Goldwyn

by A. Scott Berg

  DeMille opened a motion picture studio. He hired a secretary, who, for fifteen dollars a week, provided her own typewriter. A partition was erected in the barn to create an office, and five stables became dressing rooms. A stage with canvas diffusers was constructed outside, and backdrops were painted. DeMille interviewed prospective actors right away and drew a large number of local talent, mostly cowboys and a few young actors who had appeared in one- and two-reel films. DeMille’s ledger noted that he hired an extra named Hal Roach for five dollars a day and rejected Jane Darwell, because the actress was already commanding sixty dollars a week. Orange trees were dug up, and a big sign announcing the company’s name was painted. The budget of The Squaw Man quickly ran up to $47,000, more than twice the company’s assets. New York would somehow have to meet these needs.

  Goldfish scrounged among his friends but found no backers. The Laskys were fast souring on the entire undertaking. Goldfish was able to borrow a few thousand dollars from a Philadelphia bank, but that only bandaged the financial hemorrhaging. The company’s viability depended on a large transfusion of money.

  Goldfish announced in the newspapers that the Lasky Company was going to produce a yearly slate of five-reel pictures, one a month, and that each state’s rights for those films could be purchased in advance. In the matter of The Squaw Man, he guaranteed “a prospective epic of the screen for which theaters would be able to charge as much as 25 cents,” top price those days. “The films you have seen so far are only rehearsals for what we’re going to do,” Goldwyn remembered saying. “The time is coming when the best plays and the best actors will be in pictures. This is going to be the greatest entertainment medium in the world.”

  Fortunately, Adolph Zukor had just successfully financed a five-reel version of The Prisoner of Zenda. Expansive motion picture stories were catching on with the public. Though the Trust filmmakers rejected this new idea as too expensive and referred to these lengthy films as “the feature craze,” the independent exchanges were grabbing every new five-reeler they could.

  Goldfish received immediate requests, starting with a California theater manager who plunked down four thousand dollars for the rights to show The Squaw Man. Then Goldfish began guaranteeing the Lasky Company’s roster of a dozen films for the next year. He made deals with fourteen states’ rights buyers, who made deposits on all twelve films. They did not realize they were in fact paying the costs of the first.

  On December 29, 1913, a sunny Monday, DeMille gathered the members of his cast and crew outside the Stern barn for a group photograph. Then the shooting of motion pictures began—six days a week, so long as there was daylight, for a month. The Squaw Man was not, as has often been claimed, the first motion picture made in Hollywood. In fact, several small movie companies had filmed one- and two-reelers there for years; Griffith had made annual hegiras since 1910. The independents appreciated the distance from the Trust raiders and the proximity to Mexico in case they suddenly had to flee; more experienced filmmakers appreciated the profusion of sunlight and the variety of settings—snowy mountains, deserts, a city, and the sea all within a day’s drive. The Squaw Man, which would use most of those locations, became the first feature-length film produced in Hollywood.

  During one lull early in the shoot, DeMille noticed a crew member putting a lighted cigarette up to a discarded scrap of film and saw it vanish in a puff of smoke. Realizing how fragile these “permanent” pictures were, he made an extravagant request: that two negatives be taken of every scene in the picture—one to be kept in the barn and one in his home.

  After a few days of shooting, DeMille entered the small, unlighted laboratory set up next to the barn, and before his eyes had adjusted to the darkness, he felt something underfoot. When he picked it up, his first panic-stricken thought was confirmed. All the footage of The Squaw Man to date had been scraped and torn and strewn. It would have been curtains for the Lasky Company had it not been for the extra negative at DeMille’s house in Cahuenga Canyon. The perpetrator was never unmasked, but the director-general always assumed it was one of the people in that photograph taken on the first day of shooting, someone bribed by the Trust.

  DeMille kept such catastrophes from the New York office. He already knew better than to trouble the company’s treasurer with situations beyond his control. Besides, Goldfish was busy rustling up states’ rights money. Once most of The Squaw Man was “in the can,” DeMille invited Lasky to inspect his studio.

  Lasky was present for the filming of the final shots of The Squaw Man; and in a few days it was completely assembled, as simple as that. The straightforward tale of an Indian maiden who saves the life of a British aristocrat, bears his child, then commits suicide required little more editing than the pasting together of each day’s footage. DeMille and Lasky announced a screening of the film right in the barn for all who had worked on it and their families. Everybody connected with the film was there, except the company’s legal counsel, Arthur Friend, and the man who had launched the entire venture and kept it afloat. Goldfish waited anxiously in New York for a telegram of good news.

  Over fifty people gathered that night at the end of January 1914 in the big, drafty barn out in the desolate flats of Hollywood, coyotes howling all around them. The lights were turned out and the projector started to whir. “The title of ‘The Squaw Man’ went on the screen,” DeMille remembered, “and promptly skittered off at the top of the screen. The actors appeared, and as promptly climbed out of sight, sometimes leaving their feet at the top of the screen and their heads peeking up from the bottom.” They rewound the film and threaded the machine again. When they started it up, they encountered the same snag. The film looked all right, and there was no evidence of further sabotage, but the mysterious problem remained. The disheartened audience dispersed, leaving Lasky and DeMille alone to sulk over their ruination.

  The thought of prison sentences passed through DeMille’s mind, for Sam Goldfish had raised a lot of money that was tied up in a mile of worthless celluloid. Almost immediately after informing Sam of the catastrophe, Jesse left for San Francisco, where he was having trouble with one of his vaudeville acts at the Orpheum, Lasky’s Redheads. He thanked God he had a career to fall back on.

  Even in uncharted territory, Sam Goldfish never lost his sense of true north. He went straight to the top, this time calling on Sigmund Lubin of Philadelphia, an impish German-Jewish immigrant who had bought into the film business as early as 1896. Now in his sixties and known as “Pop,” he was reputed to be the most knowledgeable man about film there was. He was also the one maverick member of the Motion Picture Patents Trust. Goldfish knew that Lubin had fought against the Edison company before the Trust was established; and he had since been known to rent out his Philadelphia rooftop studio to independents. Short of suing the East-man Kodak Company for selling them defective film, Goldfish had nowhere else to turn.

  “I got so emotional telling him my story,” Goldwyn recounted years later, “I was practically in tears.” Lubin sympathized. Contrary to Trust policy, he agreed to diagnose the problem. DeMille and Lasky (who rendezvoused in Chicago) went by train to Philadelphia with the tins containing The Squaw Man. They had not left DeMille’s side for an instant during the cross-country journey; nor had DeMille’s revolver. Arthur Friend came down from New York, and they converged upon Lubin’s studio.

  Pop Lubin held a piece of the negative up to the light and reeled it through his fingers. “The negative stock was defective, wasn’t it?” offered Friend, girding his loins for legal battle. Lubin said there was no trouble with the stock, but he would have to examine the film in the next room. He left the officers of the Lasky Company for fifteen minutes, then returned with a broad grin.

  Under Pop Lubin’s questioning, DeMille revealed that in a moment of frugality he had purchased a secondhand, British-made machine for punching sprocket holes along the sides of the film. What DeMille had been too green to know was that his American equipment was regulated for film sproc
keted at sixty-four holes per foot, while the British punched out sixty-five. In his drive to economize, Cecil had purchased unperforated positive stock and hand-punched the sprockets himself, each hole off the mark by a few microns. Lubin said his company could fix the film by pasting a strip of film over the edge of the negative and re-perforating it. Within days, the Lasky Company’s first product was ready to market.

  They had taken offices in the Longacre Theater Building on West Forty-eighth Street, at the heart of Broadway. On Tuesday morning, February 17, 1914, The Squaw Man had its first trade showing, in the theater downstairs. Goldfish had arranged the preview, packing the house with as many important journalists and buyers as he could gather. He had, of course, already sold a good share of the states’ rights, but the company’s future hinged on this audience’s reaction.

  Lasky and DeMille took seats in the rear of the little theater, “to watch for the moving of heads, the shifting of bodies, the coughs, the laughter at the wrong places, and the other unconscious signs which are always a more accurate gauge of audience reaction than what the viewers say or write about a picture.” Sprocket holes constantly showed up on the muslin sheet that served as a screen; and the film broke six times in the next hour. But the six-reel story in 264 scenes entranced the audience. When the houselights came up, Goldfish found himself the center of adulation. He introduced Lasky and DeMille, who took their bows. Buyers swarmed around them. One was Louis B. Mayer, who said he would pay four thousand dollars for the rights to run the film in his theaters. Another was the undisputed leader of feature films, Adolph Zukor himself.

  Until then, Goldfish had not met Zukor, but he had been so impressed by his life story that he often folded the more pathetic details of their similar backgrounds into his own autobiography. Zukor was but one year old when his father died in Hungary in 1874; his mother remarried but died eight years later. In 1888, he successfully pleaded with the Orphan’s Bureau to let him emigrate to America. He apprenticed in a fur shop on the Lower East Side, and within four years he had moved to Chicago, where he became a furrier. Not until 1900 did a prosperous Zukor return to New York City.

  In 1903, a penny arcade owner from Buffalo got Zukor to invest in a similar emporium in Manhattan. They opened their arcade on Fourteenth Street at Broadway. A few months later, Zukor converted the second floor into a motion picture theater. Within a few years, he had four-hundred-seat nickelodeons in Newark, Boston, and Philadelphia.

  Zukor began to realize that the novelty of one- and two-reel chases and comedies had worn off. He concluded that “the only chance motion pictures had of being successful was if stories or plays could be produced which were like those on the stage or in magazines and novels. That way you could give something to the public that would hold their interest.”

  Opportunely, Zukor heard that Sarah Bernhardt had just closed in a successful European tour of a play called Queen Elizabeth and that its French producer wished to preserve the performance on film. Zukor agreed to finance the picture in exchange for the American rights. He cleverly exhibited the film in legitimate theaters during their dark afternoons.

  “For the first time a movie had been reviewed and written about in the papers,” Zukor would remember most of a century later. “They said Sarah Bernhardt had ‘starred’ in a motion picture.” Its success set Zukor on a course of presenting “famous players in famous plays.” He began to populate his films with stars from the stage who had proved their ability to fascinate audiences. When several of their vehicles did not go over as well in theaters as Zukor had expected, he realized, “The public attending motion pictures had never heard of or seen these theatrical stars. Matinee idols meant nothing to them at all. Finally we had to build our own stars.”

  THE public determined which screen deities would be placed or replaced in their pantheon; but the filmmakers decided which actors could even be considered. At first, only D. W Griffith’s opinions of talent mattered. But he tended to believe in his own mythology, putting more stock in his powers of attracting the public than in his actors‘. Mack Sennett, once an unemployed actor, never forgot Griffith at the old Biograph brownstone on Fourteenth Street, toiling and grimacing “to make his actors and actresses act,” all but turning them into marionettes whose movements were regulated by the lifting of his finger. He rehearsed their every smile and tear.

  “Not until your name becomes a household word in every family—not only in America, but in the world, if the world feels it knows you and loves you—will you be a star in motion pictures,” Griffith told Lillian Gish. And though he was the first to recognize that possibility in James Kirkwood, Mack Sennett, Mabel Normand, and Mary Pickford, as well as Lillian Gish and her sister, Dorothy, he was just as ready to auction them off.

  Adolph Zukor was the highest bidder. Having managed theaters, he had a sense of whom the audiences came to see. Although the one everybody called “Little Mary” was scarcely twenty years old—and hardly a famous player—Zukor saw something special in her performances on both stage and screen. But Mary was not convinced that motion pictures were good for her career.

  Zukor knew what made Mary Pickford tick. She was a native of Toronto, the daughter of an unsteadily employed laborer who died before she was school age, leaving another daughter and a son to be supported by their mother, Charlotte. The young widow paid the mortgage by taking in boarders; one of them, an actor, spoke of getting jobs for the little girls in local stock companies. When Zukor met Charlotte Pickford, he suggested astronomical sums for her daughter’s services. For five hundred dollars per week, Mary was his.

  Zukor went after every actor he thought had star potential. Biograph was always an easy target for a raid. “Once you had worked with Mr. Griffith,” Lillian Gish recalled, “other companies were always eager to hire you.” All it took to lure most actors away was a bump up in salary.

  In that moment the parallel aims of show business—art and commerce—diverged. “You can see that difference between Mr. Griffith and Adolph Zukor,” observed Blanche Sweet, an actress who worked both sides of the street. “More than anybody else at the time, they embodied the artistic possibilities of motion pictures and the financial. Don’t get me wrong, the Griffith pictures did very well at the box office, but he didn’t know anything about money, and he was always broke.” And many of Zukor’s films were artistic successes. One of them needed money to make his films, the other needed films to make his money.

  Once it dawned on these early producers that stars pulled audiences into theaters, there ensued a mad pursuit. Vitagraph signed the elegant Clara Kimball Young and the handsome Wallace Reid; comedies were created for a fat man called John Bunny. Rough-and-ready Tom Mix first rode into pictures for Selig. Essanay—“Broncho Billy” Anderson’s company—signed a former sculptor’s model who had won the Ladies’ World “Hero Contest,” Francis X. Bushman. Pathé made a star of Pearl White, who appeared in a successful series—each episode ending with a cliff-hanger—called The Perils of Pauline.

  An erstwhile actor named Thomas Ince realized he had a greater future behind a camera than in front. He was directing at IMP when a former bookmaker named Adam Kessel and his friend from the track named Charles O. Baumann offered him the opportunity to make westerns in California. Ince enlisted a friend he had worked with on Broadway, a stone-faced Shakespearean actor named William S. Hart.

  Baumann and Kessel, who formed a production company called Reliance, were lunching at Luchow’s in New York in the late summer of 1912 when they noticed the tall and stocky Mack Sennett. Born Michael Sinnott in Canada, he had been directing at Biograph and thinking about the comic possibilities of policemen. “I kept right on telling D. W Griffith that cops were funny,” Sennett later recalled, because they had dignity—“and wherever there is dignity, comics can embroil it, embarrass it, flee from it, and thumb their noses at it.... I wanted to take a giant step and reduce cops to absurdities.” Griffith failed to see the humor.

  Kessel and Baumann offere
d Sennett the opportunity to direct his own films in his own fashion. They were all walking past Penn Station, trying to settle on a name for the company, when Sennett looked up and saw the Pennsylvania nickname on the building. By the end of the summer he was making “Keystone” comedies, with a sympathetic fatso named Roscoe Arbuckle and a number of Biograph stars he had nabbed, including a doe-eyed comedienne named Mabel Normand.

  While still an extra at Griffith’s studio, Mack Sennett had caught Karno’s Pantomime Company, an English vaudeville troupe, and been especially impressed with a performer who portrayed a drunk in their show A Night in an English Music Hall. In 1913, when Sennett was building his troupe of players, he tracked down the five-foot-four-inch, twenty-four-year-old mime and offered him $150 a week to appear in motion pictures. Divinely inspired, Charles Chaplin picked up a pair of oversized shoes, a cane, and a cocked derby and developed a character right before Mack Sennett’s camera eye. “You know this fellow is many-sided,” Chaplin explained one day, “a tramp, a gentleman, a poet, a dreamer, a lonely fellow, always hopeful of romance and adventure.”

  BY the end of February 1914, The Squaw Man was in release. Within two weeks of its preview, only seventeen states did not have prints of the film running; a week later, only four states’ rights remained unsold. The Lasky Company was on the map, having grossed by late spring close to $250,000. (Goldwyn swore all his life that Louis B. Mayer paid only half the $4,000 he contracted for that night in the Longacre Theater, the second strike against Mayer in Goldwyn’s book.) Like all the other new production companies, the Lasky Company began to look for stars and properties.