Moving Pictures
Next day there was a news story, prompted by B.P.’s energetic releases, on the enthusiastic response of the scores of literary, artistic, and dramatic figures who showed up at the Lyceum, who had sat entranced throughout the four reels, and who had applauded at the end as though Madame Bernhardt were there in person to take a bow. But the officials of the Trust who attended out of curiosity remained unconvinced. The exclusive audience was impressed, they argued, only because they were seeing Sarah Bernhardt. Try the same four-reel experiment with your ordinary actor and this overly ambitious form would fall flat on its face.
While I was teething, this Motion Picture War of Independence was seething. General Kennedy employed an army of spies to infiltrate the independent productions. Spying was easy because filmmaking was still so informal. When extras were needed they were usually recruited from the curious onlookers attracted to the open sets. There were no unions or guilds to bar the way to instant employment. And the young moviemakers were ever on the lookout for fresh talent, from bit players to technicians. Just as my father had walked in on Edwin S. Porter at his studio in The Bronx and immediately become a photoplay writer because he obviously knew how to put words together, so anyone who had ever tinkered with a camera and knew how to thread one with raw stock might find himself hired on the spot as a cameraman.
Kennedy’s spies were paid not only to report back to him, but to sabotage independent production. James Cruze, later to become famous as the director of The Covered Wagon in the heyday of the silents, told my young father of a typical Trust-war incident: He was acting in a western on the plains of Mamaroneck, with the good guys shooting it out with the bad guys, their blank cartridges giving off the sound of a miniwar, when suddenly a live bullet went crashing through the unlicensed or “pirated” camera, ending in every sense the shooting for that day and very nearly the life of the cameraman as well. One of the good guys, now revealed as a Kennedy goon disguised as a cowboy, spurred his bronco to make his getaway from Jim Cruze and the Thanhouser Company extras whom this sabotage had transformed into a genuine posse.
Goons were sent out from the Trust to destroy Independent equipment, expose their film, and burn their sets. An “extra” would suddenly turn out to be a process server, with orders for the police to confiscate equipment. The dragons in my fairy tales were Kennedy and his goons.
Despite the financial and political power of the Trust, month by month the Independents were winning. And they were winning for the same reason that rebel leaders often win—they had the people with them. Zukor, with Porter and B.P. and the rest of his advance guard, was right: Once audiences saw lengthier films with better stories and finer actors they quickly turned away from the stale old one-reelers that the Trust companies went on cranking out at so much a foot. Once they saw someone on the screen to whom they responded emotionally they demanded to know his name, or hers. When Mary Pickford was appearing in one-reelers for Biograph, one of the most influential companies in the Trust, she began to receive a stream of letters—the first fan mail. Instead of embracing this great new audience, Biograph gave it the back of its hand. Thousands of letters, my father remembered, were simply dumped into the trash can. People begging to know the name of “that cute little girl with the beautiful curls” were not to be told that she was Mary Pickford. For if Little Mary, as her fans began to call her, began to realize her importance, she would want more money. Mary had been on the stage since she was five years old, touring with her mother Charlotte; at fifteen she had a sense of the dollar and of her impending value at the box office. Give her and her tough old mama an inch and they would take a mile, J. J. Kennedy argued.
“They actually thought they could keep her anonymous,” my father told me. “She was making one picture a week, and with every release she was becoming more of a national idol. Talk about not being able to see the handwriting on the wall, they literally couldn’t see the close-up on their own screen. So Mary Pickford came to us, to Famous Players, and first we paid her twenty thousand a year and then one thousand dollars a week, then two thousand, and finally four thousand—but she and her mother were never satisfied—especially when they heard that her chief rival in popularity, Charlie Chaplin, had just signed a new contract for six hundred and seventy thousand dollars a year. Suddenly four thousand a week—even back in ’16, the good old days before taxes—looked like chicken feed. She wanted a thousand dollars a day.”
Charlotte and Mary were perhaps the first star bargainers in the history of this tough bargaining business to employ the now familiar blackmail against which the best written contract is helpless: “Little Mary is so unhappy at hearing how much more Charlie Chaplin is making that the poor child is positively sick. She might become too upset to come to work. And if she does show up at the studio, how can she do her best work when her mind is distracted by her financial problems?”
“What a crisis that was for Mr. Zukor, for all of us,” Father said. Zukor used to walk the streets all night trying to solve problems like that. If he signed her, it would be at a staggering sum for twenty pictures a year; they would have to raise prices at all the movie theaters springing up around the country. He paid and prayed.
“She was not just the first screen idol, she had become a national institution,” my father explained. “The symbol of rags to riches, of the good little girl overcoming evil. The titles of the pictures we made with her say a lot about what she meant to America: Cinderella, Poor Little Rich Girl, Pollyanna, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, A Dawn of Tomorrow… She was poised delicately between childhood and adolescence. Even when she was twenty years old, married to Owen Moore, and able to play young romantic leads, America still wanted to see her with her long golden curls and her puckered little-girl lips. They wanted to keep her a perennial child. I really think she was the perfect symbol of our own wide-eyed innocence, before the War and the new generation of sheiks and flappers changed our morality.
“Calling Mary ‘America’s Sweetheart’ was not exactly a stroke of genius. I was simply putting down in two words what everybody in America seemed to be feeling about her. I was standing in front of a theater one day watching people buy tickets to see Mary in one of the early movies I wrote for her when a middle-aged couple stopped in front of a display of stills from the picture. ‘There she is,’ the husband said. ‘My little sweetheart.’ Remember, people really talked a lot more sentimentally in those days. ‘She’s not just your little sweetheart, she’s everybody’s sweetheart,’ his wife said. It rang a bell. That’s exactly what she was—America’s Sweetheart! I went back and tried it first on Al Kaufman, and then on Mr. Zukor himself, and they loved it. I wrote it into our next ad and she’s been ‘America’s Sweetheart’ ever since.”
By the time I was three years old, the businesslike Mary and her shrewd mother-manager Charlotte Smith were raising the ante to ten thousand a week, and half the profits. They insisted that her pictures—now limited to ten a year—not be sold in a block with all the other Famous Players product but released through a subsidiary to be called the Mary Pickford Famous Players Company. In four incredible years, unlike any in the history of entertainment from Aesop to Zukor, Little Mary had gone from an uncredited fifty-dollar-a-week moving-picture-show performer to a star whose earning power for a single year had rocketed to a cool million. It was a price that not even Zukor was prepared to pay, even though, in that same dynamic period, he had gone from an obscure nickelodeon owner to president of a twenty-five-million-dollar company that was growing every day.
Although I had adopted Ed Porter and Adolph Zukor as my simulated uncles, I never thought of Mary Pickford as a vicariously glamorous aunt. Maybe I inherited from B.P. a sense of her ingratitude for his services. I had only the dimmest memory of her, unlike my lasting impressions of Mr. Zukor, and my trips to the Zukor farm in New York City—where I saw my first cow. (In our apartment overlooking the park I had been drinking the fresh milk delivered by the Zukor chauffeur without appreciating the source of this cool
white liquid.) My “bad” grandfather Simon had disappeared, mysteriously, and my “good” grandfather Max wasn’t much fun, drinking tea from a saucer and rocking back and forth muttering prayers in a strange language. But “Uncle” Adolph was young and spry, a neat, energetic, kindly figure as he showed off his horses and cows.
Influenced by the European-made biblical spectacles, D. W. Griffith, while still working for Biograph, went out to California to make his ambitious four-reel Judith of Bethulia. One of the reasons he took that long trip across the continent was to get out from under the grip of the Trust. Independents were going to “the coast,” as it was called then and has been known ever since, not so much for the perpetual sun that would light roofless interiors (winter sunshine was more accessible in Florida) as to escape the goons and the process servers of the Trust. It was this game of cat-and-mouse that really started Hollywood on its way to becoming the film capital of the world.
Even when Griffith brought his four-reel film east, hoping its impact would soften the hearts or strengthen the minds of the Patents Company executives, they insisted on clinging to their antique ways. Judith of Bethulia was released one reel at a time, like a serial. They could not recognize the genius of the filmmaker who was on the threshold of making the film that is the second great landmark in the history of American cinema: The Birth of a Nation. He had to leave Biograph and the Trust, and form his own independent company to make that film on a scale—twelve reels—that horrified and outraged the Trust mentality.
Half a dozen times during the making of that unprecedented film, Griffith ran out of money. He begged and borrowed to keep it going. Its final cost was unthinkable for its day: one hundred thousand dollars. But when it finally opened, in 1915, its reception was so overwhelming that controversy over the “multiple film” became academic.
The picture was screened at the White House for President Wilson, a symbolic first. There were special screenings for the Supreme Court and for the diplomatic corps. And when it opened in New York, seats were priced at an unheard-of two dollars, as high as for a Broadway play. Blacks, then called Negroes, protested the blatant bigotry of the film, adapted as it was from a popular novel, The Clansman, extolling the virtues of the K.K.K. The film was a cultural schizoid, as backward politically and racially as it was advanced cinematically. But in vain did Booker T. Washington, Jane Addams, Dr. Charles Eliot of Harvard, and Oswald Garrison Villard protest “the humiliation of ten million American citizens.” Blacks and liberals were swept aside as the public lined up across the country to see “the greatest motion picture ever made.” The gross reached fifteen million dollars, more than ten times what this supposedly spendthrift picture had cost. Once an audience had experienced The Birth of a Nation, how could they ever again be satisfied with the stilted one-reelers of the Trust?
The lawsuit of the Independents against the Trust was being fought all the way up to the Supreme Court. The fact that the motion picture, through the work of Griffith and the vision of men like Zukor and Porter, had established itself as an art form that could hold an audience spellbound for an hour and a half or even two hours—that fact undoubtedly affected the judgment of the Hughes Court. Its decision: that the patents of the Trust were invalid, and that the motion-picture camera and projection machine could not be dominated by one small group. “That was the first Declaration of Freedom of the Screen,” my father told me. “None of us who fought that antitrust action against the Patents Company will ever forget it.” For Zukor and Griffith, for Porter and Schulberg, for Carl Laemmle, Jesse Lasky, Sam Goldwyn, and all the rest of the rebels, this was their Yorktown. The Trust that had held on like a bulldog, threatening Zukor, inhibiting Griffith, blasting opponents for daring to make longer and better pictures, was forced to retire from the field.
The decision came in 1916, when I was two. Porter was now at work in Rome on a spectacle, The Eternal City, starring one of the great actresses of the day, Pauline Frederick. Porter had never attempted a film on such a scale, costing as it did more than a hundred thousand dollars, and he found it difficult to stage this lavish production in a foreign country. When he came back from Rome he sat down and talked over his problem with my father. He had been a poor boy with little education, though with a strong social conscience in the tradition of his contemporaries, novelists like Frank Norris, Stephen Crane, and Jack London. His mechanical inventiveness and sense of social realism had enabled him to make his ground-breaking films. But now he felt that the art form he had originated was passing him by. His cinematic inventions looked crude alongside D. W. Griffith’s, J. Stuart Blackton’s, Allan Dwan’s…
Though he was only middle-aged, and could have remained as Director-General of Famous Players, Porter told my father that he thought it was time for him to quit. He did not feel equipped to direct talented actors in the subtleties of the craft. In another few years, he predicted, other Griffiths would come along who would put his efforts to shame. Porter was proud of his position as the father of the American story-film. In a single decade he had seen the American “moving picture show” develop from the primitive Life of an American Fireman to the complexity of The Birth of a Nation, followed by an even more ambitious Griffith project, Intolerance, telling the story of man’s intolerance to man on four different historical levels, from Rome to modern times, with sets as grandiose as the ones which would soon become synonymous with the prototypical megaphone-wielder C. B. DeMille. “I know when I’m licked,” Porter told my father. “I can’t compete with these new fellers D.W. and C.B. I’ve had my day.”
Whereupon Mr. Porter sold all of his stock back to Famous Players, and returned to his first love, tinkering with machines. Joining the Precision Machine Company, he continued to perfect cameras and projection machines. He was a wealthy man, although he would have been considerably wealthier if he had grown with Famous Players as it expanded in partnership with the Jesse Lasky Film Company, which in time would become Paramount Pictures.
B.P. never saw him again—was never able to track him down. Mysteriously, he dropped completely out of sight. None of the notables he had worked with, Zukor, Pickford, or Griffith, ever heard from him. The only rumor was that he prospered until the crash of 1929, when he lost the savings of a lifetime. When he died in 1941 he was working as an obscure mechanic, still tinkering, totally forgotten by the industry he had virtually created.
Fifty years later I happened to mention Porter’s name to one of this country’s most famous directors. “Edwin S. Porter?” he said. “I never heard of him.” “Pal,” I said, “if there hadn’t been an Edwin S. Porter, there might never have been a you.” One of these days the motion-picture industry, which never has had much respect for its history, failing to set up a museum, burning historic negatives, and neglecting its founders, will suddenly have an attack of conscience and offer a posthumous award to the first American filmmaker. But until that moment, this tribute from the son of his scenario editor: To the Granddaddy of us all.
4
ONCE THE TRUST WARS WERE behind us and Zukor's policy of big stars in big pictures had put the old giants of the one-reel days out of business, the growth of Famous Players was reflected in the personal geography of the Schulbergs. Starting from 120th Street and Mt. Morris Park and moving to the larger apartment on 110th Street overlooking Central Park, we advanced to an even grander apartment near Zukor’s and Pickford’s on Riverside Drive, with a balcony where I could play and watch the ships go up and down the Hudson.
My memories of those New York days before the move to Hollywood are haphazard and piecemeal, the chance groupings and color patterns a child sees in his kaleidoscope. I remember that balcony on the river, remember making paper airplanes that would spiral down toward the toylike trees and the little cars far below. I remember collecting tinfoil, rolling it into balls and giving them to my mother for “our boys over there.” I didn’t know what war was, but it was fun to see how much foil I could gather and press together into a silvery ball. While
we were singing cheery war songs like “Pack Up Your Troubles in Your Old Kit Bag,” and while millions of young men were dying in the war to end wars, the movies did their bit by cranking out propaganda films like To Hell with the Kaiser and The Woman the Germans Shot and sending such glorified patriots as Mary Pickford and Doug Fairbanks across the country selling Liberty Bonds.
More important to me was that the Irish immigrant maid was replaced by a beautiful and soothing woman called Wilma, who was slightly darker than the rest of us, like my cocoa after she had poured a little warm milk into it. I loved my mother and my father, but I don’t remember them in those years as vividly as I do Wilma. One of my earliest senses of pleasure was of her color, as she would lean over my crib and over the small yellow bed with the elaborately carved headboard into which I was graduated when my sister Sonya arrived. I was four years old then, and in that short period from 1914 to 1918 it had become bad taste for babies to be born at home. Home births were for immigrants and peasants, for the poor. I remember my mother returning to Riverside Drive from the hospital with Sonya, and Wilma paying a great deal of attention to the little intruder, and my worrying that I was going to lose her to the homely little thing in the cradle that everyone thought was so cute.