by Ellen Dawson
As Rob King argues, however, the drive to assimilate comic bodies, to curtail such wildly non-normative figures and feats, accelerated as well.
And by the early 1920s, the meanings associated with comedian Roscoe Arbuckle’s biological features—most specifically his “fatness”—formed a guarantee for those who would turn the 275-pound comedian into a
“scapegoat” for the “massive” and apparently uncontrollable growth of the film industry and of the spiraling, unprecedented, and unparalleled power of film stars to influence public perception by the end of the decade. King’s intricate analysis scrutinizes Arbuckle’s rising prominence as both director and star after 1915, during which time the comedian labored to overcome the perception of his “fatness” as a determining factor that relegated the meaning of his “self” to sheer “body.” Arbuckle also sought to transform perceptions of slapstick comedy as commonplace knockabout fun by incorporating elements of a pictorial tradition and a logic of simple rural pleasures tinged with a bit of good-hearted fun. “Body versus brain, performance versus direction, ‘Fatty’ versus ‘Roscoe’: these were the contradictory coordinates from which would emerge new parameters for comic stardom,”
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JENNIFER M. BEAN
Ben Turpin, undated photo. From the author’s collection.
King writes, while also revealing how these coordinates reflect conflicting cultural registers, a hybrid of genteel tastes and embodied sensations, of
“high” and “low” cultures, of a both/and logic that liquidates traditional distinctions and forms the basis of the movies’ emergence as “mass entertainment.” The scandal that terminated Arbuckle’s career in the early 1920s, however, and which altered the currency associated with film stars more generally, retreated to the easy economy of the biological body. As King
INTRODUCTION
21
puts it with characteristic flair, “Arbuckle’s fatness became polluted and obscene, at once the dead weight that allegedly crushed Virginia Rappe’s bladder and a symbol of moral disorder whose expulsion permitted the
‘normalization’ of the movies.”
Whether or not any norm was secured by stardom, or by an American film industry more generally in the decades to follow, remains the task of the subsequent volumes in this series. Frankly, I have my doubts. What remains vividly certain, however, is one simple fact: as a new breed of historians, vitalized by the broader reach of archival materials available in the digital age, set off roaming through the messy, mass-mediated phenomenon shaping modern celebrity culture, we must agree to disagree on certain counts. By embracing just this spirit, Flickers of Desire aspires to the fully contradictory status of a “collection of essays.” The result is a study of stardom’s genesis that is whole enough, at moments, to cohere in an identifiable set of concerns, but partial enough, at other or even the same moments, to frustrate any totalizing assessment. What becomes evident in the pages that follow is that contributors share a powerful sense of commonality in confronting cultural and historical issues—about politics, identity, nationalism, consumerism, economics, and aesthetics—and in insisting that stars are central rather than peripheral to the constitutive matrix of film history. In so doing, we hope this collection prompts further explorations as to how and why, in the course of the ten years covered by this book, a cinema without stars, one lacking even the habit of crediting names on the screen, developed into a cinema in which stars became the American film industry’s gold standard, its determining economic and aesthetic factor—and consequently its greatest risk.
N OT E
1. I borrow the phrase “like you and me” from Richard Dyer, with a touch of irony intact. The most common error marring general scholarship on film stardom has been the tendency to treat the silent era as a homogenous “early period,” a time, according to Dyer’s oft-cited study, when “stars were gods and goddesses, heroes, models—embodiments of ideal ways of behaving” ( Stars 24). Dyer erroneously pinpoints a “paradigm” shift, somewhere near the end of the 1920s and the beginning of the 1930s, when stars transformed from
“gods to mortals” and became “identification figures, people like you and me—embodiments of typical ways of behaving” (24, my emphasis). Taken together, the first two volumes in this Star Decades series offer an important correction to this historical generalization. Compare, for instance, Scott Curtis’s discussion of Douglas Fairbanks’s rise to stardom in this volume with his subsequent chapter on Fairbanks, “King of Hollywood,” in Idols of Modernity: Movie Stars of the 1920s. In the latter, Curtis traces the emergence of a discourse around 1920 that granted stars like Fairbanks the status of “royalty,” and hence altered the democratic rhetoric that suffuses these earlier years in which stars were understood as “identification figures, people like you and me.”
1 ★★★★★★★★★★
✩✩✩✩✩✩✩✩✩✩
G. M. Anderson
“Broncho Billy” among the Early
“Picture Personalities”
RICHARD ABEL
Among the “picture personalities” who increasingly
assumed a crucial role in promoting motion pictures between 1910 and 1912, G. M. “Broncho Billy” Anderson certainly was one of the more remarkable. In the fall of 1911, for instance, in the industrial heartland of northeastern Ohio, the Canton News-Democrat ballyhooed Anderson as “the best known motion picture actor living . . . his face [as] familiar to the people of this country as that of President Taft’s” (“This Man’s Photo Seen Every Day by 300,000,” 5 November 1911, 15). By the following spring, Essanay G. M. Anderson, Essanay Photoplayer, circa 1913.
22
G. M. ANDERSON
23
was boasting that Anderson was now famous worldwide for the character he often played, “Broncho Billy” (Essanay ad, Moving Picture World, 30
March 1912, 1123). In Great Britain, several months later, Bioscope made an even more extravagant claim for what it called this “magnetic man”: he
“can be ‘felt’ photographically on a screen, just as Irving was ‘felt’ in actual life” on the English stage (“The Pick of the Programmes,” 1 August 1912, 367). Anderson arguably demands attention as a pioneering cowboy movie star, whose popularity as “Broncho Billy” offers some insight into why westerns became such an “American subject” in the early 1910s. His regular weekly appearances onscreen also suggest why audiences were so attracted to other early “personalities” as well—for example, Florence Lawrence, Florence Turner, Marion Leonard, Alice Joyce, Mary Pickford, Maurice Costello—and how that attraction registered not only in the trade press but also in local newspapers. Moreover, the unusual fame that his cowboy character quickly enjoyed abroad can be taken as an early sign of the U.S. film industry’s heady opportunistic aims to expand its reach beyond the borders of the USA.
✩★
✩★
✩★
✩★
✩ The “Broncho Billy” Brand
I love to watch the cowboys
And see the horses run,
I wish I had a hundred votes
For Gilbert Anderson!
(Buster Trishy, a Texas boy, “Popular Player Contest,”
Motion Picture Story Magazine, April 1912, 137)
So who was G. M. Anderson prior to his starring role as
“Broncho Billy”? Born Max Aronson in Little Rock, Arkansas, on 21 March 1880, and raised in St. Louis, Missouri, the man who would become “Broncho Billy” was an unsuccessful New York stage actor and sometime model for magazine illustrators before he Anglicized his name to George M.
Anderson in 1903, was hired by the Edison Manufacturing Company, and played several minor roles in The Great Train Robbery (1903). After learning as much as he could about the new motion picture business, Anderson convinced the Vitagraph Company to let him write and direct more than a dozen comedies and dramas between the summer of 1905 and the spring of 1906. Refused a part
nership at Vitagraph, he went to work for Selig Polyscope in Chicago and, in the winter and spring of 1907, joined H. H. Buckwalter in Denver to make several profitable westerns, among them The Girl from Montana and The Bandit King (both 1907). Refused a share of Selig’s
24
RICHARD ABEL
business as well, in the summer of 1907 he teamed up with another Chicago exhibitor/distributor, George K. Spoor, to found a new film production company, Essanay (S & A), and changed his name one last time to Gilbert M. Anderson. During the next several years, as Essanay became a member of the MPPC, Anderson wrote, directed, and sometimes acted in one film on average per week and, leading a peripatetic production unit (its headquarters shifted from Southern California to Colorado to Texas and back to Southern California), gradually began to specialize in “school of action” western films such as The Road Agents or The Indian Trailer (both 1909) and Under Western Skies or Broncho Billy’s Redemption (both 1910). The last title would be the first in a series of increasingly numerous Broncho Billy one-reelers, in all of which Anderson starred: three in 1911, nineteen in 1912, and thirty-four in 1913.
Anyone seeking more detailed information about G. M. Anderson’s pioneering career, his construction in 1912 of a permanent studio in Niles, California, and the fortunes of Essanay have several excellent sources from which to choose (Kiehn; Smith). The task here, however, is to locate traces of Anderson’s early stardom, sketch a portrait of the actor as a movie cowboy, especially as “Broncho Billy,” and account for that figure’s phenomenal appeal in the early 1910s. References to Anderson in the trade press prior to 1911 focused on the reputation he had gained from building and managing Essanay’s western production unit and from turning out a steady schedule of noteworthy films. That spring, the New York Dramatic Mirror in particular also began to take notice of him as an actor, printing his “leading man”
photo among the first “picture personalities” that would regularly mark its weekly pages and acknowledging that he was “known to thousands of picture lovers, with whom he is a favorite” (“‘Spectator’s’ Comments,” 16 April 1911, 28–29). By the summer of 1911, Anderson was so well known that exhibitors everywhere could use his name—along with a few others—to promote their frequently changing programs in local newspapers. In Ada, Oklahoma, for instance, the Majestic Theater put his name above the title of its featured Essanay western and advertised in the Ada Evening News: “G. M.
Anderson in ‘A Pal’s Oath’” (11 August 1911, 3). In Mansfield, Ohio, the Arbor Theater lauded The Puncher’s Law (September 1911) as another one of those “famous western pictures by the Essanay Co. in which they feature the very popular actor G. M. Anderson” ( Mansfield News, 3 October 1911, 5). In Canton, Ohio, the Odeon assumed that its clientele would want to know that The Sheriff’s Brother (July 1911) had “Mr. Anderson, everybody’s favorite, in [the] leading role” ( Canton News-Democrat, 9 September 1911, n.p.) That fall, in nearby Youngstown, the Princess Theater arranged with
G. M. ANDERSON
25
the local newspaper to print Essanay’s publicity photo of Anderson and a brief story calling him “one of the most popular motion picture actors of the day” (“Today’s Entertainments,” Youngstown Vindicator, 15 October 1911, 15).
For months thereafter, all of its Sunday program ads featured an Essanay western starring Anderson, now locally nicknamed “Bullets” ( Youngstown Vindicator, 15 October 1911, 15, and 7 January 1912, 17). By early 1912, many exhibitors could count on a large, steady audience for “Broncho Billy”
stories with G. M. Anderson in the title role.1
A stolid, rather stocky man with a full, heavy face and prominent nose, Anderson would have been the first to admit that his range as an actor was limited. A reviewer once wrote of his acting that he played with “the usual sturdy vigor” ( New York Dramatic Mirror, 10 January 1912, 30). Yet he came off well if a shot required him to look taciturn, or to glower tight-lipped at an antagonist, or to appear uncomfortably quiet while facing a young woman, or even to smile at a lone child, and he projected (much like the aging John Wayne would in later decades) an unexpectedly strong presence onscreen. Although he had to learn to ride horses, handle revolvers and rifles, and wear lived-in cowboy gear comfortably, Anderson was clearly convincing and accepted by audiences as “true to life”: in May 1911, an experienced cowhand claimed that his “movements, his dress and, more than anything else, that smile of his and his facial expressions make him . . .
the best cowboy character delineator of any film concern” (“Letters to ‘The Spectator,’” New York Dramatic Mirror, 24 May 1911, 33). Trade press reviews consistently praised his “gripping characterization,” whether as
“Broncho Billy” or another cowboy figure, as in The Bandit’s Child (March 1912) ( Moving Picture World, 2 March 1912, 768). Local exhibitors more and more featured his name in their ads: in Lowell, Massachusetts, Anderson was the Voyons’ “favorite western actor”; in Fort Wayne, Indiana, his name assured the Gaiety’s fans that Broncho Billy’s Bible (June 1912) was “a big, vital, powerful picture”; in Hamilton, Ohio, the Jewel perhaps inadvertently misnamed his character “Broncho Billy” in advertising The Dead Man’s Claim (May 1912); in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, the Princess called Anderson the “king of Motion Picture players” ( Sheboygan Journal, 5 April 1912, 8; Hamilton Evening Journal, 11 May 1912, 2; Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette, 2 June 1912, 9; Lowell Sun, 6 June 1912, 10). The title of “king” was not all that inappropriate, for, in Motion Picture Story Magazine’s first “Popular Players Contest,” he was among the top five actors receiving more than
“one million and a half votes” from fans (“Winners of the Popular Players Contest,” July 1912, 34). By June 1912, Essanay could offer enthusiastic fans, like the Texas boy quoted above, “4 sepia-tone lithographed posters
26
RICHARD ABEL
and postal photos of G. M. Anderson . . . the World’s Greatest Photoplay Star” (see the Essanay ads in New York Dramatic Mirro r, 29 May 1912, 29, and Moving Picture World, 1 June 1912, 787).
Well before committing to the “Broncho Billy” series, Anderson already had developed the recurring kind of cowboy figure that would make him (and others later, from William S. Hart to Clint Eastwood) a star: the “good badman.” In Under Western Skies (August 1910),2 for instance, he plays one of three drunken cowboys who attack a young woman left alone at a ranch and make her the stake in a poker game and then in a gunfight; in desperation the woman agrees to marry the survivor (Anderson) but refuses to accept him. Her fiancé, who has been away on a trip east, tracks the couple down and gets her to flee with him but eventually abandons her when they lose their way in the desert. When Anderson, now a respectable miner, finds her, she finally pledges to love him and then persuades him not to shoot the coward who once promised to marry her. An even more telling instance of this “good badman” appears in A Pal’s Oath (August 1911).When a doctor refuses to tend to his badly injured “pal,” Anderson robs a pony express rider whose money pouch he has spotted so he can pay for what turns out to be a successful treatment—and the “pal” promises to keep the robbery a secret.
Later, however, he arranges Anderson’s arrest and imprisonment so he can marry the woman his friend has been courting. Released from jail several years later, Anderson plans his revenge. Now a disheveled figure, he peers through a ranch house window (much like the one through which the “pal”
first saw the courting couple) and discovers the “pal” embracing his wife and young daughter (a portrait of Lincoln hangs prominently on the back wall).
Startled and saddened, he slowly holsters the revolver he has aimed through the window, shakes his head, and quietly steals away.
This redemptive character increasingly had the benefit of similarly strong stories, most notably in one of the earliest “Broncho Billy” films, Broncho Billy’s Christmas Dinner (December 1911). This film begins with a town sheriff receiving news about the ou
tlaw Broncho Billy, his daughter preparing to take a stagecoach off to college, and Broncho Billy himself planning to rob the stagecoach—and smiling as he rips a wanted poster off a tree. Drunken cowboys spook the stagecoach horses, and the daughter, who has been sitting in the driver’s seat, struggles vainly to rein in the out-of-control horses. Surprised by the stagecoach that races past him, Broncho Billy rides after it, climbs on board, and gradually brings the horses to a halt. Recovering from a faint, the young woman thanks him by inviting him home for Christmas dinner; after eyeing the cash box he intended to steal, Broncho Billy reluctantly accepts. When he discovers she is the sher-
G. M. ANDERSON
27
iff’s daughter, Broncho Billy decides to confess his identity and the sheriff offers him immunity. Although he tries to leave, the daughter draws him back to the dinner table where everyone accepts him with a handshake and all (but Billy) bow their heads for a blessing by the local parson—who, ironically, had been buying drinks earlier for the drunken cowboys. In reviewing this film, the New York Dramatic Mirror found the “thrilling ride on [the]
stage coach . . . as exciting and realistic as anything of its character ever shown in pictures” (“Reviews of Licensed Films,” 3 January 1912, 30).
Indeed, the surviving film print reveals some deft framing and editing, including an unusual high angle midshot/long shot taken from a camera mounted behind Broncho Billy as he struggles with the horses’ reins. Yet the Mirror also was impressed by his acting “in the quieter moments” of the film, such as when, near the end, a pensive Broncho Billy is washing up in the foreground space of a small room while, in the larger adjacent space, the family and other guests cluster around the festive dinner table.
Throughout 1912 and into 1913, Anderson’s “Broncho Billy” character often appeared initially onscreen as an outlaw or else as a cowboy between jobs, and almost never as a rancher, entrepreneur, or any kind of property owner. Provoked by one or more twists of plot, the character then usually underwent a transformation through “moral and psychological conflict”
