. Moving Picture World, March 3, 1917, p. 1372.
82. Motion Picture Studio Directory, 1918, p. 220. She was given permission to visit the death house at Sing Sing to gather research, New York Dramatic Mirror, June 30, 1917. AFI Catalogue, 1911–1920, p. 1031, says Gilson Willets rewrote her original story.
83. Moving Picture World, December 22, 1917, p. 1800. A private presentation was given to members of the Chicago branch of the Anti-Capital Punishment Society of America, and among the audience was Clarence Darrow. Among the prominent people who endorsed it was Thomas Mott Osborne, New York Dramatic Mirror, September 8, 1917.
84. Photoplay, March 1923, p. 98. Other races to the rescue included Night Patrol (1926), a Richard Talmadge film, Fred Niblo’s Mother o’ Mine (1921), in which the race took place in a storm. Bright Lights of Broadway (1923) with Harrison Ford had two races going at the same time, the second being the villain trying to stop his confession being revealed (he is killed in a smash). Edward Sloman’s The Last Hour was actually one example of anticapital punishment propaganda hiding under the camouflage of melodrama—the hanging mechanism fails, and the victim (Milton Sills) is given a last hour while the gallows are put in working order. During this hour, the real killer arrives by auto and confesses. Universal’s Legally Dead (1923) had a race to the rescue arriving too late—the hero has been hanged. A scientist injects adrenalin, and life returns. This was a reflection of the publicity given to adrenalin and its miraculous effects. Miraculous or not, as Scott O’Dell pointed out, it was of little use with a broken neck. The hero was Milton Sills again. Scott O’Dell, Representative Photoplays Analyzed (Hollywood: Palmer Institute, 1924), p. 109.
85. Sam Jaffe, production manager, Preferred Studios, to Sue McConachy, “Hollywood” TV series, 1976.
86. Nash, p. 396. Clarence Darrow, The Story of My Life. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1932), p. 226. Darrow wrote that Leopold had a high intellect and that Loeb, strangely enough, was “kind,” p. 231.
87. AFI Catalogue, 1921–1930, p. 110.
88. Budd Schulberg, Moving Picture (New York: Souvenir Press, 1981), p. 134.
89. Motion Picture Classic, April 1925, p. 49.
90. Variety, February 4, 1925, p. 33.
91. Picture Play, May 1925, p. 68.
92. Picture Play, April 1925, p. 33.
1. Sidney Lens, Poverty, Yesterday and Today (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1973), p. 126.
2. Sanger, An Autobiography, p. 88.
3. One film record of slum conditions I have seen which shows even the vermin in close-up was filmed in the 1920s in Somers Town, London, for a Housing Trust. The 16mm footage was incorporated into a Thames TV documentary on Somers Town made by Richard Broad in 1984 for Channel 4 and the footage donated to the National Film Archive.
4. Upton Sinclair, The Jungle (London: Penguin, 1982; originally published in 1906), p. 94.
5. Motion Picture Story Magazine, July 1911, p. 79.
6. Ibid.
7. New York Dramatic Mirror, January 20, 1915.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid.
11. Motion Picture News, February 6, 1915, p. 47.
12. Moving Picture World, March 13, 1915, p. 1612.
13. People’s Chronology, 1979, p. 582.
14. Moving Picture World, November 18, 1911, p. 535; Edison Kinetogram, December 15, 1910, pp. 3–4.
15. Martin S. Pernick, Edison’s Tuberculosis Films, Hastings Center Report 8 (June 1978), pp. 21–27.
16. Tannura, the son of a shoemaker who made shoes for the actors at the Edison studio, played the role of a boy. A few years later, he became a cameraman.
17. Moving Picture World, December 2, 1911, p. 746.
18. Lauritzen and Lundquist list Charles France, but Edison Kinetogram, December 1, 1913, gives Ridgely.
19. New York Dramatic Mirror, June 24, 1914.
20. Pernick, pp. 21–27.
21. John Purroy Mitchel, a lawyer, served in Mayor George Brinton McClellan’s second administration (1900–1910) as commissioner of accounts. His assistant, Raymond Fosdick, had been a resident of the Henry Street Settlement and had helped organize the campaign for the reelection of District Attorney William Travers Jerome. In 1913, Mitchel was elected mayor and, thanks to the advice of men like Fosdick, surrounded himself with a cabinet of settlement house and social workers. He appointed Katharine Bement Davis to the post of commissioner of correction, Allen F. Davis, Spearheads for Reform (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), p. 186.
22. Moving Picture World, December 5, 1914, p. 1359.
23. Pernick, p. 23.
24. Moving Picture World, December 2, 1916, p. 1325.
25. Moving Picture World, May 22, 1915, p. 1275.
26. Bourne, among a variety of jobs, played the piano for the movies. Born in 1886, he died in the flu epidemic of 1918.
27. The New Republic 3, July 3, 1915, p. 233, quoted Carl Resek, ed., in War and the Intellectuals (New York: Harper, 1964), pp. 171–74.
28. Motion Picture News, March 18, 1916, p. 1165.
29. Ibid.
30. Motion Picture News, April 22, 1916, p. 2359.
31. Variety, April 14, 1916, p. 25.
32. Motion Picture News, April 22, 1916, p. 2359.
33. New York Dramatic Mirror, October 20, 1917, p. 18. Dick Rosson remade The Escape (1914) in 1928.
34. Variety, October 19, 1917, p. 32.
35. Moving Picture World, June 21, 1913, p. 1233; city government crusade: Motion Picture News, May 11, 1912, p. 15.
36. Moving Picture World, October 5, 1912, pp. 22–25.
37. Moving Picture World, June 21, 1913, p. 1233.
38. Ibid.
39. Moving Picture World, May 3, 1913, p. 489.
40. Moving Picture World, May 17, 1913, p. 713.
41. Leslie Wood, Miracle of the Movies (London: Burke Publishing Company, 1947), p. 201.
42. Moving Picture World, December 30, 1911, p. 1081.
43. Goldman, Rendezvous with Destiny, p. 198.
44. Bowser, ed., The Biograph Bulletins, p. 277.
45. Moving Picture World, September 18, 1909, p. 385.
46. Moving Picture World, December 14, 1912, p. 1108; Moving Picture World, December 21, 1912, pp. 1099–1200.
47. Lubin Bulletin, n.d. Courtesy Linda Kowall.
48. Motion Picture News, February 24, 1912, p. 9. Courtesy Q. David Bowers.
49. Motion Picture Magazine, July 1911, pp. 143–50. (These stories were elaborated for publication; some of the details may have been imposed upon the Edison original.) Perhaps the most bizarre plot for any film connected with poverty was The Amazing Woman (1920), about a girl so touched by the sufferings in the slums that she becomes a high-class prostitute, using the money for the relief of the poor, Morals of the Movie quoted in Gerald Mast, ed., The Movies in Our Midst, p. 200.
50. Blanche Sweet to author, “Hollywood” TV series, New York, 1977.
51. Moving Picture World, June 20, 1914, p. 47.
52. Variety, June 5, 1914, p. 19.
53. Moving Picture World, June 20, 1914, p. 47; AFI Catalogue, 1911–1920, p. 244.
54. Variety, June 5, 1914, p. 19.
55. Moving Picture World, June 20, 1914, p. 47.
56. Variety, June 5, 1914, p. 19.
57. New York Dramatic Mirror, June 10, 1914, p. 42.
58. Mast, p. 105. The Paul Armstrong play was remade as The Escape, directed by Richard Rosson, in 1928.
59. Adams, Jr., The Age of Industrial Violence, 1910–1915, p. 179.
60. Ibid.
61. Variety, May 28, 1915, p. 17.
62. By Charles Kenyon and Arthur Hornblow (Sr.)
63. Photoplay, December 1915, p. 100.
64. Variety, July 16, 1915, p. 17.
65. New York Dramatic Mirror, July 21, 1915, p. 24. DeMille shot the film in seventeen days. It was his first with Thomas Meighan, who became a DeMille stalwart. (It was Meighan’s second film.) A film with a very similar plot was The Child of the Tenements (Solax, 1912).
66. Figures from DeMille Estate. Courtesy Bob Birchard.
67. Photoplay, March 1916, p. 69.
68. Howard Hickman married Bessie Barriscale.
69. Photoplay, July 1915, p. 120.
70. New York Dramatic Mirror, April 21, 1915, p. 26.
71. New York Dramatic Mirror, July 8, 1917, p. 15. Hoover appeared in a prologue.
72. Variety, June 29, 1917, p. 30.
73. New York Dramatic Mirror, July 8, 1917, p. 15.
74. Variety, June 29, 1917, p. 30.
75. Albert S. Parker is best known for his The Black Pirate (1926).
76. New York Dramatic Mirror, August 11, 1917, p. 19.
77. Ibid.
78. Ibid.
79. Photoplay, November 1917, p. 132.
80. Variety, August 10, 1917, p. 23.
81. The Bioscope, August 15, 1918, p. 31. Cheating the Public, directed by Richard Stanton from a Mary Murillo story, was shot in 1917 and released in 1918. This one was about a canning factory owner who cuts wages and his son who protects the heroine, a girl from the slums who is the sole support of her family. Mary’s mother dies of malnutrition, and Mary leads the factory workers in a strike. They storm the house of the profiteer, and when the attack is beaten off and the workers jailed, she pulls out a revolver and, as in Intolerance, another bullet kills him. But Mary goes on trial and is given the death sentence. An eleventh-hour rescue, also as in Intolerance, saves her life, Moving Picture World, February 2, 1918, p. 684; New York Dramatic Mirror, January 26, 1918, p. 19.
82. Lens, p. 143.
83. Picture Play, April 1926, advertisement.
84. People’s Chronology, p. 856.
85. Photoplay, November 1921, p. 113.
86. Variety, August 19, 1921, p. 35.
87. Anthony Slide, “The Blot,” in Magill, ed., Magill’s Survey of Cinema, vol. 1, p. 242.
88. Calhern was Julius Caesar in the Joseph Mankiewicz film.
89. The Blot appears to have had its influence. The Woman’s Home Companion produced a two-reeler with a very similar story entitled Under Paid; it was about the poverty of a church minister and his sister, who is tempted to steal. She does not do so but her suspicious actions are spotted by a neighbor. The film was once available from the Kodascope libraries.
90. Vidor, A Tree Is a Tree, p. 99. According to Scott Simmon and Raymond Durgnat, Vidor’s story, written with John V. A. Weaver in 1926, was called The Clerk. A treatment called March of Life followed the same year, King Vidor, American (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), p. 81.
91. Vidor, p. 99.
92. Motion Picture Magazine, January 1928, p. 95.
93. Murray’s end was so tragic that Vidor wrote a script based on it. It came in New York one night in July 1936: “He had borrowed money and bought liquor, and he was clowning for a bunch of tourists on a pier on the Hudson. He pretended he was in makeup, waiting for the movie company to arrive. He was trying to entertain this group of tourists, dancing on the edge of the pier. He did a sort of false step and fell in and everybody laughed. They thought it was a gag. But he didn’t come up. They went and looked over and he was floating face down, dead.”
94. King Vidor to author, “Hollywood” TV series, 1976.
95. Vidor to author, 1976.
96. Charles Silver, Museum of Modern Art retrospective program, November 1972.
97. King Vidor to Nancy Dowd, AFI Oral History, 1971.
98. Vidor to Dowd, 1971.
99. Vidor to author, 1976.
100. Ibid.
101. Eleanor Boardman to author, “Hollywood” TV series, 1976.
102. Vidor to Dowd, 1971.
103. Boardman to author, 1976.
104. The Film Spectator, December 24, 1927, p. 7.
105. Photoplay, December 1927, p. 52.
106. Variety, February 22, 1928, p. 20.
107. Samuel Marx, Mayer and Thalberg: The Make-Believe Saints (New York: Random House, 1975), p. 255. Russell Merritt has sent me his investigation into the first-run behavior of the picture and found it the flop everyone said it was. “If a film didn’t make money in the major cities,” he wrote, “where did it make money?” He was astonished by the $69,000 profit figure, which comes from Eddie Mannix’s records, MGM. Merritt to author, December 3, 1987.
1. Maldwyn A. Jones, Destination America (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1976), p. 11.
2. Henry Pratt Fairchild, Immigration (New York: Macmillan, 1913 and 1925), p. 230.
3. People’s Chronology, p. 632.
4. Edward A. Ross, “The Old World and the New” quoted in Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform (New York: Knopf, 1955), p. 180. Ross, a former Populist, was a leading spokesman for the Progressives.
5. Fairchild, p. 203.
6. Pitkin, Keepers of the Gate, p. 31.
7. Pitkin, p. 48.
8. Pitkin, p. 51.
9. Pitkin, p. 112.
10. Pitkin, p. 115.
11. Moving Picture World, December 7, 1912, p. 978.
12. Blaché, Memoirs, p. 56.
13. Moving Picture World, October 26, 1912, p. 353.
14. Ibid.
15. Moving Picture World, January 7, 1914, p. 340.
16. New York Dramatic Mirror, March 25, 1914.
17. Lars Lindstrom believes these are parents rather than hired hands. The films were discovered by the late Gardar Sahl-berg.
18. Lars Lindstrom letter to author, December 25, 1984.
19. Anthony Slide, Early American Cinema (New York: A. S. Barnes, 1970), p. 51.
20. Despite her exotic name, Valeska Suratt came ftom Terre Haute, Indiana. She was a vaudeville headliner.
21. Moving Picture World, January 8, 1916, p. 236.
22. New York Dramatic Mirror, January 1, 1916, p. 28.
23. “Unknown Chaplin” was a TV series produced by David Gill and the author for Thames TV in 1983. It was first shown in the U.S. in 1986.
24. Carlyle Robinson, La Verité sur Charlie Chaplin (Paris: Societé Parisienne d’Edition, 1935), p. 18. Chaplin used the old immigrant dream of finding the streets of America paved with gold when he finds a coin outside the café.
25. Pitkin, p. 14.
26. The Mexicans were equally despised, and it is all the more remarkable that a film was made about their plight called The Land of Promise (Imp 1912).
27. Pitkin, p. 15.
28. Pitkin, p. 26.
29. In 1889, in New Orleans, eleven Italians acquitted of murder were lynched.
30. Fairchild, p. 141.
31. Lens, Poverty, pp. 117, 118.
32. Jones, pp. 198–99.
33. Bowser, ed., The Biograph Bulletins, p. 341.
34. Moving Picture World, February 24, 1912, p. 698.
35. Moving Picture World, December 16, 1911, p. 5; Moving Picture World, January 13, 1912, p. 32; Moving Picture World, December 25, 1911, pp. 6, 22.
36. Hal Mohr to author, Hollywood, 1970.
37. Short, Crime Inc., p. 30. Moving Picture World, January 21, 1911, p. 128, reported a little girl who saw a Black Hand film and a picture about a fire and wrote a note demanding five dollars, threatening to burn the house unless the money was left under the mat. She was caught.
38. Short, p. 77.
39. Short, p. 85.
40. Iorizzo and Mondello, The Italian Americans, p. 72.
41. Iorizzo and Mondello, p. 207.
42. Variety, October 16, 1909, p. 12.
43. Moving Picture World, January 30, 1909, p. 125.
44. Ibid.
45. Short, p. 32. Motion Picture News, March 22, 1913, p. 13, announced a film, directed by Sidney Goldin, about Petrosino—Whispering Winds. It was also known as The Adventures of Lieutenant Petrosino or The Life and Death of Lieutenant Petrosino (1912). It was made with the “special permission of Madame Petrosino.” AFI Catalogue, 1911–1920, p. 6.
46. Moving Picture World, April 5, 1913, p. 49.
47. Moving Picture World, October 24, 1914, p. 540.
48. Static Flashes, February 20, 1915, p. 4. AFI Catalogue, 1911–1920, p. 12, lists Ned van Buren as cameraman.
49. New York Dramatic Mirror, February 3, 1917.
50. New York Dramatic Mirror, June 2, 1915, p. 28.
51. Ibid.
52. Photoplay, June 1915.
53. Motion Picture Magazine, April 1916, p. 141. Beban remade The Alien in 1922 as The Sign of the Rose, under the direction of Harry Garson, and he repeated the florist shop sketch on the stage. The personal appearance idea was dropped after a five-week run in New York—the public preferred the photoplay, Photoplay, September 1916, p. 131.
54. Wid’s, March 7, 1918, p. 986.
55. Ibid. Camille Ankewich changed her name to Marcia Manon, AFI Catalogue, 1911-1920, p. 677.
56. Wid’s, March 7, 1918, p. 986.
57. Ibid.
58. Motion Picture Magazine, June 1918, p. 105.
59. In The Wop Luigi and his small daughter suffer in a strike. Gathering coal at the railroad yard, Luigi is dragged to jail, leaving his daughter freezing and helpless. When he comes out he cannot find the girl. He determines to get even with the man who sentenced him; he breaks into his home and is about to stab the man’s child when she awakes. It is his own daughter, Moving Picture World, July 5, 1913, pp. 82-84.
60. Ince’s publicity said the company had gone to Venice, Italy (an unlikely journey in November 1914).
61. Perhaps it was cut when the film was reduced from six reels to five, synopsis and Variety, January 4, 1915, but that still does not justify the arrival of Annette as though she were returning from a cruise. (Beban made up for it with One More American.)
62. Beppo’s letter is dated April 11, 1913; had it been 1914, Beppo would have only a few months before returning to Italy to enlist.
63. Locations were at the Plaza (the Mexican district) in Los Angeles and three small streets in the nearby Italian quarter. But there were no real slums in Los Angeles. Slum streets were shot in San Francisco, and the ward boss’s home in Oakland, California. Harbor scenes were in San Francisco because P. J. Beban and Louis G. Beban, George’s brothers, were working for the port authority, Motion Picture News, November 14, 1914, p. 36.
64. Ince publicity claimed this had been a real accident and that Beban had almost been killed. It was probably a way of drawing attention to the $25,000 insurance taken out by the company on Beban, Moving Picture World, November 21, 1914, p. 1060.
65. Anthony Slide and Edward Wagenknecht, Fifty Great American Films (New York: Dover, 1980), p. 25.
66. Los Angeles Herald, November 19, 1919.
67. Ibid.
68. Ibid.
69. Ibid.
70. Lindsey, The Art of the Moving Picture, p. 71.
71. William K. Everson to author, 1971.
72. Only one of Beban’s films was shown in Italy (One Man in a Million, 1921). II gondoliere di Venezia is said to be their title for The Italian, but this is an error. Courtesy Vittorio Martinelli.
73. William Peterson, “The Chinese and Japanese,” Essays and Data on American Ethnic Groups, edited by Thomas Sowell (Harvard Urban Institute, 1978), p. 220.
74. Moving Picture World, February 10, 1917, p. 877.
75. Wid’s, February 15, 1917, p. 103.
76. Variety, January 28, 1921, p. 2. The most astonishing re-creation of a tong war was staged for a comedy—Buster Keaton’s The Cameraman (1928).
77. T. K. Peters’s letter to author June 2, 1973. Peters was also a scientist and thanks to his knowledge of precision flight instruments, was appointed head of the Chinese Air Force college in Georgia by Sun Yat-sen, “the father of Modern China,” as he was known; American Cinematographer, February 1974, p. 228. I can find no record of the release of this series.
78. Moving Picture World, June 27, 1914, p. 1842.
79. Geoffrey Bell, letter to author, July 2, 1985.
80. Moving Picture World, June 20, 1914, pp. 1705, 1738–39.
81. Variety, August 9, 1918, p. 33.
82. Exhibitors Herald, September 28, 1918, p. 27.
83. Variety, September 13, 1918, p. 41.
84. One story broker received calls from four producers asking him to dig out whatever Chinese stuff he had, purely as a result of the success of this play, Variety, January 24, 1919, p. 48. Sidney Franklin made the film for Joseph Schenck with Constance Talmadge. A San Franciscan, Franklin remained interested in the Chinese and directed what was probably the most sympathetic film on the subject ever made in America, The Good Earth (1937). East Is West has just been found in a collection in Holland.
85. Motion Picture Magazine, July 1919, p. 97.
86. Motion Picture Magazine, November 1932, p. 6.
87. Richard A. Oehling, “Hollywood and the Image of the Oriental,” quoted in Richard L. Stromgren, “The Chinese Syndrome: The image of China and the Chinese in Silent Movies,” unpublished ms., p. 19.
88. Frances Taylor Patterson, Cinema Craftsmanship (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1920), p. 164. Frances Patterson was a scenario writer herself. The film was not a commercial failure.
89. Richard Barthelmess letter to Barnet Bravermann, May 2, 1945, quoted by Arthur Lennig in The Film Journal (Fall-Winter 1972), p. 3. Dorothy Gish Productions was a Griffith subsidiary.
90. Barthelmess letter to Bravermann, May 2, 1945.
91. Lillian Gish to author, New York, May 1983. Richard Schickel says Griffith rehearsed Carol Dempster in this role (D. W. Griffith, p. 391).
92. Lillian Gish to author, London, October 1983.
93. In the twenties, female drug addicts were known to the police as Broken Blossoms, Norman Dash, Yesterday’s Los Angeles (Miami, Fla.: E. A. Seemann Publishing, 1976), p. 134.
94. Lillian Gish, The Movies, Mr. Griffith, and Me (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1969), p. 220.
95. Gish, p. 221.
96. Tino Balio, United Artists (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1971), p. 31.
97. Rex Ingram made a film about the Chinese in 1916 called Broken Fetters.
98. Moving Picture World, April 17, 1920, p. 388. I obtained the patent description from the U.S. Patent Office (it took eighteen months!), and it showed the “invention” limited to two rows of colored bulbs recessed in light trays, aimed at the screen at such an angle that the brilliance of projection would not be diminished.
99. Brown, Adventures with D. W. Griffith, p. 240. The lights around the auditorium would have been an additional effect by Clune’s management.
100. Brown, pp. 241–42.
101. The trade press was upset by “anti-British prejudice.” “There is a reference which almost amounts to a sneer, to the brutal prize-fighters’ ‘great country’ and the episode in the police station, when a constable is made to remark that ‘things are better today; only 40,000 casualties,’ has no connection with the picture or the story, and it is difficult to see it as anything but a gratuitous jeer at the ghastly errors of the latter middle period of the war which cost us so much in treasured young life. America should remember that, even if she ultimately saved us, we had first saved her and all civilisation, though it drained our life-blood in the doing. It is anticipated that these subtitles will be eliminated, but it is to be regretted that a man of such wide artistic and spiritual perception as Griffith should have moments of parochial little-ness of mind,” Kine Weekly, January 20, 1920, p. 106.
102. Moving Picture World, September 20, 1919, p. 1800. The First Born was filmed in 1921 with Sessue Hayakawa, Helen Jerome Eddy, and a Chinese cast.
103. Brown, p. 242.
104. American Cinematographer, December 1921, p. 11. “Jimmy the Assistant” was a regular column written (anonymously) by Karl Brown in this publication.
105. Picture Play, July 1920, p. 31. The Chinese charged some Japanese actors with the willful misrepresentation of the Chinese for the benefit of Japan.
106. R. G. Burnett and E. D. Martell, The Devil’s Camera (London: The Epworth Press, 1932), p. 6 on The Thief of Bagdad.
107. James B. Leong, Jr., to author, telephone interview and letter, May 1984.
108. Picture Play, January 1922, p. 84.
109. Picture Play, April 1922, p. 73.
110. Picture Play, February 1925, p. 47.
111. Edward Sakamoto, Los Angeles Times, July 12, 1987, p. 40.
112. “Anna May Wong and the Dragon-Lady syndrome,” in ibid.
113. Picture Play, September 1926, pp. 83–86. Gubbins later worked on Harold Lloyd’s Welcome Danger (1929), a parody of these serials, which nonetheless upset some Chinese. Lloyd later made up for it with his sympathetic portrayal of Chinese in The Cat’s Paw (1934).
114. Photoplay, March 1924, p. 96; Motion Picture Classic, April 1924, p. 52.
115. Moving Picture World, January 5, 1918, p. 57.
116. Rowland V. Lee, “Adventures of a Film Director,” unpublished autobiography, p. 184.
117. Motion Picture Classic, April 1922, p. 27.
118. Lee, unpublished autobiography, p. 185.
119. This was not a Hollywood invention. The only method of family limitation known to poor Chinese was infanticide of girl babies by suffocation or drowning; Sanger, An Autobiography, p. 344.
120. AFI Catalogue 1921–1930, p. 62.
121. From the Electric Theatre, Centralia, quoted in Photoplay, December 1923, p. 114.
122. Quoted by Carl Sandburg, Carl Sandburg at the Movies: A Poet in the Silent Era, 1920–1927, eds. Dale Featherling and Doug Featherling (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1985), p. 85.
123. Harry Perry, with Lieutenant Colonel Oscar Estes, Jr., “How We Filmed the Virginian and Shadows and Other Preferred Pictures,” Classic Film Collector, no. 22, p. 32. Perry was shocked when he saw a bad 16mm dupe of the film in 1959 and was sad when he learned nothing better survived. A 35mm nitrate original, however, is in England, as yet uncopied.
124. Picture Play, May 1923, p. 83.
125. Photoplay, January 1923, p. 67.
126. Photoplay, January 1923, p. 96.
127. Photoplay, May 1924, p. 98.
128. Sherwood, ed., Best Moving Pictures, pp. 27–28.
129. Sherwood, ed., pp. 27-28.
130. It was a Japanese gardener suffering a mental breakdown who shot the pioneer director Francis Boggs.
131. T. Iyenaga and Kenoske Sato, Japan and the California Problem (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1921), p. 12.
132. People’s Chronology, p. 832.
133. Moving Picture World, November 29, 1913, p. 995.
134. The same year, 1913, Eclair opened a studio in Tokyo, Motion Picture News, February 1, 1913, p. 29.
135. Moving Picture World, June 21, 1913, p. 1231.
136. Ibid.
137. Written by Eugene Mullins.
138. Written by James Young. Both films were directed by James Young, who later directed Sessue Hayakawa. The Vitagraph party was shown around a film studio, where the light was diffused through translucent paper, providing a softness “that has no equal elsewhere.” (Americans used canvas or muslin.) The grounds, landscaped with ponds, gardens, and grottoes, were a picture makers’ paradise. The Americans pointed out the difference between the two great Oriental nations—Japan was building studios, while the Chinese were still superstitious and camera shy, Moving Picture World, June 21, 1913, p. 1231.
139. Moving Picture World, May 26, 1917, p. 1266. Wallace Beery also tried to make pictures in Japan.
140. Moving Picture World, October 17, 1914, p. 314. Abbe’s real name was Utaka Abe; he played Hayakawa’s valet in The Cheat.
141. Moving Picture World, October 10, 1914, p. 199.
142. Photoplay Journal, May 1920, p. 20. Tsuru Aoki’s real name was Kawakami.
143. Moving Picture World, January 31, 1914, p. 554.
144. Photoplay, December 1919, p. 51.
145. Dewitt Bodeen, “Sessue Hayakawa,” Films in Review, April 1976, p. 193.
146. Ibid.
147. Moving Picture World, July 11, 1914, p. 156.
148. Moving Picture World, June 20, 1914, p. 1665.
149. Kotani—a native of Honolulu—was an actor and later cameraman who went to Japan and became a highly paid director. So did another actor in the film, Thomas Kurihara.
150. Lindsay, The Art of the Moving Picture, p. 80.
151. Photoplay, March 1916, p. 139.
152. Bodeen, p. 193.
153. Moving Picture World, December 25, 1915, p. 2384. The location of the Japanese garden was at the home of Dr. Sanss in Santa Monica, Photoplay, May 1916, p. 35. While filming Fannie Ward crossing a Japanese bridge, the wooden structure collapsed, depositing Miss Ward in the stream. This shot survives in DeMille’s accident reel at the DeMille Estate.
154. Bodeen, p. 193.
155. Variety, December 17, 1915, p. 18.
156. Moving Picture World, February 19, 1916, p. 1114.
157. Moving Picture World, February 21, 1921, p. 1064. Libretto by Paul Milliet and André Lorde.
158. Variety, February 18, 1921, p. 2.
159. Colette, Colette at the Movies, Alain and Odette Virmaux eds. (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1980), pp. 19–20.
160. Colette, p. 18. The Cheat was remade, in Hollywood in 1923 (when the collector becomes a crook masquerading as an Indian prince!), and in France in 1937 with Hayakawa. In 1944, Hayakawa was able to produce his own version on the stage. The Cheat gave Hayakawa a career in British and French films. A stage version called I.O.U., adapted by Turnbull and Willard Mack, opened on Broadway in 1918, but failed. A 1931 talkie starred Tallulah Bank-head and Irving Pichel.
161. Motion Picture Magazine, November 1924, pp. 21–27.
162. Ibid.
163. Karl Brown letter to author, March 4, 1985.
164. Photoplay, August 1916, p. 160. Yet in Lasky’s Forbidden Paths (1917), which also starred Hayakawa, it is suggested that suicide and murder are preferable to miscegenation.
165. Fairchild, p. 461. Hayakawa had encountered “picture brides” on his voyage to the United States.
166. Florence Vidor to author, Santa Monica, California, 1969.
167. Variety, September 20, 1918, p. 45.
168. Bessie Love to author, London, 1984.
169. Mon Ciné, March 9, 1922, p. 22.
170. One could sense the end for Hayakawa some time before he left America. Audiences began kidding his film Who Is Your Servant? (1920) when the titles approximated the Japanese speaking broken English. Variety criticized the film, a spy story, for bad timing: “When an effort is being made by the entire world to sign a lasting peace, arousing prejudice by hinting at Japanese spies employed as servants in the households of naval officers is going a little too far.… The picture looks as if it has been on the market for some time. About the best thing they can do is to put a lot of crepe over the negative and then apply the match and forget it ever happened,” Variety, February 27, 1920, p. 47.
171. Motion Picture Magazine, January 1929, pp. 33, 90–91. La Bataille broke box office records in France.
172. Variety, November 24, 1922, p. 38. Borzage, who had played with the Japanese at Inceville, directed other Japanese stories such as Who Is to Blame? (1918).
173. Exhibitors Herald, March 11, 1922.
174. Ibid.
175. Quoted in Kemp Niver, The First Twenty Years (Los Angeles: Locare Research Group, 1968), p. 91.
176. Fred Balshofer and Arthur Miller, One Reel a Week (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), p. 46.
177. Ibid.
178. Variety, July 25, 1908, p. 13.
179. Variety, October 23, 1909, p. 13.
180. Variety, January 29, 1910, p. 13.
181. Variety, July 25, 1908, p. 13.
182. Ibid.
183. Moving Picture World, April 1916, p. 458.
184. Brownlow, The Parade’s Gone By … , p. 18.
185. Resurrection was made by the Masko Film Company with mainly Russian actors.
186. The Bioscope, February 28, 1918, p. 6.
187. Jay Leyda, Kino (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1960), p. 91; Ramsaye, A Million and One Nights, p. 727; Brownlow, p. 18.
188. Leon Trotksy, My Life (London: Penguin, 1971), pp. 278, 289. My Official Wife was reissued on December 25, 1916.
189. Trotsky, p. 279.
190. Program, author’s collection. The British, who cordially disliked the Imperial Russian government, but who were allied with it, changed the title to The Spider and the Fly, to avoid offense.
191. Rapid cutting appears in another Edison film, The Unbeliever (1918, Alan Crosland), so it may have been the work of a talented editor! Rapid cutting was perfected by Abel Gance in La Roue (1919–1922) before being adopted by the Soviets for “Russian montage.” The Cossack Whip is now being restored by Paolo Cherchi Usai at Eastman House.
192. Viola Dana letter to author, May 2, 1984. Miss Dana was born in 1897.
193. It was copyrighted in September 1916.
194. Wid’s, November 16, 1916, p. 1110.
195. Variety, November 17, 1916, p. 26.
196. Viola Dana to DeWitt Bodeen, Films in Review, March 1976, p. 147.
197. Its original title was The Downfall of the Romanoffs.
198. Alex de Jonge, The Life and Times of Grigorii Rasputin (New York: Coward, McCann and Geoghegan, 1982), p. 148.
199. De Jonge, p. 338.
200. If only it had survived!
201. Later Stalingrad, now Volgograd.
202. De Jonge, p. 204.
203. Ramsaye, A Million and One Nights, p. 766.
204. De Jonge, p. 319.
205. Synopsis from program for premiere, Ritz-Carlton ballroom, September 6, 1917: Theatre Arts Collection, Lincoln Center, New York City. Courtesy George Geltzer.
206. New York Times, September 7, 1917, 9:2.
207. Kyril Zinovieff letter to author, March 15, 1984. In 1921, cameraman Floyd Traynham made a film for the American Relief Administration called America’s Gift to Famine-Stricken Russia. It includes shots of Iliodor “the Mad Monk” ruling a village in the hills called the Commune of Eternal Peace. The two-reel film is in the National Archives in Washington, D.C.
208. Letter from the Iliodor Corporation to Russian Art Film Corporation, September 6, 1917, Selznick archives, at Harry Ransom Library, University of Texas at Austin. Courtesy Raymond Daum.
209. Jay Leyda letter to author, November 9, 1984. Documents in the Selznick archives suggest Austin Strong may have ghost-written the book, but Brooks told Leyda that he did the work.
210. Adam Ulam, Russia’s Failed Revolutions (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1981), p. 275.
211. At this period the Gregorian calendar was thirteen days ahead of the Julian calendar. We will remain with the Julian, otherwise the October Revolution will occur in November.
212. Leyda, p. 92.
213. Jacob Rubin, Moscow Mirage (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1935), p. 128. Published in U.S. as I Live to Tell (Indianapolis: Bobbs Merrill, 1934).
214. Arkatov, who had made a number of Jewish films in Russia, went to Hollywood and, calling himself Dr. Arkatov, claimed to be the true director of Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919). Since he was in Russia at the time, any connection with it is highly unlikely, but he was desperate for a job. He was going to make Studies in Wives for J. G. Bachman, but nothing came of it. He opened a photographic salon in San Francisco in 1929 and in 1940 became a director of training films for the U.S. Army. After the war, in Hollywood, he formed an audio-visual company to make filmstrips teaching the stories of the Bible. He died in 1961 at 72. (Jim Arkatov letter to Yuri Tsivian, February 18, 1982. Courtesy Yuri Tsivian.)
215. Rubin, p. 131.
216. Leyda, p. 144.
217. Variety, in a review of Kerensky in the Russian Revolution of 1917, said “it is very doubtful if the rank and file of the American public will have enough interest in the internal affairs of the new republic to make the pictures a financial success,” Variety. August 14, 1917, p. 24. The U.S. government made unsuccessful efforts to send propaganda films to Russia. See Leyda, p. 123.
218. Gilbert Seldes to author, Philadephia, March 1964.
219. N. P. Hiley, “Counter-Espionage and Security in Great Britain during the First World War,” in the English Historical Review, July 1986, pp. 635–70. Among the papers of Sir Horace Rumbold (the minister in Warsaw) in the Bodleian Library, Oxford University, Nick Hiley discovered a letter from Lord Hardinge of Penshurst which said that Basil Thomson was sending a troupe of fifteen people to Poland for an anti-Bolshevik propaganda film under the direction of Harold Shaw: “They are starting for Warsaw, via Dantzig, on March 1st (1920). Their intention is said to be merely to photograph one or two streets and a few villages with peasants, etc. Thomson asks that they may be treated kindly if they get into any difficulty, and I should be very grateful if you would help them in case of need.” The trip was presumably diverted when, in March 1920, Red Army divisions massed on the Berezina River, threatening to attack Poland.
220. Hiley, pp. 635-70.
221. Sidney Felstead, In Search of Sensation (London: Robert Hale, 1945), pp. 90–91.
222. Daily Herald, November 3, 1921, p. 2:4. Courtesy Nick Hiley.
223. Variety, June 18, 1920, p. 2.
224. Harold Shaw, born in Tennessee, was an actor and director at Edison. He came to England as chief stage director for the London Film Company, which operated out of Twickenham Studios, in 1913, the same year as George Loane Tucker and Bannister Merwin. Shaw married Edna Flugrath in 1917 and was killed in a car crash in 1926.
225. Pictures and Picturegoer, July 24, 1920, p. 107. Edna Flugrath was the sister of Viola Dana and Shirley Mason. In March 1920, a coup d’état was attempted by General Walther V. Lüttwitz, commander of troops in the Berlin area, and Wolfgang Kapp, an East Prussian official. The so-called Kapp Putsch failed.
226. Pictures and Picturegoer, July 24, 1920, p. 107.
227. John M. East, ’Neath the Mask (London: Allen & Unwin, 1967), pp. 315–21.
228. East, p. 317.
229. The Kine Weekly, July 8, 1920, p. 97.
230. The Bioscope, July 8, 1920, p. 43. Phyllis Bedella and Laurent Novikoff were the leading dancers of the Imperial Ballet.
231. The Bioscope, July 8, 1920, p. 43.
232. Quoted in The Bioscope, July 8, 1920, p. 18.
233. The Kine Weekly, July 8, 1920, p. 97.
234. Laurence Irving, unpublished memoirs, p. 413.
235. Robert Allen, “Motion Picture Exhibiton in Manhattan 1906–12,” Cinema Journal 18, no. 2 (Spring 1979), p. 4.
236. Harold Hoadley letter to H. Lyman Broening, February 23, 1913. Courtesy Marc Wanamaker.
237. Edward Sloman to author, Hollywood, 1970.
238. Fairchild, p. 139.
239. Quoted in Thomas Cripps, “The Movie Jew,” Journal of Popular Film 3, 1975, p. 201.
240. Friedman, Hollywood’s Image of the Jew, p. 52.
241. Moving Picture World, October 25, 1913, p. 355.
242. Short, p. 135.
243. Short, pp. 135–37.
244. Moving Picture World, April 18, 1914, p. 337.
245. The Jeffersonian, quoted in John P. Roche, The Quest for the Dream (New York: Macmillan, 1963), p. 89.
246. Ibid.
247. Variety, July 30, 1915, p. 19.
248. Ibid.
249. Moving Picture World, March 27, 1915, p. 1952.
250. Roche, p. 89.
251. Roche, p. 90.
252. Variety, August 27, 1915, p. 15.
253. Variety, September 13, 1915, p. 18.
254. Moving Picture World, September 18, 1915, p. 2126. In 1920, Oscar Micheaux produced the Negro film Within Our Gates. based on the Frank case.
255. Steve Oney, “The Lynching of Leo Frank,” in Esquire, September 1985, p. 90. This article contains recent evidence exonerating Frank.
256. Keith Sward, The Legend of Henry Ford (New York: Rinehart & Company, 1948), p. 151.
257. Sward, p. 143.
258. One resourceful Jewish producer—William Fox—managed to keep a denigrating article out of the Independent by threatening to send cameramen to every crash involving a Ford car and including the footage in his twice-weekly newsreel, Sinclair, Upton Sinclair Presents William Fox, p. 216.
259. Moving Picture World, March 5, 1921, pp. 20–21.
260. David L. Lewis, “Pioneering the Business Film,” in Public Relations Journal, June 1971, pp. 14–17. Ford’s Weekly was replaced by the Ford Education Library, which circulated films to schools, churches, and other groups.
261. Variety, October 22, 1920, p. 47.
262. Joseph Goebbels, The Goebbels Diaries, 1939–1941, trans. and ed. by Fred Taylor (London: Sphere, 1983), p. 89.
263. Lloyd Morris, Not So Long Ago (New York: Random House, 1949), p. 305.
264. Moving Picture World, July 30, 1927, p. 305.
265. The Jazz Singer, scenario edited and with an introduction by Robert L. Carringer (Madison: Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, University of Wisconsin Press, 1979), p. 24.
266. Randall Miller, ed., Ethnic Images in American Film and Television (Philadelphia: The Balch Institute, 1978), p. 23.
267. Friedman, p. 9.
268. H. Lyman Broening, oral history, 1982 by Marc Wanamaker.
269. The Universal Weekly, August 2, 1913, p. 32, quoted in Judith N. Goldberg, Laughter Through Tears (East Brunswick, N.J.: Associated University Presses, 1983), p. 35.
270. Moving Picture World, June 14, 1913, p. 1180.
271. Patricia Erens points out that persistent desertion of families by immigrant husbands was a great problem in The Jew in American Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), p. 44.
272. Moving Picture World, July 19, 1913, p. 300.
273. The Universal Weekly, September 6, 1913, p. 8, quoted in Goldberg, p. 122.
274. New York Dramatic Mirror. October 8, 1913, p. 30. Goldin collaborated with George K. Rolands on Bleeding Hearts and Sorrows of Israel.
275. Goldberg, p. 38.
276. New York Times, April 6, 1914, quoted in Goldberg, p. 39.
277. Ulam, Russia’s Failed Revolutions, p. 187.
278. People’s Chronicle, p. 703. Life for Jews had entered a horrific new phase on March 13, 1881, when Alexander II was assassinated. His son, Alexander III, decided that the Jews were the ideal scapegoats and declared he would kill a third, drive out another third, and convert the rest. The formula emanated from Pobedonostzev, procurator of the Synod, whose influence was equally strong on Nicholas II.
279. Moving Picture World, December 13, 1913, p. 1288.
280. Perhaps this was because a converted Jew, ostracized by his people, was shown giving evidence against Beilis.
281. Variety, December 5, 1913, p. 16. So familiar was the habit of film people of presenting topical events with the leading protagonist of that event playing himself that Variety expected to see the real Mendel Beilis on the screen. Beilis left Russia in 1914 and tried to settle in Palestine. In 1922 he came to America, where Boris Thomashefsky featured him in a play Thomashefsky had written—but even playing himself, Beilis was not a convincing actor. A 1915 Russian version of the story in six reels was directed by Josef Soifer in the actual Ukrainian locations. It suffered from the censorship that confiscated or cut every film that mentioned the Jews and did not see the light of day until the February revolution, Leyda, p. 83. In the light of the worldwide outcry that the Beilis case aroused, the Russians must have wished they had never embarked on it. A collaborator of Goldin, George K. Rolands, who also came from Odessa, had his own film corporation. Terrors of Russia (1913) was shot at Carmel, New Jersey, a Jewish colony. Five hundred immigrant Jews and Russians took part in the pogrom scenes. Yet another film, The Mystery of the Beilis Case, was released in the United States in April 1914. Although the advertisements promised that it had been photographed on the scene in Kiev, it had actually been made in Germany the previous year. The film was based on the account of the ex-Chief of Secret Police of Kiev, Nicolai Krasovsky, who wrote the script together with the journalist Brazul-Brushkovsky.
282. Moving Picture World, February 7, 1914, p. 660. The Chicago police seized the Goldin film in December 1913, Goldberg, p. 39–40.
283. Moving Picture World, May 9, 1914, p. 795.
284. Moving Picture World, July 11, 1914, p. 284.
285. Variety, June 19, 1914, p. 21..
286. Molly Picon to author, New York City, November 1983.
287. AFI Catalogue, 1921–1930, p. 210.
288. Jim Hoberman, Career of Sidney Goldin, typescript, September 1986.
289. Frank Borzage to George Pratt, George Eastman House, oral history, 1958. “The first time I started looking for locations [in the ghetto],” said Borzage, “I was dressed just as I normally would and they looked at me and I heard one of the Jewish people say, ‘There is a goniff,’ which means a thief. So I decided that I would come down in old clothes. So this I did and I spent three or four weeks, just moving around and getting my locations. As a matter of fact, I hid a camera in the back of a truck with just the lens sticking out, and I had the cameraman in there and I’d be there myself. I’d say, ‘Move down there. Get this.’ And they’d move right over and get natural people trying on collars and hats and ties or whatever. And I got the opening of my picture with about 500 feet of just these wonderful shots of these great characters.”
290. Frances Marion, Off With Their Heads (New York: Macmillan, 1972), p. 71.
291. Motion Picture Classic, February 1921, p. 59.
292. Gilbert Warrenton to author, Hemet, California, 1972.
293. O. Henry Memorial Award: Prize Stories 1919 (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page, 1921), chosen by the Society of Arts and Sciences. Introduction by Blanche Colton Williams, 1921, pp. 148–79.
294. Marion, p. 74.
295. Frances Marion to author, Hollywood, 1970.
296. Variety, June 4, 1920, p. 27.
297. Picture Play, July 1920, p. 70.
298. “I enjoyed two thirds of the way they handled my Humoresque,” Fannie Hurst quoted in Motion Picture Classic, June 1924, p. 77.
299. Fannie Hurst to author, New York, 1964.
300. Marion, p. 74. Hearst must have been mollified by the personality Photoplay selected to receive the medal. It was William Randolph Hearst. “The Medal goes to the producer because no picture can be greater than its producer. It takes the producer’s faith, foresightedness, money and appreciation to make a great picture. Mr. Hearst believed in Fannie Hurst’s great short story, which appeared in Cosmopolitan magazine. He believed in Frank Borzage. He brought these two together. The result has been seen, wept over and applauded by nearly everyone in the world,” Photoplay, December 1921, p. 56.
301. Telegram from Samuel Goldwyn to Frank Godsol, January 11, 1921. These and other telegrams and memos are from MGM legal files.
302. Sam Goldwyn to Frank Godsol, January 11, 1921.
303. Sam Goldwyn to Abe Lehr, February 24, 1921.
304. Anzia Yezierska, The Bread Givers, introduction by Alice Kessler Harris (London: Women’s Press, 1984). The child grew up to be an authoress herself, Louise Henriksen; see Anzia Yezierska, A Writer’s Life (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1988). Anzia was, in the United States, Hattie Mayer until she reverted to her original name.
305. Frank Crane, quoted in Anzia Yezierska, Red Ribbon on a White Horse (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1950), p. 121.
306. Frank Godsol to Sam Goldwyn, January 15, 1921.
307. Motion Picture Classic, November 1922, p. 41.
308. Yezierska, Red Ribbon on a White Horse, p. 45.
309. Estimated cost $130,000–145,000, probable final cost $160,000.
310. Lee, unpublished autobiography, p. 363. Extract from letter written by Seymour Stern at Bern’s death; “His deeds of decency affected all Hollywood. There was a legion of people on Vine Street or Hollywood Boulevard—actors, actresses, ex-directors, cameramen, prop men, ‘extras’ —whom Bern helped and saved from starvation … The time I came to Bern asking for $10,000 for a labor film, his refusal was so decent that I could not feel disappointed about it. He was in accord with the idea, but he explained (this was last winter [1931]) that so many people around town were dependent upon him for the winter that he couldn’t risk their welfare by helping us!” Letters to Larchmont. Courtesy Ira Gallen.
311. Marx, Mayer and Thalberg, p. 46.
312. Sam Goldwyn to Abe Lehr, June 1, 1921.
313. Picture Play, January 1928, p. 72.
314. William Wellman to author, Brentwood, California, 1965.
315. Motion Picture Classic, November 1922, p. 41.
316. Yezierska, Red Ribbon on a White Horse, p. 49.
317. Abe Lehr to G. Hess, May 5, 1922.
318. Abe Lehr letter to Frank Godsol, April 17, 1922.
319. Her real name was Kaufman. She had played in Chet Withey’s New Moon.
320. Sam Goldwyn to Abe Lehr, June 17, 1921.
321. Sam Goldwyn to Abe Lehr, June 21, 1921.
322. Abe Lehr to Sam Goldwyn, June 4, 1921.
323. Sam Goldwyn to Abe Lehr, September 9, 1921.
324. Sam Goldwyn to Abe Lehr, September 15, 1921.
325. Abe Lehr to Sam Goldwyn, September 15, 1921.
326. Abe Lehr to Sam Goldwyn, September 16, 1921.
327. Sam Goldwyn to Abe Lehr, September 17, 1921.
328. Abe Lehr to Sam Goldwyn, September 17, 1921.
329. Abe Lehr to Sam Goldwyn, September 20, 1921.
330. Abe Lehr to G. Hess, May 1, 1922.
331. Ibid.
332. Anzia Yezierska to Abe Lehr, May 10, 1921.
333. Abe Lehr to Sam Goldwyn, September 30, 1921.
334. Abe Lehr to Sam Goldwyn, October 3, 1921.
335. Helen Ferguson to author, Palm Springs, California, 1970.
336. Motion Picture Classic, April 1922, p. 79.
337. Helen Ferguson to author, Palm Springs, California, 1970.
338. The publicity department claimed that Hopper discovered Budin on the street and that Budin bought the store out of the money he earned on the picture. But photographs of his store show that it is anything but new.
339. Abe Lehr to Sam Goldwyn, October 6, 1921.
340. Ibid.
341. Sam Goldwyn to Abe Lehr, October 7, 1921.
342. Yezierska, Sam Goldwyn to Abe Lehr, November 1, 1921.
343. Yezierska, The Bread Givers. The short stories in Hungry Hearts were connected only by the fact that they dealt with ghetto people. The script had to be written more or less from scratch, with elements borrowed from other stories. The letter from America was condensed from “The Miracle” and “How I Found America.” The arrival in the dark tenement occurs in both “My Own People” and “How I Found America,” with the same crack repeated in both: “It ain’t so dark. It’s only a little shady,” pp. 224, 264.
344. Anzia Yezierska, Hungry Hearts (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1922), p. 271.
345. Abe Lehr to HEE, December 19, 1921.
346. Abe Lehr to Sam Goldwyn, February 27, 1922.
347. Frank Godsol to Abe Lehr, May 2, 1922.
348. Ibid.
349. Frank Godsol to Abe Lehr, May 24, 1922. It was cut down to 6,538 from around 8700 feet.
350. Motion Picture Classic, April 1922, p. 79. Glass’s title read: “Titled in part by Montague Glass.”
351. The American Hebrew, September 8, 1922, p. 387. The magazine even liked Montague Glass’s titles; Variety, December 1, 1922.
352. The American Hebrew, September 8, 1922.
353. Ibid.
354. Motion Picture Classic, June 1922, p. 46.
355. John Cannon, who was then running an arts association in East Anglia, England, found it by an extraordinary coincidence. A house in Peterborough was raided by vandals who left it in such a state that the local paper printed a photograph of the debris. Cannon noticed streams of film across the wreckage. He went at once to the house and discovered an eccentric gentleman who had filled the place with his birthday presents, carefully rewrapped, his mother’s clothes, carefully preserved, and, not so carefully preserved, masses of nitrate film he had picked up from local projectionists. Hungry Hearts was one of the films.
356. Louise Henriksen letter to author, November 30, 1984. Anzia was paid $15,000.
357. Jetta Goudal’s real name was Julie Henriette Goudeket; she was the daughter of a Jewish diamond cutter and was born in Holland, Films in Review, May 1986, p. 319. There was a scene of a tenement flat shared by three old ladies, played by inmates of the Home of Old Israel, 204 Henry Street, New York. One was Jennie Freeman, 108 years old, Picture Show, February 14, 1925. Courtesy Cliff Howe. The Yiddish newspaper scenes were peopled with New York motion picture trade paper editors, Exhibitors Trade Review, November 29, 1924, p. 45. Courtesy Richard Koszarski.
358. Picture Show Art Supplement, July 3, 1926, p. 11.
359. Variety. February 25, 1925, p. 31.
360. Louise Henriksen to author, London, May 1985.
361. Variety, February 25, 1925, p. 31.
362. Photoplay, December 1925, p. 132.
363. Edward Sloman, unpublished autobiographical fragment, pp. 18–19.
364. Ibid.
365. Moving Picture World, January 8, 1916, p. 257.
366. Ibid.
367. Edward Sloman to author, Hollywood, 1967.
368. Brownlow, p. 162.
369. Undated publication, Sloman scrapbook, author’s collection.
370. Louella Parsons, Universal Service Syndicated, November 2, 1925.
371. Undated film paper, probably Film Spectator, scrapbook, n.d.
372. Alfred A. Cohn was a former Chicago newspaperman who had coedited Photoplay in its early days and written some of its best articles. He was to write the scripts for The Cohens and the Kellys, The Jazz Singer, We Americans, and Abie’s Irish Rose and was thus a key figure in the production of films about the Jews. Charles Whittaker was born in Ireland, was also a journalist, and wrote such scenarios as Woman for Maurice Tourneur.
373. Sloman, autobiography, p. 20.
374. Undated Jewish paper (Los Angeles), Sloman scrapbook.
375. The Bioscope, p. 43. December 3, 1925, p. 43.
376. The Universal publicity department crammed all the sensational reactions into advertisements and then credited the direction to Harry Pollard!
377. To the small-town audiences, the ghetto sets and the New York subway scenes were so realistic that Universal put a title on the front pointing out that “every scene in the picture was taken at the Universal Coast Studios,” in case they might think stock or location shots had been used.
378. Undated Jewish paper (Los Angeles), Sloman scrapbook. His People cost $107,396.80 and grossed $439,587.57—making a profit of $139,961.03—a healthy sum for Universal in those days, according to Richard Koszarski, but considerably less than I would have expected. Koszarski adds that these figures, which he copied from Laemmle’s personal register, were revenue, funds accruing back to Universal. “It is possible there was once a figure for box office gross, which would have been much higher, though Universal would not have seen that much money,” letter of April 2, 1984.
379. Undated Jewish paper (Los Angeles), Sloman scrapbook.
380. Ibid.
381. The name “Stein” signals a Jew of German origin, from an earlier wave of immigration. These Jews had achieved a striking degree of social prominence and mostly kept themselves apart from the East Side Jews, although they did charitable work among them.
382. In Frank Capra’s The Younger Generation (1929) (from a Fannie Hurst story), the young Jew denies his parents by introducing them as hired help. This picture featured Rosa Rosanova and was produced by Jack Cohn for Columbia. See page 420.
383. Joseph Schildkraut, My Father and I (New York: Viking, 1959), p. 24.
384. Brownlow, p. 163.
385. Undated Jewish paper (Los Angeles), Sloman scrapbook.
386. Edward Sloman letter to author, March 2, 1966. Edward G. Robinson had preceded Muni as the lead in We Americans. Muni Weisenfreund played the Jewish gangster in the stage version of Four Walls, but John Gilbert played him on the screen. Erens, Jew in American Cinema, p. 97.
387. Undated press cutting, Edward Sloman scrapbook.
388. Ibid.
389. Once the immigrant entered the glass-enclosed hall, his baggage was taken away to be examined and labeled with the tickets of the railroad or steamship company by which he was to travel next. The immigrant passed through a series of small rooms in which he received a medical examination, an intelligence test, and filled out a dossier with his date of birth, his occupation, and his destination. Then he went to the money-changing bureau and into the restaurant. “This,” according to Inspector Baker, “is one of the most difficult things to provide for such a cosmopolitan clientele. A Scandinavian, for instance, doesn’t care anything about spaghetti, and Italians would turn up their noses at Swedish bread. A glance into the food box which an immigrant can purchase for $1.50 is a keen insight into international dietetics,” undated press cutting, Sloman scrapbook.
390. Undated press cutting, Sloman scrapbook.
391. Ibid.
392. Motion Picture Magazine, June 1928, p. 61.
393. Carringer, ed., p. 13.
394. Ibid.
395. Moving Picture World, June 4, 1927, p. 340.
396. Carringer, p. 18.
397. Title writer Jack Jarmuth may have been responsible for making the film less offensive to blacks than it might have been. Alfred Cohn’s final shooting script gives Otto Lederer the title, when seeing Jolson in blackface for the first time, “It talks like Jakie, but it looks like a nigger.” In the film, the title reads, “He talks like Jakie—but he looks like his shadow,” J. B. Kaufman.
398. Warner Oland’s singing voice was dubbed by Joseph Diskay, not Rosenblatt, courtesy Miles Kreuger.
399. Joseph Green to author, New York, 1983.
400. Columbia University oral history transcription, quoted in Carringer, ed., introduction, p. 21.
401. It was Goldfish in America. Goldwyn’s name in Poland was Schmuel Gelbfisz. A. Scott Berg, Goldwyn (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1989), p. 5.
402. Motion Picture Magazine, July 1927, p. 36. “When Shakespeare wrote Abie’s Irish Rose, he used different dialogue and called it Romeo and Juliet,” Preston Sturges, quoted in Curtis, Between Flops, p. 94.
403. Motion Picture Classic, March 1925, p. 21.
404. Patricia Erens says this echoes sentiments more Christian than Jewish, The Jew in American Cinema, p. 107.
405. The first wedding is at an Episcopal Church.
406. The Film Spectator, March 31, 1928, p. 5.
407. Variety, December 26, 1928, p. 27.
408. Jesse Lasky, I Blow My Own Horn (New York: Doubleday & Co., 1957), p. 223.
409. Anne Nichols sued the producers of The Cohens and the Kellys for plagiarism, Motion Picture Magazine, September 1928, p. 35. She lost. The court decided that while the underlying themes were similar, there was no infringement because the theme itself was trite and motivated many other plays, Authors’ League Bulletin, May 1929, p. 20.
1. Lindsey and Borough, The Dangerous Life, p. 94.
2. Steffens, Upbuilders, pp. 202–5.
3. Stephen B. Wood, Constitutional Politics in the Progressive Era; Child Labor and the Law (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), pp. 4–6.
4. Moving Picture World, March 13, 1915, p. 1622.
5. Apart from leading the campaigns that resulted in the State Widows’ Pension Law, Loeb also worked for the New York motion picture law, which ensured that theatres were sanitary and fireproof. She was the first woman called in as mediator in an industrial dispute; in 1917 she settled a New York taxicab strike.
6. Photoplay, September 1920, p. 108.
7. Addams, The Second Twenty Years at Hull-House, p. 36.
8. Image, no. 51, May 1957, p. 114.
9. Marc Wanamaker, “Encyclopaedia of the Movie Studios,” unpublished ms., p. 49. Paterson, New Jersey, was not known for employing child labor, which was presumably one reason why the Edison people selected it. Edison had touched on child labor in 1909 with Suffer Little Children.
10. Child labor was not only an American problem, nor did it die out. (In England, it has recently been established by a press survey that 2 million children are secretly employed.)
11. Moving Picture World, March 9, 1912, p. 866.
12. Moving Picture World, April 27, 1912, p. 305.
13. An act excluding the products of child labor from interstate commerce was passed in the first few months of the Woodrow Wilson administration. Goldman, Rendezvous with Destiny p. 169, but in 1918 another child labor law was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court as “an encroachment on states rights,” People’s Chronology, p. 786. When in 1922 Congress passed a new law levying a heavy tax on child labor products, the Supreme Court found it invalid.
14. Moving Picture World, May 11, 1912, p. 529.
15. “Mrs. Browning’s poem has been to the particular evil it deals with what Uncle Tom’s Cabin was to the slavery question,” Bioscope, October 10, 1912. Cry of the Children was also the title of a 1908 book by Mrs. John van Voorst (New York: Moffet Yard) on child labor in the South. John Spargo published The Bitter Cry of the Children in 1906 with Macmillan, New York. Sloan, The Loud Silents, p. 70.
16. Nevertheless, Eline’s performance was selected by Moving Picture World as “the very breath of poetry,” May 11, 1912, p. 529. The role was not played by Helen Badgley, another Thanhouser kidlet, as has been stated, according to Q. David Bowers.
17. Possibly George Nichols; the cameraman was Carl L. Gregory, according to Q. David Bowers. He sometimes co-directed.
18. Moving Picture World, April 27, 1912, pp. 305–6.
19. “Anarchism looked as if it might rival the European successes of the ‘Black International’ until a bomb went off in Chicago’s Haymarket Square … in 1886 and killed the movement by associating it with black bearded horror.” Goldman, p. 35.
20. Steven J. Ross, “Cinema and Class Conflict: Labor, Capital, The State and American Silent Film,” ms., pp. 16–17. This essay will appear in Robert Sklar and Charles Musser, eds., Resisting Images: Radical Pespectives on Film and History (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990). A Martyr to His Cause was produced at the W. H. Seeley Studio, Ohio. Philip S. Foner has recently discovered the scenario for A Martyr to His Cause: See Labor History 24, pp. 103–111.
21. Ross, “Cinema and Class Conflict,” pp. 16–17.
22. Moving Picture World, September 20, 1913, p. 1323.
23. Moving Picture World, September 13, 1913, p. 1185.
24. Compiled for unpublished ms., Thomas Brandon Collection, MoMA. Steven Ross feels that if Brandon had taken a broader view of politics, he would have greatly increased the number, letter to author, August 8, 1989.
25. Goldman, pp. 36–64.
26. Adams Jr., The Age of Industrial Violence, 1910–1915, p. 140.
27. Moving Picture World, May 31, 1913, pp. 903, 923.
28. Moving Picture World, June 14, 1913, p. 1138.
29. Moving Picture World, May 31, 1913, p. 923.
30. Ibid.
31. Hal Mohr was another cameraman, and he also edited the film. Maltin, The Art of the Cinematographer, p. 77. Keane began in pictures in 1895 or ’96. He also made a film about V.D., The Spreading Evil (1918), Martin Sopocy, letter to author, October 16, 1987. This is now in the National Film Archive, London.
32. New York Dramatic Mirror, February 10, 1915.
33. Moving Picture World, September 26, 1914, p. 1780.
34. New York Dramatic Mirror, February 10, 1915.
35. Moving Picture World, September 26, 1914, p. 1790.
36. Upton Sinclair letter to Nicolai Lebedev, May 4, 1923, Brandon Collection, MoMA/ Lilly Library, Indiana University.
37. Upton Sinclair letter to Nicolai Lebedev, May 4, 1923.
38. Herbert Blaché telegram to Upton Sinclair, November 25, 1916, Brandon Collection, MoMA/Lilly Library.
39. Upton Sinclair letter to Nicolai Lebedev, May 4, 1923. The Moneychangers was directed by Jack Conway. The story was credited to Benjamin B. Hampton and Sinclair.
40. Federal Photoplays letter to Upton Sinclair, March 3, 1921, Brandon Collection, MoMA.
41. Horsley was a socialist, which makes his failure as an early capitalist in Hollywood somewhat more understandable. Steven Ross, who has examined his papers (in the library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Los Angeles), concludes that while he was committed to radical politics, he saw the MMPC as a good way to sell his studio and make a great deal of money, letter to author, August 8, 1989.
42. Upton Sinclair letters, January 18, 1921, and May 4, 1923, Brandon Collection, MoMA.
43. A potentially splendid collaboration—between Sinclair and Douglas Fairbanks—never took place. Sinclair tried to interest Fairbanks in The Millennium. Fairbanks wrote to Sinclair on December 13, 1924: “Think maybe we were talking a bit at cross purposes Thursday. You know I have had the seed of an idea for a Utopian story in the back part of my mind for a number of years only waiting for a time to put it into execution. That time has never yet seemed ripe. What I meant to convey to you was that in case I should ever decide to go on with the idea there might be a possibility that we should like to collaborate on it. All that, however, is in the problematic future and would in no way interfere with your disposal of the play and picture rights to The Millennium.”
44. New York Dramatic Mirror, August 12, 1914.
45. Moving Picture World, December 12, 1914, p. 1498.
46. Bowser, ed., The Biograph Bulletins, p. 150. The speculator was played by Frank Powell, later a director of social films himself (and of the 1914 Theda Bara classic, A Fool There Was). The story was probably inspired by the case of Joseph Leiter, a Chicago millionaire, who had attempted to corner the wheat market in the late 1890s. He borrowed vast sums to buy all the wheat in America, forcing up the price so that when he sold it he made an immense profit. He was outwitted by a rival (who imported wheat from Canada) and ended up owing $9 million. Nicholas Mosley, The Rules of the Game (London: Secker & Warburg, 1983), p. 13.
47. New York Dramatic Mirror, quoted in George Pratt, Spellbound in Darkness (Greenwich, Conn.: New York Graphic Society Ltd., 1966), pp. 67–68.
48. Schickel, D. W. Griffith, p. 144.
49. Tourneur and Carré would have a highly rewarding partnership spanning several years.
50. New York Dramatic Mirror, December 11, 1915.
51. Variety, November 29, 1918.
52. Ross, “Cinema and Class Conflict,” p. 20.
53. Photo-Play Journal, January 1920, p. 5.
54. Variety, November 14, 1919, p. 65.
55. Leuchtenburg, Perils of Prosperity, p. 66.
56. Ibid., p. 78.
57. They landed in Finland and were given an official welcome by the Russians. But they arrived at a period of famine, blockade, and terror, and most were thoroughly miserable, Rubin, Moscow Mirage, p. 201.
58. Sinclair, Autobiography of Upton Sinclair, p. 139. Several colonists became well-known writers, including Sinclair Lewis.
59. According to Raymond Rohauer, the title was changed to Shattered Dreams in 1920 to lengthen its commercial life. But I can find no reference to this in print. The film’s working title was Red Republic; alternate Shattered Dreams (AFI Catalogue, 1911–1920), p. 86
60. Russell Campbell in Silent Picture 19, p. 26, says the pamphlets are the work of Scott Nearing and John Spargo, together with a report by a writer on the left-wing New York Call.
61. The hotel in Florida used as a location was the Royal Poinciana Hotel, Palm Beach, owned by Henry Flagler, said to be the largest resort hotel in the world.
62. Moving Picture World, April 19, 1919, p. 424.
63. Variety, April 30, 1920, p. 48.
64. Moving Picture World, May 17, 1919, p. 1058.
65. Duncan Mansfield, who did such a brilliant job on Tol’able David (1921).
66. Donn Byrne was the pseudonym of an Irish-American, Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne, who was educated at University College, Dublin, and at Paris and Leipzig.
67. Moving Picture World, February 14, 1920, n.p.
68. Moving Picture World, April 10, 1920, p. 248.
69. Seldes said ten years, but a study of how the Russian Revolution was reported by the New York Times over a period of two years concluded that it was a disaster—“the net effect was almost always misleading,” The New Republic, August 4, 1920, pp. 3, 10, quoted in Kaplan, Lincoln Steffens, p. 232. New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty (1921–1940) was a Soviet apologist, Tim La Haye, Hidden Censors (New York: Power Books, 1984), p. 53.
70. H. H. Van Loan, How I Did It (Los Angeles: Whittingham Press, 1922), p. 32.
71. Kaplan, p. 229.
72. Van Loan, p. 33.
73. Variety, May 16, 1919, p. 53. The cameraman was the Russian immigrant David Abel.
74. Wid’s, May 17, 1919.
75. Photoplay, August 1919, p. 118.
76. Van Loan, p. 65.
77. Picture Play, January 1920, p. 66. The picture starred Robert Anderson; the future star Colleen Moore was a supporting player.
78. Picture Play, January 1920, p. 66.
79. Variety, October 17, 1919, p. 65.
80. Variety, January 3, 1924, p. 21.
81. The leading radical in the film is clearly intended to be Jewish. I can find no director credit, but the film was written by O. E. Goebel and Condé B. Pallen. Goebel was sent to prison for misappropriating Catholic diocese funds to back a talkie in 1929, Kay Thackrey, unpublished ms. p. 176B.
82. A full synopsis is in the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
83. Variety, August 15, 1919, p. 71.
84. Wid’s, June 29, 1919.
85. Variety, September 5, 1919, p. 71.
86. Photoplay, November 1919, p. 13.
87. Wid’s, August 24, 1919.
88. Photoplay, December 1919, p. 117.
89. Variety, November 21, 1919, p. 55.
90. Variety, June 4, 1920, p. 38.
91. Wid’s, 1920 Year Book, p. 383.
92. Variety, January 9, 1920, p. 58.
93. Variety, June 4, 1920, p. 38.
94. Moving Picture World, February 7, 1920, p. 878. Franklin Lane wrote to Adolph Zukor, July 29, 1920, expressing his embarrassment that only one film had been produced on the Americanism theme. Courtesy Russell Merritt.
95. Letter from Bert Patenaude to author, January 26, 1988.
96. For information about Donald Thompson’s activities in WWI, see Brownlow, The War, the West and the Wilderness, p. 8, and American Newsfilm 1914–1919: The Underexposed War, unpublished thesis by David Mould, University of Kansas, p. 100.
97. Memo regarding photographic account, April 7, 1920, Herbert Hoover Archives, Stanford University. Courtesy Bert Patenaude.
98. Invitation from George Barr Baker to Governor Gilbert, January 8, 1920, Herbert Hoover Archives.
99. New York Times, January 10, 1920, p. 9:2.
100. Variety, January 24, 1920, p. 61. Hoover and Baker agreed that the famine and misery in the film were the result of Bolshevism. At other times, especially in 1921–1922, when they dealt directly with Russia, Hoover and Baker insisted that people turned to Bolshevism because they were hungry. Bolshevism could be cured through food, Bert Patenaude.
101. New York Times, January 10, 1920, p. 9:2.
102. Moving Picture World, January 24, 1920, p. 635.
103. Invitation from George Barr Baker to Alexander J. Hemphill, January 8, 1920, Herbert Hoover Archives.
104. Bureau of Labor Statistics, quoted in People’s Chronology, p. 792.
105. Variety, January 16, 1920, p. 61.
106. Letter from George Barr Baker to Herbert Hoover, January 13, 1920 (misdated 1919).
107. Variety, January 16, 1920, p. 61.
108. Letter from George Barr Baker to Fred B. Warren, July 24, 1920, Herbert Hoover Archives.
109. Letter from George Barr Baker to the New York State Income Tax Bureau, Albany, State of New York, January 25, 1923, Herbert Hoover Archives. He helped to stop an attempt by Zimmer to publish a volume of stills through Alfred A. Knopf in 1929.
110. Letter from George Barr Baker to New York State Income Tax Bureau, Albany, April 19, 1923, Herbert Hoover Archives.
111. In 1919, Griffith’s Intolerance had got through the blockade into Russia, where it had a profound effect on Soviet filmmakers. Lenin saw it and arranged to have it shown throughout Russia. He tried, through an intermediary, to persuade Griffith to come and take charge of the Soviet film industry, Leyda, Kino, p. 142. According to Leyda, of three stories, (the Christ episode was censored) The Modern Story had by far the strongest impact. “Russian audiences had never seen such a believable tragedy on American working class life—it must have given life to every slogan they had heard, about the sympathies of foreign workers with the revolution in Russia,” Leyda, Kino, p. 143. The film ran for ten years.
112. Author’s League Bulletin VII, no. 3, June 1924, pp. 5–7. MoMA/Lilly Library, Upton Sinclair Collection.
113. Author’s League Bulletin, June 1924, pp. 5–7.
114. Ibid.
115. Variety, August 2, 1923, p. 3.
116. American Film Institute Catalogue, 1921–1930, p. 207.
117. Daily Worker, January 18, 1924, quoted in Brandon ms. Mussolini appears in a shot beside the king reviewing his troops entering Rome.
118. Balshofer and Miller, One Reel a Week, p. 166.
119. Photoplay, January 1924, p. 5.
120. Balshofer and Miller, p. 166.
121. Winifred Johnston, Memo on the Movies (Norman, Okla.: Cooperative Books, 1939), p. 46.
122. DeMille, Autobiography, p. 248.
123. Lenore Coffee, Storyline (London: Cassell, 1973), p. 140. The song, allegedly sung in the 1860s by the men hauling the boats along the Volga, was popularized by Feodor Chaliapin, the celebrated Russian bass.
124. Photoplay, November 1926, p. 112.
125. Picture Play, July 1926, p. 60.
126. Jan and Cora Gordon, Stardust in Hollywood (London: Harrap, 1930), p. 187. The general was probably Lodijenski. Another adviser was Vasili Kalmykoff.
127. Motion Picture Magazine, May 1934, p. 72.
128. Picture Play, July 1926, p. 60.
129. Sidney Lens, The Labor Wars (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Co., Inc., 1973), p. 6.
130. George Baer, president of the Reading Railroad in 1902, quoted in Lens, p. 141.
131. Lens, p. 7.
132. It was a Chinese who gave them their nickname when he had trouble pronouncing the Ws and referred to them as the “I Wobble Wobble.” One film, J. Stuart Blackton’s Life’s Greatest Problem (1919), was the exception that proved the rule—it had the I.W.W. threaten to blow up a shipyard and mentioned them by name.
133. Motion Picture News, June 11, 1914, p. 82.
134. Moving Picture World, October 6, 1908, p. 266.
135. Variety, September 26, 1908, p. 12.
136. Moving Picture World, October 6, 1908, p. 266.
137. Lens, p. 11.
138. Lens, p. 10.
139. Moving Picture World, December 12, 1908, p. 485. Kalem produced so many films on Irish themes—some filmed on location in Ireland—its employees became known as the O’Kalems.
140. Moving Picture World, May 15, 1909, p. 634.
141. Moving Picture World, July 2, 1910, p. 1910.
142. Jacobs, The Rise of the American Film, p. 151.
143. Moving Picture World, April 2, 1910, p. 509.
144. Moving Picture World, June 24, 1911, p. 1424.
145. Ibid.
146. Velvet Light Trap, no. 17 (Winter 1977), p. 38. Solax, however, also produced the socialist Child of the Tenements the same year.
147. New York Dramatic Mirror, April 29, 1914. Muriel Ostriche played a loyal girl employee wounded by a bullet. A fictionalization appeared in Photoplay, June 1914, pp. 158–64. The location was Stamford, Connecticut, according to Q. David Bowers.
148. New York Dramatic Mirror, April 29, 1914.
149. Moving Picture World, May 3, 1913, p. 489.
150. Credits on the print at the National Archives, Washington D.C., and Steven J. Ross, letter to author, August 8, 1989. In Motion Picture News, February 14, 1914, p. 23, Charles Hite says the United States Steel Corporation came to him in 1913 and asked for a film to be made showing the human side of the company.
151. A close-up of the man filmed against a backcloth jars badly with the next shot, showing him at the Battery surrounded by people.
152. Moving Picture World. April 26, 1913, p. 418.
153. Ross, “Cinema and Class Conflict,” p. 13.
154. Undated Chicago newspaper quoted in Moving Picture World, May 24, 1913, p. 81.
155. Moving Picture World, May 24, 1913, p. 81.
156. Moving Picture World, February 21, 1920, p. 1257; the use of cameramen in a strike was revealed in a murder trial.
157. Moving Picture World, August 7, 1915, p. 1039, and Ross, “Cinema and Class Conflict,” p. 14.
158. New York Dramatic Mirror, September 22, 1915.
159. Moving Picture World, October 24, 1914, p. 538.
160. Moving Picture World, October 31, 1914, p. 658.
161. John Collier, in The Survey, August 7, 1915, p. 424.
162. Adapted by Richard Willis from a novel by Jacques Futrelle. The mob scene near the end was shot on the steps of the State Capitol at Sacramento, California. “One of the beauties of the offering is its convincing atmosphere … Among its specially interesting elements are the foundry scenes, taken in some big steel plants and showing, as backgrounds for the early life of its hero, the great machine tools at which he works, the pouring of molten metal and the flying sparks that in the dusky shop scatter from the whirling emory wheels biting into the steel,” Moving Picture World, March 20, 1915, p. 1780. Favorite Players was Carlyle Blackwell’s short-lived company.
163. Moving Picture World, March 20, 1915, p. 1780.
164. Moving Picture World, December 13, 1913, p. 1266.
165. Moving Picture World, April 24, 1914, p. 576.
166. Sinclair, Autobiography, p. 124.
167. Poison was made in collaboration with the Westfield Pure Food Movement to alert the public to the dangers of canned and bottled foods. Professor Lewis Allyn, the pure food expert, appeared in it.
168. Sinclair, Autobiography, p. 135.
169. Sinclair, The Jungle.
170. Upton Sinclair letter to Joseph Malkin, April 5, 1923, Lilly Library, Indiana University (as with all other Sinclair letters and documents).
171. Grau, Theatre of Science, p. 69. The All-Star Feature Corporation had organized in 1913, and its first production was Augustus Thomas’s Arizona.
172. New York Times, August 13, 1934, pp. 1, 13, Augustus Thomas’s obituary.
173. Motography, July 4, 1914, pp. 21–22.
174. William S. Hart, My Life East and West (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1929), p. 274.
175. Upton Sinclair letter to Joseph Cannon, August 21, 1920.
176. Upton Sinclair letter to Joseph Malkin, April 5, 1923, and to Nicolai Lebedev, May 4, 1923.
177. Moving Picture World, June 20, 1914, p. 1625.
178. Ibid. Upton Sinclair letter to Albert Rhys Williams, June 30, 1924.
179. Clement Wood, The Appeal to Reason, June 12, 1914, quoted Brandon ms. This proved to be Sinclair’s favorite review.
180. Brandon ms./Philip S. Foner, “Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle: The Movie,” in Upton Sinclair, Literature and Social Reform (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1989), p. 156.
181. Brandon writes that this happened much later, when Sinclair tried to distribute it himself, i.e., 1927—but this reference is from a letter to Joseph Malkin, April 5, 1923, in a paragraph referring to the original run. Philip Foner considers the picture was kept off the screen by big business, frightened by the enthusiastic response of the working-class audiences, a campaign foreshadowing that which the industry conducted to keep Sinclair from becoming governor of California in 1934. Foner, op. cit., p. 156.
182. J. Johnson, Colorado Springs, letter to Upton Sinclair, February 3, 1916. The film was especially valued at Socialist party meetings.
183. Upton Sinclair letter to Joseph Cannon, August 21, 1920.
184. Joseph Cannon to Upton Sinclair, September 20, 1920. Cannon suggested Sinclair had made a mistake playing the orator at the end—“he weakened Sinclair and he weakened The Jungle. It is placing Sinclair in a field where he does not really function,” letter, September 20, 1920.
185. Upton Sinclair to Joseph Cannon, September 27, 1920.
186. Joseph Cannon to Upton Sinclair, August 4, 1921.
187. Joseph Cannon to Upton Sinclair, August 4, 1921.
188. Joseph Cannon to Upton Sinclair, August 15, 1921.
189. Joseph Cannon to Upton Sinclair, November 18, 1921.
190. Upton Sinclair, to Augustus Thomas, October 22, 1921.
191. Sinclair, Autobiography, pp. 216–17. Augustus Thomas was completing his autobiography at this period; he makes mention of none of his films. But neither does he decry socialism. He comes out strongly for organized labor (see pp. 462–3) but opposes class warfare.
192. C. W. Pugsley letter to the Labor Film Service, November 1921.
193. Joseph Cannon to Upton Sinclair, November 29, 1921.
194. Upton Sinclair to Joseph Cannon, December 5, 1921.
195. Film Craft Laboratory to Joseph Cannon, May 18, 1922.
196. Joseph Cannon to New York Call, June 20, 1922.
197. It later became the theatre where foreign films and Workers Newsreels were shown in the thirties.
198. Joseph Cannon to Upton Sinclair, August 15, 1922.
199. Upton Sinclair to Nicolai Lebedev, May 4, 1923.
200. Upton Sinclair to Joseph Malkin, April 5, 1923.
201. Censors’ report, October 29, 1927, quoted in Brandon ms.
202. Ibid.
203. Sinclair, Autobiography, pp. 216–17.
204. Addams, The Second Twenty Years at Hull-House, p. 36. For a full account of industrial safety films, see Photoplay, November 1918, p. 54.
205. Lens, p.148.
206. Ross, “Cinema and Class Conflict,” p. 9.
207. New York Dramatic Mirror, October 21, 1914. It was produced by Broadway Star for Vitagraph.
208. New York Dramatic Mirror, October 21, 1914. The name was changed from Emanuel to Emanon (“no name” spelled backward) in the story in Motion Picture Magazine and probably in release prints.
209. Moving Picture World, November 20, 1915, p. 1469.
210. New York Dramatic Mirror, May 5, 1915.
211. Logan, Against the Evidence, p. 124.
212. Adams, Jr., p. 149.
213. In 1912–1913 alone, 151 people caught typhoid, Adams, Jr., p. 148.
214. Adams, Jr., p. 159.
215. Harry Perry with Colonel Oscar Estes, unpublished autobiograhy.
216. Ibid.
217. Victor Milner letter to author, October 28, 1972.
218. Quoted in Moving Picture World, December 6, 1913, p. 1155.
219. Victor Milner letter to author, October 1972.
220. The Photographic Times, June 1913, p. 236.
221. New York Dramatic Mirror, June 10, 1914.
222. Ibid.
223. Ibid.
224. Synopsis of Graft, episode 8, Library of Congress.
225. Moving Picture World, February 19, 1916, p. 1152.
226. Variety, February 18, 1916, p. 21.
227. New York Dramatic Mirror, February 27, 1916.
228. Screenland, June 1930, p. 38.
229. New York Dramatic Mirror, February 27, 1916.
230. San Francisco Call and Post, March 8, 1916.
231. Memorandum from FBI files, August 1922, Chaplin exhibition, David Robinson collection.
232. Griffith was also inspired by a Bayonne, New Jersey, industrialist “fervid in charity and zealous in ecclesiastical activities” whose guards killed nineteen strikers, Drew, Intolerance, p. 32.
233. Machine guns could not operate with blank cartridges at this period.
234. Lubin Bulletin, n.d. Courtesy Linda Kowall. A satire of Rockefeller was The Subpoena Server (1906 American Mutoscope & Biograph Co.) Rockefeller hired a public relations specialist after Ludlow. A 1,240-seat luxury theatre was built at his Pueblo, Colorado, steelworks in 1916. His Colorado Fuel and Iron Company sponsored programs of free films for their workers. “In industrial plants where films are shown,” wrote Sir Gilbert Parker, “the men have remained more contented than they otherwise would be. Besides, the films took them away from Socialist and extreme radical meetings,” Steven Ross ms. Ross also describes a five-reel film made by socialists in New York, What Is to Be Done? (1914), which depicted the Ludlow massacre.
235. Photoplay, February 1917, p. 26.
236. The story was by William Ritchey. Henry King recalled that he wrote the scripts himself, but Ritchey, who was responsible for other social films, should be credited with the original stories.
237. Photoplay, February 1917, p. 26.
238. New York Dramatic Mirror, September 2, 1916. Adapted by Douglas Bron-ston from a story by Louis Tracy, the series was directed by W. A. Douglas and Harry Harvey. Other episode titles suggest their contents: The Hypocrites, The Butterflies, Mammon and Moloch, Into the Pit, Humanity Triumphant.
239. Von Sternberg, Fun in a Chinese Laundry, p. 41.
240. Born and trained in England, Warde went to America in 1874 and played with Edwin Booth. He was an authority on Shakespeare. The small boy was played by a girl—Helen Badgley.
241. Variety, June 8, 1917, p. 19. Jeanne Eagels’s MGM film with John Gilbert, ten years later, started life with the same title—Fires of Youth—but was eventually called Man, Woman and Sin.
242. Quoted in Motion Picture Magazine, May 1918, p. 8.
243. Wid’s, May 31, 1917, p. 341.
244. Moving Picture World, January 11, 1919, p. 202.
245. Variety, November 19, 1920, p. 30.
246. Ibid.
247. Ross, “Cinema and Class Conflict,” p. 14.
248. Brandon ms. Besides Cannon, the Labor Film Service Board of directors included the president, Thomas D. Healy, of the Waterfront Federation; Darwin J. Meserole, publicist; I. M. Sackin, attorney; Dr. Isaac Grossman; and Herman Ross, business manager, Labor Film Service Bulletin, Upton Sinclair Collecton, MoMA/Lilly Library.
249. New York Call, August 12, 1920, quoted in Brandon ms.
250. Joseph Cannon to Upton Sinclair, August 23, 1920.
251. Joseph Cannon to Upton Sinclair, August 20, 1921; Ross, “Cinema and Class Conflict,” p. 33.
252. Variety, February 24, 1922, p. 38.
253. Ibid.
254. Variety, September 20, 1923, p. 18.
255. Cineaste 6, no. 4, n.p. It was the coal strike which drove the last of the East Coast studios to California and all but emptied Fort Lee, Variety, September 1, 1922, p. 47.
256. Wid’s, December 25, 1921.
257. Margaret Mann, the mother in John Ford’s Four Sons (1928), had a role in The New Disciple.
258. Photoplay, March 1922, p. 116.
259. Variety, December 23, 1921, p. 35.
260. Daily Worker, March 18, 1924, quoted in Brandon ms.
261. Steven Ross letter to author, June 9, 1989; Ross, “Cinema and Class Conflict,” p. 37.
262. The New Majority, October 17, 1925, quoted in Brandon ms.
263. The New Majority, October 17, 1925.
264. Ross, “Cinema and Class Conflict,” p. 35.
265. AFI Catalogue, 1921–1930, p. 504.
266. Motion Picture Magazine, May 1926, p. 28.
267. Laurence A. Hughes, ed., The Truth About the Movies (Hollywood: Hollywood Publishers, 1924), p. 455.
268. Picture Play, June 1927, pp. 24–25.
269. Ibid.
270. AFI Catalogue, 1921–1930, p. 505.
271. Picture Play, June 1927, p. 25. Lionel Stander made his first film appearance in Men of Steel, although he appeared only in the studio scenes shot in New York. The only incident he could recall was that some structure fell on top of some extras—probably the water tower effect, Stander to author, Cannes, 1964. Stander was later in trouble with McCarthy for being a “radical.”
272. Picture Play, June 1927, p. 25.
273. Variety, July 14, 1926, p. 14.
274. Ibid.
275. Ibid.
276. Photoplay, September 1926, p. 54.
277. Motion Picture Magazine, October 1926, p. 60.
278. Picture Play, February 1927, p. 10.
279. Mary Heaton Vorse wrote, “During that week (the fourth week of the strike) Margaret Larkin began her work as publicity director which meant that she worked all day and night, saw the newspaper men, ran to the court house, marched on the picket line, telephoned for speakers, got out daily statements and later got up concerts and worked on the moving picture,” The Passaic Textile Strike 1926–27 (General Relief Textile Strikers, 1927), quoted in Barry Sabath, “The Passaic Strike Comes to the Screen,” unpublished ms., 1976, Brandon Collection, MoMA.
280. Letter from Albin Zwiazek to author, August 1983.
281. Ibid.
282. Gus Deak to author, Garfield, New Jersey, November 1983.
283. Sam Brody to author, letter and telephone interview, August 1986.
284. Martha Stone Asher to author, London, May 1988.
285. The facts for this section come from Passaic, The Story of a Struggle, told by Albert Weisbord, published by the Workers (Communist) Party, Daily Worker Publishing Company, 1926, reprinted by AIMS press in New York in 1976; Paul L. Murphy, with Kermit Hall and David Klaassen, The Passaic Textile Strike of 1926 (Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 1974).
286. When, in 1919, the school authorities introduced a new scheme for the teaching of English, the millowners put such pressure on them they abandoned it. This was attributed to the owners’ fear of Bolshevism, although Bolshevism had flourished well enough in Russian and Hungarian.
287. Gus Deak to author, November 1983.
288. Ibid.
289. Ibid.
290. New York Times, March 4, 1926, quoted in Murphy, p. 12.
291. New York Times, March 5, 1926, quoted in Murphy, p. 15.
292. Albert Weisbord, questioned by Tom Brandon in 1976, declared that no film had been made of the strike, Weisbord letter to Brandon, January 6, 1976, Brandon Collection, MoMA.
293. Daily Worker, May 10, 1927, p. 2, Brandon Collection, MoMA.
294. Daily Worker, October 18, 1926, p. 6, Brandon Collection, MoMA.
295. Daily Worker, October 12, 1926, p. 5, Brandon Collection, MoMA.
296. Daily Worker, October 26, 1926, p. 4, quoted in Sabath, p. 9.
297. Daily Worker, December 1, 1926, p. 3, quoted in Sabath, p. 10.
298. Daily Worker, January 7, 1927, quoted in Sabath, p. 11.
299. Passaic Daily News, November 30, 1926, p. 2, quoted in Sabath, p. 11.
300. Daily Worker, March 4, 1927, p. 5.
301. Alfred Wagenknecht interview, Daily Worker, May 10, 1927, p. 2, Brandon Collection, MoMA.
302. Daily Worker, August 13, 1928, pp. 1, 3, Brandon Collection, MoMA. There is no record of this film being completed.
303. Gus Deak to author, November 1983. Albert Weisbord was expelled from the Communist party as a Trotskyite. According to Martha Asher, he devoted the years that followed to writing books and speaking wherever he could, “advancing the position of the Trotskyites in his never-ending attacks on the party.” She recalled a New Jersey Historical Society meeting in the 1970s when he was invited to speak on the strike, and instead he spent two hours making it clear that he was not associated with the Communist party. “He was obsessed, and that was unfortunate because he never told his story.”
304. Martha Asher to author, London, May 1988.