The Origins of the Film Star System: Persona, Publicity and Economics in Early Cinema 9781788312073, 9781350111608, 9781350111417

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The Origins of the Film Star System

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The Origins of the Film Star System Persona, Publicity and Economics in Early Cinema Andrew Shail

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2019 Paperback edition published 2022 Copyright © Andrew Shail, 2019, 2022 Andrew Shail has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. viii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Charlotte Daniels Cover image: Les Célébrités du Cinéma (© Fondation Jérôme Seydoux-Pathé) All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-7883-1207-3 PB: 978-1-3502-7225-5 ePDF: 978-1-3501-1141-7 eBook: 978-1-3501-1142-4 Typeset by Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

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Professor Plum

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Contents Acknowledgements Copyright Acknowledgements A Note on Referencing Acronyms Introduction

viii ix x xi

1

Part 1  A New Run at the Story55 1 Europe63 2

North America113

3

What Happened Next?158

4 Causality176

Part 2  Another Run at the Story187 5

The Series Character189

6

The Series Character and the Star System259

7

The Ontology of Film Stardom331

Conclusion

370

Works Cited Index

379 393

Acknowledgements Thanks to the staff at all of the archives that it was necessary to use to provide the answers contained herein to a somewhat ambitious research question: the Fondation Jérôme Seydoux-Pathé (particular thanks to Stéphanie Salmon), the Cinémathèque française, the Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, the Bill Douglas Cinema Museum (particular thanks to Mike Rickard), the Wisconsin Center for Film & Theater Research (particular thanks to Mary Huelsbeck), the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, Tyne & Wear Archives, the various incarnations of the British Library’s newspaper collections, the British Film Institute, the Bibliothèque historique de la ville de Paris, the archives of the British Universities Film & Video Council, the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin, The Cinema Museum in Lambeth, the History of Advertising Trust Archives in Norwich, and the powerhouses behind the various digital newspaper and magazine collections on which I draw heavily throughout, particularly the Media History Digital Library. Katie LaBarbera at the St Louis Public Library also deserves special thanks. Thanks also to Joe Barton, Richard Koszarski, Paul Moore, Jon Burrows, Simon Brown, Joe Kember, Chris O’Rourke, Anthony Slide, Guy Austin and Charlie Keil, discussions with whom have been beneficial. Attention to the specifics of dates and prices has been very important in researching for this book, and I am indebted to, respectively, Georg Renken and Simon Brown for their rare resolve that dates and prices matter. Georg also deserves special thanks for being so willing to share his discoveries about mentions of Linder in specialist and popular press. Thanks also to Dr Amy-Claire Scott, who single-handedly built the database of nearly 19,000 films released in the UK 1907–1912 which proved invaluable at many points in writing this book. Lastly, much gratitude is due to Paula Blair, for whom this was not the absolute height of nerdery.

Copyright Acknowledgements Elements of Chapters 1 & 2 have previously appeared in French as ‘Max Linder et l’émergence de le vedettariat du cinéma’, Max Linder et le comique début de siècle, ed. Laurent Le Forestier and Laurent Guido (Paris: Association française de recherche sur l’histoire du cinéma, 2018) and in English as ‘Max Linder and the Emergence of Film Stardom’, Early Popular Visual Culture 14.1 (February 2016), 55–86. Figures 0.1, 2.1–2.4, 5.9–5.10, 6.10 courtesy of the Media History Digital Library. Figures 0.4, 6.13–6.14 courtesy of Bill Douglas Cinema Museum, University of Exeter. Figure 1.1 courtesy of the Institut Max Linder. Figure 1.3 courtesy of Intemporel, Paris. Figures 1.4–1.6, 1.8–1.11, 1.13–1.19, 5.3, 5.12–5.16, 6.20–6.22 courtesy of the Fondation Jérôme Seydoux-Pathé and © Pathé frères. Figures 6.20–6.21 also © Maurice Gottlob. Figure 2.5 courtesy of Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences. Figure 2.6 courtesy of Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, Wisconsin Historical Society. Figures 3.2, 5.4, 5.20–5.21, 5.23–5.27, 6.12, 6.15–6.16 courtesy of the British Library and © The British Library Board. Figures 0.3, 1.20–1.21, 5.28– 5.38, 7.2 courtesy of Tyne & Wear Archives. Figures 1.7, 1.12, 5.5–5.7, 5.22, 6.2, 6.4–6.6, 6.9, 6.17–6.19, 6.23 courtesy of the Cinémathèque française. Figures 5.11 and 5.39 courtesy of the BFI National Archive.

A Note on Referencing Because much of the evidence on which this book draws was published anonymously, parenthetical referencing that cites bibliographic entries, though my preferred method, is impractical in many cases. My referencing therefore adapts the MLA system, combining parenthetical citations of entries in the list of works cited for items with authors with full-form endnote referencing for anonymous items.

Acronyms Publications EK FI HDM K&LW MPC MPM MPSM MPW NYDM P&PG

Edison Kinetogram Film Index Hull Daily Mail Kinematograph & Lantern Weekly Motion Picture Classic Motion Picture Magazine Motion Picture Story Magazine Moving Picture World New York Dramatic Mirror Pictures & the Picturegoer

Organisations AEL/FSA B&C IPPC LFS MPPC NIMPA NYMPCo

The Association of Edison Licensees / Film Service Association British & Colonial Kinematograph Company International Projecting and Producing Company Laemmle Film Service Motion Picture Patents Company National Independent Moving Picture Alliance New York Motion Picture Company

Archives BDC BFI(NA) CF FJS-P HATA HRC MHL RWC

Bill Douglas Cinema Museum, University of Exeter British Film Institute (National Archive) Cinémathèque française, Paris Fondation Jérôme Seydoux-Pathé, Paris History of Advertising Trust Archive, Raveningham, Norwich Harry Ransom Humanities Research Centre, University of Texas at Austin Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, Los Angeles Robert Wood Collection of Music Hall, Cinema and Circus Posters, Tyne & Wear Archives, Newcastle upon Tyne

xii

Introduction In July 1909 none of the film production companies active in Europe and North America were using the identities of the people who routinely performed for their fiction films in their publicity.1 By early 1912, most of them were. This book provides a detailed account of this change, explaining how the film industries of the two continents came to operate a star system. The first fiction films were made in both continents in 1896, just months after the various debuts of projected films around the world, meaning that fiction film-making took place in both continents without an accompanying star system for over 12 years; fiction film-making, that is, does not automatically entail the use of a star system. This book therefore asks: Why did a star system emerge in film at all? Richard deCordova’s article ‘The Emergence of the Star System in America’ (1985) and his book Picture Personalities (1990) provided an answer to this research question (in respect of North America and, by dint of what seemed to be his model’s high degree of generalisability, in respect of Europe too) that began to constitute a scholarly orthodoxy in the early 1990s2 and that is still treated as the definitive answer in the late 2010s.3 Although I started researching the emergence of film stardom in 2006 in complete agreement with deCordova’s model of causality,4 research carried out in 14 archives in the last decade has uncovered 1) a story of the emergence of the star system in Europe that differs from deCordova’s account of events in North America, and 2) evidence which adds to and modifies deCordova’s account. This evidence includes instances of publicity for previously anonymous film performers, directed at the general public, in Europe, by a European production company, that not only predate the earliest instances of such publicity in North America, but may also have occasioned them. This evidence also speaks of a sequence of events in the US that does not substantiate deCordova’s claim that nearly all US film production companies commenced publicity for their as yet unknown performer employees simultaneously, a claim on which he bases his model of causality. In the light of all of this new evidence, then, Part 1 of this book will tell the story of the emergence of the star system across both continents. Supplementing deCordova’s evidence base and sketching the international picture, I will show, illuminates a new causality for this watershed moment in the history of the film industry. In Part 2 I will step back from minutiae to rerun the story another time, examining the part played by a prevalent film-making phenomenon of the 1908–1912 period in occasioning the emergence of the star system. The final chapter of Part 2 will use this new account to show that we may have our scholarly model of film stardom wrong.

In his foreword to the 2001 paperback edition of deCordova’s Picture Personalities, published five years after deCordova’s death in 1996, Corey Creekmur wrote that, for deCordova’s surviving family, friends and colleagues, “[i]t’s a small but hardly insignificant comfort that this book, the first accurate account of its important subject, will keep his name alive in film scholarship, to which he devoted his professional life” (viii). The argument that I will lay out in the following chapters seems to put me in the unenviable position of scrutinising an argument on which deCordova’s posthumous distinction in film scholarship is based.5 There is, however, a small and seemingly universally overlooked detail in deCordova’s book that suggests that he would not have agreed with those, Creekmur included, who have designated it the last word: mid-way through his introduction, he pointed out that “[t]he star system is made up of both discursive practices and economic practices. This book will focus principally on the discursive organisation of the star system” (PP, 11). Though he added that “one of the points that will clearly emerge from my arguments will concern the connection between the symbolic and economic identities of the star” (PP, 11), and briefly described, at several points, relevant economic aspects of the contemporary film industry in the US,6 deCordova’s work on this subject is mostly devoted to describing how just one of these two constitutive practices – the discursive – came about. That is, deCordova openly described just half of the causality for the emergence of the star system in the US: alongside the transformations in the discursive status of the filmed body that stimulated film production companies to regard their performers’ identities as relevant pieces of public information, other transformations, in the economic terrain of film production, sales, hiring and exhibition, prompted these companies to devote capital to the publicity campaigns that initiated a star system. That is, as deCordova acknowledged and as my research indicates, half a causality remains to be described. DeCordova’s account was simple and radical. Over a decade passed between the first fiction film-making in the US in 1896 and the gradual emergence of a film star system in, as deCordova saw it, the period 1909–14. This significant time lag occurred, he argued, not because employers were withholding knowledge of the identities of their performer employees from the public; rather, during this period both the cultural practice of making films and the cultural work of performing for a film were popularly understood according to the technological profile of this new proto-medium ‘animated photography’: the relevant work was that of photochemical artifice, the relevant events were optical, and the medium of communication was machinic and industrial. Before 1907, he claimed, in the US at least, the act of being filmed does not seem to have been popularly deemed to be comparable to acting (PP, 7, 29–36). As he saw it, the US film industry was initially simply unable to even imagine operating a system of stardom based on performers: “[g]iven the nature of the industry at the time and the early film’s status as discourse, the movie star, as it would later develop, was in a very real sense unthinkable” (PP, 24). Consequently, for deCordova, before 1907 employers could not have been concealing the identities of their performer employees, and film viewers could not have been deluging film companies with

2  The Origins of the Film Star System

inquiries about the identities of film performers, because neither could have even regarded these identities as relevant to the cultural practice of cinema. Correspondingly, for deCordova, when the star system did come about this was not because of the actions of any specific industry personnel or because of demands made by film viewers (PP, 7–8). Instead, cinema’s initial star-system-proof conditions changed because a) the turn to fiction as the dominant film product in the US, the psychological bent of the particular type of fiction that the US industry produced, and an accompanying industry effort to increase the cultural respectability of film, jointly generated a ‘discourse on acting’, a general impression that film work might be regarded as acting, which manifested in articles in the US film trade weekly Moving Picture World in the second half of 1907 (PP, 26–36, 46), and b) as part of this same bid for cultural respectability, from late 1908 and early 1909, the film industries of France and the US issued films in the US that featured widely known stage performers and adapted widely known stage plays, causing a strand of film practice to align with the discourse on acting (PP, 36-46). On the basis of this novel idea that film performance and stage acting were similar, the idea of a ‘picture player’ emerged in film discourse in the US from 1908. By 1909, deCordova pointed out, the filmed body had been established as a site of textual productivity, as subject in an enunciative process; this enunciative process had been symbolized in terms of an aesthetics of acting, thus establishing its fictional status and lending it an air of artistic legitimacy; and, finally, the actor, thus constituted, had entered into and shifted the status of film as a commodity; it had been recognized as a viable means of product differentiation, as something that could be exploited and advertised to increase business for that particular film. (PP, 50)

Newly imbued with a personal status, the body in fiction films now fell under the influence of the Foucauldian ‘will to knowledge’ (PP, 74), so that discourse on the filmed body began to drift towards discovering the personal and the private, while performers’ employers very soon exploited the usefulness of this new discursive figure for product differentiation, beginning to circulate the names of performers late in 1909. Both impulses supplemented the figure of the ‘picture player’ with a meta-narrative of knowledge about players’ professional careers and so generated a new discursive figure, the ‘picture personality’. In roughly late 1913/early 1914 this figure further metamorphosed into the figure of the ‘star’, because claims that film performers’ non-filmic lives were (at least potentially) significantly different from their films began to appear (PP, 98); this popular understanding of difference grew during the subsequent decade until the extreme difference involved in sexual scandal was first incorporated in 1921 (PP, 117). Thus, for deCordova, five separate discursive developments had to occur for the discursive components of a film star system to emerge in the US: 1) the reconceptualising of film performance as acting, 2) an intermedial alliance with an older cultural form (already populated with stars) redefining film performance and introducing the habit of publicly naming filmed bodies, 3) the reconceptualisation



Introduction 3

of film as a work with an enunciator, 4) the emergence of the idea of a profession populated by people with curricula vitae listing relevant experience, and 5) the reformulation of the private lives of these people as relevant to the cultural practice ‘cinema’. These discursive developments, for him, gradually shifted popular thinking about film from a state where the idea of caring about the identities of filmed bodies was as risible as caring about the identities of the people who work on an industrial production line to a state where the identities of performers were major salient characteristics of the cultural practice. For deCordova, there was no design behind these discursive changes. Categories through which the production of films was to be understood were produced, constructed, determined and constituted,7 but not by a specific agent or group of agents. The major film production companies put in a portion of the effort behind these changes, and film hiring companies, exhibitors, popular film magazines and national and regional daily and weekly newspapers put in the rest; each followed short-term aims, none of which was the establishment of a star system in film; popular and industry interests, for their own differing reasons, followed the same path. Thus when film stardom did emerge, deCordova argued, no one person or company started it; this explains why nearly all of the film production companies in the US (in his understanding) started to use film stars simultaneously. In spite of signalling that he was mostly describing just one of the two fields of practice (the discursive and the economic) that constitute the film star system, deCordova also proposed, implicitly in places and explicitly in others, that it was discursive changes alone that explained its appearance. Although his discursive shifts were often rooted in economic changes, in his account it was usually the discursive shifts that were causal: for example, while he argued that one impulse giving rise to the discourse on acting was the felt need among film-making companies during 1907–9 to achieve greater degrees of product differentiation in a competitive market (PP, 46), he saw the discourse on acting as the causal force in bringing about the star system: “the discourse on acting began to put in place a system of product differentiation that would be based on the identity of the subject within an institutionalized system of enunciation” (PP, 46). On the same page as his nod to these two constitutive fields (the discursive and the economic), he argued that “[t]he star could become the point of an economic exchange only by virtue of its identity as constructed in discourse” (PP, 11): for him, even though film’s star system has both discursive and economic components, it was discourse that first brought it about. DeCordova also managed to imply that his discursive shifts alone constituted a sufficient condition for the emergence of the film star system through a combination of, in places, leaving the star system undefined and, in others, implicitly describing the star system as primarily or exclusively a system of ideas. In one place, for example, he remarked that “[t]he positions from which statements about stars emerge […] taken together form the most stable and systematic aspect of the star system” (PP, 11); the star system, that is, is primarily an enunciative apparatus. In another, he referred to “the system that speaks him or her [i.e. the star]” (PP, 11), a system that could not accommodate Roscoe Arbuckle when he was accused of sexual violence in September 1921: after

4  The Origins of the Film Star System

these accusations Arbuckle “could still speak, no doubt, but he could no longer “be spoken” by the system that had produced him as a star” (PP, 10). The star system, that is, deCordova implied, is a system of discourse. In the last paragraph of Picture Personalities he treated “the star system” and “discourses of stardom” as near-synonymous (146). Thus there was a degree of circular logic in deCordova’s work: because the star system is a system of discourse, unsurprisingly, we find that its major cause was a series of shifts in the realm of discourse.8 There is, I will show, evidence indicating that while deCordova’s discursive changes constituted a necessary condition for the emergence of a star system, they did not constitute a sufficient condition. Acknowledging deCordova’s explicitly partial historical picture, and in response to deCordova’s implicit claim of the sufficiency of these discursive conditions, the third section of this Introduction will look at evidence that, if they were sufficient causes, the story of the emergence of the star system would have been quite different, and the remainder of this Introduction will point out the additional impediments that the discursive refashioning of the filmed body could not, on its own, overcome. Although a historical model that sees discursive changes as merely enabling rather than determining may seem somewhat naive, as it assumes that human subjects are not entirely spoken by discourse, there is evidence to suggest that personnel in the film industry, at least at this historical moment, did nonetheless have a degree of choice in their approach to marketing films, and therefore that influences in addition to deCordova’s series of discursive shifts should be sought out when establishing why they did ultimately make the choice to launch the first stars. This evidence, I will show, suggests that film industry figures could imagine the possibility of establishing a star system several years earlier than in deCordova’s model, meaning that in not using a star system they had been making a choice; when they did later choose to establish a system of celebrity, therefore, this choice was likewise motivated rather than discursively dictated.

Stars, Celebrities, Star Systems A word, first, about terms. In this book, I define ‘star’ slightly differently from deCordova. DeCordova only applied the term ‘star’ to the performer celebrities whose identities were being publicised by the US film industry after late 1913/early 1914 (PP, 98), the discursive figure that “is characterised by a fairly thoroughgoing articulation of the paradigm professional life/private life” (‘The Emergence’, 26). In the nearly four years between the first instances of popular publicity for these performers in 1909/1910 and the emergence of this discursive paradigm public/private in late 1913/early 1914, film-making companies in the US tended to publicise information that, while it named performers, insisted on the existence of a real-world identity that “merely referred readers back to the evidence of the films in a kind of tautological loop” (PP, 91); this real-world identity was derived from filmographies and very filmic



Introduction 5

private lives. Hence deCordova’s choice of the term ‘picture personality’ to describe the discursive figure of the named film performer during these four years: discourse claimed that her/his personality was discoverable in her/his films. Until the idea began to be popularly propounded that their lives outside work differed – anywhere from subtly to markedly – from their professional personae, these people did not yet have all of the characteristics of stars, occupants of the discursive position of ‘star’ as already established in a range of existing cultural realms. ‘Star’ applied to film celebrities before 1913/1914 is therefore, deCordova implied, an anachronism. I propose to depart from this taxonomy for several reasons. First, this taxonomy follows from conflating the star system with star discourse; as I will show, people could be the object of a cultural industry’s star system without discursively constituting stars. Secondly, it derives from the preoccupation in film studies during the late 1980s with the ideological functions of each film star persona. It had become clear to film scholars in the 1980s that stars were real people being called on to play roles extrafilmically, roles that served certain ideological purposes: star F permits bourgeois viewers to reconcile their humanity with their implication in perpetuating wage slavery, and star G is both a point of proletarian identification and a means for channelling it away from political action and into heterosexual drama (see e.g. LaPlace, 145–50). Stars, it was being argued, were unavowedly fictional, and all the more determining of people’s choices than works of fiction because their public selves appeared to be real in contrast with their appearances in avowedly fictional films; in Stars (1979), for example, Richard Dyer wrote of the usefulness for ideological apparatuses of stars whose main work is acting: “[b]ecause stars have an existence in the world independent of their screen/‘fiction’ appearances,” he pointed out, “it is possible to believe […] that as people they are more real than characters in stories. This means that they serve to disguise the fact that they are just as much produced images, constructed personalities as ‘characters’ are” (22). This ‘film life’ versus ‘real life’ distinction was key to academic thinking on stars during the 1980s. Maria LaPlace, for example, remarked in 1987 that “the star is an actress/actor whose private life takes on as much significance as her/his acting roles” (146). It has remained tenacious: Paul McDonald, a long-term voice in film star scholarship, wrote in 1998 that “[a]s a general point about star studies, overuse of the term ‘star’ to describe any well-known film actor obscures how with most film performers, knowledge is limited to the on-screen ‘personality’” (‘Reconceptualising’, 178). That is, for McDonald, if the term ‘star’ is used to refer to a person about whom no knowledge concerning their ‘real’ life circulates, then it is misused. But in looking for the origins of this star, deCordova was reading a scholarly distinction into the discursive category of the star: a popular recognition of this distinction is necessary, he argued, for someone to constitute a star. As far as the industry is concerned, however, ‘interference’ from a private life is not necessary for someone to constitute a star. DeCordova even quietly acknowledged that even though the discursive figure of the star had not emerged in 1909/1910, it was “indeed around this time [c.1909] that the star emerges as an economic reality” (‘The Emergence’, 24): the economic star system, that is, was

6  The Origins of the Film Star System

already in place before the emergence in 1913–14 of the discursive category that deCordova calls the ‘star’. In this book, therefore, I will use the following definitions, based on the distinctions applied by film industries. A production value is defined as an element of the material or labour that goes into the production of a cultural work that both a) necessitates expenditure and b) is publicised as having necessitated expenditure (see e.g. Maltby, Hollywood, 2nd ed., 42). Resources and labour that cost nothing, resources and labour that cost relatively little in the roster of expenses, and, generally speaking, resources and labour that, even if relatively expensive, are not conspicuous in the finished work, do not normally qualify as production values because they tend not to be mentioned in publicity. Resources and labour that do qualify as production values are normally also arranged hierarchically, in that the scale of the attention devoted in publicity to the resources and labour that qualify as production values is usually proportional to the amount that they cost, or at least proportional to their existing renown, which is linked to cost because renown usually permits employees to charge accordingly for their labour. This category permits a clear distinction between star and a celebrity: a celebrity is a person who is known by more people than they themselves know (even an elected local government representative, for example, is a very minor celebrity; see Van Krieken 10); a star is a person whose identity is treated, by the mechanisms of publicity employed by their profession, as a production value (see e.g. Susan Hayward’s first definition of ‘star’: “star as capital value” (375–6)). Using a person as a production value automatically means privileging their identity in publicity over the identities of others who do the same job, so that, for example, a poster advertising a work will name that person near the name of the work and/or use their image as its most prominent graphic element, with the prominence of each employee on such publicity diminishing according to how inexpensive their labour is, and the vast majority of the labour force for the work not featuring in publicity at all. To use a star system is therefore to adopt a degree of exclusivity in using employees’ identities as production values (see e.g. McLean 423). There are practical reasons for this: for example, the public cannot be expected to remember the names of everyone performing in every stage play appearing in Paris’s theatres in a single season. A star system, therefore, exists when even one employer in any given cultural realm (with the self-employed also counting as their own employers) treats it as normal to use one or more employees as production values. Steve Blandford, Barry Keith Grant and Jim Hillier reflect this industry definition when they define ‘star system’ as “[a] method of conceiving, making and marketing films that focuses primarily on the public identity of their leading performers or stars” (224). Stardom, therefore, is not a high degree of fame; identifying stardom is not a matter of drawing the lines that separate non-star fame from star fame.9 One can be a B-list, C-list, etc. celebrity and still constitute a star if one is treated as a production value by one’s employer’s mechanisms of publicity. The two concepts – celebrity and stardom – are of course closely tied, but this tie is the consequence of capital: given that an employee’s labour can conceivably be treated as a production value even if they have no existing fame,



Introduction 7

it is not necessary for a person to be known by a certain number of people to be the object of a star system, but it is in practice nearly impossible for a person with no renown to be able to charge enough for their labour that they qualify for the position of production value, meaning that no star is, in practice, without celebrity. Deliberately using the identities of only part of a workforce in publicity means, in turn, arranging the identities of those who are used as production values hierarchically, both in their pay and in their treatment as production values in publicity: usually a few will be major stars, a larger number will be minor stars, and a much larger number will remain, though perhaps credited, unpublicised. This hierarchy was mentioned in the earliest uses of the term ‘star’ to describe a film performer. For example, in October 1912 J.B. McDowell, managing director of the British & Colonial Kinematograph Co., described the contents of his latest letter-bag: “Piles of them, bags of them, neat little stacks of them, and all from ‘fans’ who wish to become picture play actors or actresses. […] [A]ll the writers seem possessed with the same idea, – that it is the easiest thing in the world for an inexperienced amateur to become a star picture actor” (‘Concerning’, 4). By implying that ambitious amateurs could not hope to achieve the status of “star picture actor”, McDowell expressed the idea that this position was at the top of a ziggurat. But for the economic star system, a person does not have to be at the top of a ziggurat to be a star; an occupant of a lower level is a star as long as they are treated as production values in publicity. It is understandable that when deCordova looked at what he understood to be the earliest publicity for previously anonymous film performers in the US (in late 1909 and early 1910), he doubted whether he was seeing the emergence of a star system: calling these people stars would not be feasible, it would have seemed, given that the etymology of the term ‘star’ suggests that it be reserved for the minority occupying the top stratum of this hierarchy of employers’ publicity,10 and it would have seemed that merely naming people in publicity aimed at the general public did not sort these people into a hierarchy. Unsurprisingly, then, deCordova looked at later dates for the bifurcation of publicity efforts into the levels of privilege that generate this hierarchy. And it makes sense that deCordova alighted on the time – very late 1913 and 1914 – when public accounts first stressed a clear separation between the public lives and the private lives of a certain few film performers (PP, 98): the investment involved in distributing such extensive information was a clear sign that the employer privileged the performer concerned over a performer for whom they went no further than, for example, producing portrait photograph postcards. However, as I am investigating the origins of the star system’s economic practices, I will treat the first publicity campaigns naming film performers as constituting a star system, and the term ‘star’ as applicable even to the first people about whom film production companies orchestrated publicity campaigns. Because, in a star hierarchy, the number of personnel who can inhabit each stratum shrinks the higher up the hierarchy one moves, such a hierarchy emerges not when it is fully populated but when it begins to be populated: the highest stratum needs no more than one person to constitute a full stratum. Film’s star system was initiated, therefore, by the

8  The Origins of the Film Star System

decision to use the identities of people performing for films as production values. This was reflected by contemporaries’ willingness to apply the term ‘star’ to publicised film performers as soon as this economic reality applied: for example, the manager of the Colonial Theatre in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, in March 1910 referred to “that talented actress, Miss Florence Lawrence, easily America’s foremost moving picture star”.11 The reality to which s/he referred here, as Chapter 2 will show, was the economic reality of being treated as a production value by an employer. In explaining the origins of a star system which uses film performers, I examine only one of several star systems that have obtained in the cultural realm of film, the most enduring but not, it should be stressed, the first. Celebrities associated with the new technology emerged at the same time that it first appeared in popular consciousness: Thomas Edison’s name was popularly linked with the idea of animated photographs with the appearance of the kinetoscope in 1893.12 In just the UK, because the French music hall performer Félicien Trewey was given the task of introducing the Lumière Cinématographe to the UK public during 1896, first at the Regent Street Polytechnic and then at a number of Stoll variety theatres, he became publicly associated with the new phenomenon via national press commentaries;13 inventor/film-maker Robert Paul was profiled in the July 1896 issue of the Strand and film-maker G.A. Smith was profiled in a June 1900 issue of Chambers’s Journal.14 Even counting only those people with no pre-existing fame from another profession as stars,15 one can observe a star system in film before the emergence of performerbased stardom in 1909–11, a star system which used the identities of the managers of the production companies. For example, after Charles Urban, managing director of Maguire & Baucus (from 1897 to 1898), the Warwick Trading Company (from 1898 to 1903), the Charles Urban Trading Company (from 1903 to 1909), and then the Natural Colour Kinematograph Company (from 1909 to 1914) (McKernan, 65–77; Urban, 36–69), attained a reputation among the trade as a leader by 1904 (he was the first film trade figure to be profiled in the UK film trade paper Optical Lantern and Cinematograph Journal, appearing in an article in its first, November 1904, issue,16 and in October 1905 the trade paper printed a cartoon depicting him as chief among the managers of UK film production companies),17 he then gained a degree of public celebrity, enhanced by the publication of his 1907 pamphlet The Cinematograph in Science, Education and Matters of State. The author of the article on ‘the animated picture’ in the 1908 Stage Year Book (published in January 1908) remarked that “the idea [of ‘living pictures’] is generally ascribed to Edison, but to Mr. Charles Urban as its real pioneer all the real credit is due”,18 and, drawing on research gathered no later than 30 September 1908, A&C Black included an entry for Urban in the 1909 edition of Who’s Who (published in early January 1909), the publication’s first entry on a film professional.19 Urban and his rival production company managers, who commonly used their surnames as the names of their companies, could therefore be called the world’s first film stars. The film star system of this book’s title is therefore not the one and only star system of film: it is the one star system of several potential star systems to have achieved long-term primacy. The film industry has utilised other



Introduction 9

star ‘constellations’ too and yet more have had the potential to attain primacy. For example, in showing that various UK production companies’ trade and popular accounts of non-fiction film-making activities in the period c.1899–c.1910 often mentioned the pluck of their intrepid camera operators, Joe Kember has charted a germinal star system that would almost certainly have become the star system of film had the institution as a whole not been shifting to fiction as its main output at the time (189–202). This book therefore also seeks to answer a secondary research question: why was the primary long-term form of stardom that did emerge based on performers?

Film Performance DeCordova described two major changes that led to the appearance of the first instances of publicity that named hitherto unknown performers in the US: 1) the “appearance of the discourse on acting” (i.e. the idea that film performance was acting) in “roughly 1907” (PP, 30), and 2) the industry-wide adoption, from the middle of 1909, of the practice of making lines of prestige products, mostly adaptations of canonical prose or stage plays and designated as quality or ‘art’ films, which featured performers ‘loaned’ from the legitimate stage (at significant cost), and accompanying them with publicity that named these performers (PP, 30–44). For him the second phenomenon ended a two-year situation in which the discourse on acting clashed with film content, so that from mid-1909 United Statesians were prompted by both paratextual discourses and the discourse implicit in films to reconceive the act of ‘being filmed’ as acting. This section will demonstrate that these two discursive transformations were not sufficient conditions for the adoption of a star system in the film industry, by looking at examples that predate deCordova’s and by comparing US film discourse with its UK counterpart. DeCordova’s key evidence for the first of these two all-important changes was the emergence of the ‘mistaken for reality’ scenario in popular discussions of film. In this scenario, an uninformed passer-by comes across a group of people performing for a fiction film, fails to observe any of the signs that these people are contriving a pro-filmic event, consequently mistakes their actions for un-performed actions, seeks to intervene in some way, and then discovers, or has to be instructed about, the contrived nature of the performers’ actions. In this scenario, the earliest instance of which appeared, in deCordova’s account, in an article in MPW in May 1907 (PP, 32), the specific anecdote plays out confusions between the pro-filmic and the real as a way of distinguishing between them for the reader: “[i]n straightening the two out the performer [i.e. the person required to explain the situation to the wellmeaning passer-by] – and the reader – must confront the fictional status of that which is photographed by the camera” (PP, 33). In these ‘mistaken for reality’ scenarios, “[a]nother narrative is set forth (separate from that of the film) that takes as its subject the performer’s part in the production of film” (PP, 33). The writer and implied reader’s

10  The Origins of the Film Star System

shared superior knowledge, which distinguishes them from the unaware passer-by, is knowledge of the difference between a spontaneous real-world situation (i.e. that which the passer-by thinks is happening) and a purposefully contrived real-world situation (i.e. the pro-filmic event). Indeed, as this knowledge is necessary for the dramatic irony of the story to function, the overt framing of these stories as humorous anecdotes indicates that public awareness of this distinction was sufficiently widespread for their writers to be confident that they would be funny. Although all of deCordova’s examples were taken from MPW, a weekly paper that circulated among the trade rather than the general public, they presumably represented wider, nonspecialist discourse. The problem with this claim, however, is that the ‘mistaken for reality’ scenario had emerged in popular discourse at least two and a half years before deCordova’s earliest, May 1907, example. The earliest instance that I am aware of dates from the first half of November 1904, and it seems to have circulated quite widely: an article in a local South Carolina newspaper reproduced an article from the New York American that told how the manager of the Chicago-based Selig Polyscope Company, ‘Colonel’ William Selig, arranged a scene involving the hold-up of a stage coach for a film. Not necessarily drawing from a press release by the Selig Company, it is worth reproducing in its entirety: New subjects, new situations and new films of pictures must be constantly provided for the moving picture machines at the theatres, vaudeville houses and country fairs. The fast express trains, prize fights and Boer wars having been worn threadbare, the enterprising biograph agents decided to pose a real, live, thrilling Western stage coach “hold up” in the good, old-fashioned style. Colonel William N. Selig, of Chicago, after much care, assembled together all the necessary paraphernalia, including a genuine old-fashioned mail coach, a half dozen mail bags and a picturesque company of men, women and children, who were willing to pose as passengers on the “held-up” stage, while Colonel William N. Selig’s squad of picturesquely mounted imaginary bandits fired blank cartridges at them and otherwise carried out the desperate end of the undertaking. To make sure of every possible touch of realism, Colonel Selig carefully selected the very canon [i.e. cañon/canyon] in the turn of the road on the old Leadville trail, where, surely enough, many a successful “hold up” by real bandits had been accomplished in the days that are now long passed. With this brief statement of the quite proper ambition and active efforts of the energetic moving picture agent, who for some days had been patiently rehearsing his little “hold up” operations just outside the city of Colorado Springs, Col., the reader is invited to go back to last Thursday at about 2 o’clock in the afternoon. THE HISTORIC “HOLD-UP” TRAIL Fred C. Ai[c]kens, the well-known Philadelphian and a party including Mrs. Aickens and another lady, had started from Colorado Springs and were being driven over that part of the old Leadville trail by an old time miner, now in



Introduction 11

the livery business. The ladies were delighted with the mountain scenery, and the driver was regaling them with historical data. “Now, right around that bend,” he went on, “is one of the most celebrated spots in the whole State.” “Dear me,” said Mrs. Aickens eagerly, “what happened there?” “It always was a lonesome place,” mused the driver, “and it’s just as lonesome now as it ever was.” “How interesting! Do you mean that it was haunted?” “Not by ghosts, ma’am,” answered the driver, with a grin. “The gang that haunted that part of the old Leadville trail were just about as quick with the trigger as they make ’em.” “Are you talking of stage robbers? Oh, how very interesting.” “Yes’m, hold-ups. A couple of hundred yards ahead is where more stages were held up in the 70’s, and passengers half scared to death, and Wells Fargo treasure boxes busted open, than in all of the rest of the West put together.” “You don’t say so! Just like Buffalo Bill’s ‘Wild West’, I suppose?” “Not exactly. You see, in those days there weren’t no blank cartridges. When those six-shooters went off somebody was bound to drop.” “But nothing of that kind happens nowadays, of course,” said Mrs. Aickens, nervously. “Waal, not so often,” drawled the driver. THE LADIES WERE GETTING SCARED The ladies were visibly trembling by this time, and even Mr. Aickens looked a bit serious. In another moment they were rounding the bend. The spot just ahead was indeed lonesome, with the canon on one side and beetling crags on the other, obscuring the sunlight. Suddenly the driver uttered an exclamation: “Jumpin’ Judas! Do you see that?” A strange-looking vehicle was approaching just beyond where the trail crossed the mouth of a ravine. “It’s only a stage coach,” said Mr. Aickens. “Stage coach?” repeated the driver. “Stages don’t run on this road any—more [sic] not for twenty years.” “Why, it’s just like Buffalo Bill’s,” said Mrs. Aickens. “See what an old rattletrap it is.” “It carries the mails all right,” repeated Mr. Aickens. “Look at the bags piled up around the driver.” At that instant half a dozen picturesque mounted men with drawn revolvers dashed out of the ravine and surrounded the coach, with revolvers aimed at the driver’s head. The driver of the Aickens party, with a smothered oath, quickly turned his team out of sight behind a jutting rock. “Quick! Jump out and hide your selves with your valuables,” he said. “They haven’t seen us yet.” Half-fainting the ladies were helped out of the carriage by Mr. Aickens, who, considering the suddenness of the surprise, had no difficulty in convincing himself that discretion was the better part of valor. Around the corner of the ambuscade

12  The Origins of the Film Star System

he and the driver gazed upon the “hold-up.” Both had revolvers. Mr. Aickens drew his, but the driver cautioned him: “No use. Put up your gun. They’re too many for us.” A REALISTIC “HOLD-UP” In fact, the half hysterical ladies were demanding all their attention. It was almost impossible to keep them from shrieking as the passengers tumbled out of the old stage coach at the command of the bandits, with their hands up. Now, all that was going on around the old stage coach had not only been rehearsed over and over again on that same spot, but upon this, the great occasion that was to furnish the pictures, Colonel Selig’s voice was constantly heard by his actors, like that of a stage manager stationed in the wings of a theatre while the play is in progress. The photograph machine was stationed beside the road near the mouth of the ravine. As the stage approached, Colonel Selig sang out to the operators: “All ready! Look sharp, now!” And to the passengers: “Get ready to throw up your hands and look scared!” As some shooting seemed necessary for the sake of realism, a boy named Johnny Bowman, sitting up with the driver, was to jump from his seat to the ground and run, and the bandits were to shoot him down. “Now, Johnny, remember,” Colonel Selig kept saying. And when the bandits at length appeared he repeated: “Now, Johnny!” The frightened party behind the rocks were at too great a distance to hear these commands. They could only see what was going on. Mr. Aickens and his driver saw the boy jump down from the driver’s seat and run towards them, saw two of the bandits motion to him to stop, then, as the boy still ran, saw them level their revolvers and fire, and saw the boy fall. “By gum! this is too much!” exclaimed Mr. Aickens, and blazed away at the bandits. The driver, equally indignant, let his revolver speak – and the cartridges in these revolvers were not blank. Colonel Selig, who had come out of the coach with the other terror-stricken passengers, uttered a yell and his arm dropped to his side, shot through the fleshy part. Another bullet went through a bold bandit’s hat, neatly shaving off a lock of his hair. Such evidence of their excellent marksmanship stimulated Mr. Aickens and his driver to renewed efforts. “When the scoundrels go to shooting down small boys, it’s time to butt in,” said Mr. Aickens, and both he and the driver, jumping out in full view of the bandits, peppered away at them right merrily. “Get out! Stop shooting! It’s all a joke!” shouted Colonel Selig, dancing up and down in the road with his injured wing flopping. “If it’s a joke, the joke’s on you!” yelled Mr. Aickens, taking Colonel Selig for a bandit, and letting fly at him again. “Shoot down little innocent boys, will you!” The bandits jumped for the cover of the trees, and several persons from the stage ran up and tried to convince the tourists that it was not a real robbery but a performance for moving pictures.20



Introduction 13

Other publications reporting the same ‘event’ included the December 1904 issue of the UK trade paper the Optical Lantern and Cinematograph Journal. Its briefer version ran like so: Realism is the first necessity for a popular film but even the most enthusiastic film maker does not wish for the contretemps accorded to the well-known Chicago subject maker Colonel W.N. Selig last month. Ever on the qui vive for a sentimental subject he decided to obtain a thrilling western stage coach “hold-up” in the good old fashioned style. After obtaining the paraphernalia, such as a genuine mail coach, with a picturesque company of occupants and some determined looking imaginary bandits, he selected a canon [i.e. cañon/canyon] in the turn of the road on the old Leadville trail in Colorado where many a successful “hold-up” had taken place in the 70’s. With the ardour of a clever stage manager, rehearsals were held and the company carefully drilled in their parts. The coach suddenly appeared in the bend, the occupants apparently chatting and full of merriment, when suddenly the bandits headed by the gallant Colonel brought it to the halt. “Hands-up” was quickly responded to, and to make it even more striking, a boy at the back of the coach jumped down and ran for dear life, pursued by robbers who, firing blank cartridges, stretched him to the ground, apparently dead. So far, so good, and the rehearsal was all that could be wished, but the unforeseen frequently happens. Mr F.C. Atkins [sic] and party including several ladies were on a visit to Colorado Springs and hearing shots told their driver to hurry and see what was happening. He had just regaled them with some of his choicest tales of the dreaded locality. Suddenly the rehearsal burst into view. There lay the boy with the bandits still blazing away. Prompt to lend a willing hand, Mr. Atkins whipped out a pistol and his driver equally indignantly did the same, but their cartridges were not blank. Colonel Selig, who was well to the fore, uttered a yell and his arm dropped to his side and another bullet went neatly through his hat. “When scoundrels go to shooting unarmed boys it’s time to butt in” said Mr. Atkins, and he continued peppering the amazed bandits, although Colonel Selig, dancing up and down from the pain of his injured arm, cried “Get out! Stop shooting – it’s only a joke.” Mr. Atkins, however, could not see the joke – it was all too serious, and not until several of the occupants from the coach run up and convinced him that they were “acting” could he be persuaded to stop firing at the robbers, who for the most part had taken cover in the trees. Order and explanations followed, but a certain uneasiness existed when the scene was later gone through in front of the camera, and the amateur bandits listened suspiciously for other tourists.21

Although the word ‘acting’ only appears in the UK version, and in inverted commas, and although there are places where the original writer’s reluctance to use vocabulary pertaining to histrionic performance diverted her/him onto alternatives to acting including “imaginary”, “picturesque” and “joke” (all three terms feature in both versions), the scenario that deCordova sees as emerging only in mid-1907 is present here in November 1904 in all its details, its humorous appeal reliant on demonstrating the failure of the uninformed to apprehend the ‘fact’ known by the

14  The Origins of the Film Star System

informed: the difference between one type of real event – a pro-filmic performance – and an uncontrived real event. Indeed, the UK version’s description of the passers-by mistaking a scene that is being rehearsed rather than being filmed further insisted that film labour involves impersonation. In addition, while it might be argued that both versions’ use of the word “joke” indicates that, at this time, a means of relating film performance to the act of impersonation was absent, ‘joke’ seems rather to seek to be more descriptive than ‘acting’ of the specific type of work involved in film performance. That is, where ‘acting’ can be defined as ‘enacting to an audience’ and ‘fictional’ denotes ‘non-existent’, ‘joke’ denotes ‘real and, though not in earnest, carried out as if in earnest’, providing the writer of the original copy with an astute way to describe how film performances differ from real events: they are carried out as if for real (but for certain elements that minimise the risk of injury and suffering), and only implicit and explicit frames separate from the acts themselves indicate that they are not sincere events, frames that include cinematography, titling, editing, colouring, advertising and social conventions governing the situation in which a film is viewed.22 If the publication of such ‘mistaken for reality’ stories demonstrates that contemporaries were able to classify film performance as impersonation, deCordova seems therefore to have placed his watershed moment several years too late when he cited stories from May 1907 as evidence of the emergence of “the notion that they [film performers] were actors” (PP, 19). Furthermore, the greater warmth towards histrionic categories apparent in the UK version of this late-1904 anecdote suggests that, outside the US, a discourse on film acting emerged even earlier than c.November 1904. Indeed, in the UK, even in early 1897, as cinema’s novelty phase drew to a close,23 public attention began to shift from film’s technological apparatus to film content, and several UK film-makers began to specialise in what they called ‘invented subjects’ (i.e. fiction), contemporaries were already prepared to use elements of a histrionic vocabulary to refer to the work involved in performing for films. In March 1897, Cecil Hepworth, at the time a professional still photographer, travelling exhibitor of projected media and columnist for the Amateur Photographer, wrote that he had recently projected some pictures which might be described as being of an episodal nature – far more interesting than the interminable street scenes of which there are so many about. These were little comedies in one short act, as arranged for the cinematograph by Philip Wolff. Well acted and staged, so to speak, they were calculated to please the most exacting, and did it too. (‘On the Lantern Screen’ (5 March 1897), 186.)

At roughly this time, Hepworth also wrote Animated Photography: The ABC of the Cinematograph, in which he remarked that “[l]ittle made-up comedies, carefully arranged and well acted (there’s the rub!) make perhaps the most pleasing of all subjects for the living photographs, just as, when indifferently performed or evilly conceived, they are ineffectual or repulsive” (98). The performance required for fiction films was, Hepworth deemed, acting, and it was even possible to parse good acting



Introduction 15

from bad acting. The following year, Robert Paul’s fifteenth catalogue, dated August 1898, opened with a special mention of a new line of films, listed under the heading “comic and dramatic films” (Animated, 7): Special attention is drawn to the new series of films, illustrated and described within, which are now issued for the first time. The scenes have been produced at great trouble and expense to attain perfection; backgrounds and accessories have been specially prepared, and the dramatic scenes have been enacted by experienced actors, the action being perfectly natural. (Animated, 3, emphases in original)

This discourse on acting was being, of course, asserted as well as observed, and it was unlikely that these people were really “experienced actors”, but clearly, for this scientific-instrument-maker-turned-film-maker, it was not necessary for a photographic discourse on ‘being filmed’ to ebb for it to be possible to conceive of ‘being filmed’ as acting. In the same vein, a ‘Notice to Artistes and Sketch Combinations’ in an advertisement that Paul placed in the music hall trade journal The Era in April 1899 claimed that Preparations are being made for the Production of a Large Number of Fine Comic and Dramatic Scenes for next Season, and Special Scenery and Accessories are being made for each Picture. Artistes who are willing to appear in such are invited to communicate with the undersigned. The announcement of the actors in each scene forms a Valuable and World-Wide Advertisement.24

Again, the idea that film performance is acting was asserted here rather than being observed, but the fact that it was possible to assert it at all indicates that the presence of other accounts of film-making did not, at least in the UK, prevent a discourse on acting from coming about. In the middle of 1900, a year after setting up a film processing and production company at Walton-on-Thames with his cousin Monty Wicks (see Simon Brown, 25), Hepworth produced a second edition of Animated Photography, in which he referred to the new company’s “excellently fitted and thoroughly complete stage, erected in the open air, where small dramas are enacted for the benefit of an audience of

16  The Origins of the Film Star System

one – a cinematograph camera”.25 While non-fiction film-making took place further afield, Hepworth claimed, in Walton-on-Thames his employees were busy “executing miniature dramas for the amusement and entertainment of their patrons. Upon a wellfurnished stage in the open air these dramas are enacted, after careful and elaborate rehearsal, amid all the requisite surroundings of scenery and accessories which the subject demands.”26 Hepworth even claimed that film demanded greater histrionic skill than theatre from its performers: The camera forgets nothing and notices everything, and the scenery and all accessories must be just as carefully prepared for a play which has a run of one performance only, and that lasts but a single minute, as if a three hours’ entertainment were contemplated in the hope of a run as long as that of Charley’s Aunt. There is a little staff of actors within easy call, who rehearse again and again until they are proficient in their respective parts for each of their playlets.27

These admittedly overblown descriptions nonetheless demonstrate that film performance was deemed to be compatible with at least a rough approximation of acting, and all before the end of the Victorian period. By the early years of Edward’s reign, a discourse on acting pervaded UK film trade discourse. Paul’s November 1901 catalogue described Garters versus Braces; or, Algy in a Fix (roughly 1 minute) as “of an extremely fine photographic quality, and perfectly acted”, described A Gretna Green Wedding (1 min 20 secs) as “[s]plendidly mounted and acted throughout”, called The Little Breadwinner (40 secs) “[a] very clear and pretty picture, naturally acted”, and claimed that “Handy Andy”, the Clumsy Servant (1 min 40 secs) was “a marvellously worked-up scene by some of the cleverest pantomimists of the day”, here employing a specific sub-category of acting (Catalogue, n.p.). The November 1902 catalogue of the UK branch of Gaumont claimed that “[a] great feature of this film [its version of East Lynne (8-9 minutes)] is that the acting is so dignified and so arranged that slow music may be played during the exhibition” (Gaumont, 8). The Warwick Trading Company’s January 1903 catalogue supplement described Robinson Crusoe as “one of the most entertaining productions yet conceived and produced for us by that clever Artist, Actor and Necromancer, Mr. G. Melies” (Warwick, Film Blue Book Supplement, 10). As these catalogues consistently listed more non-fiction films than fiction films,28 it seems that it was not even necessary for the majority of films to be fiction (one of deCordova’s claims)29 for it to be possible to regard performance in fiction films as acting. DeCordova’s claim that “[t]he fictional film existed long before the notion that people acted in films” (PP, 35) cannot, it seems therefore, be generalised to the UK: this notion appeared at the inception of the fiction film. However, even recent film historians who have noticed as much nonetheless incline to agree with deCordova. In 2003 Jon Burrows wrote that, in the UK, [b]efore the transitional era [elsewhere defined as 1907–13] there seems to have been no concerted belief that what the performers employed by film companies did on screen constituted a form of acting. The idea that their creative labour



Introduction 17

might be shaped or judged by the practices and standards of theatrical actors appears to have been more or less inconceivable. Acting was rarely identified or promoted as an element of cinematic content in the medium’s first twelve years of existence. (Legitimate, 45)

He adds that “[b]efore 1908 there was thus hardly any mention in Britain of the work that actors did in films” (45). The above examples, however, suggest that even Burrows’s qualified remarks may give too little credit to the willingness of industry and lay commentators to regard performance in fiction films as acting. A June 1906 article in the Strand exhibits the ease, by this point, with which UK commentators could associate film performance with acting. The writer, one Theodore Waters, based the article, a description of the production of a film about escaping convicts, on the contrast between the drama as it would appear to unfold to the film viewer and the viewpoint of the performers involved in contriving that drama, constantly confronting the reader with the fictionality of the pro-filmic performance. A lengthy description of the three convicts’ prison break, told in the first person from the viewpoint of one of them, ends thus: ““This way, boys; follow me!” exclaimed Panzer. With determined faces we ran along the corridor and out of a door leading to the roof, and as we rushed out, striped suits and all, into the bright light of day, there fell upon us a roar of wild applause, the sound of multitudinous hand-clapping” (650). The drama so far has been performed in an open set on a rooftop, and the applause comes from the occupants of an office building on the far side of the street. The writer goes on to recount the ‘stage-manager’s’ experiences of filming in public (including bribing certain people to keep out of shot), performance conventions such as throwing up one’s hands to indicate being shot and disregard for plausibility (Waters remarks that the convicts fire many more blank cartridges than they could have carried with them from the prison), and production conventions that depend on post-production work such as using interior and exterior locations that are far removed from each other, and a further episode in the film is described first as the stage-manager’s instructions and then comically described again, almost verbatim, as a description of the enacted action. This glib commentary reflects playfulness with already secure concepts. Waters called a fellow performer an “actress” (655), was even comfortable using the sub-category of “character-actor” (651), and even set up all the necessary components for a ‘mistaken for reality’ scenario only to then bypass it as passé (6534). A discourse on acting was some years old in the UK by this point. DeCordova also claimed that even after the first stirrings of the discourse on acting, film discourse in the US still impeded the emergence of a star system because, up to at least late 1909, it was characterised by “a kind of struggle between a photographic conception of the body and a theatrical one – between posing and acting” (PP, 34; echoed by Burrows in Legitimate, 45 & 49), adding that “the pose does not usually carry connotations of a fictional production” (PP, 34; O’Rourke 194). But as the multiple allusions to Bill Cody’s Wild West show in the US version of the 1904 Selig anecdote quoted above also suggest, ‘being filmed’ could be, and was, described as a form of fictional performance by means other than a discourse on acting, and

18  The Origins of the Film Star System

as Chris O’Rourke’s research into discourse on life modelling in the UK in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries indicates, the photographic pose was not anathema to the idea of performance. O’Rourke finds that, during the 1909–12 period in the UK, the work of performing for a fiction film was likened as much to the work of painters’/photographers’ life model as it was to the work of actors (193–6) and, notably, that both types of modelling were recognised as performance modes. Painters’ life models, first used in the late seventeenth century, and photographers’ life models (the profession emerged in the 1870s) were both expected to assume costumes and postures in such a way as to convey dense meaning; both might also present a character in more than one pose if posing for a linked series of paintings or photographs. Though ‘posing’ might easily be regarded as describing the passivity of the amateur posing for a portrait photograph, as a professional activity for life models it “could denote more than simply being oneself” (O’Rourke, 195). Using sources from the 1880s and 1890s, O’Rourke demonstrates just “how histrionic, how ‘like actors’, models in this period were expected to be”: Oscar Wilde and Henry James, for example, opined that, like good actors, good life models were both versatile and able to overcome their given physical habits (O’Rourke, 194). Such skills required training. A common aspect of life modelling, for instance, was adopting a resting face that is not one’s normal resting face.30 This was not specific to the UK. In 1910, when Mabel Normand, at the time working as an artist’s and photographer’s life model, filled out her US census form, she stated that her profession was ‘poser’ (Sherman, 10): posing, for her and her contemporaries, was an activity and a profession. O’Rourke also shows that ‘pose’ was used because it denoted the specific act of making one’s performance available for a second-stage creative agent, such as an artist or photographer, instead of direct to a viewer. ‘Posing’, that is, was more appropriate than ‘acting’ to describe the work of film performance (O’Rourke, 197). In film discourse, like ‘joke’, the verb ‘to pose’ alluded to aspects of ‘being filmed’ that did not fit all of acting’s connotations: ‘acting’, after all, also refers to controlling the pitch, volume and clarity of one’s voice; hence the use of terms alluding to acrobatics that deCordova noticed in commentaries in US film discourse in 1907 (PP, 31, 25), and hence the rise of ‘pantomime’ as a film performance ideal in the early 1910s,31 both of which tried to precisely describe silent performance for an indexical technology. O’Rourke’s 1909 examples were not the earliest: a March 1900 contribution to the Optical Magical Lantern Journal reported that “[a] correspondent asks us how he is to know real from sham war films, seeing that several subjects are made up at home from life models?”32 and observed that “[t]he subject lends itself […] well to life model work”.33 One September 1909 commentary explained that “Miss Annette Kellerman recently posed for the Vitagraph Company of America, performing her diving feats as well as her physical culture exercises and diabolo playing. Some of the pictures were taken in the Vitagraph’s fifty-foot tank, while others were made in the country, Miss Kellerman devoting several days to the posing.”34 If ‘posing’ meant merely ‘render oneself still and inert’, it would not have been used to describe the athletic feats of this professional swimmer. The appropriateness of ‘pose’ for denoting



Introduction 19

the act of being filmed is also evidenced by its tenacity: one commentator described a film actor’s much-sought-after ability “to pose successfully for the pictures” in 1913 (Steer, 53); in June 1915 P&PG reported that the opera star Geraldine Farrar would “positively receive the largest salary ever paid an artiste to pose for pictures” during her time with the Lasky Feature Play Company,35 a prose poem in an October 1915 issue of the same magazine observed that “[a] lot of girls in this world of ours would picture actors be. They think it fine to pose in plays with wide publicity”;36 a January 1916 article reported that it was the stage star Lillie Langtry’s “opinion that posing [for a film] is the greatest test of one’s art” (Dench, 400), and a September 1917 article, describing a ‘clip’ film constructed from bits of Chaplin’s 14 Essanay films, stated that he “did not actually pose” for it.37 The tenacious co-presence of ‘posing’ and ‘acting’ in contemporary film discourse does not, therefore, indicate a tension between inertness and performance; instead it merely indicates the co-presence of two models of performance.38 These instances also employ a use of the verb ‘to pose’ other than ‘signify for the benefit of another’, as ‘pose’ can also mean ‘impersonate’, in that one can pose as something one is not. That is, when looking for a term to describe performing for a fiction communicated to its audience by an indexical technology rather than performing amongst the overt frames needed to indicate fictionality when working in front of a live audience, one might be prompted towards terms denoting covert pretending rather than overt pretending. In 2006, when I remarked that, even in October 1911, the ongoing project to redefine film work as acting was not complete in the UK (‘She looks’, 47), I took deCordova’s claim that a photographic discourse of being filmed provided a barrier to the emergence of the idea that being filmed is a form of fictional performance (PP, 34-6) as robust, but this was a mistake. In addition to the above evidence, one might consider a letter from the American stage actress/playwright Beulah Poynter to William Selig, dated 5 April 1910, which reads as follows: “Yours at hand regarding scenario of Lena Rivers and my posing for same. Kindly make me a proposition and if favourable I shall be glad to accept.”39 Contra deCordova, who, remarking that Vitagraph made five Shakespeare adaptations in 1908, claimed that “one does not […] “pose” the role of Macbeth” (PP, 40), Poynter seems to have been quite able to imagine ‘posing’ the role of Lena Rivers. I argued in 2012 that “[i]t was not necessary for a discourse specifically on acting to concretise for a system of film celebrity to emerge. It is possible to envision any of the versions of film performance that circulated in the period before 1910 forming the basis for an order of celebrities” (‘The Invention’, 469). There was no particular reason why filmic celebrity could not be cultivated out of other types of performance, such as acrobatics, mime, escapology, combat or prestidigitation. But I also claimed that in spite of the availability of a histrionic discourse of ‘being filmed’ in the UK, the sheer range of alternative accounts of ‘being filmed’ that circulated at the time was what nonetheless prevented any one of these from providing the basis for a form of stardom: “[w]ith so many scales of quality apparent in films, a single, or singularly filmic, account could not form the basis for a system of celebrity” (‘The Invention’, 465).

20  The Origins of the Film Star System

I stand corrected here though: film performance has never, either before, during or after the emergence of the film star, been identified in popular consensus as a matter solely of acting. One of the non-histrionic accounts of film performance that dominated after the rise of the film star was that of risk, which was particularly strong in both UK and US film discourse during the 1910s (for more, see my ‘She looks’, 49–55 and The Cinema, 60–73). For example, Valentia Steer, in his 1913 book The Romance of the Cinema, described film performance like so: When you sit in the picture theatre and watch your favourite actor or actress leap from a galloping horse, swim a swollen river, fall backwards over a cliff, or jump from a moving train, you may possibly imagine that the thing is “faked” so that there is no danger to the performer. But it is not so. […] the average picture player daily takes risks which would appal the ordinary public were they only there to see, and the skill and pluck of the performer are only equalled by the ingenuity and enterprise of the producer. (49)

An article in the January 1914 issue of the Strand devoted entirely to the risks required when performing for films began as follows: “Can you swim, walk a tight rope, drive an express engine, vault from a motorcar when travelling at sixty miles an hour, stop runaway horses, wrestle with wild animals, and—” “Certainly!” “Oh, that’s all right then. Now we’ll see if you can act.” Such might be the typical introductory conversation passing between a producer and a new aspirant for the honours and glories of the picture-play heroine. (Talbot, 96)

Here risk and acting were listed as the twin principles of film performance, with neither devalued; the contributor added that “[s]ensationalism to-day is the rage, and grave risks are incurred to satisfy this demand” (Talbot, 96). This discourse of risk accounted for ‘being filmed’ as a matter of performance without describing it as acting: it employed the use of ‘perform’ to mean ‘achieve against a scale of endeavour’ rather than the use in which it is roughly synonymous with ‘resemble’.40 The discourse of risk also had its roots in specific types of film performance developed in North America. For example, during the Kalem Company’s November 1908–March 1909 time filming in Florida, Gene Gauntier later recalled, my screen work was all strenuous, horseback riding for hours each day, water scenes in which I committed suicide or floated on spars in shark-infested waters, climbing trees, coming down on ropes from second-story windows, jumping from roofs or rolling down to be caught in blankets, overturning skiffs, paddling canoes, a hundred and one “stunts” thought out to give the action which Kalem films demanded. (‘Blazing’ Part 2, 170)

One August 1912 account issued by the Lubin Company about their filming at the Wissahickon Falls in Pennsylvania told of the swimming feats required of two of their



Introduction 21

performers – Howard Mitchell and Arthur Johnson – when the wire holding Johnson’s canoe from going over the Falls snapped: “Mitchell shouted for Johnson to take the water; then plunged in, and with the American crawl stroke reached his friend just in time to save him from a 50ft drop over the Falls.”41 Physical danger was purportedly very real: an early 1913 account released by Kalem claimed that Ruth Roland had torn out a fingernail as a result of a saddle mishap during “a spectacular ride” while filming The Sheriff of Stone Gulch.42 The star system thrived on a discourse of risk, which shows that non-histrionic accounts of film performance did not inhibit the emergence of discursive conditions favourable to its emergence.43 As with the discourse on acting, the second of the discursive conditions described by deCordova – the emergence of an ‘art film’ phenomenon – also occurred in the UK earlier than in the US. DeCordova points out that before early 1909, film content militated against the rise of a discourse on acting, and that when Pathé began to release the first of the Film d’Art company’s films, which adapted widely known stage plays and/or utilised widely known stage performers, in the US in February 1909, film content first began to synchronise with the discourse on acting (PP, 36).44 As Jon Burrows has shown, however, in the UK the first such films were produced by UK Gaumont (independent of its French parent company by this time) in early 1908, and so predated the debut in the US of the first three releases of the Film d’Art company by eight months, and the November 1908 France and UK debuts of these films by five months (Legitimate, 47). Instigated by the company’s managing director Alfred Bromhead, the first of these UK Gaumont ‘art films’ was Romeo and Juliet (roughly 21 minutes long), issued on 17 June 1908. This was advertised to the trade as “The famous Tragedy in Five Acts, by Shakespeare”.45 The equivalence of the film to the original was emphasized – all five acts of the play had been “cinematographed by us” – and actors associated with the recent production at the Lyceum were advertised, although, as Burrows indicates, the leads in the version of the play running at the Lyceum (Matheson Lang and Norah Kerin) seem to have declined Bromhead’s proposal to feature in the film, which explains why the film features Godfrey Tearle and Mary Malone, junior members of the company, instead (Legitimate, 47). Gaumont continued this strategy with Napoleon and the English Sailor (just under 9 minutes), issued on 6 July 1908, an adaptation of a ballad by the music hall celebrity Herbert Darnley in which Darnley took the lead role and Arthur Page played the English sailor.46 The film opened with title footage announcing Darnley followed by a ‘credit’ shot of him bowing to the camera, which, Burrows speculates, was the first such credit sequence in world cinema (Legitimate, 48). Gaumont maintained this association with Darnley, issuing a roughly 9-minute film version of his famous sketch, Moving In, performed by members of his own company, in late July/early August 1908.47 In November 1908 they issued Lady Letmere’s Jewellery, a film written specially for them by the journalist, satirist and author George Sims, starring the variety performer Maisie Ellis as Lady Letmere.48 K&LW remarked that in the film “[a]ctors and actresses of note have been employed throughout and before the commencement of the picture we are introduced to the leading characters” via “a special portrait study, in which

22  The Origins of the Film Star System

their names, together with the parts they play, are stated”.49 That is, at least Ellis was introduced with credit footage which named her. Again, although the celebrity of the performers was modest, the films implicitly claimed that film performance was worthy of the labour of stage professionals. The last of Gaumont’s run of prestige films was The Mystery of Edwin Drood, issued in February 1909, also featuring junior actors associated with the Lyceum50 and also incorporating a credit sequence stating the names of these actors.51 Although the output of the Film d’Art company, founded in February 1908 and issuing films in Europe via Pathé between November 1908 and early 1912, was certainly more plentiful than these UK Gaumont precursors, they by no means dominated European ‘art film’ production, which is better understood as an industry-wide tendency (something that deCordova noticed in the US industry (PP, 40), and to which I will return at the beginning of Part 1). Although theatrical scenes had been filmed before (for example, in the 1899–1902 period British Mutoscope and Biograph specialised in films of theatrical scenes (see Kember, 150)), UK Gaumont’s prestige films of June 1908 to February 1909 were adaptations of entire works. Of course, even before it emerged, cinema had futures imagined for it that included recording whole pre-existing stage performances; in 1894 Thomas Edison promised that, when he worked out a method of projecting the images taken by his kinetograph camera, “grand opera can be given at the Metropolitan Opera House at New York […] with artists and musicians long since dead” (Qtd. Dickson & Dickson, 206). In March 1896, just a month after the public debut of projected films in the UK, one British journalist remarked that “[a] trifle of about forty-five thousand exposures will preserve an Empire ballet intact for ever”.52 And complete performances were indeed filmed during the last few years of the nineteenth century, the nascent film production business utilising an existing star system to market a strand of its products. For example, Paul’s Chirgwin in his Humorous Business and Chirgwin Plays a Scotch Reel (both June 1896) were just the earliest of a lengthy spate of films recording entire performances by music hall performers.53 However, unlike such reproductions of entire performances, these ‘art films’ of 1908 and onwards were presented overtly as adaptations, and so as constituting labour intrinsic to the proto-medium of cinema, rather than as mere filmed performances.54 I sketch these UK precursors of deCordova’s discourse on acting and production of ‘art films’ not to request credit for UK culture. Instead, these precursors demonstrate something about causality: that both a discourse on acting and an ‘art film’ phenomenon emerged in the UK before they emerged in the US means that if deCordova was right to argue that the absence of either a discourse on acting or a slew of films confirming this discourse prevented the establishment of the first elements of the star system, then the star system should have emerged in the UK before it emerged in the US. It did not: the earliest evidence of a UK film production company carrying out a publicity campaign for a regular performer employee dates from no earlier than April 1911, when the Hepworth company supplied K&LW with a photograph of Flora Morris and a brief account of her career before and during her



Introduction 23

time with them,55 which indicates that they were also targeting publicity at the general public at the time. As Chapter 2 will show, this occurred at least 15 months after its US equivalent. The discursive changes evidenced by these two phenomena, though perhaps necessary conditions for the emergence of a film star system, were not, therefore, sufficient conditions. The remainder of this Introduction will look in detail at impediments that stood in the way of sufficient conditions coming about.

Systemic Anonymity Endemic to any new cultural practice in which cultural labourers sell their labour to employers, and in which, as a consequence, it is employers who make the decisions about whether to operate a star system, is the following deadlock: advertising a new product with publicity mentioning the name of a person involved in making that product necessitates an outlay on designing, printing, copying and distributing the appropriate publicity matter – advertising in the local press, for example, or posters that are given away to retailers/exhibitors for free, which are more likely to reach the public than those with a price tag. Because of this, employers normally only invest in such publicity if the person concerned already possesses a degree of existing fame that promises to stimulate the market for that product enough to provide income in excess of the initial outlay on this publicity. Employers making products in a new cultural form would be aware of the benefits of exploiting existing celebrity by inviting people in the labour pools of existing spheres of work (both within and outside the realm of culture) to work in the new cultural practice. By the same token, though, employers would also be aware that if existing celebrities agreed to participate in the new cultural form, it would be highly likely that this work would be temporary, given that such a person’s existing celebrity amply motivated them not to leave their existing career for a career in the new cultural form. By contrast, those starting their career in the new cultural form would, by dint of the youth of the new form, have little or no existing celebrity, giving their employers no motivation to spend money on producing publicity material specifically about them. Lastly, while it is also possible for employers to imagine building a public profile for a regular employee from scratch, this first necessitates that an employer be convinced that the even greater investment involved would achieve sufficient return to make such an investment worthwhile. Given the centralised, nation-wide and company-operated form of film production that came about in the North American and European film industries by roughly 1905, itself a consequence of the mass-reproducibility of the product, film stardom would have to come via employers; it could not be conducted by the individuals independently of the decisions of their employers.56 Translated into this film industry, this new-medium deadlock applied as follows: any executive of a company producing films anywhere in the world would have been aware of the benefits of accompanying a performed film with publicity that named one of its performers if that performer already possessed a measure of celebrity in an older cultural practice, or in other

24  The Origins of the Film Star System

realms of work such as politics or sport, and would have been just as aware that if such people agreed to be filmed either in the habitual activities of their existing profession or in a performance orchestrated specifically for a film, it was highly likely that this work would be temporary, as their existing celebrity gave them every reason not to leave their existing career for a career performing for films. By contrast, as the people employed by film production companies to perform regularly for their films had little or no existing celebrity, their employers had no motivation to spend money on producing publicity material about them. Lastly, while it was possible to imagine building a public profile for a regular employee from scratch, film production companies would first need to be convinced that investing in such a publicity campaign would achieve sufficient return to make such an investment worthwhile, and when they already had an efficient means of distinguishing their products from those of their competitors – company brands (see page 35) – and an efficient means of differentiating their own products from each other – genre57 – there was no motive for them to even investigate the feasibility of doing so. Indeed, this widespread lack of an incentive for producing publicity for regular performer employees was accompanied by a substantial disincentive, because building a celebrity profile for an employee would risk creating ‘wandering’ value, as the employee could take their public profile with them to another employer at the next expiration of their contract, which would render the initial employer’s expenditure not just wasted but damagingly counterproductive by ‘arming’ a competitor.58 Situations in which this type of value would be openly mentioned at the time were rare, but there are some, including liquidation: a November 1926 pamphlet announcing that Triangle Pictures was selling off its assets, including 324 films, claimed that these films bore substantial value because they featured “[n]ames in which millions of dollars have been invested […] . Star names, director names, author names – every kind of big name, that means actual money in the exhibitors’ box office the moment it appears in his announcement”.59 Although deCordova criticises accounts of the emergence of the star system which claim that employers were wary of creating this value in their employees because it would have given them reason to demand higher salaries (PP, 7),60 and even describes the star system as an attractive prospect (alluding to “the increased commercial viability of the film emphasising the star” (PP, 7)), he does not mention the idea that the employers were concerned that this value would equip another employer, and there are several instances of evidence that this worry was indeed common at the time. In his 1951 autobiography, Hepworth recalled encountering this exact situation in c.1911, when his company was employing, for the most part, completely unknown artists in our films […] . When the time came when we wanted to advertise them, both on the screen and in the press, by posters and by ‘stills,’ I foresaw what was beginning to happen to other firms would certainly happen to us. An actor had the value which was due to his own good work. He also had a fortuitous value, not contributed by him, and due to the money spent in advertising him. That accumulated value he was free – unless, and only for so long as, he was under contract – to sell to any rival firm for



Introduction 25

as much as he could get. His new firm would, of necessity, add to that increased value and the process would go on, higher and higher, until the producers were impoverished and the actors near millionaires. That, indeed, has largely come to pass and it is one of the reasons why the film production industry is nearly always in difficulties. (Came the Dawn, 81)

Such wariness is particularly understandable given that, once an employer established a public profile for a performer employee, films themselves would double as publicity, meaning that any subsequent employer would need to put very little into publicity to be able to reap the rewards of the first employer’s investment.61 Hepworth was not alone. In April 1911 the editor of K&LW, after writing to all of the production companies releasing films in the UK, reported that he “was surprised at being refused photographs of certain actors and actresses when I mooted our special number containing “People in Pictures.” One or two firms objected to their characters figuring in print, the chief reason being that other makers would get to know them and capture them for their own productions.”62 Even though he went on to explain that many of the other companies had not expressed this concern, and that one had even ridiculed it, these responses suggest that an earlier and more widespread concern was only being tentatively relinquished by the industry as a whole. Production companies were still expressing this concern as late as the end of 1911: in a letter from the head office of the Danish company Nordisk in Copenhagen to their London office, dated 21 December 1911 and replying to an 11 December 1911 letter from the London office, the Copenhagen office informed the London staff that “we principally decline to state the names of our players”. Though they added that the name inquired for was W[Valdemar] Psilander, they warned the London staff that this information “is only for your use and must not be given to someone other [sic]”.63 That is, the parent company did not mind if this name circulated among employees but they refused to use it in publicity. Combined, these conditions meant that, while employers may have been open to the idea of merely crediting their employees, capitalist imperatives made them hostile to the possibility of producing publicity materials for them.64 As I remarked in 2012, “even in 1908 there was no immediate commercial motive for film production companies to publicize the appearance in a film of somebody whose name was not already known” (‘The Invention’, 466). And of course, no film-only performer could accrue widespread public recognition if their name was not being publicised to the general public. This deadlock gave rise to a systemic anonymity for regular film performers, what Jane Gaines calls “a kind of negative shroud” (‘Anonymity’, 444), in the industries of Europe and North America that lasted for nearly all of the first decade of the twentieth century and continued patchily well into the 1910s, as employers continued to fluctuate between having no incentive to spend on commissioning publicity about their regular performer employees and being powerfully incentivised not to commission such publicity. The discursive figure of the film actor/performer co-existed with this situation of systemic anonymity. Discourse, that is, is enabling rather than causal; discursive imperatives, however strong, can and do nonetheless

26  The Origins of the Film Star System

clash with the imperatives of capital-based systems. The economic situation in the last few years of the first decade of the twentieth century was such that the immediate causes of the emergence of the film star system would have to be that it became apparent to employers that operating one would be a) feasible and b) commercially desirable c) even given the associated risks. Part 1 of this book shows how such extreme circumstances came about.

Crediting versus Publicity The distinction between crediting and publicity mentioned above warrants examination. DeCordova cited several instances from 1909 when hitherto uncredited film performers were named in the trade press, classifying them as examples of publicity (PP, 43, 52-3). At the end of 1908, for example, Kalem supplied the New York Dramatic Mirror with a group photograph of 11 employees currently filming around Jacksonville in Florida, accompanied by a list of their names, both of which the NYDM included in their first issue of 1909, though they did not match the names to the faces.65 DeCordova also claims that “[t]he Edison Company was quite active in publicizing its actors during 1909” (PP, 53), reporting that the 1 September 1909 issue of their fortnightly trade bulletin the Edison Kinetogram (launched on 1 August 1909) included synopses for Ethel’s Luncheon and Little Sister that featured cast lists, and that the 15 September 1909, 1 October 1909 and 15 October 1909 issues of this bulletin also included brief articles on specific stock company members (PP, 43, 53), a fact also mentioned by Tom Gunning in support of his claim that “the traditional view, that the MPPC [Motion Picture Patents Company] refused to publicize its stars and the Independents were the first to do so, is untrue” (D.W. Griffith, 220).66 These lists of performers’ names also featured in the MPW synopses for Ethel’s Luncheon and Little Sister, in the 4 September 1909 and 11 September 1909 issues respectively, which were probably reprinted from the EK.67 Anthony Slide likewise champions Ben Turpin, at the time working for Essanay, as “[p]ossibly the first film actor to be recognized by the trade press” (‘The Evolution’, 591): his name was included in reviews of Oh, What Lungs, A Midnight Disturbance and The Rube and the Bunco Men in, respectively the 20 March, 27 March and 17 April 1909 issues of MPW,68 all suggesting that the paper had been informed of his name by the company, and an article of around 320 words, entitled “Life of a Moving Picture Comedian,” appeared under his name in the 3 April 1909 issue of MPW (Turpin, 405). However, these are all instances of crediting rather than publicity, and for several reasons: first, they all occurred either among trade personnel or in trade publications and so were directed at a public of no more than a few thousand people (Slide, at least, acknowledges this). While I have not been able to acquire circulation figures for any of the US film trade publications, a comparison between general-public-oriented film publications and trade-oriented film publications in the UK is revealing: in August 1919 the publishers of the general-public-oriented film



Introduction 27

magazine Picture Show based their advertising charges on a weekly circulation of 573,000,69 and they certified net weekly sales of 422,819 per week in December 1920 (as a magazine’s circulation was roughly double its sales figure, the August 1919 circulation estimate was therefore very modest);70 in September 1919 the publishers of P&PG, also targeted at the general public, based their advertising charges on a weekly circulation of 250,000,71 and they certified net weekly sales of 110,000 in March 1919.72 This put the film magazines oriented at the general public at roughly half the weekly circulation of general-interest UK weekly periodicals, which sold, at the time, in the range of 400,000, making for a circulation of around 800,000–900,000 (David Reed, 141). By contrast, in March 1920 the publishers of the UK film trade paper Kinematograph Weekly claimed that it sold 4,400 copies per week,73 which would make for a circulation of less than 10,000, and even if the paper had attained this circulation over a decade before, it would still have attained a circulation somewhere between 1/60th and 1/20th of that of its general-public contemporaries, meaning that it reached a public somewhere between one and two orders of magnitude too small to make it viable as a method for conducting publicity to the general public. It is reasonable to regard the same extreme discrepancy as applying in the US.74 Although trade personnel, such as cinema managers, were free to pass on the above trade publication crediting in their own publicity, crediting itself presented them with no motive to do so.75 The three September/October 1909 articles in the EK referenced by deCordova did indeed exist, but only the last two of these gave the names of performers (William J Sorelle and Herbert Bostwick, respectively)76 and the EK circulated to even fewer recipients than the trade papers, serving mainly as a means of feeding the trade papers with copy. Indeed, this copy can hardly be classed as an attempt to turn the people concerned into production values. In the first of these three articles, the anonymous copy writer regarded the names of the current Edison stock company as so insignificant next to the fact that they had all recently been acquired from prestigious stage companies (such as Frohman, Fiske, Skinner and Mansfield) that s/he did not mention them: the Edison Company had simply “looked towards the coming winter season, and […] secured some of the best talent the theatrical profession affords.”77 Why did the Edison Company even deem the mere existence of this group of unnamed performers worth mentioning? Because it “proves [i.e. insists] that the moving picture world is no longer considered a mere novelty – a passing amusement, that cannot last, but that it has reached the distinction of high art – an art such as requires the brains and talent of the best actors in the profession”78 – the theatrical profession, that is. Similarly, the 1 October 1909 EK article on William Sorelle (who, the article noted, was only with the Edison Company for “the winter season”) mostly comprised quotations of Sorelle describing his erstwhile colleague the then late theatrical actor-manager Richard Mansfield. Second, these instances of naming were not part of concerted campaigns: Kalem, for example, did not credit any other employees, even in their trade press advertisements, for fourteen months after the 2 January 1909 NYDM photograph

28  The Origins of the Film Star System

mentioned above. Essanay’s brief openness to the trade about Ben Turpin does not seem to have been accompanied by any publicity to the general public and seems not to have lasted beyond April 1909. The cast lists provided by Edison in the EK in late 1909 (which they did not even include in their trade advertisements for the weeks’ releases that included Ethel’s Luncheon and Little Sister)79 were not even the beginning of consistent trade crediting: other than the cast lists for Ethel’s Luncheon and Little Sister, I have not been able to find any mention of an Edison performer by name in their trade synopses (at least as reprinted in the trade press) up to the beginning of 1912. And while I have not seen extensive runs of the version of the EK issued in New York, the version that Edison issued in London from 15 April 1910 gave no names for Edison’s own performers (or, indeed, for any scenarist whose name was not already known from work as an author of prose fiction) until its 15 May 1911 issue.80 Edison’s trade press advertisements gave no names for any of their stock company members until April 1911,81 long after the start of the first stardom-building publicity campaigns in the US (see Chapter 3). A third reason, applicable only to the handful of late-1909 Edison cast lists, was that they lacked the hierarchical characteristic of star publicity: assuming that at least some of these performers had appeared in Edison films before, it is notable that, though the reviewers of these two films in later issues of MPW had been informed of the names of the performers, neither named any of them, even though the acting attracted praise; in Ethel’s Luncheon, for example, “[t]he acting is so natural that it appears on the screen as though the operator had made his exposures unknown to the group who were chiefly interested”.82 This was probably at least in part because a cast list of five names for a film is a significantly more dilute version of the potential of public information to draw attention to the work of a performer than publicity for a single person’s appearance in a film. DeCordova also omitted to mention that the handful of late-1909 instances of trade crediting by the Edison Company were also overtly related to the involvement of two prestigious local (i.e. New York/New Jersey) authors, Carolyn Wells and Edward Townsend, whom the Edison Company commissioned to write scenarios for them in the second half of 1909 and the first half of 1910. Ethel’s Luncheon, the first of the films to be accompanied by a cast list in the EK, was also the first film based on a scenario written by Carolyn Wells, and was advertised to the trade as “[a] comedy by Carolyn Wells. […] Brimful of laughter and amusing complications. Special cast for the production.” The same advertisement announced that Little Sister was “[e]specially written for Edison […] by Edw[ard]. W. Townsend, author of “Chimmie Fadden,” and interpreted by a special cast”83 (see Fig. 0.1). Neither advertisement, as mentioned above, gave the names of the performers. That is, in providing these cast lists in the 1 September 1909 EK the Edison Company was insisting on the prestigious nature of these films, signalling that they had the characteristics of authored products, rather than making efforts to build celebrity profiles for the performers. And the company seems to have had little faith in the potential of the identities of performers to do even this: these performers’ names were never used in their trade advertisements during all of 1909



Introduction 29

Fig. 0.1 Advertisement for Edison films, MPW 5.10 (4 September 1909), 322. Note the mention of Carolyn Wells under Ethel’s Luncheon and Edward Townsend under Little Sister.

30  The Origins of the Film Star System

and 1910, and they disappeared from synopses after these two mentions, while Wells and Townsend, by contrast, were mentioned in Edison’s trade advertisements for 13 films between them (see Fig. 0.2) and frequently mentioned in the films’ synopses or in MPW’s ‘Edison Notes’ item. Edison, that is, cited the concept of authorship in trying to convince the trade of the prestigious nature of some of their films, and this prompted them to also cite the idea of acting, but without engendering the habit of naming performers. For example, the first issue of the UK version of the EK included a synopsis for The Suit-Case Mystery, based on a scenario written by Townsend specifically for the company, and released in the UK on the 18 May 1910, which mentioned no performers’ names and remarked that “Mr. Townsend has in this clever story given the Edison players a splendid vehicle for displaying their talents, and they do not miss a point, as the film will prove.”84 A later issue finished off a synopsis of Sisters (released in the UK on 20 July 1910) with the remark that “[t]his picture was also played by our stock Company in Cuba and is replete with lovely scenery beautifully photographed. The acting is of a very high order.”85 Another issue rounded off a Fig. 0.2  The Edison Company’s crediting of scenario-writing work by Carolyn Wells and Edward Townsend in its trade advertisements during late 1909 and early 1910. Film title and US release date

Scenarist

Mentioned in trade advertisement?

Ethel’s Luncheon, 3 September 1909

Carolyn Wells

Yes

Little Sister, 14 September 1909

Edward Townsend

Yes

The Wallace Jewels, 1 October 1909

Carolyn Wells

Yes

Their Social Education, 19 October 1909 Edward Townsend

Yes

The Three Kisses, 29 October 1909

Carolyn Wells

Yes

A Rose of the Tenderloin, 23 November 1909

Edward Townsend

Yes

A Victim of Bridge, 22 February 1910

Edward Townsend

Yes

The Suit-Case Mystery, 25 March 1910 Edward Townsend

Yes

The Senator and the Suffragettes, 6 May 1910

Edward Townsend

Yes

History Repeats Itself, 10 May 1910

Carolyn Wells

Yes

Carminella, 13 May 1910

Edward Townsend

Yes

The Valet’s Vindication, 26 August 1910 Edward Townsend

No

The Piece of Lace, 3 June 1910



Edward Townsend Yes (also featured Pilar Morin)

Introduction 31

synopsis of How the Squire was Captured (released in the UK on 9 October 1910) with the claim that “[f]or pure, roguish fun and wholesome sweetness the comedy is pretty hard to beat, and it is played by a special cast which would do credit to almost any picture.”86 The Joke They Played on Bumptious (released in the UK on 22 February 1911) was described as “a full-reel, up-to-date, up-to-the-minute comedy of the very best order delightfully played by the Edison company actors”.87 No performers’ names were given in any of these synopses. The earlier cast lists in the US version of the EK for Ethel’s Luncheon and Little Sister served a purpose that, for the company, was better served by acknowledging labour anonymously and collectively; these cast lists were not, that is, attempts to use performers as production values. The same was the case with other instances that deCordova regarded as examples of the first slew of ‘picture personality’ marketing: the display boards made up of photographs of stock company members produced by Kalem in January 1910 (headed ‘Kalem Stock Company’ and showing 11 stock company members) and by Vitagraph in April 1910 (headed ‘Vitagraph Players’ and showing 36 stock company members) (PP, 8, 52, 64),88 because both display boards, though produced for cinemas to use direct to the general public, presented their constituent photographs anonymously,89 a fact that deCordova glossed over on several occasions90 and that Richard Abel, following deCordova, omits to mention (Red Rooster, 148). An article in the 15 January 1910 issue of MPW commenting on Kalem’s display board remarked that this new development in film marketing was laudable because “[m]anagers of picture theatres and nickelodeons all over the country are making repeated urgent requests upon the producers of moving picture subjects for photographs of the principal actresses and actors taking part in them”.91 That is, as far as MPW was aware, these were requests from exhibitors for point-of-sale publicity rather than requests from either exhibitors or cinemagoers for information about the identities of performers. Indeed, at no point did this article even mention the prospect of naming film performers in publicity. This journalist had noticed merely that while “[h]eretofore requests of this character have come from love-smitten patrons of the places [i.e. cinemas] […] [t]he managers of the places now see a big advertising advantage in the display of such photographs in the lobbies of their theatres.”92 The earliest evidence of cinema managers seeking out publicity concerning the identities of specific people comes from two years later.93 Even if exhibitors were coming over to the idea of using audiences’ engagement with the personhood of those involved in the production of films as an aspect of their own advertising in early 1910, and even though this indicated a willingness to submit to being used as conduits for production companies to contact audiences, the industry seems to have been inclined to respond with visual materials that permitted them to adhere to the principle of anonymity. It is therefore difficult to agree with Eileen Bowser’s remark that, in the form of MPW’s comments on the Kalem display board, “the trade paper was already predicting the coming of a star system for the moving picture” (Transformation, 110). This anonymous use of portrait photographs was even picked up by some of the newer film production companies

32  The Origins of the Film Star System

not allied with the Motion Picture Patents Company (see Chapter 2). For example, in November 1910 both Powers and Thanhouser made available framed posters bearing portrait photographs, again without names, of their stock companies.94 And so to the one possibly public-oriented component of deCordova’s late-1909 examples: he claimed that in late 1909 “the Edison Company became the first company to announce the cast of their pictures on the screen” (PP, 53). The only evidence that he cites for this is an early November 1909 article by the French pantomimist Pilar Morin, printed in the EK and reprinted in MPW. Pilar Morin performed in six films for the Edison Company over a roughly one-year period between c.September 1909 and c.September 1910; when she wrote this article the first of these, Comedy and Tragedy, had just been released in the US (on 2 November 1909).95 The article does indeed mention on-screen crediting: Pilar Morin remarked that “[t]he Edison Company have been pioneers in elevating the art of moving pictures by securing well-known artists and authors […]. This firm also first announced on the screen the cast of their best pictures, thus making the artist more eager to do his or her best in action.”96 However, although I have only been able to view several surviving Edison Company films from 1909 and 1910, I have found no evidence of on-screen crediting in these films.97 Indeed, the earliest instance of on-screen crediting for a regular performer employee in a film produced anywhere in the US confirmed by Eileen Bowser, curator of the film archive at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, dates from September 1911 (Transformation, 118), and the earliest for which there is any reliable circumstantial evidence (a review in MPW) dates from May 1911.98 Pilar Morin’s remark in the EK therefore seems to have been either a mistake or a reference to the Edison Company’s use of her own name in title footage for Comedy and Tragedy, and/or their naming Edison’s other recent cross-media ‘loan’, the stage actress Cecil Spooner, in footage in The Prince and the Pauper (released in the US on 3 August 1909), rather than to title footage naming Edison’s own performer employees.99 Of course, these instances of trade crediting indicate that employers were not ruthlessly keeping the names of their employees secret. A casual openness is clear in the popular and trade press at the time: for example, when the Chicago-based Essanay Company sent a small group to film in Colorado, Nevada and California in late 1909, an account of this trip that appeared in the Denver Post in November 1909 included the names of the four performer employees who were part of this group;100 Florence Turner and Maurice Costello were named in the 15 January 1910 issue of MPW as part of a list of the ‘home talent’ due to participate, at the time the paper was printed, in the live entertainments to take place after the Vitagraph dinner on 8 January;101 in February 1910 the New York Motion Picture Company, one of the new ‘independent’ US production companies, provided MPW with a press release that included a list of their stock company members filming in the Northwest plains, a list that MPW included in their 5 March 1910 issue.102 While all of the instances of naming that I have described in the last few pages certainly indicate that the discursive impediments to the emergence of a star system had now, in North America at least, abated, they do not evidence a willingness to operate a film star system.103



Introduction 33

This distinction between crediting and publicity is fundamental to determining the beginnings of the film star system: unlike the above instances of crediting, only evidence that an employer was a) making a performer the focus of publicity materials purposed for use with the general public, and b) consistently concentrating on that performer over the course of several films can clearly indicate that the employer was willing to operate a star system.104 As MPW was launched in March 1907, deCordova’s claim that the ‘mistaken for reality’ scenario discussed above only appeared in May 1907 indicates that he was largely confining his search to trade papers, and this is understandable, given that he was working in a time before the widespread digitisation of local and national newspapers in the US and Europe, and given the ephemeral nature of most publicity materials and the resultant paucity of the surviving evidence base for the inquiry that I propose here. Chapters 1 and 2 in particular will draw heavily on surviving ephemera that deCordova would have been unable to access.105

Impediments In addition to the new-medium deadlock described above, there were further practical obstacles to the emergence of a film star system. In work published in the same year as deCordova’s Picture Personalities (and showing signs of influence by deCordova’s earlier 1985 article),106 Eileen Bowser identified two of these major practical obstacles in the US. (I should acknowledge that both only constituted obstacles because of fiction film’s property of rendering one of the types of work behind it “both “bodied” and “faced”” (to use Jane Gaines’s terms (‘Anonymity’, 447)), regardless of whether this classification of workers remain anonymous in credits and publicity, and so have influenced the adoption of a star system in film where they would not have influenced the adoption of a star system in, for example, jewellery manufacture). These obstacles were 1) that before a point in roughly late 1908/early 1909, long-term employment as a film performer was the exception rather than the norm in the US film industry: “there could scarcely be stars before 1908 or even 1909 because there were few regularly employed actors and actresses and no regular production schedule” (Transformation, 106),107 and 2) that before roughly 1909, norms of camera distance shared by the whole US film industry kept the human figure too small on screens of average size for it to be feasible to expect a viewer to be able to recognise that person from film to film.108 These norms also applied outside the US, and the shifts that suspended these norms in the US – a one-quarter reduction in camera distance norms during 1909 and 1910109 (which enlarged human heads from roughly 9% to roughly 16% of the height the frame),110 and the establishment of a new norm of long-term employment as a performer among the older US film production companies – seem to have been representative of changes occurring in the film industries of other countries; while details about the UK are sparser, Simon Brown remarks that “by 1909 [Cecil] Hepworth was running a studio with a detailed division of labour”, with an older

34  The Origins of the Film Star System

system where all staff were obliged to pitch in with all jobs now applying only to the younger performers (50). Other impediments that lessened around 1909 include the interference to employer-originated stardom caused by the widespread tendency to employ the personhood of film exhibition personnel in publicity. As Joe Kember has shown (in describing the UK), on the public lecturing circuit, in fairgrounds and in travelling shows it was the live agents accompanying films who provided their audiences with the sense of ‘personality and performance’ that, for him, the media public widely sought in their engagement with the image during the early twentieth century (40–128).111 In addition, conditions that remained the norm after 1908–9 also constituted longterm systemic impediments to the inception of a practice of making regular performer employees the focus of publicity. Significant among these is that the identities of people who sell their labour are, in one respect, irreconcilable with branding. DeCordova claimed that before 1907 the prevailing view of film was such that “[t]o accuse the [film] manufacturers of concealing names at that time is like accusing Ford of not revealing the names of the people who assembled your car” (PP, 7). This simile is useful, but as a description of the ideal nature of the film product sought by managers of production companies both before and after 1907: industrial authorship. For company managers, the only creative agency that consumers ought to associate with the product should be the agency of the company, a collective constituting a small leadership to whom employees had sold their labour, so relinquishing any right to call the product of that labour theirs.112 In late December 1909 an exhibitor wrote to MPW to advise fellow exhibitors that, when advertising in local newspapers, they should “give the title of the film, its maker and a brief synopsis of the story. […] Educate your patrons to the names of the different manufacturers [i.e. film production companies]. Familiarize them, let each one stand for something, just the same as Belasco, Erlanger, Nixon, Thomas and many other names stand for something in the living theatres” (Morris, 957). Company brands, in this view of good business practice, were not just symbols of single characteristics, such as the narrative and photographic clarity denoted by the Lubin Company’s brand, with its bell logo (adopted by mid-March 1910)113 and ‘Clear as a Bell’ slogan (adopted by August 1911);114 each was associated with a specific flavour derived from that company’s film output so far. By June 1909 the executives at Biograph were sufficiently convinced of the worth of their ‘AB’ logo among hiring companies and exhibitors that when they changed their corporate name from American Mutoscope and Biograph Company to simply Biograph Company, they did not change their logo, in spite of having rendered the ‘A’ inaccurate.115 In November 1909 Biograph supplied the trade press with six examples of recent testimonials from cinema managers, all of whom used production company brands as the primary product identifier.116 And as Fig. 0.3 shows, exhibitors deemed production companies’ brand names to be of sufficient value with the public to reproduce them in their own publicity. DeCordova alluded to the ideal of industrial authorship when he explained why the Biograph Company did not, as he understood it, publicise any of their regular



Introduction 35

Fig. 0.3  Poster for the Royal Electric Theatre, Hartlepool, 9 May 1910, featuring (American) Biograph and Selig as brand names. RWC. DF.WOD.B1729. Note that one of the films, the ‘bio-drama’, will be accompanied by spoken dialogue provided by local actors.

36  The Origins of the Film Star System

performer employees until 1913, holding out for what appeared to him to be a period of three years (PP, 78–9; I update the story of the Biograph Company in ‘The Biograph ‘Anomaly’’, forthcoming in Screen). For him Biograph’s resistance was overcome because “the dominant institutional pressures were to link film as a symbolic act with traditional forms of artistic production. And of course these forms were heavily dependent on ideas of authorship. Art was, according to the romantic tenets of the day, an arena of individual expression” (PP, 79). Nonetheless, even in the twenty-first century, employers of cultural producers pursue the ideal of industrial authorship in spite of the common idea that films are products of individual acts of authoring. Why, for instance, did John Travolta not know the name of the performer who voiced the part of Elsa in Disney’s Frozen (dir. Chris Buck & Jennifer Lee, 2013), even though this was the third-highest-grossing of the films released in 2013 at the US and Canada box office, and even though one of her songs in the film, ‘Let it Go’, was, at the time, one of the most widely played pieces of music on US radio and one of the most widely streamed and downloaded pieces of music in the country (the film’s soundtrack was the highest-selling album of 2014 in the US),117 when he was called on to introduce her at the 86th Academy Awards on 2 March 2014? Why, that is, did Travolta call Idina Menzel ‘Adele Dazeem’? Because the production/distribution company behind the film had adhered to the principle of industrial authorship in its publicity: the relevant name, for the public of this film, including Travolta, was not the performer who provided the voice for its protagonist, or even the film’s director or screenwriter, but ‘Disney’, itself initially the name of a person but since Walt Disney’s death in 1966, for the overwhelming majority of the people aware of it, the name of a commercial entity. Among early-twenty-firstcentury film production companies, Disney seeks to make less of the identities of performers in its films – both live-action and animated – than its contemporaries: the domestic theatrical release posters for Frozen, for example, did not name any of the film’s creative personnel. But in doing so it merely takes a common industry norm to an extreme. Similarly, neither Biograph nor any of the production companies operating in the US during the 1910s made the decision to employ a mode of authorship other than industrial authorship merely because the cultural forms with which they were trying to align film were associated with authorship. It was and is in employers’ interests not to generate a public profile for their performer employees because this would enable the employee to retain symbolic ownership of the work in spite of having implicitly assigned that ownership to the employer in taking payment for their labour. Even worse, performer authorship threatens to eclipse the company brand. As Tom Gunning opines, the industry-wide norm of anonymity during the first decade of the twentieth century “reflects manufacturers’ desire to have a single name associated with their films, that of the production company. The audience was to see a Biograph film, not a Florence Lawrence film.”118 Thus even when Gene Gauntier started to habitually play leads in Kalem’s films in early 1909 (in The Girl Spy: An Incident of the Civil War (released in the US on 21 May 1909), according to



Introduction 37

their trade advertisement, “such daring horsemanship as is shown by a young girl in this film has never before been pictured”,119 and in The Tom-Boy (released in the US on 23 July 1909), “a splendid romantic drama exploiting the remarkable riding and swimming ability of a pretty young girl”),120 Kalem did not publicly name her; as Chapter 3 will show, her name did not appear in local newspapers in connection with film before mid/late March 1910. Even with popular discourse prompting employers to regard their performer employees as actors, it was in the interests of production companies to keep their employees in the creative position of the producers of automobile components, or the writer of jokes on lollipop sticks: not a member of a team of talents capable of working at variance with one another’s aims but a member of a collective of talents producing as one and in tune with the will of their employer. Seeking to generate brand loyalty among end users by individuating employees, it would have been clear, would threaten the loyalty among those end users to the company’s brand. Indeed, I will also show in Chapters 5 and 6 that employers were so keen to adhere to the principle of industrial authorship that they worked up a variation on stardom specifically purposed not to counteract it. Fiction films, like mechanically produced items, were also palpably, to any viewer, the product of a ‘noisy’ work environment. Multiple workers had clearly generated aspects of the product during the production process; these included a planning figure working for the company making broad decisions about content and length, an originator of the story, an organising figure coordinating the work of all personnel working on the film, a camera operator, one or more performers, an assembler of strips of film (if it was a multi-shot film) into the larger whole, and a printer of positives from the assembled negative. Clearly a star system had emerged in various stage forms even though audiences could recognise that theatre producers, music hall song-writers etc., personnel who could also become celebrities, were making contributions to finished performances in addition to those of performers, but unlike pre-existing forms of performance involving the human body, film involved such a substantial set of logistical processes – those involved in obtaining an image, developing it, printing it, manipulating it by editing and colouring, distributing the result across and between nations, and then reversing the optical processes involved in obtaining the image to project it – that to attach a role to each process meant that human performance would form a relatively small proportion of the human endeavour involved. As the 1918 cartoon reproduced in Fig. 0.4 indicates, even after the star system had come about, film’s labour noise was perceptible to viewers. This posed a further impediment to the selection of any creative personnel for use in publicity. Another systemic impediment to the emergence of a film star system (mentioned by Bowser, albeit in passing (Transformation, 118)) is the fact that from roughly 1907 in both continents, the norm in the market for films was that film production companies would sell their products outright, not to exhibitors but to hiring

38  The Origins of the Film Star System

Fig. 0.4  ‘Labour noise’ depicted in P&PG in June 1918.121



Introduction 39

companies, companies who then in turn hired their copies to exhibitors.122 As Simon Brown points out, in Europe “the cinema market operated not between producers and audiences but between producers, renters and showmen” (98). If the product’s end user is a member of the general public, the norm even in 1909 was that the manufacturer of a film was removed three times from the person to whom it would ultimately be availed, with hiring company and exhibitor as middle people. This had two significant consequences. First, it is difficult for the manufacturers of such products to even conceive of them as capable of achieving brand loyalty with the general public. In a situation where the producer of a product does not retail directly to the end user of that product, publicity fashioned for and directed towards the primary buyer will take priority. Exhibitors seeking to achieve brand loyalty with their public via the characteristics of their venue were applying their own layer of branding, and hiring companies seeking to achieve brand loyalty with their public via the variety, amount, consistency and up-to-dateness of their films were also applying their own layer of branding. There was, therefore, significant signal interference between manufacturers and end users. Though publicity fashioned for and directed towards an end user will be regarded as having a lower success rate, given that it relies on end users influencing the decisions of the primary buyers, it is nonetheless feasible. To regard end user-targeted publicity as worthwhile, however, a producer needs to be satisfied that several requirements have been met. Principal among them is that the product needs to be rendered sufficiently widely available that if the publicity succeeds in making end users try to obtain it, a significant proportion of them will be able to do so immediately, through their local retailer/hirer/ etc., or shortly, via their local retailer/hirer/etc. obtaining it from their retailer/hirer. But product availability on an open film market is highly unpredictable, such that any member of the public seeking out a certain film at one of their local venues (and in the case of a prospective star system the relevant product category is a specific film rather than a specific brand) could easily find that none of them had hired a copy, and even if enough cinemagoers asked a local cinema manager for a specific film to motivate that manager to ask their hiring company for it, s/he could just as easily find, in turn, that the hiring company had not bought any copies. Public-oriented publicity would only be successful if enough cinema managers were asking hiring companies for a specific film to motivate the hiring companies to buy copies. And given the massive volumes of films being released on an open market by late 1909 (e.g. in just one week in late September 1909, 36,497 feet of films totalling over 10 hours of footage were placed on the UK market: this was more than twice what an exhibitor needed to fill a 2-hour programme changed every three working days),123 getting a copy of a film bought by a hiring company by advertising to the general public was very far-fetched: it was plausible only in the case of films with exceptional and therefore newsworthy subject matter. This situation of uncertain availability of specific products only worsens the more competitive the market becomes. Production companies could better accomplish high sales volumes of their products to the hiring companies via the more direct method of building the identity of their output-wide company brand.

40  The Origins of the Film Star System

Secondly, even the very simple company brands could easily be silenced by hiring companies and exhibitors. In July 1907 an exhibitor wrote to the K&LW to advise other exhibitors on how to treat intertitles: The strip of title film is usually inartistic and often disfigured by a too obvious trade mark. One firm’s titles are particularly obnoxious for this reason, and I invariably detach them, as I think it mistaken policy to let the public know that one is showing the products of two or three firms. I prefer to foster the harmless delusion that all have been made by myself, which adds to the respect paid to the show.124

Such a regard for the production company’s brand may have been harmless as far as the exhibitor was concerned, but such practices threatened any attempt that the production company might make to advertise production values direct to the general public. Consequently, in the period before the first popular film magazines (launched in the US in February 1911 and in the UK in October 1911), when any production company averse to the major expenditure of advertising in national newspapers wanted to contact the general public, their only significant means was via hiring companies and exhibitors, and production companies had no reason to even try to establish brand loyalty among the general public as they could not reasonably assume that hiring companies and exhibitors would consistently act as conduits for that publicity, which forestalled any impulse to establish a star system. Even contacting the public via hiring companies would require a channel of dedicated communication, specifically posters, and few film companies had developed the practice of producing posters for point-of-sale use before 1909.125 Chapters 1 and 2 will explain why this practice became a norm.

A Word on Structure The historical shift described in this book is easily exaggerated. Even in the twentyfirst century the identities of performers constitute just one of a stable of factors used to market films. But a thorough analysis of why a film star system emerged can help to generate models of causality in cultural industries. In attempting this analysis, this book tells the relevant historical story twice. In Part 1, ‘A New Run at the Story’, I will examine the further conditions – on top of those listed above – that needed to come about for the new-medium deadlock to be suspended and the industrial disincentives and logistical impediments also listed above to be dissolved. Rather than mere milestones in a discursive swelling, the first stardom-building publicity campaigns were the result of confluences of local exceptions and chance events that, together, suspended the new-medium deadlock and dissolved the above disincentives and impediments. Chapter 1 looks at Europe, concentrating on the train of events in France that led to the first stardom-building publicity campaign in the world. Chapter 2 looks at the corresponding events that occurred in North America just a few months later, showing that a direct line of causation can be drawn between the emergence



Introduction 41

of a star system in France and the first stardom-building publicity campaign in North America. Chapter 3 looks at the development of the star system in both continents during the ensuing months, and Chapter 4 examines the common elements behind these two emergences. Chapter 4 ends by pointing out a seemingly insignificant detail in the first stardom-building publicity campaigns in France and North America – the prominence, in the filmographies of the performers concerned, of work depicting series characters – and suggests that this work evidences a wider causality for the emergence of the star system that bears examination. Part 2, ‘Another Run at the Story’, follows this line of evidence. Chapter 5 looks at why most European and some North American film production companies widely adopted this particular film-making format, the cultural traditions on which it drew, and the prominence it achieved in film exhibition. Drawing on this study, Chapter 6 retells the history covered in Part 1 from a more distant vantage point, arguing that the series character phenomenon both unintentionally installed aspects of the star system and produced viewing conditions that not only made it possible for audiences to consistently recognise performers from one film to the next but even prompted them to do so, a phenomenon that was crucial in motivating production companies to regard stardom-building publicity campaigns as feasible. This chapter also argues that, by serving many of the purposes that the star system would later come to serve, the series character also rendered that system redundant, thus delaying the widespread adoption of the practice of generating and using stars. Indeed, I show that in some respects series characters provide film production companies with better means of product differentiation and marketing than stars. Chapter 7 re-examines the popular concept of film stardom in the light of the similarities between series characters and stars established in Chapter 6, eroding the gap between series characters and stars from the side of the latter: popular regard for film stars, I show, includes both an implicit acknowledgement that stars’ public personae are fabrications and a corresponding invitation to suspend disbelief about this fictionality, which places audience interaction with film stars in the same realm as their interactions with transtextual fictional characters.

Notes 1. In this book I will normally use the term ‘performer’ rather than ‘actor/actress’ both because of its gender-neutrality and because film performance utilises several types of performance other than acting. 2. See for example Gunning, D.W. Griffith, 225; Pearson, 14, 16, 135; Abel, Red Rooster, 147–8; Maltby, Hollywood (1995), 466 (material unchanged in Hollywood (2003), 559), and Abel, Americanizing 232, all of whom endorse deCordova’s central thesis. General works on film stardom that channel deCordova’s thesis include Butler, 344; MacNab, 1–3; and McDonald, The Star System, 28–33, 36. 3. In 2015, for example, Barry King treated deCordova’s work as the authoritative account of the emergence of film stardom in the US (Taking, 107–8, 116–17).

42  The Origins of the Film Star System

4. With reference just to the UK, I even argued for the solidity of deCordova’s model of causality in a chapter published in 2012 (see ‘The Invention’). 5. Creeekmur praised deCordova for bringing “an incomplete investigation to a precise conclusion” (viii). 6. He notes, for example, that film stardom facilitated both fine product differentiation for film-making companies (PP 46 & 112) and a means for cinemagoers to group films in a way conducive to repeat consumption (PP 113). 7. DeCordova uses all four of these terms across two pages (PP, 18–19). 8. It also ought to be pointed out that in launching an inquiry beleaguered by much myth about the early film industry in the US, deCordova adopted a principal research question that was not ‘why did the film star system emerge?’; instead he asked ‘are the accepted reasons for its non-emergence before 1910 accurate?’ That is, he was not primarily looking at why film stardom did emerge: he was looking at why, before c.1909, it had not. Assuming that the removal, in c.1909, of the discursive impediments to its emergence before this point would have led to its emergence is, therefore, quite understandable. 9. This definition of stardom is sometimes found in film studies (Richard Jewell, for example, claims that “[a]ctors who become intense objects of public fascination are called stars” (250)). 10. 4c: “orig. Theatre. [first used in the mid-Eighteenth Century] A very famous or popular actor, singer, or other entertainer; spec. one who has top billing or takes the leading role in a film, play, etc.” (‘star, n.’, Oxford English Dictionary). 6a: “(a) To perform as a star […]; to take a leading role in a play, film, etc.; (originally [first used in the early Nineteenth Century]) to tour as the star of a theatre company” (‘star, v.’, Oxford English Dictionary). 11. Advertisement for the Colonial Theatre, Oshkosh Daily Northwestern (11 March 1910), 3. Florence Lawrence and King Baggot were called “silent stars” in the 9 April 1910 issue of Billboard, printed on 2 April 1910 (Will J. Farley, ‘St Louis, M.O.’, Billboard 22.15 (9 April 1910), 10); as I will show in Chapter 2, this was immediately after they came to the attention of this trade publication’s staff. 12. Local newspapers around the US reported in advance the debut of the Kinetoscope at the April 1893 Chicago World’s Fair under the heading ‘Edison’s Latest Invention’ (see e.g. Anon., ‘Edison’s Latest Invention’, San Francisco Chronicle 57.35 (19 February 1893), 5, and Anon., ‘Edison’s Latest Invention’, The Atlanta Constitution vol. 26 (17 April 1893), 1). In the UK in April 1896 a writer in Chambers’s Journal remarked that “Edison’s beautiful optical instrument, the Kinetoscope, has now become familiar to most people through its exhibition in various large towns.” (Anon., ‘The Month’, Chambers’s Journal of Popular Literature, Science and Art, Fifth Series, 13.643 (25 April 1896), 267–78, 267.) 13. Trewey’s name was mentioned in advertisements for the first Lumière Cinématographe shows (e.g. Anon., ‘Empire’, St James’ Gazette 32.4909 (20 March 1896), 1) and Trewey was also quoted at length in contemporary press commentaries (e.g. Anon., ‘A Wonderful Invention’, The Sketch 13.164 (18 March 1896), 323). 14. Anon., ‘The Prince’s Derby’, Strand 12.67 (July 1896), 134–40; Victor Cook, 486–90.



Introduction 43

15. Trewey had a degree of celebrity in the UK before 1896. Percy Fitzgerald’s 1890 account of the state of music hall included the remark that “[t]he rare neatness and deftness of the French school [of music hall performance] is admirably illustrated by “Mons.” Trewey in one of his little exhibitions. He takes up a sort of felt circle, a hat without a crown, and bending it in an instant into the form of every known or conceivable hat, fits his expressive features and figure to the character assumed. Thus he presents us with the tri-cornered, the sombrero, the regular cocked hat, Napoleon’s, the Spanish Bartolo hat, with innumerable others. A simple touch or twist produced these changes, and there was a good deal of finish and even elegance in his performance” (58). 16. Anon., ‘Chats with Trade Leaders. No 1. Mr. Charles Urban’, Optical Lantern and Cinematograph Journal 1.1 (November 1904), 13–16. 17. Anon., ‘The Film Crises’, Optical Lantern and Cinematograph Journal 1.12 (October 1905), 261. 18. Anon., ‘The Triumph of the Animated Picture’, The Stage Year Book, ed. Lionel Carson (London: Carson & Comerford, 1908), 47–9, 47. 19. Anon., ‘Urban, Charles’, Who’s Who 1909 (London: A&C Black, [January] 1909), 1925. In June 1907, almost ten years after he moved to the UK, Urban became a UK citizen. 20. Anon., ‘A Serious Joke’, The Manning Times (Manning, South Carolina) 14.8 (16 November 1904), 8. The article ended with the acknowledgement “New York American”. 21. Anon., ‘From the Editor’s Pen’, Optical Lantern and Cinematograph Journal 1.2 (December 1904), 25–7, 26–7. 22. The UK version’s use of a rehearsal rather than a pro-filmic event can be regarded as another way of emphasising a distinctive aspect of film performance: even when cameras are present the pro-filmic event resembles the real thing in ways that forms of performance that take place on a stage or in an arena do not (at the very least by virtue of the absence of an audience). When they are not, the resemblance is even greater. 23. For an example of a contemporary remark that the novelty of the new invention was over, see Hepworth, ‘On the Lantern Screen’ (19 March 1897), 226. 24. Anon., Advertisement for Robt. W. Paul, The Era 62.3158 (1 April 1899), 27. 25. Qtd. Anon., ‘The Making of an Animated Photograph’, Lantern Record (6 July 1900), 51–2, 52. 26. Ibid. 27. Ibid. Charley’s Aunt, a three-act farce, had been the longest-running play of the 1890s. Simon Brown reports that the then Hepworth & Co. built this stage around June 1900 (28). 28. Paul’s November 1901 catalogue, for example, listed 65 fiction films (spread across seven categories) and 124 non-performed films (spread across nine categories), along with 6 films openly specified as showing re-enactments of Boer War events that do not fit into either category. 29. DeCordova writes that in the US “the discourse on acting only appeared at the point at which the fiction film became the dominant, standardized product of the manufacturers” (PP, 35).

44  The Origins of the Film Star System

30. In addition, life modelling was not the only contemporary form of performance which involved the principle of performing without moving: the 1890s and 1900s were the heyday of the field of public entertainments known as tableaux vivant or living statuary (the topic of much public comment because it could involve simulated nudity (Faulk, 142–87)); the minutes of a summer 1908 meeting of Newcastle upon Tyne’s Town Improvement & Streets Committee, for example, described living statuary as both an exhibited artefact and a “performance”: “The Town Clerk read a letter dated 7th June, 1908, which he had received from Canon Southwell, after an interview which the latter had had with the Lord Mayor, with respect to Exhibitions of Living Statuary (performance by “La Milo” at the Empire Theatre).” (Town Improvement & Streets Committee Meeting, 10 June 1908, Town Improvement and Streets Committee Minute Book No. 25, Tyne & Wear Archives, Discovery Museum, Newcastle upon Tyne, MD/ NC/261/26, pp. 588–95, p. 589–90.) 31. For example, one UK commentator remarked in mid-March 1914 that “[t]o-day [in] the moving-picture industry […] entire companies of trained and practised actors are carried to every interesting spot on the Continent, and carefully drilled to enact pantomimes which will concentrate within the space of a few minutes the world’s most entertaining and instructive incidents.” (Anon., ‘Screen Gossip’, P&PG 6.5 (w/e 21 March 1914), 117.) A few weeks later the film star J. Warren Kerrigan declared that “[a]fter three years in the legitimate stage and four years in pictures, I can safely say that the art of pantomime is quite as much a study as histrionic art, and as different from it as painting is different from music” (150). Here ‘pantomime’ was Kerrigan’s classification for filmic acting. The following week a contributor to the same magazine remarked that “[t]he actor or actress who has mastered the art of pantomime, and who can act so as to bring tears of pity or, on the other hand, of laughter to the eyes of the audience, is the one required by cinema firms.” (Anon., ‘A School for the Screen-Struck’, P&PG 6.8 (11 April 1914), 170–1, 171.) 32. Anon., ‘Sham War Cinematograph Films’, Optical Magic Lantern Journal and Photographic Enlarger 11.130 (March 1900), 30. 33. Ibid. 34. Anon., ‘Items of Interest’, Bioscope 151 (2 September 1909), 9–11, 11. 35. Anon., ‘Largest Salary for Pictures’, P&PG 8.71 (26 June 1915), 230. 36. Anon., ‘Picture News and Notes’, P&PG 9.86 (9 October 1915), 26. 37. Anon., ‘Chase me Charlie’, P&PG 13.186 (1–8 September 1917), 278. 38. Indeed, posing may be a fundamental aspect of film performance. Laura Mulvey, for example, has argued that distinctively cinematic gestures “combin[e] the stillness of pose and the movement of dance” (8) and claims that “star performance, particularly female star performance, revolves around pose” (9). Thanks to Paula Blair for pointing this out. 39. Letter from Beulah Poynter to William Selig, 5 April 1910, received 7 April 1910, Correspondence (Actors), William Selig Collection, MHL, Folder 453. Lena Rivers was Poynter’s own 1906 stage adaptation of Mary J. Holmes’s 1856 novel of the same name. Poynter had been starring in the Nixon touring company’s production of Lena



Introduction 45

Rivers for four seasons when she wrote this letter. It presumably refers to a scenario which one of Selig’s scenarists had adapted from Poynter’s play. Poynter would eventually perform in a film version of Lena Rivers for Selig in 1914. 40. For one model of why the discourse of risk emerged, see Bean, 18. 41. Anon., ‘Motion Picture News’, The Pictures 2.45 (24 August 1912), 31. This is quite an exaggeration of the height of the Falls. 42. Anon., ‘Motion Picture News’, The Pictures 3.77 (date unspecified, c.April 1913), 22. 43. To find the term ‘acting’ used in inverted commas (e.g. see deCordova, PP, 35–6) or terms alluding to other forms of performance employed to describe work that we would now call acting (see Kember 134) during the period studied in this book is also unsurprising because, if it is defined as ‘performing in all of one’s actions’, ‘acting’ is not even the most appropriate term to describe the work of playing a part in a stage play. Casting directors for stage plays implicitly acknowledge the capacity of the body to signify automatically when they take into account height, weight, hair colour, resting posture and such facial variables as mouth size, nose size and eye size during casting: one usually gets the opportunity to play a part because one already possesses at least some physical – and preferably also behavioural – characteristics of the character whom one is playing. In addition, a stage performer portraying a character carrying out any act that is legal, moral, safe and physically possible in the circumstances will, almost invariably, actually carry out that act. While the logistics of film-making may make a larger array of actions possible than are possible on the stage, even the most modest stage play already involves a marked proportion of doing rather than acting. All fictional performances, that is, sit uneasily with lay definitions of ‘acting’. 44. Having echoed deCordova’s model in his 1991 D.W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film, Tom Gunning did so again with specific reference to the ‘art film’ phenomenon in material that he wrote for volume 1 of The Griffith Project, published in 1999: he wrote of “the star system (which the French films d’art would introduce early in 1909 and which a number of American companies, such as the Edison Company, would quickly emulate” and opined that film-intrinsic stardom was merely “a uniquely American approach to the star system” (‘The Girl’ 89.) 45. Advertisement for Gaumont (UK), K&LW 3.57 (11 June 1908), 91. Burrows, Legitimate 47. 46. Advertisement for Napoleon and the English Sailor, K&LW 3.60 (2 July 1908), 165. 47. Advertisement for Gaumont Film Leaders, K&LW 3.64 (30 July 1908), 62. 48. Maisie Ellis is not mentioned anywhere in J.P. Wearing’s 2,969-entry list of productions staged at 35 selected London theatres from 1900 to 1909 inclusive (1–1,504). 49. See Anon., ‘Remarkable Film Subjects. No. 19. Lady Letmere’s Jewellery’, K&LW 3.81 (26 November 1908), 713–5, 713. 50. “The characters are played by star artists, among whom may be mentioned Miss Nancy Bevington, as Rosa Bud, Mr. James Annand, as Neville Landless; Mr. Cooper Willis, as Edwin Drood.” (Anon., ‘The Very Latest’, K&LW 4.90 (28 January 1909), 998–9.) Bioscope deemed the performers’ identities to be insufficiently important to include in their article on the film; what mattered was merely that Gaumont’s Arthur Gilbert

46  The Origins of the Film Star System

“has obtained excellent representations of the various characters by London actors of repute.” (Anon., ‘Topics of the Week’, Bioscope 122 (11 February 1909), 13–16, 13.) 51. Advertisement for Edwin Drood, K&LW 4.92 (11 February 1909), 1077. 52. Anon., ‘A Wonderful Invention’, The Sketch 13.164 (18 March 1896), 323. 53. Paul’s Mr. Maskeleyne Spinning Plates and Basins (July 1896) used one of John Nevil Maskeleyne’s most visually stark performances. G.A. Smith used Tom Green in a stretch of comic films from August 1897 to late 1900, including The Maid in the Garden (August 1897), Comic Faces – Old Man Drinking a Glass of Beer (September 1897), Weary Willie (September 1897), The Return of the Missus (March 1900) and Let Me Dream Again (August 1900). Dan Leno also appeared in a handful of films for the Warwick Trading Company, including Dan Leno’s Attempt to Master the Cycle (August 1900), Burlesque Fox Hunt (August 1900), Dan Leno’s Cricket Match (September 1900), Dan Leno’s Day Out (July 1901) and Dan Leno, Musical Director (July 1901), all comics. Vesta Tilley also appeared in a handful of films, including The Midnight Son (November 1900), Algy the Piccadilly Johnny (November 1900) and Louisiana Lou (November 1900). Later, the UK Gaumont company, in exploiting the Chronophone, a synchronised film sound system, from 1904, filmed performances by several well-known music hall singers, including one of the most famous, Harry Lauder, Chronophone films of whom were first shown at the Hippodrome in July 1907 (Advertisement for The Gaumont Co. (UK), K&LW 1.8 (4 July 1907), 120). 54. There had been precursors: the Warwick Trading Company’s 1897–8 catalogue included a description of a version of Cinderella in which the title role was “played by the accomplished actress, Miss Laura Bayley” (Warwick Trading Company, Descriptive List, 59). The 1908–9 ‘art’ films, however, constituted a much more widespread version of the same phenomenon. 55. Anon, ‘An English Picture Actress’, K&LW 8.207 (27 April 1911), 1775. 56. A comparison with a cultural practice where the norm is that cultural workers are selfemployed may be illuminating. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, when vaudeville houses in North America and music halls in Europe produced their own publicity for their programmes via local printers, it was an elementary routine for them to state just the titles of acts (and not even of every act), with extra text about the nature of the act added underneath the title of each act only if there was a compelling reason to include it. If the name of the act was the name of a person (any self-employed performer reserved the right to name their act, and could threaten to withhold their labour if the venue proposed to change it), then this publicity would automatically publicise that person. By contrast, the only information that a film company had to issue alongside each product was its title, and simply stating the name of each film in a poster for a film show would not automatically publicise the people involved in making it. 57. For example, as Églantine Monsaingeon shows (248), by the time they issued their 1900 catalogue, Pathé Frères already had a system of nine distinct genres, each with its own number. By the time of their 1907 annual catalogue (i.e. for all films issued by the end of 1906) they had established twelve categories: 1. “Scènes de plein air”, 2. “Scènes comiques”, 2. “Scènes à Trucs”, 4. “Sports – Acrobatie”, 5. “Scènes historiques,



Introduction 47

politiques et d’actualité; Scènes militaires”, 6. “Scènes grivoises d’un caractère piquant”, 7. “Danses & Ballets”, 8. “Scènes dramatiques & réalistes”, 9. “Féeries & Contes”, 10. “Scènes religieuses & bibliques”, 11. “Scènes Ciné-phonographiques”, 12. “Scènes diverses” (Films Pathé Frères: ce catalogue annule les précedents, c. December 1906, FJS-P, PRO-P-686). Though surviving copies of Pathé’s catalogues for the ensuing years are sparse, a set of surviving copies of German weekly releases for the last four months of 1908 still employed this exact 12-genre system (Pathé Frèrese: die films gelangen zum versand am Sonnabend, den 26. September 1908, FJS-P, catalogues). 58. Jane Gaines is the one scholar, to the best of my knowledge, to have pointed out this possibility, and she does so in an endnote (‘Anonymity’, 457n33). 59. Lewis J Selznick Collection, HRC, box Correspondence Sto-U, folder Triangle Pictures 2, second item, 1. 60. For example, in 1970 Paul O’Dell wrote that when Mary Pickford first joined Biograph in April 1909, “the Company did not name any of its players (for fear that the publicity might make them swollen-headed, and demand more money)” (142–3). 61. As Mark Lynn Anderson explains, fear of the damaging effects of what I have called ‘wandering value’ explains why, in the summer of 1918, Adolph Zukor offered Mary Pickford, who had refused to renew her contract with Famous Players-Lasky, a quarter of a million dollars to leave the film industry altogether (349). 62. Anon., ‘Weekly Notes’, K&LW 8.205 (13 April 1911), 1553–7, 1556. 63. Letter from Nordisk Films Copenhagen to Nordisk Films London, 21 December 1911, Nordisk Archive, Danish Film Institute, Copenhagen. Thanks to Isak Thorsen for bringing this letter to my attention. 64. When the identities of performers were used as production values, this did indeed lead to a hierarchy of salaries that made it impossible to use the principle of equal pay for equal work. A columnist for MPSM wrote in the August 1911 issue that while a regular film performer could expect to earn a salary of $35–75 per week, a star could expect to earn a salary of $400–500 per week (Anon., ‘Answers to Inquiries’, MPSM 2.7 (August 1911), 144–6, 144). In March 1915 a contributor to MPM claimed that Mary Pickford had received a salary of $52,000 in 1914, while $35 a week ($1,820 a year), less than 1/28th of the figure for Pickford, was the norm for “a vast army of photoplayers” (Anon., ‘Musings of “The Photoplay Philosopher”’, MPM 9.2 (March 1915), 97–8, 98). In August 1916 Cleo Madison told MPC that a performer for a stock company could expect to start on $20–$30 a day (Qtd. Anon. ‘How to Get In!’, MPC 2.6 (August 1916), 45–8, 46), while the star Billie Burke was receiving a salary of $4,000 per week, at least according to her employer’s publicity department (Courtlandt, ‘My Lady’, 60). Even if Burke was really earning just a tenth of this amount, she was being paid more than ten times the starting weekly wage of a regular performer. Anthony Slide has calculated that in mid-1917 the budget for a typical $17,700 feature taking three weeks to film would have to include $6,000 for the star, twice the director’s fee and gargantuan compared to the $1,200 for the leading man, the $1,300 for all of the other principals combined and the $300 for all of the extras (Silent Topics, 23). Any extra income received via rentals

48  The Origins of the Film Star System

or sales as a result of the investment in the star could therefore easily be swallowed by the extra expense of the star’s fee. And this situation could be envisioned by anyone familiar with the similar pay inequalities which applied to work in the theatre at the time. 65. Anon., ‘The Kalem Stock Company’, NYDM 51.1567 (2 January 1909), 8. The names listed were Max Schneider, Keenan Buell, James Vincent, Thomas Quincy, Gene Gauntier, Bennett Phelan, Eloise Mortimer, Thomas Santley, Minerva Florence, Sidney Olcott (presumably already the stock company’s manager by this point) and Charles Arthur. 66. MPW noted that “the Edison Kinetogram of September gives the cast of characters of the play called “Ethel’s Luncheon”” as well as for Little Sister (‘Lux Graphicus’, ‘On the Screen’, MPW 5.11 (11 September 1909), 342). 67. See the synopsis for Ethel’s Luncheon in Anon., ‘Stories of the Films’, MPW 5.10 (4 September 1909), 317–32, 317 (which credited Ethel Browning, Kathleen Taylor, Myrtle Tannehill, Tefft Johnson and Bertram Yost), and the synopsis for Little Sister in Anon., ‘Stories of the Films’, MPW 5.11 (11 September 1909), 349–57, 349 (which credited Browning, Yost, Johnson, Josephine Fox and Maggie Weston). 68. See, respectively, Anon., ‘Comments on Film Subjects’, MPW 4.12 (20 March 1909), 336–8, 338; Anon., ‘Comments on Film Subjects’, MPW 4.13 (27 March 1909), 367–9, 368; Anon., ‘Comments on Film Subjects’, MPW 4.16 (17 April 1909), 476–8, 478. 69. Advertisers’ Protection Society Monthly Circular, November 1919, n.p. HATA. 70. Advertisers’ Protection Society Monthly Circular, December 1920, n.p. HATA. 71. Advertisers’ Protection Society Monthly Circular, November 1919, n.p. HATA. 72. Advertisers’ Protection Society Monthly Circular, May 1919, n.p. HATA. 73. Advertisers’ Protection Society Monthly Circular, September 1920, n.p. HATA. 74. In April 1914 the general-public-oriented MPM gave a conservative circulation estimate of 270,000 (Anon., ‘To the Advertising World’, MPM 7.3 (April 1914), 5; I say ‘conservative’ because it had estimated its monthly circulation at nearly half a million in mid-October 1912 (Anon., ‘Musings of “The Photoplay Philosopher”’, MPSM 4.10 (November 1912), 136–44, 140; the issue was date-stamped 14 October 1912 by the Library of Congress), admittedly lower than the circulations of such general-interest US weeklies as Collier’s Weekly, which sold roughly 500,000 copies weekly by 1910 (David Reed, 108), but still in the order of magnitude necessary to reach the urban general public. 75. See Anon., ‘Special at the Elite’, Woodland Daily Democrat (Woodland, California), 16 October 1909, 1 for one example of a paper reprinting Edison’s synopsis and cast list. 76. Anon., ‘Our Stock Company’, EK 1.5 (1 October 1909), 13–14. Anon., ‘Our Stock Company’, EK 1.6 (15 October 1909), 13–14. 77. Anon., ‘The Edison Stock Company’, EK 1.4 (15 September 1909), 13–14. 78. Ibid. 79. Advertisement for Edison, MPW 5.10 (4 September 1909), 322. Advertisement for Edison, The Film Index 4.35 (28 August 1909), 16. Advertisement for Edison, MPW 5.12 (18 September 1909), 390. Advertisement for Edison, The Film Index 4.37 (11 September 1909), 17. 80. The stage ‘borrowing’ Pilar Morin, for example, was mentioned by name several times. A synopsis of The Cigarette-Maker of Seville, released in the UK on 10 December



Introduction 49

1910, asserted that “[t]he vivacious, alluring, heartlessly cruel and irresistibly charming character of Carmen is perfectly portrayed by Mlle. Pilar Morin” (Anon., ‘The Cigarette Maker of Seville’, EK (London) 2.3 (15 November 1910), 5–6, 6). The new practice of giving cast lists was discussed in the opening editorial of the 15 May 1911 issue (Anon., Editorial, EK (London) 3.3 (15 May 1911), 2). 81. Advertisement for Edison, The Film Index 7.13 (1 April 1911), 20. 82. Anon., ‘Comments on the Week’s Films’, MPW 5.12 (18 September 1909), 377. Little Sister was reviewed in Anon., ‘Comments on the Week’s Films’, MPW 5.13 (25 September 1909), 414–16, 414. 83. Advertisement for Edison films, MPW 5.10 (4 September 1909), 322. The MPW synopses for these two films, cited above, named these authors above the cast lists and paid much more attention to their work than the work of the performers. 84. Anon., ‘The Suit-Case Mystery’, EK (London) 1.1 (15 April 1910), 7–8, 8. 85. Anon., ‘The Sisters’, EK (London) 1.5 (15 June 1910), 6–7, 7. 86. Anon., ‘How The Squire was Captured’, EK (London) 1.11 (15 September 1910), 8–10, 10. 87. Anon., ‘The Joke They Played on Bumptious’, EK (London) 2.8 (1 February 1911), 8–10, 10. 88. Kalem’s display board was reproduced in Anon., ‘Photographs of Moving Picture Actors’, MPW 6.2 (15 January 1910), 50. Vitagraph’s display board was described in Anon., ‘Vitagraph Notes’, MPW 6.13 (2 April 1910), 515, and advertised in Advertisement for Vitagraph, MPW 6.17 (30 April 1910), 674. The Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center holds a surviving copy (Poster Collection, Actors, HRC). 89. Gene Gauntier recalled in 1928 that the photographs featured on Kalem’s display board were taken just before the stock company left for their second winter in Florida, meaning roughly early November 1909 (‘Blazing’, Part 3, 16). Slide mistakenly reports that this display board bore the names of the Kalem stock company (‘The Evolution’, 592), a mistake repeated by Charles Musser (‘The Changing’, 58) and by Kathryn Fuller-Seeley (409). 90. DeCordova cited Slide mistakenly claiming that Kalem’s stock company were publicly named in January 1910 (presumably referring to this display board) without correcting this error (PP, 5) and claimed that “[i]n April 1910 Vitagraph began promoting its regular stock company in earnest when it offered exhibitors a poster for lobby display similar to the one Kalem had produced three months earlier” (PP, 64), again omitting to mention that this display did not put a name to any of the 36 faces which it featured. 91. Anon., ‘Photographs of Moving Picture Actors’, MPW 6.2 (15 January 1910), 50. 92. Ibid. 93. For example, the manager of Atlas Animated Pictures, which ran cinemas in Stafford, Macclesfield, Cleckheaton and Heckmondwike, wrote to the Selig Company in May 1912: “Will you please send me some Postcards of your leading artistes. I intend having them mounted and framed to hang on the Palace walls.” (A. Ellis to Selig Polyscope Co., 16 May 1912, Correspondence (G.B.) A-B, William Selig Collection, MHL, Folder 490.) Selig received orders from a number of UK cinemas for posters of its performers, as well as large numbers of postcards of ‘artistes’ (i.e. these were for public distribution or

50  The Origins of the Film Star System

sale), from this date. Requests for publicity had, until then, been rather vague, but now these requests began to centre on either performers or films. For example, on 3 August 1912, Arthur F Preston, Managing Clerk of the Picture House in Spalding, Lincolnshire, wrote asking for “particulars of anything you may have in the way of Lobby Displays. What I particularly require is a large Photograph of your leading Lady and leading Gentleman.” (Arthur F Preston to Selig Polyscope Co., 3 August 1912, Correspondence (G.B.) N-Q, William Selig Collection, MHL, Folder 494.) Another asked, “Can you let me have Picture Postcards for sale in the above theatre [the Empire Electric Theatre, High Street, Exeter] of Selig Players (particularly Kathlyn Williams).” (J.H. Graham Cutts to E.H. Montagu, 31 January 1912, Correspondence (G.B., Exchanges/Exhibitors) E-G, William Selig Collection, MHL, Folder 492.) The fact of these people being categorisable as performers seems to have been more important to exhibitors than their identities. 94. Anon., ‘The Powers Picture Play Easel’, MPW 7.21 (19 November 1910), 1173. Advertisement for Thanhouser, MPW 7.21 (19 November 1910), 1146. 95. Her remaining five films at Edison were: The Japanese Peach-Boy (released in the US on 1 February 1910), The Cigarette Maker of Seville [i.e. Carmen] (released in the US on 3 May 1910), The Piece of Lace (released 3 June 1910), From Tyranny to Liberty (released 30 August 1910) and Greater Love (released 29 November 1910). The oneyear duration of Pilar Morin’s contract with the Edison Company was mentioned in Anon., ‘Edison Manufacturing Company Notes’, MPW 6.2 (15 January 1910), 55; the end of her contract was announced in mid-October 1910 in Announcement, MPW 7.17 (22 October 1910), 916. 96. See Pilar Morin, 682. MPW was published a week before the cover date, meaning that this article was written no later than the first few days of November 1909. 97. The only film from 1909 that I have been able to view is True Love Never Runs Smoothly, released in the US on 24 September 1909 (BFINA; 22633). 98. The reviewer of the Edison Company’s Aida (released 5 May 1911) remarked that “[t]he fact that the names of the actors are given is notable.” (Anon., ‘Comments on the Films’, MPW 8.20 (20 May 1911), 1140–3, 1140.) 99. It seems reasonable to expect that Edison included on-screen credits for Miss Cecil Spooner and Pilar Morin in both of these films: according to Bowser, Vitagraph had included an on-screen credit for the stage star Elita Proctor Otis in Oliver Twist (released in the US on 1 June 1909) at the point when her character, Nancy Sykes, first appears (Transformation, 107). 100. Anon., ‘The Essanay Company Out West’, Denver Post, reprinted in MPW 5.23 (4 December 1909), 801–2. 101. Anon., ‘Vitagraph Notes’, MPW 6.2 (15 January 1910), 59. The dinner, that is, was due to occur the night this issue was published. 102. Anon., ‘New York Motion Picture Company’s Notes’, MPW 5.9 (5 March 1910), 342. 103. DeCordova overtly conflated crediting with publicity when he called these mentions of names in NYDM, EK and MPW (all trade publications) “similar promotions” (PP, 52) to IMP’s campaign for Florence Lawrence, which he knew to include publicity direct to



Introduction 51

the general public (I will show in Chapter 2 that the launch of this publicity campaign occurred earlier than deCordova thought). 104. For an example of scholarship which sees this distinction as unimportant, see Gaines, ‘Anonymity’ 455n3. Rachael Low was also treating this distinction as unimportant in 1950 when she gave 18 August 1910 as a significant date for the emergence of the star system in the UK, as this was the date when the UK trade paper Bioscope carried its first personal article about a film performer (Florence Lawrence) (126). 105. For an example of the imprecision on economic practices that can result from inattention to the distinction between crediting and publicity (and, in this case, to whether a performer’s name is stated anywhere at all), see Ian Christie, ‘From Screen Personalities’, 355; Christie remarks that in Europe the names Max Linder, André Deed and ‘Prince’ were established star brands by 1911, but is both unable to specify when they first became stars, in contrast to his account of the US, which gives a definite date (1909), and inclined to regard the dates when performers started appearing in films as the dates when they were first publicly named (see 355n12, in which Christie mistakes Linder’s and Deed’s use of professional pseudonyms in their interactions with their employers for publicity at the hands of their employers, and, as I will show, makes several date errors). 106. Bowser seemed to be aware of deCordova’s model of discursive impediments to the emergence of film stardom, remarking at one point that, as far as the industry were concerned, “[t]he films were only photographs, after all” (Transformation, 106). 107. To be fair to deCordova, he did implicitly acknowledge that the long-term employment of a performer, combined with the choice to have her/him appear relatively frequently and regularly, was a necessary condition for the emergence of the first publicity campaigns for regular film performers: he wrote that “for the intertextual meaning that created the picture personality to arise, the individual actor had to appear quite regularly in films” (PP, 51) and points out that it was feasible for Vitagraph to publicise Florence Turner in early April 1910 (see Chapter 2) because “Turner […] had certainly become a recognizable figure by early 1910 because of her many appearances in a single company’s films” (PP, 64). 108. Recognition of a performer from one scene to the next was already possible by July 1908. The 18 July 1908 issue of Variety included the remark that “[t]he force of “A Bashful Young Man” [Un jeune homme timide] lies in the excellent pantomime of its chief character, an actor who appears frequently in the production” (‘Rush’, ‘Bashful Young Man’, Variety 11.6 (18 July 1908), 11. This was an anonymous Max Linder). Recognition of a performer from one film to her/his next, however, would be much less likely. 109. Bowser, Transformation 110. Bowser also cites Gunning, ‘D.W. Griffith’ 540; Gunning included this idea in D.W. Griffith 219. See also Salt, Film Style 88–9. 110. Studies of observers’ eye movements and fixations when looking at still images which include full human figures have shown that in the absence of prompts to search for specific visual information, viewers’ eyes pay much more attention to faces than to other types of visual detail (e.g. Yarbus, 172).

52  The Origins of the Film Star System

111. As Kember explains, “[t]he names of eminent showmen were well known to the public, and were often as widely mythologised as picture personalities were to become” (89). 112. In his description of this process, Jerome Christensen observes that the ideal employee “interprets a set of decisions as establishing the character of the organization, which he impersonates in order to make a decision that will accomplish corporate objectives and do so as if the corporation, not he, were the author of that strategy” (176). 113. Advertisement for Lubin, MPW 6.12 (26 March 1910), 487. 114. Advertisement for Lubin, MPW 9.8 (2 September 1911), 598. 115. Anon., ‘Change of Name’, Bioscope 143 (8 July 1909), 27. 116. The managers were, of course, lauding Biograph’s films in particular (Advertisement for Biograph (‘Biograph: Leading Showmen’s Opinion of Biograph Films’), Bioscope 161 (11 November 1909), 18.) 117. 2014 Year End: Top Billboard 200, Billboard, 2015, , accessed 1 January 2016. 118. Gunning, D.W. Griffith 219. DeCordova also described the attractive features of industrial authorship (PP, 79). 119. Advertisement for Kalem/The Girl Spy, MPW 4.20 (15 May 1909), 623. 120. Advertisement for Kalem/The Tom-Boy, MPW 5.3 (17 July 1909), 98. 121. Anon., ‘What they all said when they saw the film’, P&PG 14.227 (15–22 June 1918), 588. 122. Even the practice of hiring, rather than selling, films to hiring companies, which became a general norm during 1912, as long as production company and hiring company were still separate companies, did not diminish these layers of removal. 123. Anon., ‘Latest Productions’, K&LW 5.124 (23 September 1909), 998. 124. Qtd. Anon., ‘Helps and Hints’, K&LW 1.8 (4 July 1907), 121. 125. By 1907, for example, Pathé Frerès was already producing posters for sale and listing them for sale in their catalogues and monthly supplements. Abel finds that they first began to do this in 1902 (‘In the belly’, 364).



Introduction 53

54

Part 1  A New Run at the Story In the next four Chapters I provide a new account of the immediate circumstances under which film production companies launched the first publicity campaigns purposed to establish film stardom, identifying the conditions that led to the two earliest known instances of this and the subsequent spread of the system across the film industries of the industrialised West. It will soon become apparent that if film’s star system can be said to have been initiated first in any specific country, this country was France and the decision-makers were the executives at Pathé Frères.

Incentives Before looking at specific countries, I introduce Part 1 by outlining, in turn, four strong economic incentives to adopt a star system that applied in the European and North American film industries by early 1909: a highly competitive film production marketplace, the rise of a hiring industry, the patchiness of copyright protection for films, and the rise of fixed-site film exhibition in the form of the first cinemas. In the period 1906–9, intense competition emerged between film production companies in both continents, competition that led to a system of setting the price of films per unit of measurement regardless of the subject of the film. In the US, a 12c-per-foot norm was already instituted by late 1906 (in part by Pathé undercutting the domestic production companies). In the UK, by April 1907, all companies selling films had converted their prices from per-subject pricing, which had averaged around 6d per foot, to a standard of 4d per foot regardless of the film’s subject. In France, 1.25fr per metre was the norm by the end of 1908. In both continents, with the prices that they could ask for their films standardised at these very low levels by competition, film production companies were prevented from increasing sales through further price-dropping. In addition, the widespread norm in both continents, by late 1907/early 1908, of selling copies of films to hiring companies (rather than directly to exhibitors) drastically reduced the number of prints of a film that film production companies could sell relative to the period when they sold the copies directly to the people who would project the films to the public, and so diminished the revenue that they could exact from each outlay on production.1

Faced with this combination of a dwindling market share and hiring companies siphoning off a large part of the profitability of each film, each production company had a slim range of options for maximising the revenue that they could extract from their outlay. The shift to longer films was one option: if production costs are steady, then a longer film, even at a standard per-metre/foot price, generates more profit. The most widely adopted method, however, was for a production company to seek to maximise the number of prints of each film that they could sell, and this stimulated a search for unique production values that they could use to stimulate demand among audiences and/or exhibitors and/or hiring companies. Sole access to a newsworthy real-world event had been the model for exclusivity in the period when the majority of films were non-fiction. After fiction became the dominant output in both continents around 1906, in part as a way of providing a steady output of new product, exclusivity was much harder to identify in film content, although production companies did of course commonly claim that their photographic clarity, sensationalism, staging etc. were unrivalled.2 The ‘art film’ phenomenon described in the Introduction was one attempt to achieve this sought-after exclusivity of content. It included theatrical adaptations but also drew on the prestige of other cultural forms too. For example, in June 1908 Pathé founded an affiliate company called Société Cinematographique des Auteurs et Gens de Lettres (Society/Company of Cinematograph Authors and Literary Gentlemen), known as SCAGL; it operated on the basis of an agreement with the Société des Gens de Lettres (an authors’ society founded in 1838 by a group of writers including Honoré de Balzac, Victor Hugo, Aurore Dupin (George Sand), Théophile Gautier and Alexandre Dumas), which permitted it to make adaptations of their published works (see Abel, Ciné, 40); they began issuing films in October 1908, and publicity for these films usually stated the author of the source text. After SCAGL’s initial films and the theatrical adaptations produced by UK Gaumont and the Film d’Art company in 1908–9 were financial successes, ‘art film’ branding soon became widespread in European film production, with Pathé, Éclair, Itala and Cines all issuing films under an ‘Art Film’ or ‘High Art’ label by the end of April 1909.3 Vitagraph was issuing an ‘Art’ brand of films in the US and Europe by June 1909,4 and this phenomenon also included the Edison Company’s use of Miss Cecil Spooner, Pilar Morin, Carolyn Wells and Edward Townsend described in the Introduction. As Laurent LeForestier observes, the French film industry’s practice of stating names and professions on their posters for these ‘art films’ had the goal of giving films “artistic surplus value” (‘From Craft’, 191). While in some cases the makers of these films were able to advertise exclusive access to a famous stage performer or a source text, by mid1909 the majority of these ‘art film’ products were featuring production values that were not actually exclusive, presumably because exclusive production values were prohibitively expensive. For example, after they publicised the stage star Elita Proctor Otis’s appearance in Oliver Twist in early June 1909, Vitagraph’s successive ‘High Art’ productions were just lavish accounts of episodes in the life of historical figures, including Napoleon Bonaparte and George Washington, and their marketing for

56  The Origins of the Film Star System

these films made no mention of performers or writers. Even SCAGL’s output gradually shifted to include original scenarios. This search for exclusivity without extra expense would have also made apparent, albeit implicitly, the prospect of using the identities of long-term production employees. And the most visible production personnel, personnel who would be automatically advertised by each film, would have been first in line as candidates for use as demand-stimulating content. Production companies also tried several methods of relaxing this squeeze on their profit margins and sales volumes, including forming associations to place conditions on hirers and exhibitors by threatening to deny them product, and the system of hiring films to hirers rather than selling them, first attempted in France in 1907 and in the UK and the US no later than 1908. The European film production companies who convened the International Congress of Film Manufacturers in Paris in early February 1909 collectively sought to establish such a system as a norm among the most powerful constituents of the European film industry, though the agreement that they formed, the European Convention of Kinematograph Film Makers and Publishers, disintegrated within just a few weeks as a result of internal dissent and widespread resistance from hiring companies.5 The ‘art film’ phenomenon was also part of this push-back, in that one of its underlying motivations was the perceived amenability of high-demand products to a system in which the production company permanently retained control of them: for example, though the first of the UK Gaumont ‘art films’ were sold outright at the usual rate of 4d per foot, in the case of Lady Letmere’s Jewellery (see page 22) Gaumont did not sell copies, distributing the film solely through their own hiring subsidiary.6 An alternative way to push back against per-metre/foot pricing would be to provide a strong justification for re-adopting per-subject pricing with certain films. Indeed, this seems to have been the primary, and little-noticed, aim of the ‘art film’ phenomenon. For example, for at least several months, Pathé Frères’s UK office, while still adhering to the 4d-per-foot standard for the majority of their films, priced SCAGL films at 6d per foot, though the advertisements stated just the length and the overall price to distract from this price hike. In March 1909, for example, one of their trade advertisements listed nine films at 4d per foot and the “Magnificent Art Film “Judas’ Kiss”, 808 feet, £20 4 0”,7 which works out to 6d per foot.8 Trade commentators, particularly those in Bioscope, worked hard to remind their readers that the UK’s 4d-per-foot standard was only a matter of common habit.9 A precedent for at least exceeding these standard prices was also set by the sporadic addition of ‘extras’ (supplementary values rather than supernumerary performers, that is), usually in the form of colouring.10 It was therefore feasible for film production companies to cite the use of ‘extras’ in the production of a film in justifying per-subject pricing that worked out higher than the 1.25f​r-per​-metr​e/4d-​per-f​oot/1​2c-pe​r-foo​t etc. norm and that more than paid for the ‘extra’. Even in the context of fierce competition, such per-subject pricing was feasible; most readers will be familiar with the ‘premium product’ principle, where the higher price of a purportedly superior product line, relative to the price of an existing standard



A New Run at the Story  57

product line, acts as a promise of its value: consumers can be relatively easily persuaded that the more any given product costs to buy, the more it must be worth because its production costs must have corresponded to this retail price. Price, that is, can be made to provide a proxy for quality, in turn stimulating consumer desire. This effect is even observed by economists as the Veblen effect, an exception to the normal law of demand (which states that demand for a product diminishes as the price for a product is increased): with Veblen goods, the demand for a product increases, at least up to a certain threshold, as the price is increased (see e.g. Weinberg, 259– 62). The premium product is a particular version of a Veblen good which establishes its value with reference to a base-line defined by a cheap equivalent. Film production companies, with their market of hiring companies who were themselves catering to their own market of exhibitors, were best advised not to simply assert the quality of their films by setting their prices higher, as the hiring companies could easily stop buying the premium product after the first batch of premium films turned out to be indistinguishable from the standard-price films of other production companies; instead, the production companies needed a way of justifying per-subject pricing through, at the very least, the equivalent of smart packaging: a quality apparent to the hiring companies’ own market of exhibitors, either directly or indirectly via audiences. That is, they needed a blatant aspect of the product, one which would ideally make the product line function as its own advertising. The identities of performer employees provided one possible avenue for achieving this, prompting employers in the direction of initiating a star system. This squeeze also prompted production companies in the direction of operating a star system in a second way, because it motivated them to diversify horizontally: that is, to search for product lines other than films, such as framed photographs or photo brooches, which they could manufacture and sell. As the hiring companies first emerged because production companies were availing expensive products to a potential market of a few thousand trade personnel, and as many production companies were, although already horizontally diversified, mainly selling hardware product lines such as projectors and film winders in endemically low turn-over to this same small trade market, it would have been easily apparent to film production companies that the ideal product line should be sold not to this trade market but directly to the general public, or at the very least sold to exhibitors in volumes appropriate for them to sell on to the general public: hundreds of thousands rather than hundreds. Diversifying horizontally so that revenue would come from several product lines at any one time would have also promised to insulate production companies against the prospect that any given product might do badly. And these hypothetical products should preferably, of course, be generated by the production companies’ existing operations without the need for further outlay. The consumables that variety venues sold to their audiences, which included postcards of stars, would have provided models to copy in such an expansion of operations, likewise prompting employers in the direction of initiating a star system as a way to generate product lines other than films which might be sold directly to the general public.

58  The Origins of the Film Star System

Even when it is not subject to a squeeze on its profits, it is in the interest of any manufacturing industry to seek to retain symbolic ownership of its products after they are sold by imprinting them with attributes that cannot be erased by their new owners. In 1909 there was a strong practical reason for this: films were widely beyond copyright protection. Although in 1908 one of the Berlin Commission’s modifications to the 1886 Berne Convention granted copyright protection to films, it took some time for these modifications to become enshrined into national laws (they only became law in the UK in the form of a new Copyright Act in December 1911, for example). Before films could be copyrighted, one way of seeking copyright protection was to produce fictions that implied authorship, so as to try to nudge the film under the umbrella category of literary work or dramatic performance (see Kember, 205–6). Another method of seeking a rough equivalent of copyright protection was to use trademarks in either title/intertitle footage or in sets, because in some countries defacing trademarks was illegal. However, title/intertitle footage could be removed, and logos mounted on sets could be scratched out from the film. If you see what looks like a roiling sun in the background of a silent film, you are probably seeing the clusters of scratches used to remove a trademark from each frame. In this situation, publicly known performers could be used to indelibly trademark films as logos could not: neither hirers nor exhibitors could scratch out performers, let alone remove film of them entirely, and still have an exploitable product. There is also evidence that by the end of 1908, production companies in both Europe and North America were seeking out ways of generating an infinitely variable range of product. This was in part because of the emergence of fixed-site cinemas: the key years were 1906 (nickelodeons) and 1908 (larger cinemas) in the US, 1907 in France, and 1909 in the UK. This new exhibition norm drastically reduced the active lifespan of each film. Instead of being toured from one locale to another, which would make a film exploitable for months, each film would be shown to a limited local population, members of which would expect a new film at their next visit. Like any mass-produced product, fiction films have to be both differentiated (distinct from rivals’ products) and standardised (of a consistent quality and using consistent means of construction), but unlike most mass-produced products, if fixed-site exhibition is the norm, fiction films must also be differentiated from every product placed on the market hitherto, which makes for a constant scramble for new plots. The norm in the earliest fixed-site cinemas, modelled on norms in variety venues, was that films would be changed once a week. The nickelodeons in the US were so successful at enculturating the US populace to regular film viewing that by 1909 the US film production industry was supplying an industry which changed its films every day (so at least six times a week, if the venue was closed on a Sunday). The increase elsewhere, though less drastic, was still sharp. Venues in the UK seem to have widely switched from a weekly programme change to a twiceweekly programme change during 1909.11 This rate of product turnover meant that production companies needed to produce more distinctive products within



A New Run at the Story  59

any given period. This was already apparent to Georges Dureau, editor of CinéJournal, in September 1908, when he opined that the time when all fiction films were novel was now over: “dans la production forcenée des maisons déjà nombreuses qui sortent chaque semaine une vingtaine d’œuvres intéressantes à divers titres, l’imagination des auteurs s’essouffle [in the frenzied output of already numerous companies bringing out twenty interesting films a week under various headings, the imagination of the writers is running out of steam]” (‘Le Cinéma’, 1). A struggle for greater degrees of variation of product is also evident, Laurent LeForestier has noticed, in Pathé Frères’ monthly catalogue supplements, where they began to imply variation within genres by the early 1910s (‘From Craft’, 197). This struggle was another of the impetuses behind the ‘art film’ phenomenon, which sought to access the great variety of content produced by centuries-older cultural forms. In this situation, because all people are ostensibly unique, and because the spectrum of genres is somewhat limited, film production companies would have also been prompted towards the prospective solution of using the variation of product inherent in personhood to differentiate future products. A much larger array of types exhausts the spectrum of personhood than exhausts the spectrum of genres. In addition, fixed-site exhibition of frequently changed films also increased the likelihood that individual audience members would be able to recognise a performer from one film to the next. As exhibition in fixed-site cinemas became the norm, films were also gradually being transformed from assets to disposables. Rapid exhaustion of product by static exhibition to habitual audiences led to the first systematic use of nation-wide release dates, first used in the UK, for example, in late 1909 and early 1910; industry practice was being formed around the principle that a film would exhaust its profit-making potential within a few weeks or even days after it was made available to the market. The surviving copies of the European and North American trade publications indicate that at this time the film industry was shifting from issuing catalogues to issuing bulletins: old films were, the new norm insisted, without value. As films gradually became the opposite of assets, production companies could easily envision the need to generate assets to replace them, and the prospect of generating value in employees offered one way of achieving this. Economic conditions such as these, Gerben Bakker remarks, “induced filmmakers to change film from a largely undifferentiated commodity into a heavily branded product” (76). Nonetheless, even these incentives only represent further mediumterm causes for the emergence of the star system, causes that, even combined with deCordova’s discursive transformations, were not sufficient to both outweigh the disincentives constituted by those lasting conditions listed in the Introduction and break the new-medium deadlock described on page 24–7. Though Bakker may be right to claim that, once production companies had elected to brand their films in some way, “films’ short ‘shelf-life’ forced producers to extend the brand beyond one product by using trademarks or stars” (75), the former are significantly preferable, in the industry’s eyes, to the latter, as the Introduction showed, and as Part 2 will

60  The Origins of the Film Star System

demonstrate at length. That is, even though “[t]he main value of stars and [pre-existing] stories lay … in their services as giant ‘publicity machines’ that optimized advertising effectiveness by rapidly amassing high levels of brand-awareness” (Bakker, 76), a star system is not the inevitable outcome of the industrialisation of the film industry. Looking at the specific train of events that did lead employers to decide to launch the first two stardom-building publicity campaigns, the first concerning Max Linder in Europe and the second concerning Florence Lawrence in North America, Part 1 will show that these decisions were made as a consequence of the intersection of, on the one hand, local exceptions to the lasting conditions listed in the Introduction with, on the other hand, a series of unlikely events that both temporarily lifted more of these lasting conditions and broke the new-medium deadlock. An indication, it seems, of the relatively low significance, at the time, of decisions to make performers into production values, these decisions do not seem to have been so momentous that they were minuted: for example, neither the minutes of Pathé Frères’ board of directors held by the Fondation Jérôme Seydoux-Pathé nor the minutes of the licensed manufacturers’ monthly meetings held in the MHL contain any records of a decision to begin to build fame for their performer employees.12 In the absence of such official records, the following story is, admittedly, somewhat pieced together.

Notes 1. Simon Brown has charted the effect of this situation on the UK film production industry in some detail (chs 2–3). 2. In December 1907, for example, Urban-Éclipse advertised its fiction films to prospective buyers with the tagline “Scenes Charmingly Set, Characters Delightfully Represented/ Photographic Quality Perfect.” (Advertisement for Urban-Éclipse, K&LW 2.33 (26 December 1907), inside front cover.) See also Fig. 0.1. 3. On Éclair’s ‘art’ films, see Advertisement for Éclair, K&LW 4.102 (22 April 1909), 1459. On Itala’s, see Anon., ‘New Films and Their Makers’, K&LW 4.102 (22 April 1909), 1477–83, 1475. On Cines’s see Advertisement for Cines, K&LW 4.103 (29 April 1909), 1514. These ‘art film’ outputs were soon denoted using distinctive sub-brands. In France, Gaumont used the Grands Films Artistiques brand (Abel, Ciné, 40–1), Éclair established a brand called ACAD (Association des compositeurs et des auteurs dramatiques) in November 1909 (Anon., ‘Echos’, Ciné-Journal 2.64 (8–14 November 1909), 4; films began to appear under this brand in early 1910 (see Anon., ‘The Eclair “A.C.A.D.” Series’, K&LW 6.154 (21 April 1910), 1339)), and by May 1910 Pathé had launched its own Séries d’Art brand (Advertisement for Pathé Frères, Ciné-Journal 3.91 (21 May 1910), 17). 4. They first used this brand in Europe, referring to Napoleon Bonaparte and Empress Josephine of France as “the first of our high art productions” in the trade press in midMay 1909 (Advertisement for Vitagraph, K&LW 5.106 (20 May 1909), 81); it appeared in their advertising in the US in mid-June 1909 (Advertisement for Vitagraph, MPW 4.35 (19 June 1909), 822).



A New Run at the Story  61

5. See Anon., ‘Topics of the Week’ & ‘This is IT!’, Bioscope 122 (11 February 1909), 4 & 7, and Anon., ‘Scotching the Trust’, Bioscope 125 (4 March 1909), 3. See also Burrows, ‘When Britain’, 1–19, and Shail, ‘The Motion Picture Story Magazine’, 181–97. 6. Anon., ‘Remarkable Film Subjects. No. 19. Lady Letmere’s Jewellery’, K&LW 3.81 (26 November 1908), 713–5. 7. Anon., Advertisement for Pathé Frères, Bioscope 127 (18 March 1909), 12. 8. Further examples include An Uproarious Comedy and The Magic Parchment, both sold in the UK at 6d per foot (Advertisement for Pathé Frères, Bioscope 136 (20 May 1909), 12). 9. See for example Anon., ‘What Price?’, Bioscope 119 (21 January 1909), 3, Anon., ‘More Convention’, Bioscope 134 (6 May 1909), 3, and Anon., ‘Topics of the Week’, Bioscope 147 (5 August 1909), 4. In May 1909 one contributor insisted that “[i]t is a well-worn axiom that a film is worth just as much as it will fetch. It is quite conceivable that a subject possessing fairly attractive features, but which costs little or nothing for plot or setting, might be profitably sold in quantities at twopence per foot. On the other hand, an exceptionally fine picture will sell readily at sixpence or eightpence.” (Anon., ‘More Convention’, Bioscope 134 (6 May 1909), 3.) By October 1909 Bioscope was insisting that the 4d-per-foot standard did not exist (Anon., ‘The Price of Films’, Bioscope 157 (14 October 1909), 3–4). 10. In the UK in May 1909 Pathé was selling toned films at 4.5d per foot, coloured (presumably hand-coloured) films at 6.2d per foot, and films featuring a mixture of the two at 5.9d per foot (Advertisement for Pathé Frères, Bioscope 136 (20 May 1909), 12). 11. For example, the Oxford Picture Palace, a Hartlepool cinema, moved from a weekly programme changed to a twice-weekly programme change no later than mid-October 1909 (Poster for the Oxford Picture Palace, Hartlepool, 18 October 1909, RWC, DF.WOD.G2271). The nearby Empress Picture Palace followed suit at the beginning of March 1910 (Poster for Empress Picture Palace, Hartlepool, 1 March 1910, RWC, DF.WOD.E5830). 12. Procés-verbal de le conseil d’administration, FJS-P; Minutes of Licensed Manufacturers’ Meetings, Motion Picture Patents Company and General Film Company Collection, MHL, 2.f-11.

62  The Origins of the Film Star System

1

Europe

More work needs to be done […] on comparative national star systems that doesn’t forcibly impose the US paradigm onto other examples. Jane Gaines, ‘Anonymity’ (2012), 457n32

Film scholarship has paid very little attention to the emergence of the film star system in Europe. In his 1962 history of French cinema, for example, Georges Sadoul spent less than 100 words showing, in the most general terms, that a switch occurred at an unspecified point around 1910 that made some performers’ names known to the general public (12). In her brief 2004 summary of the beginnings of cinema in Europe, Alison McMahan, devoting just one paragraph to the emergence of the star system, sticks to the general: “[a]s audiences learned to recognize certain actors and clamored to see their favorites again, [on-screen] credits with actors’ names appeared […]. By 1912 the star system as we know it was in place” (35). Laurent LeForestier, discussing the means of product differentiation employed by Pathé Frères in their trade catalogues between about 1907 and about 1911, observes that, by the early 1910s, as the company sought to move away from suggesting that the films in each of their twelve catalogue categories were homogeneous, “catalogue descriptions of scenes [i.e. films] added details, such as actors’ names, to distinguish them from one another” (‘From Craft’, 197); this was, it might seem, a virtually unremarkable development. Such relative inattention is due, in part, to the easy assumption that the star system’s purported invention in the US means that in one sense it did not emerge in Europe at all, and due in part to the more scattered nature of the relevant evidence.1 On top of showing that the star system was not initiated first in the US, this chapter will also work to remedy this relative inattention. Though it is not possible to prove a negative, exhaustive searching in Europe’s various archives of film ephemera has yielded no evidence of a European production company conducting a publicity campaign for a regular performer employee before September 1909. For example, a survey of the 45 surviving producer-authored posters for the (mostly French) fiction films issued in 1908 and 1909 held by France’s cinémathèques and the FJS-P shows that before September 1909 the names of creative staff of any role were included on these posters only when the film was an ‘Art Film’ product which drew on the fame of personnel from older cultural industries. Most of the posters which mention names pertain to films issued by either the Films d’Art company or the S.C.A.G.L. company; some were part of Pathé’s own Séries

d’Art (see page 61n3). That is, these publicity efforts all pertained to the existing fame which was deemed to be brought to the films by borrowed performers and scenarists and by the authors of the texts being adapted. This list includes L’Assassinat de Duc de Guise [The Assassination of the Duke of Guise] (November 1908), Le retour d’Ulysse [The return of Ulysses/Odysseus] (January 1909), Sœur Angélique [Sister Angelica] (c.June 1909), L’enfant Prodigue [The Prodigal Son] (c.July 1909), Dans l’Hellade [In Ancient Greece] (c.August 1909), Orphée [Orpheus] (c.August 1909), Ordre du Roy [The king’s command] (c.September 1909), Moines & guerriers [Monks and warriors] (c.October 1909), Joseph vendu par ses freres [Joseph sold by his brothers] (November 1909), Pygmalion (late 1909), Cléopâtre (late 1909), and Le tyran de Jérusalem [The tyrant of Jerusalem] (late 1909).2 The norm of systemic anonymity was thus in place for all of 1908 and most of 1909. Indeed, the ‘art film’ phenomenon described in the Introduction briefly made the European and US film industries into mouthpieces for another medium’s system of stardom. Production companies tended to name these borrowed performers in trade and popular publications because the ‘fact’ of them being nameable added lustre to the product even if their names were not actually widely known,3 and exhibitors, though free to ignore the names which they encountered in production companies’ publicity and trade synopses, also had much to gain by channelling this claim of lustre. For example, a programme for the Cirque d’Hiver on rue Amelot in Paris, a prestige venue in Pathé’s own chain of cinemas, for Friday 30 April 1909 announced that the thirteenth of the fourteen films on the programme, and the headline ‘act’ (printed in the largest and boldest type) would be La Peau de Chagrin, a Film des Auteurs et Gens de Lettres. Scène dramatique empruntée a l’œuvre de Balzac, interprétée par MM. Capellani de la Renaissance, Desfontaines de l’Odéon, Mlles Gilberte Sergy de l’Odéon et Fusier du Théâtre Réjane. [Film by [S.C.]A.G.L. Dramatic scene borrowed from the work of Balzac, performed by Messieurs [Paul] Capellani of the [Théatre de la] Renaissance, [Henri] Desfontaines of the Odeon, [and] Misses Gilberte Sergy of the Odeon and [Louise] Fusier of the Théâtre Réjane.]4

The ‘art film’ phenomenon does not seem to have occasioned a ‘native’ star system in film. No names of performers were given under the titles of any of the other films on this programme or in the ‘Notices Explicatives’ (i.e. synopses) of nine of these films that constituted the rest of the non-advertising matter in this programme. Understanding what did occasion the emergence of a ‘native’ film star system in Europe requires an understanding of the contemporary industrial context of film production. As LeForestier (Aux sources), Michel Marie and Stéphanie Salmon have all recently shown, the European film industry of the period before 1910 was centred in France, in the hands of one dominant company, Pathé Frères (its full contemporary name was the Compagnie générale des établissements Pathé Frères phonographes & cinématographes), the most powerful film company in the world in 1909. Its output consistently dwarfed that of its nearest competitors in both

64  The Origins of the Film Star System



Europe and the US. In May 1909 for example, Pathé Frères put 40 films onto the UK film market with a total footage of 20,351 feet (19.5% of that month’s market of negative footage), with its nearest competitor, Gaumont, only able to put a little more than half of this (23 films with a total footage of 11,153 feet, representing 10.7% of that month’s total negative footage) onto the UK market in the same time.5 Having moved into film production in 1898 (later than Gaumont, which started making films in 1896), by 1905 Pathé Frères already had three studios (two of which had two stages), by 1906 it had six units, each headed by a director/producer, working simultaneously and semi-permanently at these studios (Abel, ‘Perils’, 186, 210n28), and by 1908 it had six studios in operation (Abel, Ciné, 34) and print works capable, according to Charles Pathé, of producing 100 kilometres of positive prints per day for domestic and export use (‘De Pathé Frères’, 179); a rough average film length of 160 metres works out to a capacity of 625 positives printed per day. Pathé Frères was also the first film production company to establish agencies for selling its films in the major cities of its primary export markets, instead of relying on native production companies or native selling agents to act for them; they opened agencies in Moscow (February 1904), New York (August 1904), Brussels (October 1904), Berlin (March 1905), London (no later than May 1905),6 Vienna (July 1905), Chicago (August 1905), Saint Petersburg (December 1905), Amsterdam (January 1906 (Blom, ‘What’s’, 97)), Barcelona (February 1906), Milan (May 1906) and Odessa (July 1906) (Abel, Ciné, 23). Revenue from international sales, combined with the sheer extent of the network, helped the company to consistently outperform older rivals.7 In the spring of 1909 Pathé also set up film production affiliates outside France, in both Moscow and Rome, the latter in the form of Film d’Arte Italiana (Abel, Ciné, 43). As LeForestier has shown, with these components Pathé established the first industrially organised system of film production and marketing in the world (Aux sources, 320-1). In addition, in November 1906 Pathé Frères initiated “a long-range project of constructing a circuit of permanent cinemas throughout France” (Abel, Ciné, 30): the first, opened in December 1906, was the Omnia Pathé on the Boulevard Montmartre in Paris. Unlike most of its European and North American competitors, when Pathé Frères realised that fixed film-only venues were viable businesses, it took on part of the work of converting its market from travelling fairground venues and caféconcerts (i.e. music halls/vaudeville theatres) to these new and exclusively urban venues. Pathé took a significant slice of the business of the cinema boom of the following years. According to Abel, by 1909 Pathé Frères owned 200 cinemas in France, including 20 of the 100 cinemas in Paris at the time (Ciné, 31). Adapting to this new type of market, and completing its vertically integrated empire, in July 1907 Pathé made two decisions: first, it made the globally unprecedented move of stopping the sale of its films in its domestic market, moving to hiring them instead (see Salmon, 163); second, it began to establish its own hiring companies. By April 1908 it had established six hiring subsidiaries, each of which covered a designated territory of a ‘domestic’ market that, as well as France, covered Algeria, Switzerland,

Europe  65

Belgium, Holland and Luxembourg. Italy was included in this network during 1909.8 By the middle of 1909 Pathé’s output was such that in this ‘domestic’ hiring network it could hire out its films as entire programmes, changed twice a week, rather than individually, which it began to do in June/July 1909.9 By 1909, however, the European film production industry had become extremely competitive, with rivals multiplying within France and existing rivals from around Europe and North America emulating Pathé’s web of exports. Increasing competition was forcing down Pathé’s share of the European film market. For example, the 19.5% share of the UK negative market in May 1909 mentioned above was actually down on the previous year: they had produced 22.6% of the negative footage placed on the UK market in May 1908. As Abel notes, “the company’s monopolistic tactics had the effect of encouraging rather than discouraging competition” (Abel, ‘In the belly’, 370), and by largely abandoning their initial market of fairground film shows Pathé left this admittedly shrinking market open to their rivals (Abel, Ciné, 41). The company’s old rival Gaumont was also opening its own cinemas and increasing its output to supply those newly emerging cinemas that Pathé did not control, and established its own hiring company, permitting it to adopt Pathé’s hiring-only system domestically, in 1909 (Abel, ‘In the belly’, 370; Ciné, 36). New domestic rivals emerging as a result of this new market included Théophile Pathé, younger brother of Charles Pathé, who established his own company in July 1906 and began issuing films in France early in 1907, Lux, founded by Henri Joly in late 1906, Éclair, founded in May 1907 and issuing films by August 1907 (Usai, ‘Société’, 30), Urban-Éclipse, formed from pre-existing companies in mid-1907, and Le Lion, founded in roughly May 1908. These new production companies initially produced very modestly, but their output grew fast during 1908. In November 1908 Charles Pathé expressed his concern over what he perceived to be a crisis of overproduction in France and other parts of Europe: “[l]a surproduction dépasse, à mon avis, de beaucoup la consommation […] . Nous fabriquons à peu près, deux fois les besoins de la consommation [overproduction exceeds, in my opinion, and by a great deal, demand […] . We are making roughly twice what the market requires]”.10 By ‘we’ Pathé did not mean his company; he meant the film production siblinghood as a whole, and ‘overproduction’ is of course a manufacturer’s euphemism for a competitive marketplace. The European trade press consistently drew attention to this competitive marketplace during early 1909.11 As mentioned above (see page 57), Europe-wide efforts initiated in February 1909 to establish agreements that would centralise power in the hands of the production companies (in part by making Pathé’s domestic system of hiring copies of films to hirers rather than selling them the industry norm), in spite of promising early signs, had failed by early May 1909.12 Pathé was also starting to come up against powerful rivals in its primary export markets, including in Italy (from Itala, Cines, Ambrosio, Milano, Comerio and Aquila) and in Denmark (from the powerful Nordisk), and Pathé had also lost several important personnel to its Italian rivals in 1906–8 (Abel, ‘In the belly’, 370). The newly organised US film production industry’s success at limiting

66  The Origins of the Film Star System

Pathé’s exports to the US from the beginning of 1909 has been described in detail by Abel (Ciné, 44–6) and will feature in Chapter 3. For all of these reasons, during 1909 Pathé were under increasing pressure to identify new production values to distinguish their output in both domestic and foreign markets. Pathé’s vertical integration also made it abnormal in the European marketplace. In contrast to the multiple levels of removal separating production companies from the public described on pages 38–41, at least a portion of Pathé’s business was indeed done directly with the general public. In addition, because Pathé’s venues exclusively showed Pathé films, in such venues the screen population was exceptionally minimised, making it all the more likely that audiences would recognise Pathé performers from one film to the next. A further distinguishing feature of Pathé’s industrial organisation was that they used long-term contracts for some performers before their competitors (from roughly 1905 (see Salmon, 136–52 and Aimone, 83)), which made for permanence of appearance that was conducive to recognition by the general public. This is very clear in one November 1908 contribution to the NYDM, in which the writer described the methods of product differentiation that s/he deemed to be currently available: The confirmed visitor to moving picture theatres learns in time to recognize almost at sight the product of different film manufacturers, by certain peculiarities independent of the trademarks that now accompany all films. […] It may be the faces of the actors, the scenic backgrounds, the style of the acting, the quality or peculiarities of the photography, or it may be the picture story itself and the manner in which it is constructed or handled that gives the information.



S/he added that “[m]ost Pathe [sic] actors have been long in the same employ and are readily recognizable by the spectator”13 and, notably, did not say the same about any of the other production companies discussed in the article (Gaumont, Méliès, Radios, Éclair and Lux from France, Nordisk from Denmark, Cines and Rossi from Italy, Urban-Éclipse (UK/French), and Biograph, Edison, Vitagraph, Kalem, Selig, Essanay and Lubin from the US). That is, permanence of performers distinguished Pathé’s films from those of all of the other production companies issuing films around Europe and North America at the time. By 1909, therefore, Pathé Frères, searching for responses to several threats to its industry dominance, directly in contact with some end users by dint of its ownership of hiring businesses and exhibition venues, and using a handful of specialised performer employees with conspicuous consistency, was, exceptionally, exempt from several of the impediments and disincentives against launching a star system listed in the Introduction. Thus it is not surprising that it was Pathé Frères that initiated the first stardom-building publicity campaign in Europe, and, indeed, in the world. The remainder of this chapter will explore the short-term events that, by lifting the remaining impediments and disincentives and dissolving the new-medium deadlock, led to the decision to initiate this publicity campaign. The person whom it concerned was one Gabriel-Maximilien Leuvielle, also known as Max Linder.

Europe  67

A word first about temporal priority. It is very rare to claim that Max Linder was the first film star in the world. For example, in 2006 Pierre Lherminier remarked that in October 1909 Linder “devient une vedette à part entière chez Pathé [became a star in his own right at Pathé]”, but did not go so far as to claim that this made Linder the first film star in the world (‘Chronologie’, 312).14 In unpublished and undated manuscript material Henri Langlois claimed that “Max Linder avait avec André Deed la gloire d’être partage la premier apparition a l’écran de la star [Max Linder had with André Deed the honour of sharing the first appearance on the screen of the star]”, but this was shared honour.15 Abel remarked in 1994 that “[i]n late summer, 1909, under [Louis] Gasnier’s direction, Linder began appearing in a regular series of Pathé comedies with his name soon included in each film’s advertisement” (Ciné, 237), but, probably because of uncertainty about precisely when Pathé named him in their publicity, did not go so far as to claim that this made Linder the first film star in the world, even though he had already claimed, the previous year, that Linder was “the earliest French film star” (‘In the belly’, 383n100). In 2005 Jane Gaines likewise called Linder “[t]he first French star” (‘star system’, 608) rather than the first film star globally. Indeed, the only claim that Linder was “the world’s first film star” of which I am aware is made by Ginette Vincendeau, who expresses bemusement that “Linder is not more widely recognized as the world’s first film star” (42; she calls him this three more times (43, 45, 54)). By contrast, a claim that Linder was the first international film star is very common. Linder, the subtitle of Jack Spears’s 1965 article on him claimed, “Was the Motion Picture’s First Truly International Star” (272). Other instances of this claim can be seen in Jean Mitry’s 1967 biography of Linder (where Mitry called Linder “la première grande vedette internationale [the first international star]” (301)), the 1976 second edition of Gerald Mast’s Short History of the Movies, in which Mast called Linder “the first internationally famous star of motion pictures” (40–1) (the phrase remains unaltered in even the most recent edition, the eleventh, published in 2010, updated after Mast’s death by Bruce Kawin (50)), in Maud Linder’s 1992 biography of her father,16 in Michael Temple and Michael Witt’s The French Cinema Book (2004),17 and in Rémi Fournier Lanzoni’s 2014 history of French film comedy, in which he calls Linder “the world’s first international star for motion pictures” (2).18 Even Vincendeau partly withdraws her claim that Linder was the first film star in the world by conflating it with a claim that he was “the first international film star” (43, 42), doing so because, it seems, she is not confident of the sparse evidence, taken from Abel’s work, for this first claim (48).19 The logic behind this common claim is that while Linder might not have been the first film star anywhere, by overtaking, in popularity, anyone who did come before him, he conveniently rendered unimportant the question of who was first created as a film star, meaning, it is implied, that it does not really matter if we should find that Linder did not happen to be the first person to attain filmspecific stardom. Indeed, claiming that Linder was the first international film star suggests at least a suspicion that he was probably not the first film star. For Spears, Linder was cinema’s

68  The Origins of the Film Star System



“first genuine star – in the sense of a screen actor who became a public idol” (272); that is, for Spears it is possible that there are earlier candidates for the position of first non-famous person about whom a publicity campaign was orchestrated by a film company, so he defines ‘star’ either as a person who has topped a certain number of followers among the public or as a person who has become known outside the country in which they work. Though America may well have had the first film industry to generate a star, the implicit logic runs here, Linder overtook any earlier American stars in that he achieved international popularity first. I will show, however, that Ginette Vincendeau is most likely right when she insists that Linder was actually “the world’s first film star”, ‘first’ in the sense not of the scale of his following but in the sense of being temporally prior: not just the first international film star but the first film star of any scale, and by a significant margin. The earliest surviving European evidence of publicity for a regular film performer is Pathé Frères’s poster for Le petit jeune homme [The little young man], which names Max Linder and represents him twice (see Fig. 1.1). His name also appeared, albeit misspelled, in the Parisian daily entertainments paper Comœdia’s summary of films showing at the Omnia Pathé in their 26 September 1909 issue, which reflects the use of his name in publicity at the venue.20 Surviving instances of publicity for Linder’s subsequent films indicate that Pathé consistently included his name in publicity from this point onwards (see Figs. 1.2–1.19). That Pathé decided to launch a publicity campaign for Linder alongside Le petit jeune homme is suggested by the fact that the first mention of a film performer with no pre-existing fame in the UK trade journal Bioscope was their mention of Linder’s name in their synopsis for Le petit jeune homme (titled The Young Lady-Killer in the UK), which was printed in their 2 September 1909 issue, the first of a long string of instances of naming Linder that featured in the UK trade press (see Fig. 1.2).21 This suggests that Pathé Frères issued his name in the trade bulletins that they sent to trade papers and exhibitors around Europe in advance of issuing this film, although I have not been able to track down surviving copies of any of these. While no versions of the poster for Le petit jeune homme with text in languages other than French seem to have survived, there is also some circumstantial evidence to suggest that Pathé issued publicity naming Linder alongside Le petit jeune homme/The Young Lady-Killer in the UK: in the February 1911 issue of the popular publication The Strand Magazine, in an article entitled ‘In a Biograph Theatre’, which combined behind-the-scenes accounts of film production with plot summaries of a handful of comedies and dramas, Linder was named in a synopsis for a film that, though untitled, is clearly Le petit jeune homme/The Young Lady-Killer: “We now pass on to another favourite of the biograph theatre, Max Linder, who impersonates a youth supposed to be smitten with the charms of two damsels” (Guy, 160).22 This particular association of Linder with a film that had been issued over a year before this article was written suggests that it was memorable precisely because it was the first film with which Linder’s name was publicly associated, at least in the UK.

Europe  69

Fig. 1.1  Pathé Frères’s poster for Le petit jeune homme (issued in parts of Europe outside France in c.8–11 September 1909 and in France in c.late September 1909). The text under the title reads “scene comique du MR MAX LINDER / jouée par L’AUTEUR [comic film by Mr Max Linder / played by the author]”.

Dating Le petit jeune homme’s appearance on the market is possible with some precision. As the Omnia Pathé changed its films every Friday, the mention of Le petit jeune homme in the Sunday 26 September 1909 issue of Comœdia indicates that it had begun to play at the venue on Friday 24 September 1909. At the time, however, Pathé Frères was issuing its films in France later than it issued them in its foreign markets, as the result of a backlog that had begun to build up in June/ July 1909 when they had started to hire out their films in France as twice-weekly programmes rather than individually (see page 66), a practice which meant that a stream of films which could be poured into open markets outside France as soon as each film was ready had to be formed, domestically, into an ever-lengthening queue that was only two programmes per week wide.23 It seems reasonable to regard the

70  The Origins of the Film Star System



French issue date as something of an exception, therefore. The Europe-wide issue date can be better deduced from the UK issue date. As the system of release dates would be introduced (by, notably, Pathé Frères) before the end of 1909, and as the average time lag between the announcement of a film in the UK trade press and its release date during the first few months of this release date system was 6–9 days, the announcement of Le petit jeune homme/The Young Lady-Killer in the 2 September 1909 issue of Bioscope (and the same day’s issue of K&LW, which did not include Linder’s name)24 permits us to date its appearance on the UK film market to roughly 8–11 September 1909. The fact that Pathé Frères started consistently crediting Linder in their trade publicity and started consistently issuing public-oriented publicity about him specifically in connection with Le petit jeune homme, in spite of the difference of several weeks between this film’s being issued in the rest of Europe and its release in France, indicates that the company’s executives made the decision to use Linder’s identity as a production value shortly before they commissioned the publicity material for this film, publicity material that, in France, had to wait, alongside the film, in Pathé’s domestic backlog. This makes it possible to narrow down the date when this decision was made to no later than roughly 20 August 1909, as the Bioscope staff would have received notice of Linder’s name in time to prepare copy for their 2 September issue. Pathé’s publicity for Le petit jeune homme was the beginning of a consistent publicity campaign for Linder. Figure 1.2 lists the films in which Linder featured from Le petit jeune homme until June 1910, with a column listing surviving evidence of accompanying publicity naming Linder and a column listing surviving evidence of Pathé’s crediting of Linder to the trade, which, though not constitutive of a publicity campaign, is indicative, in its consistency, of Pathé using his name as a production value in other materials. As the third column indicates, from 2 December 1909 Pathé Frères started consistently including Linder’s name in the advertisements for their weekly releases that they placed in the UK’s trade papers, the first time that a regular performer’s name was featured in an advertisement placed in a trade paper.25 Three moments of escalation can be seen in this table: first, the FJS-P preserves copies of publicity stills for Un mariage Américain and À qui mon cœur? that do not give Linder’s name,26 even though, as Fig. 1.2 shows, the Omnia Pathé were naming him in other publicity for both of these films, which indicates that the company only started to include Linder’s name in this particular avenue of publicity – designed to be displayed in cinema foyers – with La vengeance du bottier, released on 18 December 1909. Second, on 14 April 1910 Pathé Frères devoted a full-page trade advertisement to Linder in Bioscope, the first advertisement devoted to a film-only performer in the UK trade press, an indication that Pathé perceived that at least some hiring companies and exhibitors were treating him as a production value. And third, as the title of the last film in this list indicates, no later than June 1910 Pathé Frères made the decision to include the name ‘Max’ in the titles of Linder’s films, a practice which they continued for the majority of the films in which he performed until he left the company in 1917 (and to which I will return in Chapter 3).27

Europe  71

72  The Origins of the Film Star System Poster naming Linder issued by Pathé (Fig. 1.3). Linder named in the programme for the Cirque d’Hiver, Paris, for 22–8 October 1909, and in publicity at the Omnia Pathé, Paris, for the same period.29 Linder named in publicity at the Omnia Pathé for 5–11 November 1909.32

Une conquête [A conquest] Europe: Issued around 29 September–2 October 1909. France: Featured on the programme for the Cirque d’Hiver, Paris, for 22–8 October 1909.28

Un mariage Américain [An American marriage] Europe: Issued around 13–16 October 1909. France: Featured on the programme for the Cirque d’Hiver, Paris, for 5–11 November 1909.31

Les surprises de l’amour [The surprises of love] UK title: The Surprises of a Flirtation Europe: Issued around 20–3 October 1909. France: Made c.October 1909.34

Poster naming Linder issued by Pathé Frères (Fig. 1.1). Linder named in publicity at the Omnia Pathé, Paris, for 24–30 September 1909 (see above).

Surviving evidence of public-oriented publicity

Le petit jeune homme [The little young man] UK title: A Young Lady-Killer Europe: Issued around 8–11 September 1909. France: Issued by 24 September 1909.

Film title and date

Linder named in synopsis in Bioscope.35

Linder named in synopsis in Bioscope33 (no synopsis for this film was included in K&LW).

Linder named in synopses in K&LW and Bioscope.30

Linder named in synopsis in Bioscope 2 September 1909 (see above), likely drawn from Pathé Frères’ Weekly Illustrated Bulletin and Supplement (London). This applies to synopses printed in Bioscope and K&LW mentioned in subsequent rows.

Surviving evidence of crediting to the trade

Fig. 1.2  The first 30 films featuring Max Linder issued/released during Pathé’s publicity campaign for him, with surviving evidence of publicity and crediting.



Europe  73

Poster naming Linder issued by Pathé (see Fig. 1.4).

Linder named in publicity at the Omnia Pathé for 10–16 December 1909.39

Poster naming Linder issued by Pathé.44

Linder named in publicity at the Omnia Pathé for 17–23 December 1909.47 Linder named in publicity at the Cirque d’Hiver for 31 December 1909 to 6 January 1910.50

Petite rosse [Little cat/bitch] UK title: A Tantalising Young Lady Europe: Issued around 10–13 November 1909. France: Featured on the programme for the Artistic Cinema in Paris for 3–9 December 1909.36

À qui mon cœur? [To whom my heart?] UK title: Who Will Win My Heart? Europe: Released 16 November 1909. France: Shown from 10 December 1909.38

Le voleur mondain [The worldly thief] UK title: The Gentleman Thief Europe: Released 1 December 1909. France: Issued c.December 1909.43

Roméo se fait bandit [Romeo turns bandit] UK title: Romeo Turns Brigand Europe: Released 4 December 1909. France: Shown from 17 December 1909.46

En bombe [On a ‘bender’] UK title: A Student on the Spree Europe: Released 8 December 1909. France: Featured on the programme for the Cirque d’Hiver, Paris, for 31 December 1909 to 6 January 1910.49

(Continued)

Linder named in synopsis in Bioscope51 (no synopsis for this film was included in K&LW) and in advertisement in Bioscope52 and advertisement in K&LW (“A Student on the Spree / Comic Play by Max Linder.”)53

Linder named in synopsis in Bioscope48 (no synopsis for this film was included in K&LW).

Linder named in synopsis in Bioscope45 (no synopsis for this film was included in K&LW).

Linder named in synopsis in Bioscope40 (no synopsis for this film was included in K&LW) and in Pathé’s trade advertisements in both Bioscope41 and K&LW (“Who Will Win My Heart? / Comic Piece played by M. Max Linder.”)42

Linder named in synopsis in Bioscope.37

74  The Origins of the Film Star System Publicity stills naming Linder issued by Pathé (see Figs. 1.5a and 1.5b). Linder named in publicity at the Cirque d’Hiver for 28 January 1910 to 3 February 191056 and at the Omnia Pathé for 4–10 February 1910.57 Poster naming Linder issued by Pathé (see Fig. 1.6).

Poster naming Linder issued by Pathé (see Fig. 1.7). Linder named in publicity at the Omnia Pathé and the Cirque d’Hiver for 11–17 February 1910.68 Publicity stills naming Linder issued by Pathé (see Figs. 1.8a and 1.8b).

Avant et … après [Before and … after] Europe: Released 24 December 1909.62 France: Featured on the programme for the Cirque d’Hiver, Paris, for 7–13 January 1910.63

Les exploits du jeune Tartarin [The exploits of young Tartarin] UK title: The Adventures of Tartarin, the Younger Europe: Released 19 January 1910. France: Featured on the programme for the Cirque d’Hiver for 11–17 February 1910.67

La timidité guérie par le serum [Cowardice cured by medicine] UK title: The Cure of Cowardice Europe: Released 2 February 1910. France: Made c.January 1910.70

Surviving evidence of public-oriented publicity

La vengeance du bottier [The bootmaker’s revenge] Europe: Released 18 December 1909.54 France: Featured on the programme for the Cirque d’Hiver, Paris, for 28 January 1910 to 3 February 1910.55

Film title and date

Fig. 1.2  Continued

Linder named in synopsis in Bioscope71 (no synopsis for this film was included in K&LW).

Linder named in synopsis in Bioscope69 (no synopsis for this film was included in K&LW).

Linder named in synopsis in Bioscope64 (no synopsis for this film was included in K&LW) and in advertisement in Bioscope65 and advertisement in K&LW (“Before and After / Comic by Max Linder.”)66

Linder named in synopses in Bioscope58 and K&LW,59 and in advertisement in Bioscope60 and K&LW (“The Bootmaker’s Revenge / Comic play by Max Linder.”)61

Surviving evidence of crediting to the trade



Europe  75

Je voudrais un enfant [I want a child] Europe: Unknown France: Featured on the programme for the Cirque d’Hiver, Paris, for 8–14 April 1910.80

Poster and publicity still naming Linder issued by Pathé (see Figs. 1.12 and 1.13). Linder named in publicity at the Omnia Pathé and the Cirque d’Hiver for 8–14 April 1910.81

Publicity stills naming Linder issued by Pathé (see Figs. 1.11a and 1.11b). Linder named in publicity at the Omnia Pathé and the Cirque d’Hiver for 18–24 March 1910.76

Jeune fille romanesque [Romantic young woman] UK title: A Romantic Young Lady Europe: Released 16 February 1910. France: Featured on the programme for the Cirque d’Hiver, Paris, for 18–24 March 1910.75

Le pacte [The pact] Europe: Released 5 March 1910. France: Made c.February 1910 and featured on the programme for the Théâtre Français, Bordeaux for 13–19 May 1910.78

Poster and publicity stills naming Linder issued by Pathé (see Figs. 1.9, 1.10a and 1.10b). Linder named in publicity at the Omnia Pathé and the Cirque d’Hiver for 11–17 March 1910.73

Une bonne pour monsieur, un domestique pour madame [A housemaid for sir, a servant for madam] UK title: Servants and Masters Europe: Released 9 February 1910. France: Featured on the programme for the Cirque d’Hiver, Paris, for 11–17 March 1910.72

(Continued)

Linder named in synopsis in Bioscope79 (no synopsis for this film was included in K&LW).

Linder named in synopsis in K&LW77 (no synopsis for this film was included in Bioscope).

Linder named in synopsis in Bioscope74 (no synopsis for this film was included in K&LW).

76  The Origins of the Film Star System Linder named in publicity at the Omnia Pathé for 15–21 April 1910.83 Linder named in publicity at the Omnia Pathé and the Cirque d’Hiver for 22–28 April 1910.85

Linder named in publicity at the Cirque d’Hiver for 29 April–5 May 1910.88

Publicity still naming Linder issued by Pathé (see Fig. 1.14). Linder named in publicity at the Cirque d’Hiver for 6–12 May 1910.90

Le serment d’un Prince [The oath of a prince] UK title: A Prince’s Word of Honour Europe: Released 26 March 1910. France: Featured on the programme for the Cirque d’Hiver, Paris, for 22–28 April 1910.84

Mauvaise vue [Poor eyesight] UK title: A Double Sight Europe: Released 30 March 1910. France: Featured on the programme for the Cirque d’Hiver, Paris, for 29 April–5 May 1910.87

Une ruse de mari [A husband’s ruse] UK title: Hubby Cures His Wife of Flirting Europe: Released 9 April 1910. France: Made c.April 1910. Featured on the programme for the Cirque d’Hiver, Paris, for 6–12 May 1910.89

Surviving evidence of public-oriented publicity

Soldat par amour [Soldier of Love] UK title: The Orderly Europe: Released 16 March 1910 France: Shown from 15 April 1910.82

Film title and date

Fig. 1.2  Continued

Linder named in synopsis in Bioscope86 (no synopsis for this film was included in K&LW).

Surviving evidence of crediting to the trade



Europe  77

Publicity still naming Linder issued by Pathé (see Fig. 1.18).

Amour et fromage [Love and cheese] Europe: Unknown France: Listed in 11 June 1910 issue of Ciné-Journal.107

(Continued)

Linder named in synopsis in Bioscope105 and in K&LW.106

Publicity still naming Linder issued by Pathé (see Fig. 1.17).

Kyrelor, bandit par amour [Kyrelor, criminal for love] UK title: Baffles, Bandit Europe: Released 4 May 1910. France: Listed in 28 May 1910 issue of Ciné-Journal.104

Linder named in advertisement in CinéJournal97 and in synopsis in Bioscope98 and in K&LW.99 Linder made the sole subject of Pathé Frères’s advertisement in Bioscope.100 Linder named in synopsis in Bioscope102 and in K&LW.103

Publicity stills naming Linder issued by Pathé (see Figs. 1.16a and 1.16b). Linder named in publicity at the Omnia Pathé for 20–6 May 1910.96

L’ ingénieux attentat [The ingenious attack] UK title: Poor Pa Pays Again Europe: Released 23 April 1910. France: Listed in 14 May 1910 issue of Ciné-Journal.94 Shown from 20 May 1910.95

Linder named in synopsis in Bioscope92 and in K&LW.93

Tout est bien qui finit bien [All is well that ends well] Europe: Released 27 April 1910. France: Listed in 21 May 1910 issue of Ciné-Journal.101

Publicity still naming Linder issued by Pathé (see Fig. 1.15).

Une représentation au cinema [A representation at the cinema] UK title: At the Cinematograph Theatre Europe: Released 13 April 1910. France: Made c.April 1910. Featured on the programme for the Théâtre Français, Bordeaux, for 22–8 July 1910.91

78  The Origins of the Film Star System Linder named in synopsis in Bioscope116 and in K&LW.117

Publicity still naming Linder issued by Pathé (see Fig. 1.19). Linder named in publicity at the Omnia Pathé for 8–14 July 1910.115 Linder named in publicity at the Omnia Pathé for 15–21 July 1910.120

Le revolver arrange tout [The revolver arranges everything] UK title: The Persuasive Powers of a Revolver Europe: Released 8 June 1910. France: Listed in the 2 July 1910 issue of Ciné-Journal.113 Shown from 8 July 1910.114

Max fait du ski [Max tries skiing] Europe: Released 18 June 1910. France: Listed in 9 July 1910 issue of Ciné-Journal.118 Shown from 15 July 1910.119

Linder named in synopsis in Bioscope121 (no synopsis for this film was included in K&LW).

Linder named in synopsis in Bioscope.112

Le duel de Monsieur Myope [Mr Myopic’s duel] UK title: A Short-Sighted Duellist Europe: Released 1 June 1910. France: Listed in 25 June 1910 issue of Ciné-Journal.111

Surviving evidence of crediting to the trade Linder named in synopsis in Bioscope109 and in K&LW.110

Surviving evidence of public-oriented publicity

Une epreuve difficile [A difficult ordeal] UK title: A Difficult Task Europe: Released 25 May 1910. France: Listed in 18 June 1910 issue of Ciné-Journal.108

Film title and date

Fig. 1.2  Continued

Fig. 1.3  Poster for Une conquête, issued around Europe c.29 September–3 October 1909 and in France c.22 October 1909.



There is also evidence to suggest that, on top of this printed publicity, Pathé used the films themselves to build Linder’s celebrity. It did this in two regards. First, it began to bring the camera as close to Linder as physically possible. All three main scenes in Le petit jeune homme, for example, have the structure: 1) establishing long shot, 2) shot of facial action that is as close as possible, 3) shot from the same distance as shot 1 to show the consequences of what happened in shot 2. The first of these three shots 2 are a 54-second medium shot and a 28-second mediumclose-up respectively. Second, shortly before the end of 1909, Pathé began to give Linder’s name in text footage: a surviving print of La vengeance du bottier (released in parts of Europe outside France on 18 December 1909) starts with title footage in German that gives Linder’s name, as well as that of a Mr Vandenne and a Miss Montavon,122 and a review of Avant et … après, released in parts of Europe outside

Europe  79

Fig. 1.4 Poster for Petite rosse, issued around Europe c.10–13 November 1909 and in France in early December 1909. FJS-P, AFF-P-25. Camille de Morlhon was a unit director at Pathé who had some existing fame as a playwright.

80  The Origins of the Film Star System



Fig. 1.5 (a and b)  Publicity stills for La vengeance du bottier, released around Europe on 18 December 1909. Note the text “de M. Max Linder” under the company logo: FJS-P, PHO-P1235 and FJS-P, PHO-P-1236.

Europe  81

Fig. 1.6  Poster for Avant et … après[!], released around Europe on 24 December 1909. FJS-P, AFF-P-403. As with Le petit jeune homme, Linder is billed as both author and performer.

82  The Origins of the Film Star System



Fig. 1.7  Poster for Les exploits du jeune Tartarin, released around Europe on 2 February 1910. CF, E4790.

Europe  83

Fig. 1.8 (a and b)  Publicity stills for La timidité guérie par le serum, released around Europe on 2 February 1910: FJS-P, PHO-P-1330 and FJS-P, PHO-P-1331.

84  The Origins of the Film Star System



Fig. 1.9 Poster for Une bonne pour monsieur, un domestique pour madame, released around Europe on 9 February 1910. FJS-P, AFF-P-598.

Europe  85

Fig. 1.10 (a and b) Publicity stills for Une bonne pour monsieur, un domestique pour madame, released around Europe on 9 February 1910: FJS-P, PHO-P-1347 and FJS-P, PHO-P-1348.

86  The Origins of the Film Star System



Fig. 1.11 (a and b)  Publicity stills for Jeune fille romanesque, released around Europe on 16 February 1910: FJS-P, PHO-P-1359 and FJS-P, PHO-P-1360.

Europe  87

Fig. 1.12  Poster for Je voudrais un enfant, released in France in early April 1910. CF, E327.

88  The Origins of the Film Star System

Fig. 1.13 Publicity still for Je voudrais un enfant, released in France in early April 1910. FJS-P, PHO-P-1396.



Fig. 1.14  Publicity still for Une ruse de mari, released around Europe on 9 April 1910. FJS-P, PHO-P-1426.

Europe  89

Fig. 1.15 Publicity still for Une représentation au cinema, released around Europe on 13 April 1910. FJS-P, PHO-P-1450.

France on 24 December 1909, which was released in the US (as Before and After) on 11 February 1910 (in the US it was only the third film featuring Linder to be released after Le petit jeune homme (this shuffling of Pathé’s releases in the US will be analysed in Chapter 3)), in the 19 February 1910 issue of Variety included the remark that “[i]f the man is important enough in this picture to be billed then he should be billed in all the Pathe [sic] pictures, for he is the principal in all their comedy subjects. He is very apt and a clever comedian.”123 The most likely meaning of ‘billed’ here refers to the use of Linder’s name in either title or intertitle footage,124 footage which was presumably being routinely included in the European versions of Linder’s films by this point and which was either also being routinely included in the US versions of his films or which the person tasked with excising it from the US version of this film (in line with the MPPC-licensed companies’ (of which Pathé was one; see page 115) norm of anonymity) simply forgot to excise.125 Opening title footage in a surviving Spanish-language print of Le Timidité guérie par le serum, released in parts of Europe outside France on 2 February 1910, also gives Linder’s full name above the title.126 The UK trade journal Bioscope’s synopsis for L’ ingénieux attentat (released in the UK as Poor Pa Pays Again on 23 April 1910) in their 14 April 1910 issue called the film “[a]nother of those excellent little comic plays so ably acted by Mr. Max Linder, whose name when announced on the screen is sufficient to guarantee a good heart laugh”;127 his name, that is, had been featuring in text footage in UK prints for some time.

90  The Origins of the Film Star System



Fig. 1.16 (a and b) Publicity stills for L’ingénieux attentat, released around Europe on 23 April 1910. FJS-P, PHO-P-1452-3.

Europe  91

Fig. 1.17  Publicity still for Kyrelor, bandit par amour, released around Europe on 4 May 1910. FJS-P, PHO-P-3957.

Fig. 1.18  Publicity still for Amour et fromage, released in France c.July 1910. FJS-P, PHOP-1514.

92  The Origins of the Film Star System

Fig. 1.19  Publicity still for Le revolver arrange tout, released around Europe on 8 June 1910. FJS-P, PHO-P-1551.



In mid/late August 1909, therefore, Pathé Frères made what, given the circumstances described in the Introduction, was a radical decision to begin a publicity campaign for one of their long-term performer employees. To explain why they made this decision, it is necessary to look first at Linder’s career during the preceding four years, and to examine some inconspicuous sources from 1908 and 1909. Linder’s first work for Pathé Frères took place in July 1905 (Lherminier, ‘Chronologie’, 309). He performed for films for them for three years from this date, and during this period he also performed in several runs of stage plays, first for the Théâtre de l’Ambigu and then, from the middle of 1906, for the Théâtre de Variétés (see Jeanne, 166–72).128 Indeed, Gabriel-Maximilien Leuvielle adopted the pseudonym ‘Max Linder’ around 1904–5 when he first started trying to establish this stage career in Paris.129 During this first stint at Pathé, Linder was occasionally credited in trade publications,130 but Pathé did not make him the subject of a publicity campaign. On 23 April 1908, a long run of Gaston Arman de Caillavet, Robert de Flers and Emmanuel Arène’s comedy Le roi [The king] began at the Théâtre de Variétés, with Linder playing the very small part of William Touret (the character features in just one of the play’s 40 scenes (Act I Scene 13) and speaks just eleven lines) but also understudying the more renowned stage actor Max Dearly in the major role of Blond, which has 153 lines and appears in 12 of the play’s 40 scenes.131 Dearly’s celebrity status was such that, for example, he was one of the six major players whose photograph was reproduced at the head of the review of Le roi printed in the 25 April 1908 issue of Comœdia (Richepin, 1).

Europe  93

Seemingly hoping that playing Blond when Dearly was unwell would open the door to lead roles, Linder stopped working for Pathé Frères. His last film in this initial stint at Pathè seems to have been Consultation improvisée [Improvised consultation], first shown around early October 1908.132 Linder continued to work exclusively for the Théâtre de Variétés in Le roi until the end of the play’s second season; his name last appeared under Le roi in the massed cast lists for plays on the Paris stage in the 5 June 1909 issue of Comœdia.133 At this point he seems to have decided to abandon his stage career, seemingly because he had still not caught the career break on the stage which he had been courting since 1904. He then approached Pathé to broker a contract for new work performing for films. In June or early July 1909, Linder signed this new contract with Pathé,134 and his first film under this new contract, Aimé par sa bonne, was first being shown in parts of Europe outside France from around 4 to 7 August 1909,135 and in France from around 20 August 1909.136 No publicity or tradeoriented materials for this film that I have seen named Linder,137 and his name is not mentioned in any French or UK local or national newspaper reference to the film that I have seen, so it seems that even in early August 1909 the executives at Pathé still did not regard it as worthwhile to build a celebrity profile for him, even though, at this time, the combination of his new contract with them and his new attitude to theatre work meant that they could rely on his labour for a relatively long period. That they did not do it in spite of these incentives indicates the extent and strength of both the disincentives that they still faced and the deadlock endemic to the new medium.138 However, it is likely that the executives at Pathé were soon confronted with evidence from multiple sources that viewers of Aimé par sa bonne had recognised Linder, not just in spite of his anonymity in Pathé’s publicity for this film, but also in spite of his relatively long-term absence from Pathé’s films. Georg Renken has discovered a synopsis for Aimé par sa bonne in an advertisement for the Kinematoscope, a cinema in Herne in western Germany, in the 7 August 1909 issue of their own publication the Kinematoscope Zeitung [Kinematoscope Journal], announcing their programme for the period 7–10 August 1909: Vom Dienstmädchen geliebt / Hochkomischer Schlager. Diese Szene wird von einem sehr beliebten Schauspieler, welcher uns schon von den Bildern, “Meine Hose ist geplaßt”, “August geht zum Ball” usw., her bekannt ist, gespielt. [Loved by the maid / High comic hit. This scene is played by a very popular actor, known here from “My Trousers are Split [Mon pantalon est décousu (1908)]”, “August Goes to the Ball” [Julot va dans le monde (1906)], etc.]139

Statements of recognition also feature in reviews of the film in North America. The review of Aimé par sa bonne (released in the US as The Servant’s Good Joke) in the NYDM included the remark that “[t]his comedy picture, which is a series of laughs all through, depends largely for its success on the admirable pantomime of a Pathe [sic] comedian whose face has been absent from Pathe [sic] pictures for some months. His return will be warmly welcomed by many admiring patrons of picture houses.”140 MPW also featured two statements of recognition. “This clever comedy”, their synopsis of the film began,

94  The Origins of the Film Star System

will be welcomed by many of the old patrons, owing to the fact that the principal character is played by one of the best comedians who ever portrayed a comedy part in our pictures. This gentleman will be readily remembered by his excellent work in “The Unskillful Skater,” which is only one of his many great successes that has left an indelible impression upon the mind of the public.141



Recognising Linder in spite of his roughly nine-month career hiatus was also recorded in MPW’s later review (not necessarily written by the author of the earlier synopsis): “The chief merit of this film”, it ran, “lies in the fact that the leading character is played by one of the best comedians Pathe [sic] ever put on the screen. He will be remembered as the one who played the comedy role in “The Unskilful Skater,” which was extremely funny.”142 This particular reviewer’s comments evidence a significant act of recollection: The Unskilful Skater (originally Les débuts d’un patineur) was listed in the US trade publication Views and Film Index on 11 May 1907 (Abel, Ciné, 444), and although it may still have been circulating in the US in 1909, it did so in the company of several thousand fiction films from this period: this writer was either picking Linder out from their memory of the hundreds of performers featuring in these films or had already been recognising him from film to film for some years. While these printed indications that viewers were recognising Linder from his previous stint at Pathé all evidence recognition by people whose job involved watching many films, and while Aimé par sa bonne was not released in the US until 25 September 1909, meaning that US commentaries on the film could not have influenced Pathé’s decision to publicise him in Europe alongside Le petit jeune homme, they all nonetheless suggest that more such indications of Linder’s recognisability were circulating around Europe, both in discussions and in print, during the middle of August 1909, even before Aimé par sa bonne was issued in France. And it is reasonable to assume that at least a handful of examples of this phenomenon of recognition of Linder by audience members came to the attention of the executives at Pathé in Paris. Such information would have demonstrated to them that the new-medium deadlock was not actually as indissoluble as it seemed: during the middle of August 1909, confronted with evidence that viewers of Aimé par sa bonne were recognising Linder both in spite of his lengthy break from films – which showed how distinctive his facial features, body shape and habits of movement were – and in spite of his anonymity in their publicity so far, the executives at Pathé would have been informed that value had accrued in Linder anyway, in spite of the existing norm of anonymity. This revelation would have made the existing system appear to be based on an error: now, with (at least) one employee being used as a production value by viewers, Pathé would have realised that they ran the risk of losing this accrued value to their competitors even if they adhered to the principle of anonymity. This realisation seems to have led to Pathé’s decision to capitalise on this accidentally accrued value by giving this value a name in both their publicity and their trade-oriented materials. That Pathé first used Linder’s name in their advertising for Le petit jeune homme (and not for La barbe de Théodore or Amoureux de la femme à barbe, the two films that they released featuring Linder between Aimé par sa bonne

Europe  95

and Le petit jeune homme)143 allows us to date this decision to a window of time spanning roughly 10–20 August 1909. While deCordova’s model of the emergence of film stardom is based on discrediting the proposal that the public was the prime mover of the adoption of the star system (PP, 4–5), the circumstances of Pathé’s decision to begin to make Linder a production value suggest that the actions of film viewers were nonetheless highly instrumental. Pathé launched their publicity campaign for Linder not with the first film of his new stint (Aimé par sa bonne) and not after several months, but shortly after this stint started, with the fourth film in this new stint, suggesting that their view of his nature as an asset was radically changed during a period of just a few weeks. If they had started their publicity campaign for Linder with Aimé par sa bonne, all other factors remaining the same, this would have demonstrated that the fact that he was now consistently playing lead roles (which had not been the case during his previous stint (see Abel, Ciné, 236)) was sufficient for them to consider him a production value. If they had started their publicity campaign for Linder after several months, this could have been because of their assessment of the popularity of Linder’s films in hiring or sales markets, popularity which could have been ascribed to common properties such as subgenre rather than to his appearance in them. By contrast, their decision to start their publicity campaign for Linder less than a month after the issuing of his first film in this new stint suggests that news reached them in this brief period that disputed the common assumption that performers who were not already famous should remain anonymous in film publicity. Of course, it could have been Pathé’s own publicity for Aimé par sa bonne (if, for example, the Kinematoscope Zeitung advertisement reproduced above was copied verbatim from publicity created by Pathé) that prompted these accounts of recognition, but any such publicity almost certainly kept Linder anonymous; that is, at the time of the issue of Aimé par sa bonne, while they do seem to have decided to consistently give Linder lead roles, and while they even had evidence from his previous stint with them that he had been recognised from film to film in spite of his anonymity,144 and while they may have been inclined to draw attention to his reappearance in their films, they were still not yet convinced of the feasibility of using his name as a production value. By contrast, when they issued his name in connection with Le petit jeune homme, Pathé’s view seems to have been that it was in their best interests to both use his name as a production value and to work at building that value yet further. Audiences may not have been clamouring for the names of recognised performers, but they did iterate, to employers, the fact that they were capable of recognising and following certain performers and so treating them as production values. A second reason why Pathé deemed it appropriate to publicise Linder for his work for Le petit jeune homme is that for this film he was both performer and scenarist; the text under the title in the poster reproduced in Fig. 1.1 reads “scene comique du Mr MAX LINDER / jouée par L’AUTEUR [comic film by Mr Max Linder / played by the author]”. It was not the norm at the time for scenarists to be credited (unless they appeared under one of the ‘art film’ brands), so the decision to give Linder’s name

96  The Origins of the Film Star System



was not motivated by the scenario-writing work alone: rather, in taking on two of the creative roles behind this particular product, he had both diminished its ‘labour noise’ and reduced the number of people who might dispute the exclusive use of his identity as a production value in the publicity for this film. Linder wrote the scenarios for at least two of the films listed in Fig. 1.2 (Le petit jeune homme and Avant et … après) and LeForestier finds in Pathé Frères’s account books that the company paid Linder for four scenarios on 30 November 1909 (Aux sources, 208). This scenario-writing work also meant that he could create work that required his particular performance skills and so ensure that he featured prominently as lead performer, a rare position leading to the necessary condition, described in the Introduction, for an employer to be satisfied that investment in a publicity campaign would have a chance of yielding a return. In the UK, for example, in the 142 days starting on 4 August 1909, at least 13 films were issued which featured Linder as lead performer, an average of one film every 11 days. For example, the writer of the synopsis for Un mariage Américain in Bioscope in early October 1909 exclaimed “Mr Max Linder again!”,145 finding her/ himself reviewing the third film in five weeks in which Linder played the lead. A notable detail in the posters for Une conquête (Fig. 1.3) and Avant et … après (Fig. 1.6) was the statement of a stage affiliation for Linder: his now defunct affiliation with the Variétés. This stage affiliation was also given alongside his name in the entry for Une conquête in the programme for the Cirque d’Hiver for 22–8 October 1909 (see Fig. 1.2) and in the opening title footage, in German, of the surviving copy of Vengeance du bottier mentioned above (see pages 79–80). This might be taken to suggest that Pathé was not jettisoning the principle of maintaining anonymity for those performers who were not already famous; perhaps Linder was indeed already famous for his work on stage at the Variétés from 1906 to 1909. This, in turn, could be taken to suggest that the new-medium deadlock described in the Introduction dissolved, and film acquired a star system, because of cross-over stars, people who, because of exceptional circumstances, did indeed leave one cultural realm, in spite of having established a degree of celebrity there, for permanent employment as a film performer.146 However, this explanation does not seem to apply to Linder. While his name had begun to appear frequently in Comœdia shortly after it was launched in October 1907,147 this was only in either cast lists or in articles on special events in which he, along with many other people, was involved. In the 3 January 1908 issue, for example, he was credited for his parts in the one-act comedy Passez, muscade and the four-act comedy Les deux ecoles, which constituted the Variétés’ evening programme, in a ¾-page article that featured a total of just under 600 other names performing/conducting/writing etc. for the plays running at Paris’s 23 major theatres that week.148 Abel remarks that by late June 1909 Linder “was already well known to Parisians”, as evidenced by “advance publicity” for his new stint of films in the 22 June 1909 issue of Comœdia (Ciné, 513n135), but although this issue did include Linder’s name, not only was this in a very small note in a lengthy description of the attractions at Paris’s music halls and cinemas (rather than “advance publicity”), the article remarked that Linder was known not to the public but to the staff of the newspaper,

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specifically for his involvement in a film which Pathé had made as their contribution to the 13 June 1909 Comœdia fête, a celebration among the entertainments trade held in the Parc au Princes.149 (Comœdia’s description indicates that this film was later issued to the market as Le voleur mondain (see Fig. 1.2).) At no point during his stage career did Comœdia make his stage acting the subject of an article or include a photograph of him; indeed, the most conspicuous mention of him that I can find in the paper is in two spates of articles in May–June 1908 and May–June 1909 describing his involvement in organising (and doing very well with the epée in) an annual fencing championship among Paris actors:150 that is, he did establish a small degree of local celebrity by working outside the remit of his various employers.151 By contrast, within the remit of his stage employers, there had been very little opportunity for Linder to accrue celebrity. And because the roles that Linder played while at the Variétés were all small, it is therefore unlikely that the executives at Pathé regarded Linder as having established a significant degree of fame as a stage performer or even, indeed, as a fencing champion.152 Rather than reflecting a widely known theatrography, Pathé used stage ‘affiliations’ to add theatrical lustre (this had, after all, been a fundamental aspect of the ‘art film’ phenomenon), a principle reflected by an early December 1909 advertisement for Un mariage Américain/An American Marriage placed in a local newspaper by one venue in Perth, Australia, which erroneously gave Linder’s affiliation as “of the New York Theatre of Varieties”.153 If Linder’s stage celebrity had indeed made him generally known among even the Paris theatre-going public alone, his name would have been publicised in connection with the first film in his new stint; it was not. So while it might be appropriate to call Linder a cross-over performer, he could not be regarded as a cross-over star in the sense of being used as a production value in first one cultural industry and then another. That Linder was the first film-only performer to be the subject of an orchestrated publicity campaign is indicated by the very early appearance of his name in point-ofsale publicity created by cinemas that were independent of any affiliation with Pathé Frères. The Imperial Hall, a cinema in Walsall in the UK, included his name in their local press advertising on 23 October 1909: they billed An American Marriage (Un mariage Américain) as “A Great Comedy, in which the famous Max Linder shines most brilliantly”;154 on 18 December 1909 the same venue advertised A Student on the Spree (En bombe) as “A Comic Play, by Max Linder”;155 on 25 December 1909 the same venue promised that in La vengeance du bottier (mistitled by them as The Bookmaker’s Revenge) “[a]gain Max Linder gives us a big dose of undiluted merriment”;156 the venue continued to name him in their advertising in the new year. Australian newspapers first featured his name no later than 6 December 1909: it appeared in The Sydney Morning Herald in a summary of the films seen on the 4 December at a local venue, which included A Conquest (i.e. Une conquête),157 and in The West Australian, printed in Perth, in an advertisement for a local venue showing An American Marriage (Un mariage Américain),158 indicating that it had been stated in both venues’ point-of-sale publicity. These were just the second and third films, respectively, of the period of Pathé’s publicity campaign for Linder. Within two

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months, a mention in the 30 January 1910 issue of the Sunday Times, also published in Perth, indicates that the columnist perceived that he was becoming known among its readers: One of the best beauty comedians of the bio drama is M. Max Linder, who at one time was Pathe Freres’ [sic] leading man. He will be easily identified by his kissable moustache, rolling eyes and perfect deportment and action. He stands as a lesson to thousands of English and Australian artists who inflict their facial woodenness and physical gawkiness on the suffering public.159



By identifying Linder’s physical characteristics and associating him with Pathé Frères, this commentator clearly indicates that Linder’s employer had been able to conduct a publicity campaign for him at the furthest extent of their publicity network during the closing months of 1909. In the UK, the items held in the Robert Wood Collection of Music Hall, Cinema and Circus Posters also indicate the temporal priority of Linder. Running to nearly 10,000 items and mostly made up of copies of final proofs of venue-commissioned posters and daybills for entertainments venues in Hartlepool, and the most complete surviving local record of entertainments in the UK, the Collection shows what roughly eight of the town’s venues were advertising week by week throughout the 1900s and 1910s. In this Collection, the first film-only performer to be named on any type of publicity was Max Linder. A poster for the Empress Theatre (formerly the Empress Theatre of Varieties) in Hartlepool, at this point a film-only venue, for the week beginning 28 March 1910, which announced the titles of the films to be shown in the week’s two programmes, stated that the 28–30 March 1910 programme would include Servants and Masters (Une bonne pour monsieur, un domestique pour madame, released in the UK on 9 February 1910), and under this title added: “Comic Play by MAX LINDER” (see Fig. 1.20). This is the earliest of the surviving copies of the Empress’s posters on which any of the films in which Linder played a lead role is mentioned, and the mention of his name under the film title indicates that it was felt by the venue’s staff to be as pertinent a detail as the film’s genre. Indeed, his name may have appeared in this venue-authored publicity even earlier, as there is a gap in the surviving copies from 3 January 1910 to 7 March 1910 inclusive. The Empress’s poster for the week beginning 2 May 1910 stated that Hubby cures his wife of flirting (Une ruse de mari, released in the UK on 9 April 1910) would be included in the programme for the 2–4 May segment of the week, and added that this was “The latest Comedy Play by the favourite comedian, MAX LINDER” (see Fig. 1.21). As this was publicity produced by a local printer according to the instructions of an exhibition venue in an independent market, the noun phrase “favourite comedian” is a reasonable indication that Linder was indeed known by name and treated as a production value by at least a small segment of the venue’s customers by this point. Likewise, a summary of films being shown by New Century Pictures at the Grand Assembly Rooms in Leamington Spa, printed in a local newspaper on 20 May 1910, included the remark that “Max Linder, a great favourite at this hall, is to the

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Fig. 1.20  Locally produced poster for Empress Theatre, Northgate, Hartlepool, 28 March 1910, RWC, DF.WOD.G1882.

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Fig. 1.21  Locally produced poster for Empress Theatre, Northgate, Hartlepool, 2 May 1910, RWC, DF.WOD.G1866.

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forefront again in a screamingly funny picture.”160 That is, he was being recognised by audiences at this venue for some time before this date, even if this represents the first time that the management informed audiences and the newspaper of his name. Although plotting the origins of the star system does not require one to determine the relative scale of the fame of certain performers, that Linder was popularly known by this point, outside his native country and outside the largest urban concentrations (Hartlepool and Leamington Spa had populations of 84,541 and 26,717 respectively, in contrast to their regional metropoles Sunderland and Birmingham, with populations of 151,162 and 525,960, respectively at the time of the 3 April 1911 Census of England & Wales (Table IV)),161 evidences that his employer had made him the subject of a concentrated publicity campaign by the end of the fourth month of 1910. While the next chapter will identify instances of stardom-building publicity in the US that predate those identified by deCordova, these do not predate December 1909. Pathé’s publicity campaign for Linder was therefore probably the first such campaign for a film-specific performer in the world. To the best of my knowledge the temporal priority in Europe of Pathé’s publicity campaign for Linder has gone unnoticed in academic film history. The vagueness of Abel’s remark that, “[i]n late summer 1909, under [Louis] Gasnier’s direction, Linder began appearing in a regular series of Pathé comedies, with his name soon included in each film’s advertisement” (Ciné, 237), with the ‘soon’ permitting much ambiguity, seems to have reflected a lack of evidence that also disinclined him from even suggesting that this campaign likely predated the first stardom-building publicity campaigns in the US. (Indeed, Abel cites only the 22 June 1909 issue of Comœdia as the source for this, and, as mentioned above, this article evidences awareness of Linder’s career among the staff of a theatrical paper rather than evidence that Pathé was including his name in the advertisement for each film.)162 Though Ginette Vincendeau describes several factors, including both biases and accidents, that mean that Linder “does […] not figure in the myth of the origins of stardom” (49), she does not present any particular reason why he should: while she calls him the first film star (three times), she has only Abel’s claim quoted above, plus his assertion that Linder was named in the synopsis for The Servant’s Good Joke (the French title of which she was unable to identify) in the 25 September 1909 issue of MPW to back this up (48; Abel, Ciné, 513n135), and, as indicated above, this was a mistake, as this synopsis did not name Linder. Pierre Lherminier’s chronology of events at Pathé includes an entry for October 1909 that runs thus: “Le départ d’André Deed pour l’Italie favorise la carrière de Max Linder, qui devient une vedette à part entière chez Pathé [The departure of André Deed for Italy favours the career of Max Linder, who becomes a star in his own right at Pathé]” (312); but this late dating of Linder’s achievement of star status is based on a mistake: Deed joined Itala in early January 1909 (see Gili, 296–9). A handful of such oversights have made the existing history of the grand picture sketched above rather opaque, but this opacity is also, of course, partly the result of what Vincendeau calls “the American bias of film historiography” (49). Such bias is at least partly responsible for Rachael Low’s remark in the volume of her History of British Film covering the 1906–14 period, published in 1950, that the UK owed its

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star system to America: “[i]t is an indication of the state of the British film that when the star system eventually appeared it was in connection with American actresses, and that even when British producers began to cultivate this type of publicity American stars remained both more numerous and individually more important” (126). Historical accident has also played a part: though issues of the Francophone trade paper Phono-Ciné-Gazette from its first four years (1905–8) all survive, very few issues from its last year, 1909, have survived; the other main Francophone film trade paper Ciné-Journal made no mention of Pathé Frères’s releases until mid-May 1910 (see Fig. 1.2), and so was silent on Pathé’s output during exactly the period in late 1909 when they launched this campaign for Linder; very few issues of the third Francophone film trade paper, Kinéma, have survived from the second half of 1909. Likewise, though copies of many of Pathé’s monthly catalogues up to the end of 1907 survive, very few survive from 1908, 1909 and 1910. Max Linder was not, of course, alone for long in being the subject of a stardombuilding publicity campaign: by the end of 1909 Pathé had also begun to add other names to their star population. Where the norm so far had been that performers would be named in their publicity if they had either some existing fame or an affiliation that lent cultural capital to the film, from October 1909 names begin to appear, on Pathé’s posters and in their trade synopses, of people with no widespread celebrity and, importantly, without any statement of a stage affiliation; the posters reproduced above included the names of scenarists and performers other than Linder from early November 1909 (see e.g. Figs. 1.4 and 1.7). This suggests that when the executives at Pathé realised that they possessed an asset in Linder in spite of the industry’s hitherto systemic anonymity, they also realised that they might possess equivalent assets in a select few of their other long-term employees, although this publicity remains outweighed by publicity that named stage performers and literary figures until the end of 1909.163 That Pathé, at least, was now viewing performers as production values is evidenced by a minor but significant detail in Linder’s films from late 1909: beginning with Vengeance du bottier, the company stopped placing their chanticleer logo on sets. It is also appropriate to expect Pathé’s reversal of business policy during the last four months of 1909 to be influential, given that it occurred at the hands of an industry leader. Accordingly, in late September/early October 1909 Pathé’s rival, Éclair, included Pierre Bressol’s name in trade advertisements for Remords (Remorse, issued in France around 27 September 1909), suggesting their willingness to use it in publicity.164 And as Bioscope indicated in November 1909 when it referred to Linder as “most decidedly a high prince amongst the humorists of the bioscope”,165 as this population expanded, it was automatically sorted hierarchically, with all as ‘royalty’ but the earlier star at the top.

Notes 1. Both factors have led to a tendency in film history to regard European countries as lacking star systems, at least during the 1910s. For example, Charles Musser argued



in 1997 that “le star-system français n’eut pas la vigeur flagrante de son homologue

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américain [the French star system did not have the blatant force of its American counterpart]” and refers elsewhere to the “absence de star-system” in France (‘L’industrie’, 77, emphases in original). Geoffrey MacNab’s account of the emergence of the star system in the UK describes it as at least partially a result of the influence of the earlier emergence of a star system in the US (10–12). 2. These 45 posters are held by the CF, the Cinémathèque de Toulouse and the Cinémathèque de Corse. In addition to these 45 films for which posters survive, Mimi Pinson, for which a poster survives, is also dated to 1909 by the CF, and would seem to propose a problem with this picture, as the poster both gives the names of the performers and has no distinguishing Art/S.C.A.G.L. brand, but a fragment of S.C.A.G.L.’s own production records indicate that this dating is an error: Mimi Pinson was only being produced in mid-January 1911 (Cahier de le S.C.A.G.L. 1910–11, Documents divers concernant la société Pathé, Collection Jaune, CF, CJ1676–B216). 3. For example, Éclipse-Urban-Radios’s trade advertising in early May 1909 stated that Le Troubadour featured Jeanne Marié de l’Isle and other performers from the Théâtre National de l’Odéon, and that On ne trompe jamais un père! featured Moricey, of the Théâtre des Variétiés (Advertisement for Éclipse-Urban-Radios, Kinéma B.11 (3–9 May 1909), 8). 4. Programme for the Cirque d’Hiver, Paris, 30 April 1909, FJS-P, PRO-P-130. Capellani and Sergy were named on Pathé’s poster for the film, which also gave the S.C.A.G.L. brand (La Peau de chagrin, poster by Candido de Faria, FJS-P, AFF-P-373). 5. Figures taken from K&LW’s ‘Latest Productions’ page. All films listed in the May 1905 issues are included, even though some may not have been available until several days after K&LW listed them. 6. Abel gives a date of July 1906, but this agency was issuing a trade bulletin no later than May 1905. See Pathé Cinematograph Co. Supplement for May 1905. FJS-P, catalogues. The front cover gave the address of the agency as 14, 16 & 18 Lamb’s Conduit Street. 7. In 1926 Charles Pathé proudly recalled this and other aspects of the highly industrial structure of his company in the pre-war period in ‘Souvenirs’, 76–82. 8. See LeForestier, Aux sources 99, and Pathé, ‘De Pathé Frères’, 176 & 187. Pathé’s decision was reported in the US in Anon., ‘What Does it Mean?’, MPW 1.34 (26 October 1907), 1. 9. Charles Pathé’s intention to shortly adopt this system of releasing films as twice-weekly programmes rather than individually was announced in early June 1909 (Anon., ‘Importante declaration de M. Pathe’, Kinéma B.16 (7–13 June 1909), 4). 10. Quoted in Anon., ‘Le Splendide Isolement de Pathé fréres’, Ciné-Journal 15 (26 November 1908), 1–2, 2. 11. See for example Anon., ‘Market Movements’, Bioscope 136 (20 May 1909), 9. 12. See Anon., ‘The Beginning of the End’, Bioscope 128 (25 March 1909), 3–4, Anon., ‘More Concessions by the Trust: The Agenda Paper for Friday’s Meeting’, Bioscope 131 (15 April 1909), 5, and Anon., ‘More Convention’, Bioscope 134 (6 May 1909), 3. See also Burrows, ‘When Britain’ 1–19. 13. Anon., ‘Earmarks of Makers’, NYDM 60.1560 (14 November 1908), 10.

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14. Unfortunately, Lherminier makes the mistake of claiming that this occurred because in October 1909 Andé Deed left Pathé for the Italian company Itala (“Octobre [1909] – Le départ d’André Deed pour l’Italie favorise la carrière de Max Linder, qui devient une vedette à part entière chez Pathé”); Deed actually left Pathé in late 1908. 15. Cahiers 27/1, Fonds Henri Langlois, CF, LANGLOIS28-B2, n.p. 16. Maud Linder wrote that “c’est Max Linder qui fut la première vedette internationale du cinéma [it was Max Linder who was the first international star of cinema]” (179). 17. They remark that Linder is “often considered to be the cinema’s first worldwide star” (13). 18. The claim that Linder achieved exceptionally international fame is common even among those who do not go so far as to claim that he was the first to do so: Frieda Grafe calls Linder “one of the first stars celebrated from Russia to America” (77), while Robert Sklar opines that Linder “became an international star” when, at an unspecified date, he began directing his own films (61). 19. Vincendeau cites Abel’s remark about “Linder […] appearing in a regular series of Pathé comedies with his name soon included in each film’s advertisement” (237) cited above. 20. The article referred to “Le petit jeune homme (joué par Max Lender [sic])” (Anon., ‘Paris Théatres’, Comœdia 727 (26 September 1909), 4). 21. Anon., ‘The Very Latest’, Bioscope 151 (2 September 1909), 19–25, 19. 22. The synopsis, frame enlargement and caption all correspond to the copy of the film in BFINA. Linder’s priority is also indicated by the fact that even though this writer also summarised two Vitagraph dramas (The Call of the Heart (released in the UK on 7 July 1910) and The Power of the Press (released in the UK on 9 April 1910)), ‘Max Linder’ was the only real person’s name given in the entire article: Vitagraph had issued no publicity for performers in the UK when these films were released. 23. For example, the Pathé films announced in the 6 September 1909 issue of Kinéma (the latest of the surviving copies) had been listed, under English titles, in the 12 August 1909 issue of K&LW (Anon., ‘Les nouveaux films’, Kinéma 29 (6 September 1909), 9; Anon., ‘Latest Productions’, K&LW 5.118 (12 August 1909), 690), a time lag of 17 working days. 24. Anon., ‘New Films and Their Makers’, K&LW 5.121 (2 September 1909), 829–33. 25. These advertisements had only started to include the titles of films in early November 1909. 26. Publicity stills for Un mariage Américain and À qui mon cœur?, FJS-P, PHO-P-1126, PHO-P-1195. 27. For Abel, Pathé decided to do this because “Linder’s fame had reached such [i.e. sufficient] proportions” (Ciné, 240). 28. Anon., ‘Théâtres & Concerts’, Le Journal 6237 (24 October 1909), 6. 29. Programme for the Cirque d’Hiver, Paris, 22–8 October 1909. Département des Documents éphémères, Bibliothèque historique de la Ville de Paris (thanks to Séverine Montigny for photographs of their Cirque d’Hiver programmes). Anon., ‘Music-Halls/Cafés-Concerts/ Cabarets Artistiques et Cirques’, Comœdia 758 (Wednesday 27 October 1909), 4. 30. Anon., ‘New Films and Their Makers’, K&LW 5.124 (23 September 1909), 989–97,



993. Anon., ‘The Very Latest’, Bioscope 154 (23 September 1909), 29–33, 33.

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31. Anon., ‘Théâtres & Concerts’, Le Journal 6251 (7 November 1909), 6. 32. Anon., ‘Music-Halls/Cafés-Concerts/Cabarets Artistiques et Cirques’, Comœdia 769 (Sunday 7 November 1909), 4. 33. Anon., ‘The Very Latest’, Bioscope 156 (7 October 1909), 92–7, 97. 34. Bousquet, Catalogue … 1907, 1908, 1909, 218. 35. Anon., ‘The Very Latest’, Bioscope 158 (21 October 1909), 37–43, 41. 36. ‘Petite rosse – Camille de Morlhon – 1909’, Fondation Jérôme Seydoux-Pathé, 15 October 2008, accessed 14 April 2015 . Abel remarks, mistakenly, that the film was mentioned in Comœdia on 7 November 1909 (Ciné, 451): this issue of Comœdia actually referred to Linder’s name appearing in the Omnia Pathé’s publicity for Un mariage Américain. 37. Anon., ‘The Very Latest’, Bioscope 160 (4 November 1909) 37–45, 41. 38. Bousquet, Catalogue … 1907, 1908, 1909, 229. 39. Anon., ‘Music-Halls/Cafés-Concerts/Cabarets Artistiques et Cirques’, Comœdia 804 (12 December 1909), 4. 40. Anon., ‘The Very Latest’, Bioscope 161 (11 November 1909), 37–45, 45. 41. Advertisement for Pathé Frères, London, Bioscope 161 (11 November 1909), 13. 42. Advertisement for Pathé Frères, London, K&LW 6.131 (11 November 1909), 15. 43. Bousquet, Catalogue … 1907, 1908, 1909, 233. 44. See Anon., ‘Le voleur mondain’, Notre Cinéma, 2018, accessed 20 April 2018 . 45. Anon., ‘The Very Latest’, Bioscope 163 (25 November 1909), 41–9, 47. 46. Bousquet, Catalogue … 1907, 1908, 1909, 225. 47. Anon., ‘Music-Halls/Cafés-Concerts/Cabarets Artistiques et Cirques’, Comœdia 814 (Wednesday 22 December 1909), 4. 48. Anon., ‘The Very Latest’, Bioscope 163 (25 November 1909), 41–9, 47. 49. Anon., ‘Théâtres & Concerts’, Le Journal 6306 (1 January 1910), 6. 50. Ibid. 51. Anon., ‘The Very Latest’, Bioscope 164 (2 December 1909), 41–50, 49. 52. Advertisement for Pathé Frères, London, Bioscope 164 (2 December 1909), 12–13, 13. 53. Advertisement for Pathé Frères, K&LW 6.134 (2 December 1909), 193; emphasis in original. 54. Anon., ‘New Films and Their Makers’, K&LW 6.136 (16 December 1909), 333–40, 333. 55. Anon., ‘Théâtres & Concerts’, Le Journal 6335 (30 January 1910), 5. 56. Ibid. 57. Anon., ‘Music-Halls/Cafés-Concerts/Cabarets Artistiques et Cirques’, Comœdia 861 (7 February 1910), 4. 58. Anon., ‘The Very Latest’, Bioscope 165 (9 December 1909), 37–48, 39. 59. Anon., ‘New Films and Their Makers’, K&LW 6.136 (16 December 1909), 333–40, 333. 60. Advertisement for Pathé Frères, London, Bioscope 165 (9 December 1909), 12–13, 13. 61. Advertisement for Pathé Frères, London, K&LW 6.135 (9 December 1909), 261. 62. Anon., ‘New Films and Their Makers’, K&LW 6.136 (16 December 1909), 333–40, 333. 63. Programme for the Cirque d’Hiver, 7–13 January 1910, FJS-P, PRO-P-131.

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64. Anon., ‘The Very Latest’, Bioscope 166 (16 December 1909), 47–58, 58. 65. Advertisement for Pathé Frères, London, Bioscope 166 (16 December 1909), 12–13, 13. 66. Advertisement for Pathé Frères, London, K&LW 6.136 (16 December 1909), 319. 67. Anon., ‘Théâtres & Concerts’, Le Journal 5349 (13 February 1910), 7. 68. Anon., ‘Music-Halls/Cafés-Concerts/Cabarets Artistiques et Cirques’, Comœdia 869 (Tuesday 15 February 1910), 4. Anon., ‘Théâtres & Concerts’, Le Journal 5349 (13 February 1910), 7. 69. Anon., ‘The Very Latest’, Bioscope 170 (13 January 1910), 45–57, 54. 70. Bousquet, Catalogue … 1910–1911, n.p. 71. Anon., ‘Latest Films’, Bioscope 172 (27 January 1910), 45–54, 53–4. 72. Anon., ‘Théâtres & Concerts’, Le Journal 6377 (13 March 1910), 3. 73. Anon., ‘Music-Halls/Cafés-Concerts/Cabarets Artistiques et Cirques’, Comœdia 897 (Tuesday 15 March 1910), 4. Anon., ‘Théâtres & Concerts’, Le Journal 6377 (13 March 1910), 3. 74. Anon., ‘Latest Films’, Bioscope 173 (3 February 1910), 43–54, 53. 75. Anon., ‘Théâtres & Concerts’, Le Journal 6384 (20 March 1910), 6. 76. Anon., ‘Music-Halls/Cafés-Concerts/Cabarets Artistiques et Cirques’, Comœdia 906 (Thursday 24 March 1910), 4. 77. Anon., ‘New Films and Their Makers’, K&LW 6.144 (10 February 1910), 781–93, 783. 78. Bousquet, Catalogue … 1910–1911, n.p. 79. Anon., ‘Latest Films’, Bioscope 176 (24 February 1910), 47–56, 47. 80. Anon., ‘Théâtres & Concerts’, Le Journal 6405 (10 April 1910), 6. 81. Anon., ‘Music-Halls/Cafés-Concerts/Cabarets Artistiques et Cirques’, Comœdia 923 (Sunday 10 April 1910), 4. Anon., ‘Théâtres & Concerts’, Le Journal 6405 (10 April 1910), 6. 82. Bousquet, Catalogue … 1910–1911, n.p. 83. Anon., ‘Music-Halls/Cafés-Concerts/Cabarets Artistiques et Cirques’, Comœdia 929 (Saturday 16 April 1910), 4. 84. Anon., ‘Théâtres & Concerts’, Le Journal 6419 (24 April 1910), 6. 85. Anon., ‘Music-Halls/Cafés-Concerts/Cabarets Artistiques et Cirques’, Comœdia 936 (Saturday 23 April 1910), 4. Anon., ‘Théâtres & Concerts’, Le Journal 6419 (24 April 1910), 6. 86. Anon., ‘Latest Films’, Bioscope 179 (17 March 1910), 47–58, 56–7. 87. Anon., ‘Théâtres & Concerts’, Le Journal 6426 (1 May 1910), 7. 88. Ibid. 89. Anon., ‘Théâtres & Concerts’, Le Journal 6433 (8 May 1910), 6. 90. Ibid. 91. Bousquet, Catalogue … 1910–1911, n.p. 92. Anon., ‘Latest Films’, Bioscope 182 (7 April 1910), 29–40, 32. 93. Anon., ‘New Films and Their Makers’, K&LW 6.152 (7 April 1910), 1233–45, 1239. 94. Anon., ‘Nouveautés Cinématographiques’, Ciné-Journal 90 (14 May 1910), 23–4, 24. 95. Anon., ‘Music-Halls/Cafés-Concerts/Cabarets Artistiques et Cirques’, Comœdia 964 (21 May 1910), 4. 96. Ibid.



97. Advertisement for Pathé Frères, Ciné-Journal 90 (14 May 1910), 17.

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98. Anon., ‘Latest Films’, Bioscope 183 (14 April 1910), 25–39, 29. 99. Anon., ‘New Films and Their Makers’, K&LW 6.153 (14 April 1910), 1293–1303, 1295. 100. Advertisement for Pathé Frères, London, Bioscope 183 (14 April 1910), 50. 101. Anon., ‘Nouveautés Cinématographiques’, Ciné-Journal 91 (21 May 1910), 23–4, 24. 102. Anon., ‘Films of the Week’, Bioscope 184 (21 April 1910), 25–39, 27. 103. Anon., ‘New Films and Their Makers’, K&LW 6.154 (21 April 1910), 1359–69, 1359–61. 104. Anon., ‘Nouveautés Cinématographiques’, Ciné-Journal 92 (28 May 1910), 27–8, 28. 105. Anon., ‘Films of the Week’, Bioscope 185 (28 April 1910), 25–41, 25. 106. Anon., ‘New Films and Their Makers’, K&LW 6.155 (28 April 1910), 1415–25, 1419. 107. Anon., ‘Nouveautés Cinématographiques’, Ciné-Journal 94 (11 June 1910), 25–6, 26. 108. Anon., ‘Nouveautés Cinématographiques’, Ciné-Journal 95 (18 June 1910), 29–30, 30. 109. Anon., ‘Films of the Week’, Bioscope 188 (19 May 1910), 21–33, 21. 110. Anon., ‘New Films and Their Makers’ K&LW 7.158 (19 May 1910), 109–19, 119. 111. Anon., ‘Nouveautés Cinématographiques’, Ciné-Journal 96 (25 June 1910), 25–6, 26. 112. Anon., ‘Films of the Week’, Bioscope 189 (26 May 1910), 29–41, 29. 113. Anon., ‘Nouveautés Cinématographiques’, Ciné-Journal 97 (2 July 1910), 25–6, 26. 114. Bousquet, Catalogue … 1910–1911, n.p. 115. Anon., ‘Music-Halls/Cafés-Concerts/Cabarets Artistiques et Cirques’, Comœdia 1013 (9 July 1910), 4. 116. Anon., ‘Films of the Week’, Bioscope 190 (2 June 1910), 25–41, 27. 117. Anon., ‘New Films and Their Makers’, K&LW 7.160 (2 June 1910), 239–51, 241. 118. Anon., ‘Nouveautés Cinématographiques’, Ciné-Journal 98 (9 July 1910), 25–6, 26. 119. Anon., ‘Music-Halls/Cafés-Concerts/Cabarets Artistiques et Cirques’, Comœdia 1020 (16 July 1910), 3. 120. Ibid. 121. Anon., ‘Films of the Week’, Bioscope 191 (9 June 1910), 33–47, 37. 122. Catalogued as One on Max, BFINA 38014. 123. ‘Dash’, ‘Before and After’, Variety 17.11 (19 February 1910), 15. 124. A very small (49-metre) fragment of this film survives in the EYE Film Institute in Copenhagen (ID: FLM4793); the EYE staff inform me that it does not include opening title footage. Thanks to Frank Kessler and Elif Rongen for their help. 125. One might ask why, if s/he had been informed of his name by title or intertitle footage, the Variety copywriter did not include it in the review, but this writer was probably aware of the unspoken agreement among the MPPC-licensed companies not to publicise the names of film-only performers, and also, being in the profession of assessing the quality of content for potential exhibitors, probably saw it as unimportant. 126. Catalogued as Timidite vainco, BFINA 22196. 127. Anon., ‘Latest Films’, Bioscope 183 (14 April 1910), 25–39, 29. 128. Linder’s first work at the Ambigu was mentioned in Anon., ‘Courrier des spectacles’, Le Gaulois 3.9920 (20 December 1904), 3. 129. Maud Linder’s biography states that he adopted the pseudonym ‘Max Linder’ at the age of 20 (i.e. based on his 16 December 1883 date of birth, roughly between December 1903 and December 1904) (21). Linder moved from his native Bordeaux to Paris

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in the autumn of 1904 and applied to the Conservatoire National de Musique et de Déclamation, using his real name (he was refused; see Spa, 5), but when he applied again in the autumn of 1905 he used the name Max Linder (see Jeanne, 166). 130. For example, Pathé gave his last name in the synopsis for Le domestique hypnotiseur in their July 1907 catalogue supplement (Bousquet, Catalogue … 1907, 1908, 1909, 31), and he was named in a July 1908 issue of the French film trade paper Phone-CinéGazette in a description of his entry to a competition at Pathé’s annual staff show at the Cirque d’Hiver on 4 July 1908 (Mair, 660–1). Linder’s entertainment involved first showing a film in which a man in a hurry to get to the Cirque d’Hiver angers many people by bumping into them in his haste and so accrues a mob of pursuers, and then, second, having the man himself enter the theatre in a state of dishevelment, still pursued by this mob. 131. The “[p]remière representation” of Le roi at the Variétés on 23 April 1909 was reported in Anon., ‘Les Grands Théâtres’, Comœdia 207 (24 April 1908), 6, and in Anon., ‘Courrier des théatres’, L’Action française 1.32 (21 April 1908), 4; both newspapers stated Linder’s name in the lengthy cast list. Linder’s understudying for Dearly was mentioned in the 1 July 1908 issue of Le culture physique (Dubois, 1185; thanks to Georg Renken for this reference) and mentioned again in the 2 February 1909 issue of Comœdia (Anon., ‘“Comœdia” à Bordeaux’, Comœdia 491 (2 February 1909), 5). Linder’s name also appears in the cast list attached to the dramatis personae in a 1908 published version of the script for Le roi (de Caillavet, de Flers & Arène, facing p.1). Dearly was also among the Paris stage stars utilised in the Film d’Art company’s earliest films, starring in L’empreinte ou la main rouge [The imprint or the red hand] (issued November 1908). 132. Though I have no evidence of the date of the film’s first showing in France (even in 1908 Ciné-Journal did not mention Pathé’s films), it was released in the US in early October 1908: it was listed (as The Fake Doctor) under Pathé’s latest films in the 10 October 1908 issue of MPW (Anon., ‘Stories of the Films’ & ‘Latest Films of All Makers’, MPW 15.3 (10 October 1908), 285–9, 287; 290) and reviewed in the NYDM on 17 October 1908 (Anon., ‘Reviews of New Films’, NYDM 60.1556 (17 October 1908), 11). Henri Bousquet’s dating of December 1908 (Catalogue … 1907, 1908, 1909, 140) therefore seems a little late. 133. Anon., ‘Les Grands Théâtres’, Comœdia 614 (5 June 1909), 6. 134. This new contract was later reported in Anon., ‘The Popular Max Linder’, NYDM 64.1649 (30 July 1910), 26. 135. For example, a synopsis for Aimé par sa bonne (under the title Loved by his Servant) was printed in the 29 July 1909 issue of Bioscope, which, based on the rough 6–9-day notice mentioned above, makes for a rough UK issue date for Aimé par sa bonne of 4–7 August 1909 (Anon., ‘The Very Latest’, Bioscope 146 (29 July 1909), 19–29, 26). This matches the date given for Aimé par sa bonne (under the title of Vom Dienstmädchen geliebt) in the Kinematoscope Zeitung below. 136. Aimé par sa bonne was one of the new films listed in the 16 August 1909 issue of Kinéma (Anon., ‘Les nouveaux films’, Kinéma 26 (Monday 16 August 1909), 9). It featured on the programme at Pathé’s Rouen cinema, the Cirque de Rouen, for 31 August to 5 September 1909 (Anon., ‘Courrier des Théâtres’, Le Travailleur Normand 971



(29 August 1909), 2–3, 3).

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137. For example, the two writers who produced the synopses of Aimé par sa bonne (titled Loved by His Servant in the UK) for K&LW and Bioscope did not state Linder’s name (Anon., ‘New Films and their Makers’, K&LW 5.116 (29 July 1909), 587–90; Anon., ‘The Very Latest’, Bioscope 146 (29 July 1909), 19–29, 26). 138. Therefore, although some elements of this story (with a few errors, including dating) appear in Maud Linder’s biography of her father, it is not possible to support her claim that Linder returned to Pathé after a hiatus (caused, in her account, by an injury) to find that his employer was sorely missing the absence of a key asset, meaning that “[d]ans le nouveau contrat qu’il signait avec son producteur, c’est lui qui imposait ses desiderate [in the new contract that he signed with his employer, it was he who imposed the wishes]” (180). 139. Advertisement, Kinematoscope Zeitung, 7 August 1909, n.p. The German trade paper Der Deutsche Lichtspieltheater-Besitzer [The German Cinema Owner] of 19 August 1909 included a near-verbatim account of the film: “Diese Szene wird von einem sehr beliebten Schauspieler, welcher uns schon von den Bildern: “Meine Hose ist geplatzt, August geht zum Ball” u.a.m. her bekannt ist, gespielt. [This scene is played by a very popular actor, known to us from “My Trousers are Split”, “August Goes to the Ball”, etc.].” It is therefore possible that both pieces of copy were taken from an earlier publication, meaning that they either evidence recognition by an earlier writer or a choice by Pathé to seek to foster anonymous recognition of Linder in their publicity. Thanks to Georg Renken for both references. 140. Anon., ‘Licensed Film Reviews’, NYDM (9 October 1909), 16–17, 16. 141. Anon., ‘Stories of the Films’, MPW 5.13 (25 September 1909), 421–9, 425. Abel mistakenly reports that this synopsis included Linder’s name (Ciné, 513n135). 142. Anon., ‘Comments on the Week’s Films’, MPW 5.15 (9 October 1909), 489–94, 491. 143. Though there is some uncertainty among Linder’s filmographers about whether Linder performed in La barbe de Théodore, a still from the film preserved by the CF almost certainly shows Linder in the role of Théodore: though the man is turning away from the camera, he has Linder’s hairstyle and body shape (La barbe de Théodore, photogrammes, CF, PO0040233). 144. This evidence reportedly came in the form of a marriage proposal: in June 1908 Comœdia reported that Linder had received a proposal from a rich young Hungarian woman, accompanied by a ring (Anon., ‘Échos’, Comœdia 252 (8 June 1908), 1; Anon., ‘Échos’, Comœdia 253 (9 June 1908), 1). These articles did not indicate whether the writer knew Linder’s name; she presumably sent it to him anonymously via Pathé Frères. 145. Anon., ‘The Very Latest’, Bioscope 156 (7 October 1909), 92–7, 97. 146. Indeed, a latent claim in deCordova’s argument is that if the French pantomimist Pilar Morin, who performed in six films for the Edison Company from c.September 1909 to c.September 1910 (see page 33) had stayed with the company permanently, she would have been the first film star in North America (PP, 43–4). This seems to have been quite possible; as Pilar Morin later described it, these films provided her with an opportunity to practice a form of acting that she called ‘silent drama’, which she

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had recently adopted before working for Edison because of damage to her voice that ended her career in opera: “[p]eople at first thought it was beneath the dignity of opera stars and stage actors to appear on the screen. But did it belittle [Enrico] Caruso to have his voice recorded on phonograph records? No. Well, I felt the same way about working in the movies. I felt it was a glorious opportunity to exhibit my ideas about silent drama” (Qtd. West, 6). That is, an overlap in craft type between pantomime and film performance permitted a stint of films that, though temporary, was closer to a career move than was the norm at the time for those stage performers agreeing to, in some capacity, be filmed. Another performer whose existing renown seems to have been nearly sufficient to make him a cross-over star was William Humphreys: at the end of May 1909 Vitagraph included his name in their trade advertisements for Napoleon because Humphreys had played Napoleon on Broadway in More than Queen, a play about the Empress Josephine starring the distinguished actress Julia Arthur (Anon., ‘“Napoleon” Made in America’, K&LW 5.107 (27 May 1909), 123). Humphreys joined the Vitagraph stock company permanently before the end of the year, but Vitagraph do not seem to have perceived him to have sufficient fame to justify a publicity campaign. 147. See for example the entry for Miquette et sa mère at the Variétés in Anon., ‘Les Grands Théâtres’, Comœdia 11 (11 October 1907), 4. 148. Anon., ‘Les Grands Théâtres’, Comœdia 95 (3 January 1908), 6. 149. Anon., ‘Music-Halls/Cafés-Concerts/Cabarets Artistiques et Cirques’, Comœdia 631 (Tuesday 22 June 1909), 5. 150. See for example E. Rouzier-Dorcières, 2. This article also featured the names of 13 other actors. 151. Even before these fencing competitions, his name was known to the Comœdia staff through Pathé’s casual openness to the entertainments trade. In March 1908 a Comœdia contributor summarised the films on show at a Pathé cinema: “Assisté à une représentations de l’Omnia, à Amiens, ancienne salle de l’Alcazar-Olympia. La salle était comble, succès considérable pour le programme, on peut dire pour les artistes, car il ne faudrait pourtant pas oublier que les scenes représentées sont jouées par de véritables artistes! Nous citerons, parmi eux, Max Lender, qui se taille sur l’écran un joli succès et se créerait une papularité mondiale, si son nom figurait sur les programmes. Cela viendra. [Attended a show by the Omnia [i.e. a cinema in the Pathé chain], at Amiens in the old room of the Alcazar-Olympia. The room was packed, considerable success for the programme and, one can say, for the artistes too because it should not be forgotten that the scenes shown are played by real artistes! We will cite, among them, Max Lender [sic], who cut a great success on the screen and would create, for himself, a global popularity if his name featured on the programmes. That will come.]” (Anon., ‘Cinématographe’, Comœdia 2.156 (4 March 1908), 4.) Thanks to Georg Renken for this reference. This casual openness to the trade is also the most likely explanation of several appearances of Linder’s name, also unearthed by Renken, in local newspaper advertising for the Cinematographo Pathe in Rio de Janeiro, one of Pathé’s own cinemas, that began in June 1908, over a year before Pathé commenced



a publicity campaign for him in Europe (Georg Renken, ‘Chronik’, Max Linder

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Filmographie, April 2014, accessed 20 April 2014 ). This ‘bottom-up’ publicity, where venue staff derived names from the trade press and voluntarily placed them in local newspaper advertising, was severely limited in its range compared to publicity campaigns operated by employers. 152. The article in the 1 July 1908 edition of Culture physique, for example, concerned the fencing championships which Linder had had a hand in organising, and included a photograph of Linder in fencing gear (Dubois, 1184). 153. Advertisement for The King’s Picture Gardens (Perth), The West Australian 7393 (6 December 1909), 1. 154. Advertisement for the Imperial Hall, Walsall Advertiser 2680 (23 October 1909), 1. 155. Advertisement for the Imperial Hall, Walsall Advertiser 2688 (18 December 1909), 1. 156. Advertisement for the Imperial Hall, Walsall Advertiser 2689 (25 December 1909), 1. 157. Anon., Advertisement for the King’s Picture Gardens, The West Australian 25.7393 (6 December 1909), 1. This is the earliest appearance of Max’s name in Australian newspapers of which I am aware. 158. Anon, ‘West’s Pictures’, Sydney Morning Herald 22,431 (6 December 1909), 3. 159. Anon., ‘The Busker’, Sunday Times (Perth) 630 (30 January 1910), section 3, p. 1. Thanks to Georg Renken for this reference. 160. Anon., ‘Local News’, Leamington Spa Courier and Warwickshire Standard 83.20 (20 May 1910), 4. 161. The population for Hartlepool here includes the recent expansion to the town known at the time as West Hartlepool. 162. See Anon., ‘Music-Halls/Cafés-Concerts/Cabarets Artistiques et Cirques’, Comœdia 631 (Tuesday 22 June 1909), 5. 163. For example, while trade synopses regularly named hitherto unknown performers in S.C.A.G.L. films (see Anon., ‘The Very Latest’, Bioscope 157 (14 October 1909), 35–47, which named “Madame [Gabrielle] Lange” as the titular protagonist of How the Cook Got Married (Le mariage de la cuisinière), Anon., ‘The Very Latest’, Bioscope 164 (2 December 1909), 41–50, 49, in which “M. Prince, M. [Pierre] Achard and Mlle. [Jane] Eyrre” were named as the cast of None but the brave deserve the fair (Deux fiancés à l’épreuve), and Anon., ‘The Very Latest’, Bioscope 168 (30 December 1909), 37–52, 41, in which The Postmistress (La receveuse des postes) was described as “a dramatic comedy which gives fine opportunities to Mdlle. [Jeanne] Grumbach, who plays the title role, for the display of her emotional powers”), which implies that these names were being provided in marketing for the general public, the publicity production stills that have survived for all of these films name just the scenarists, all of whom (Gabriel Timmory and Jean Manoussi, Jean Sigaux, and Jeanne Grumbach and Edmond Duquesne respectively) already had a degree of existing fame as writers. See FJS-P, PHO-P-1146, PHOP-1211 and PHO-P-1249. 164. Advertisement for Éclair, Ciné-Journal 2.58 (27 September – 3 October 1909), back cover. Advertisement for Éclair, K&LW 5.126 (7 October 1909), 1079. 165. Anon., ‘The Very Latest’, Bioscope 163 (25 November 1909), 41–9, 47.

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2

North America

I will now turn to the particular circumstances that led to the earliest stardombuilding publicity campaign in North America, in part to show that it is both possible and likely that the emergence of film stardom in France was one of the major causes of the emergence of film stardom in North America. As with the previous chapter, the evidence base is relatively sparse; the relative dearth of performers’ names in such trade publications as MPW in late 1909 does not mean that the Edison Company, for example, were not producing extensive publicity campaigns directed at the general public. But after over a decade of searching (through an evidence base much larger than the evidence base available when deCordova was alive) I have found no surviving evidence to show that they were, and several instances of evidence to indicate that an older story – concerning Florence Lawrence – was partly accurate.

A Baby and Some Bathwater DeCordova disputed “the standard account” (PP, 6) of the emergence of the star system in the US that he regarded as dominating an assortment of “classic film histories” (PP, 5), some popular and some academic, published between 1919 and 1970. This tenacious story, surviving, in his view, through to the later works with only minor emendations, he summarised as an account of four ‘events’: 1 The public wanted to know the names of the performers. 2 The producers resisted revealing the performers’ names for two reasons. First, they did not want to pay higher salaries to performers, and second, the performers were in reality legitimate actors who would risk their reputation by appearing by name in films. 3 Carl Laemmle, in a move designed to gain an ascendancy over the Motion Picture Patents Company (aka the ‘Trust’), introduced the first star, Florence Lawrence. The star system thus emerged out of a struggle between ‘Trust’ members and Independents. 4 The Independents and the public finally won and the star system was born. (PP, 5-6)

Clearly, as deCordova remarked, “this series of events hardly stands as an adequate historical explanation” (PP, 6): ‘event’ 1 draws on unwarranted beliefs in a) the inherently democratic nature of the medium and b) the pre-social nature of desire; the idea of concealment (‘event’ 2) “is based largely on the assumption that it would have been natural for the names to be revealed much earlier” (PP, 7), an assumption that overlooks the repurposing of cinema in popular discourse in the years around (as he saw it) 1907; ‘event’ 3 ignores evidence of the similarity between the Independents and the MPPC companies; ‘event’ 4 disregards the financial and reputational benefits to film production companies, both MPPC and ‘Independent’, of a star system (PP, 6–9). The shakiness of this 4-event account warranted, for deCordova, a shift to a radically alternative model, which he provided in the form of a story in which population-wide discursive developments, rather than certain people or even alliances between companies, occasioned the emergence of the medium’s star system. I will show, however, that deCordova’s gesture of clearing away a long-standing orthodoxy for its reductive myth-substantiation has meant that pieces of evidence that might serve as clues to the short-term and immediate causes of the emergence of the star system in the US have, unfortunately, come to be classed as aspects of myth.1 For example, I will show that while the public may not have been clamouring for the names of the performers (‘event’ 1), production companies lacked evidence of the feasibility of a star system until they at least had some evidence that they could rely on cinemagoers’ ability to actually recognise performers from film to film; that is, while public demand for names was not the cause of the star system, accounts of recognition by members of the public were important factors in decisions to embark on stardom-building publicity. This does not mean restoring individuals or companies to positions of primacy; even in this chapter, which provides evidence to re-establish a distinction between the ‘Independents’ and the MPPC companies, capitalist principles and highly unpredictable events, as elsewhere in this book, share the position of ‘agent’ of the emergence of film stardom. Basic errors have of course undermined the scholarship with which deCordova engaged: in 1926, for example, Terry Ramsaye remarked that “[n]ames began to appear on the screen, as weapons in the trade war. Names became trade-marks, the only trade-marks that have ever had a value in the film industry” (‘The Motion Picture’, 13). The examples of industrial authorship presented in the Introduction demonstrate that this is false. Such errors and oversimplifications continue to impair accounts of the events of late 1909 and early 1910: even in the 2016 edition of his History of Narrative Film, David Cook repeats the standard account which deCordova sought to amend, including the erroneous claim that Carl Laemmle lured Florence Lawrence away from the Biograph Company (30). Nonetheless I will show that the basic idea of a trade war being instrumental in the establishment of the film star system has some merit, and I will also show that the common claim in these early histories that Florence Lawrence was the first film star in North America is also nonetheless accurate.2

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An Industry



The economic conditions of the film industry in North America around the end of the first decade of the twentieth century have been an object of much historiographical attention during the last 35 years.3 They are nonetheless worth sketching here, particularly given that, as I will show, nation-specific exceptions to wider norms in the film industry constituted one of the common factors in the emergence of film stardom in the two continents. During 1907, after years of suffering legal action over patent infringement at the hands of Thomas Edison and his film-making company the Edison Film Manufacturing Company, most of the US film production industry reconciled itself to the idea that a deal with Edison was a necessary precondition of operating unhindered. The current set of legal decisions established that all major relevant patents for technologies for filming, printing and projecting films were held by four companies (Edison, Biograph, Vitagraph and the machine manufacturing company Armat), so resistance was still possible (Biograph’s film camera did not infringe Edison’s patent, for example), but most companies nonetheless agreed to form an association with Edison at its head which would permit them to make films and film technology under licence to the patent holders. Established in December 1907 (and formally registered in January 1908), the Association of Edison Licensees/ United Film Service Protective Association (from 8 February 1908 the Film Service Association) (henceforth AEL/FSA) included Vitagraph, Lubin, Selig, the two younger companies Essanay and Kalem (both formed in 1907) and Pathé Frères. Of the major ‘native’ production companies only Biograph refused to join, forming its own association of licensees, including Armat, the Italian company Cines, Great Northern (the US representatives of the Danish company Nordisk), and two importers of European films: George Kleine’s Kleine Optical Company (an agent for over a dozen European companies) and Williams, Brown & Earle (agents for the UK companies Cricks & Martin, Hepworth, R.W. Paul and Graphic). A system of licences meant that hiring companies could only buy films from either the AEL/FSA or the Biograph licensees. At a meeting on 8 February 1908 the AEL/FSA persuaded most of the hiring companies in North America to take out licences with them. After eight months of competition between the two groups, Biograph and Edison finally agreed to join forces, and in September 1908 the seven main US production companies (Edison, Biograph, Vitagraph, Lubin, Selig, Essanay and Kalem), along with Pathé Frères and Kleine with his imports from Europe, incorporated a holding company, the Motion Picture Patents Company (MPPC). The MPPC was then activated on 18 December 1908 when the relevant patents holders assigned their patents to it. In the following days the MPPC was announced to the trade4 and began to issue licences to all involved in the US film industry, including the film stock manufacturer Eastman Kodak, its various member production companies and importers, the film technology manufacturers, the hiring companies and the exhibitors, licences that permitted them to continue operating (see Cassady 25–6). The hiring companies were the primary target of this action, so on 1 January 1909 the

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MPPC member companies convened a convention at the Imperial Hotel in New York City where they informed representatives of all of the major North American hiring companies of the nature of the licenses that were effectively the new conditions of staying in business (Drinkwater, 63).5 Accounts of the number of hiring companies to sign MPPC licences in the first few weeks of 1909 vary;6 the MPPC consistently listed between 67 and 70 hiring companies (with, between them, roughly 120 branches) in their trade advertisements in January–March 1909.7 The records of the court case that led to the MPPC’s eventual dissolution in early 1916 include the remark that in early 1909 the licensed hiring companies had 116 branches between them (qtd. Cassady, 45). This seems to represent the overwhelming majority of the hiring trade in the US. Accounts of the numbers of licensed exhibitors also vary, but figures of roughly 6,000 licensed venues and roughly 2,000 unlicensed venues in the US in early 1909 are common (see e.g. Cassady, 49; Bowser, Transformation, 32). The MPPC was a well-equipped attempt to oligopolise film production in the US. They prevented Eastman Kodak, the largest producer of film stock in the world, from selling film to any non-MPPC film-making business; anyone wishing to make cameras, make films or lease films to anyone else needed a licence from them, meaning that they effectively prevented anyone but their members from making and distributing films in the US; hiring companies renting their films could only deal in the films of the member companies, and could only hire them out to licensed exhibitors using licensed machines; licensed exhibitors could not use unlicensed films on licensed machines or vice versa. This was a major set of barriers to non-MPPC film production, hiring and exhibition in North America (Cassady 26–37). Another major aspect of the MPPC’s relocating of power into the hands of the production companies was that its licences required the production companies to hire, rather than sell, their films to the hiring companies. They did not, to be fair, instigate block-booking, leaving hiring companies to select their weekly supply, film by film, from the output of the nine companies, or use this oligopoly to raise prices above the contemporary norm. Almost immediately, some hiring companies, seeing their autonomy severely diminished and much of the profit-making potential in their products now reconditioned to send that profit elsewhere, attempted to circumvent the MPPC’s oligopolistic encampment. A handful refused to even sign licences with the MPPC, including the Chicago Film Exchange, the Globe Film Service and the Royal Film Service, and various independent hiring companies, together with non-MPPC film-making companies and film importers, formed the Independent Film Protective Association on 11 January 1909.8 In the ensuing months some major hiring companies cancelled their licences, including 20th-Century Optiscope in March 1909, or were informed of cancellation by the MPPC, including Swanson in the same month. The Laemmle Film Service (LFS), a Chicago-based hiring company with nine branches across the Mid-West, West and Canada by 1909, and seemingly the largest hiring company in the US at the time, went ‘Independent’ on 26 April 1909.9 By the end of May 1909 ten major hiring companies were members of the newly renamed Independent Film Renter’s Protective Association.10 An early August 1909 list of all of the hiring

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companies doing business in the US (a corresponding Canadian list was incomplete) gave the names of 61 licensed hiring companies with 84 branches between them and 80 independent hiring companies with 98 branches between them.11 As the MPPC could claim to control the patents pertaining to all inventions needed to make a film camera, initially the only feasible option for the film hiring companies, and by extension any cinema, hoping to function without an MPPC licence, was to use a supply of films made outside the jurisdiction of the MPPC’s patents – that is, in Europe – much as Biograph had the previous year. As some European production companies (Pathé, the French Gaumont company (as distinct from the now independent UK Gaumont) and Urban-Éclipse (an amalgam of a major UK company and a major French company)) were represented by the MPPC, the ‘Independents’ did not have the whole of the European film market to choose from, although Kleine, who had previously handled films by many more companies than Gaumont and Urban-Éclipse, had agreed with the MPPC to jettison most of these European customers when he joined, and Great Northern/Nordisk was also excluded from the MPPC. ‘Independent’ film supply therefore initially comprised films from Great Northern/Nordisk and from the Film Import & Trading Company, which had imported films independently of both the AEL/FSA and the Biograph licensees during 1908. In February 1909, with the aim of further tapping the European source of film supply, J.J. Murdock founded the International Projecting and Producing Company (IPPC) in Chicago; its first advertisements claimed that it exclusively handled the films of 27 European companies.12 Its films were supplied in part by the Paris-based exporter of European films Raleigh & Robert. In September 1909 the Film Import & Trading Company took over the IPPC’s role, in part by establishing its own agreement with Raleigh & Robert, who dealt in the films of 23 European companies at the time. They promised that by the beginning of November 1909 they would be able to make 19 reels (i.e. 19,000 feet) of imported films available per week.13 As the independent hiring companies were obliged to rely on European imports for the vast majority of the films that they provided to cinemas, their client cinemas ran the risk of alienating their audiences with films that did not correspond to their own cultural milieu; for example, on 26 August 1909, at a meeting of the Independent Film Renters’ Protective Association in Chicago, it was observed that “[t]he trade demanded American subjects and good American subjects and the organization would meet this demand”.14 The fact that ‘Independent’ hiring companies’ available supply of films from Europe did not include the two most prolific European companies (Pathé and Gaumont) also meant that it could not be relied on to consistently provide a full weekly programme. Consequently, some of the ‘Independent’ hiring companies embarked on the more long-term yet more security-conducive strategy of establishing their own production companies. A handful of small US film production companies were excluded from the MPPC; Centaur was the only one capable of issuing films nationally; by May 1909 it was issuing one c.1,000-foot film a week. 1909 saw hiring companies establish a new generation of film production companies: in early 1909 the Empire Film Exchange set up the New York Motion Picture Company (NYMPCo,

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a.k.a. Bison): it started releasing one c.1,000 feet a week on 21 May 1909.15 In May 1909 the MPPC’s publication the Film Index reported that there were 12 companies in the US attempting to make films without an MPPC license (though this number included small local companies who posed it no threat).16 In June 1909 the Laemmle Film Service set up Yankee Films, soon rebranded as Independent Motion Pictures (IMP);17 the company started releasing 1,000 feet a week in late October 1909. Phoenix, which had been releasing films intermittently since around late May 1909, was able to release c.1,000 feet per week by mid-September 1909. In c.March 1909 the Columbia Film Service set up Powers, which released its first film on 2 November 1909.18 The World Film Manufacturing Company, established in either late 1908 or early 1909 and releasing intermittently from February 1909, was releasing c.1,000 feet weekly by early June 1909. Nestor (Centaur rebooted) started releasing films on 6 January 1910. Thanhouser, established in late 1909, started releasing films on 15 March 1910. More ‘Independent’ film production companies were established during 1910.19 For Bowser, “[b]y autumn 1909, the beginnings of independent American film production were well in place” (Transformation, 76). In early December 1909 the ‘Independents’ collectively claimed that independent film production currently amounted to “six American[-]made reels weekly” (i.e. 6,000 feet per week).20 This number was, in reality, closer to 5,000 feet a week (in early December 1909 only Centaur, NYMPCo, IMP and Powers were consistently releasing c.1,000 feet weekly), leaving hiring companies in need of roughly 14 reels per week from European films, in contrast to the 15 reels of ‘native’ films and 7 reels of European films that the MPPC made available to licensed hiring companies per week in December 1909. Though ‘native’ non-MPPC film-making was therefore a young underdog in late 1909, the ‘Independent’ businesses had sufficient momentum even by September 1909 to motivate them to replace the Independent Film Renters’ Protective Association with a rudimentary equivalent of the MPPC, the National Independent Moving Picture Alliance (NIMPA). Founded in Chicago on 11 September 1909, NIMPA met for the first time on 18–19 September 1909.21 In mid-November 1909 its membership included 20 production companies and importers and 35 hiring companies with 57 branches between them.22 It established a rough equivalent of MPPC licensing by, for example, stipulating that members could only purchase films from production companies and importers that were approved by NIMPA’s executive committee. By the end of the summer of 1909, for Abel, independent suppliers of films were “holding their own in competition with the MPPC, particularly as more American productions became available” (Red Rooster, 94). At the beginning of October 1909, NIMPA promised to control at least 35% of the films available in the US at any one time.23 The emergence of this major schism across US film production, distribution and exhibition brought about three significant general conditions in cinemas in North America that are relevant to the emergence of a film star system. First, the existence of first the AEL/FSA and then the MPPC brought production companies into much closer contact with the end users of their products than had been the case hitherto. With the licensed hiring companies acting as agents of the MPPC member

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companies (licensed hiring companies even had to provide the MPPC details of their customers) and the newer ‘Independent’ film-making companies being set up by hiring companies, exhibition venues were effectively dealing directly with film-making companies. When they committed to hiring, rather than selling, their films to the hiring companies, the MPPC members also took a much greater responsibility for the market performance of their products than they had hitherto. Both of these conditions put US production companies into close contact with the exhibitors of their films. One aspect of this contact was that all of the US film-making companies, both MPPC and Independent, soon started routinely supplying exhibitors with posters specific to each film (for at least a select few of their films), normalising a hitherto haphazard practice:24 in July 1908 5-cent posters for specific films of the AEL/FSA companies, produced by an external company, were first advertised in the trade press.25 Selig started producing their own film-specific posters around the time of the formation of the MPPC,26 other MPPC companies followed suit during the second half of 1909,27 and the Independents followed suit as soon as was practically possible: NYMPCo and Centaur produced their first film-specific posters from late April 1909 (Centaur gave theirs away for free, simply sending them to hiring companies with the reels),28 in mid-November 1909 the World Company were also producing posters that they gave away for free,29 and in late November NIMPA formally advised its production/importing members “to adopt high-class posters for distribution to the exchanges and exhibitors”.30 MPW remarked on this still conspicuously new form of marketing in late November 1909.31 This new trade situation involved fewer layers of removal from the public than was the norm elsewhere in the industrialised world.32 Second, it prompted film production companies to start to employ film performers on at least a medium-term basis. It would have made no sense for an employer to publicise a performer who had not signed a medium-term or long-term contract; even semi-permanent personnel would usually have the prospect of a stage engagement during the next winter theatre season. Contracts of any kind for film performers seem to have been the extreme exception, even in 1908. At Edison, for example, even during late 1907 and early 1908, according to Charles Musser, performers were still being employed on a daily basis (Before, 391-2). But the captive market obtained by first the AEL/FSA during 1908 and then the MPPC from early 1909 gave the major ‘native’ film production companies a degree and security of income that made them uniquely able, among film production companies worldwide, to employ some performers on a long-term basis as a way of seeking a degree and consistency of product quality superior to that of their competitors. For example, in 1928 Gene Gauntier recalled that, in 1908,



[a]s an Independent, Biograph had been selling but ten or twelve copies of each picture. Now [i.e. in 1909] with a sure market and a director acclaimed as great [i.e. D.W. Griffith], their sales quickly surpassed all others. Before long it was not uncommon for them to sell a hundred copies of each production. […] Griffith soon gathered about him a stock company of distinction. With the tremendous

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sales he was able to pay enormous salaries, one hundred, one hundred and fifty dollars a week! (‘Blazing’ Part 2, 168)

Behind the hyperbole, Gauntier was recollecting the financial consequences of the MPPC acquiring a captive market. Gauntier’s dates are roughly applicable to the MPPC affiliates. Anthony Slide regards Florence Turner, who joined Vitagraph in the Spring of 1907, as “the first actress to be put under contract by a film company” (Big V, 37), although he does not specify whether Turner signed this contract immediately or spent some time working for Vitagraph casually first. In the 1920s Gauntier recalled that in November 1908 Frank Marion, Kalem executive and what we would now call the company’s executive producer, “offered me the position of leading woman at a salary of thirty dollars a week and expenses, adding the commission to write scenarios at twenty dollars each” (‘Blazing’, Part 2, 168). Musser reports that the Edison Company employed its first full-time actor, Justus Barnes, in late July 1908, and its second, Francis Sullivan, in late October 1908 (Before, 417). It therefore seems reasonable to treat 1908 as the first year in the US when the frequent reappearance of just a handful of performers in films from month to month or even week to week became feasible. Evidence of the emergence of opportunities for long-term employment as a film performer also comes in the form of the establishment of stock companies of performers by the major production companies. Although Slide claims that Vitagraph established the first stock company in 1905 (Big V, 149), his claim that the contract which Florence Turner signed with Vitagraph in 1907 or later (see above) was the first in the US industry indicates that this was initially a collection of habitual performers working on a per-day or per-film basis. Tony Tracy and Peter Flynn claim that it was the Kalem company, founded in February 1907, that gathered “the first motion picture stock company”. They did not gather it immediately though: Gene Gauntier described a norm in production activities at Kalem during the summer of 1907 of hiring performers on either a film-by-film basis or a daily basis (‘Blazing’ Part 2, 25). Even her own relatively long-term employment by Kalem as scenarist and performer during 1907 covered just the summer, after which she returned to stage work (‘Blazing’, Part 1, 186). 1908 seems to have been the year when the executives at Kalem established their first contracted population of performers: the caption for the group photograph of 11 Kalem employees filming around Jacksonville in Florida in c.December 1908 mentioned on page 27 overtly called the group a “stock company” and described how these employees of the New York company would be supplemented by local extras,33 indicating a choice to use a core of long-term performer staff rather than rely entirely on local casual labour. According to Gauntier, five of the people who went to Florida in late 1908 worked solely as performers (‘Blazing’, Part 2, 168–9). Gauntier’s discussion of the nature of working among this group implies as much: when she described the “charming spirit of helpfulness, of give-and-take, this freedom from jealousy and envy, the quick word of praise for especially good work” that was the norm when the group was working in Florida, she added that this continued during

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“all the subsequent Kalem stock companies, for of course the personnel changed from year to year” (‘Blazing’, Part 2, 169, emphasis added). That is, this was the first time she had been part of something that she recognised as a stock company of film performers, a core of performers required to work together over the course of a run of films and interacting on the basis that they would continue to do so for the current season of work (this stock company was reportedly disbanded around early April 1909 and another formed, seemingly around Gauntier, to take its place).34 Although not long-term arrangements, these stock companies were based on a handful of medium-term contracts. Events at Biograph, an older company, tally nearly precisely with those at Kalem: in a brief autobiography that Florence Lawrence wrote for Photoplay in late 1914, she recalled that [w]hen I commenced working at the Biograph studio there was no stock company. […] True, there were three or four regularly employed actors and actresses who were paid a weekly guarantee, as in my case, but it was not uncommon to make actors out of the property men, actresses out of the factory stenographers, and now and then to call in some passer-by, never caring or even inquiring as to his vocation, and turn him into a picture actor. […] Some four of five months after I joined the Biograph Company, a permanent stock company was organized, the first, I believe, ever maintained for motion picture acting exclusively. (‘Growing’, Part 3, 96)



As Lawrence had joined Biograph around late July/early August 1908,35 she was describing the company expanding a small and initially short-term stock company of performers, using long-term contracts and further specialisation of labour, in the last few months of 1908, at almost exactly the same time that Kalem constituted their first stock company. They seem to have been a general development during 1909, at least among the MPPC affiliates: in early September 1909 the trade press stated that the Essanay company had taken an eight-person stock company on a trip into the West of the US and Mexico to make films on location,36 and an article on the Edison Company in the trade press in early December 1909 stated that “something like a stock company [has been] organized to be permanently on hand for the many productions staged by the company [at their Bronx studio] in the course of the year”.37 Film production companies’ formation of stock companies of performers did not, however, directly engender publicity about these people. Although it facilitated the long-term appearance of certain people in films, the stock company actually militated against the prominence of a small number of employees that would render “general publicity” about any one of them worth the investment; only publicity for a person who was consistently playing lead roles, and would continue to do so for the foreseeable future, would, in the eyes of the employer, be worthwhile in the sense of having the potential to advertise future films. Those employers who were now beginning to maintain long-term workforces of more than a handful of performer employees (and note that Vitagraph’s April 1910 lobby display featured 36 stock

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company members (see page 32)) would only have reason to think that certain employees might be recognised from film to film if they applied to this workforce a star system as defined in its older, theatrical, sense: a system in which only one, or very few, people in the stock company were permitted to star in productions. And there is evidence of resistance to such a system. Discussing the work in Florida at the end of 1908, Gauntier later recalled that even though she was “leading woman” (Gauntier, ‘Blazing’, Part 2, 170) at this time, [w]e acknowledged no real star or leading people. First one and then another player would be given the outstanding rôle, and I, as scenario writer, saw to it that the turns of each came regularly. The leading people in one play were often given small rôles in the next while a strong star part would then fall to the character man or woman. (‘Blazing’, Part 2, 169)

Jane Gaines concurs that “[i]n 1909 […] no player hierarchy within the Kalem company is being promoted as yet. Gene Gauntier is not quite the “Kalem Girl” she would soon become” (‘Anonymity’, 449). Even though the stock company represented a specialisation of labour, steadily rendering the non-specialist employee who worked as developer, performer, set painter and props master a rarity (Gauntier, ‘Blazing’, Part 2, 169),38 the stock company counteracted the exclusivity of prominence in film roles that would lead to a star system. Gauntier, recalling the situation at Kalem in 1908, wrote that Frank Marion “was quite convinced that people would tire of seeing the same actors over and over, [and] that what they wanted were frequent changes” (‘Blazing’, Part 2, 26). Similarly, at Biograph, Bowser explains, “[i]n 19081909, Griffith’s actors were expected to play leads and bit parts interchangeably, as in a [theatrical] stock company”. She adds that “this was a general policy in other companies too” (Transformation, 109). During Florence Lawrence’s time at Biograph (as I will discuss below, she left in late June/early July 1909), although she had the most female lead roles of all their female performer employees, she also rotated these roles with Claire McDowell, Linda Arvidson, Mary Pickford, Anita Hendrie, Violet Mersereau, Stephanie Longfellow and Marion Leonard. Bowser goes on to point out that it was only after 1909 that, at Biograph, Griffith “began to depend more on a star system [i.e. defined in its theatrical sense] within the company, selecting the same actors, and especially actresses – Mary Pickford, Blanche Sweet, Mae Marsh, Lillian Gish – to play the leads in one picture after another” (Transformation, 109). Although Gunning places this date of specialisation earlier, claiming that “[d]uring 1908, Lawrence took the female lead in the majority of Biograph films, appearing much more frequently than Linda Arvidson or Marion Leonard, the other regular leading ladies at Biograph that year” (D.W. Griffith, 218),39 making for constant exposure that, combined with the closer shooting distance, meant that “Lawrence’s face soon became familiar to nickelodeon audiences” (D.W. Griffith, 218–19), this situation did not last for all of her time at Biograph: while during the 1908 portion of her stint at Biograph she did play a prominent role in 29 of the 50 films that Biograph produced (58%), this number shrank to just 31 out of

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80 films during the 1909 portion of her stint (just under 39%), making for a prominence rate across her entire stint of 46% (60 out of 130 films). Even in the 1908 portion of her stint she played non-prominent parts in 12 out of the 50 films (24%) and did not appear at all in 9 of them, and in the 1909 portion of her stint she played nonprominent parts in 22 of 80 films (27.5%) and did not appear in 27 of them (just under 34%). Across her whole stint at Biograph she played non-prominent roles in 34 of 130 films (26%) and did not appear in 36 of them (28%).40 Similar percentages applied to Mary Pickford, even though by late 1909 she seems to have been valued enough by her employers for them to agree to employ her brother Jack and sister Lottie as performers too (Whitfield, 89). The recognisability of some performers in 1908 derived in part from the small size of workforces: as the workforce at Biograph grew, casting choices tended away from the use of a star system in the theatrical sense. Indeed, this rotation of performers between prominent parts and non-prominent parts during 1908 and 1909 indicates “that Griffith [or, indeed, Biograph] preferred the concept of the ensemble to the development of a star” (Gunning, D.W. Griffith, 220). As employers needed to be able to regard public recognition of a performer as not just feasible but likely (and preferably needed evidence that it was occurring), those employers with more than a handful of long-term performer employees first needed to apply a theatrical star system, in the sense of exclusively using just one or two performers to play lead roles, before it became even possible to imagine operating a star system in its industrial sense. Common attitudes among performers may have militated against this too: Pickford later recalled that even in the middle of 1910 the members of Biograph’s stock company all regarded their film work as a temporary stopgap between stage engagements (131). Indeed, the writer of the article in the 15 January 1910 issue of MPW announcing Kalem’s lobby display board of anonymous photographs of their stock company members (see page 32), while remarking that “many of the studios already have stock companies to a certain extent”, nonetheless opined that “[a]t no distant day the stock company will be inaugurated in the moving picture studios” – that is, this event was still some way off – and added that stock companies “are not sufficiently established to induce the players to allow general publicity in connection with their part in the pictures.”41 This comment reflects the oft-cited claim that people who performed for films were insisting on remaining anonymous (see deCordova, PP, 7–8), possibly because of fears that being known to have performed for films constituted a stigma in the eyes of theatre producers, which would impact on their chances in the job market during the winter stage season. Another version of this story claims that theatrical producers, afraid of losing their workforces to film companies, promised to bar from theatrical work any person who was known to have performed for a film, as a threat purposed to make anyone contemplating film work regard it as automatically harming their stage career.42 If these claims are credible, then the above MPW article indicates that only long-term employment as a film performer would render such a stigma irrelevant, because members of a film production company’s stock company with



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year-round contracts had no cause to worry about the views of theatre producers because they had no need to support themselves with stage work at any time of the year. There were still significant impediments, that is, to the inception of stardombuilding publicity campaigns. Third, the two factions’ control of film supply set the number of people appearing in a typical venue’s programme of films over the course of a week lower than had been the norm hitherto and lower than was the norm outside the US. The AEL/FSA and then the MPPC both included limitations on the amount of negative footage that each member could sell. The MPPC limited each member to releasing 4,000 feet of films per week (see Abel, ‘Perils’, 194 and ‘In the belly’, 372). In the week 21–7 August 1909, the 7 ‘native’ and 3 European MPPC companies released 31 films across 18 reels totalling 17,163 feet.43 At the same time an independent hiring company announced film releases for the same period representing all of the independent production companies and several major non-MPPC European production companies totalling 22 films measuring 11,729 feet,44 though the total amount of European film available to all hiring companies via the various importers was probably higher, making the ‘Independent’ market roughly comparable with the MPPC market. In contrast to these two relatively low levels, in the UK in the same week, 41 films were issued, with a total length of 22,585 feet.45 Thus there were definitely more films, either by number of titles or by footage, made available in the US during this week than the UK, but unlike UK exhibition venues, which would hire their films from a hiring company with the choice to buy copies of any combination of these films that they wished, US exhibition venues would hire their films from a hiring company who would only be able to choose from the films released by just one of the two industry factions. Thus a licensed hiring company had just 76% of the choice of films, by both number of titles and amount of footage, of UK hiring companies. The numbers were probably roughly the same for an ‘Independent’ hiring company. Though some licensed exhibition venues did choose to violate the terms of their license by renting films from both licensed and ‘independent’ hiring companies, they risked having their licences cancelled if this was discovered. In North American cinemas in 1909, therefore, fewer faces were competing for recognition than was the norm in any country in the industrialised world. Because licensed venues in particular were selecting from the output of relatively few companies (in the sample 21–7 August 1909 week, licensed venues in the US had the output of just 10 production companies available to them, while in the same week in the UK, 14 production companies featured in the industry’s output), their audiences were being presented with a particularly limited screen population.

A Campaign Nonetheless, even though this increasingly long-term and relatively diminished screen population in licensed venues led to instances of recognition, which I will examine

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below, these exceptional circumstances in the US, though conducive to the inception of a star system, did not cause any of the MPPC production companies to break with the norm of anonymity. Further conditions brought about by this stark division in the film trade in the US led directly to the first stardom-building publicity campaign by a domestic production company, and this campaign came from the other side of the industry divide. When Carl Laemmle and his business partner Robert Cochrane cancelled the Laemmle Film Service’s license with the MPPC in late April 1909, the circumstances into which they took the company could not have been further from an open market. The LFS had to persuade managers of exhibition venues and exhibition companies to cancel their licences with the MPPC, which meant persuading them to court significant risks: the likely scarcity and lower reliability of ‘Independent’ product, the questionable legality of using any film technology whatsoever without an MPPC licence, and the possibility that if ‘Independent’ product proved to be inferior and they wished to rejoin the MPPC, they would find that they had been blacklisted. This meant convincing exhibitors that the benefits of the service that the LFS provided were substantial enough to outweigh these risks. So even though any production company entering an already populated marketplace would be under pressure to produce a product of superior quality to achieve more than the even share of the market that they could expect should they produce a product equivalent in quality to the products of the older companies, Laemmle and Cochrane were under even greater pressure to deliver a superior quality product: they needed to make robust promises of superior quality to obtain any market share at all. There were limits to their capacity to convince exhibitors of the superior quality of the mostly European films they were already providing via the LFS in the months between going ‘Independent’ in late April 1909 and the first release of their new production company, IMP, on 25 October 1909 (indeed, their campaign against the MPPC in the trade press concentrated on the MPPC’s disreputable business practices instead).46 Control of a production company, by contrast, meant control of the elements that went into the production of these films, a major motive for the establishment of IMP. Laemmle and Cochrane’s drive to include production values in IMP’s films that would demark them as not just distinct but superior is clear in the trade advertisements for the company’s first film, Hiawatha (an adaptation of Henry W. Longfellow’s epic poem The Song of Hiawatha (1855)), released on 25 October 1909: Film exchanges and exhibitors by the hundreds have been urging me to hurry up with this first release, but to all alike I have said: “None of the going-off-halfcocked business for mine!” I have held back week after week to be absolutely certain that everything is in ship shape. And I now present “HIAWATHA”



Length 988 feet. Taken at the Falls of Minnehaha in the Land of the Dacotahs. And you can bet it is classy or I wouldn’t make it my first release. […] It is taken from Longfellow’s masterpiece of poesy and it is a gem of photography and acting.47

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Such production values as picturesque domestic locations, cinematographic polish and clarity, the cultural prestige of an adapted poem and the quality of performance could, however, be duplicated by the other production companies, including the MPPC’s member companies. The preferable situation for Laemmle and Cochrane was that IMP use production values that no other company could obtain. Better still, IMP would give the LFS just the trump card it needed if they were to use an entire classification of production values that no other company could obtain. The identities of specific people would provide both the former – production values exclusive to the company – and, at least for as long as the current situation, where anonymity was the industrial norm, lasted, the latter: an entire classification of production value exclusive to the company. And although they could easily envision the disincentives which had motivated the MPPC companies to, so far, avoid operating a star system around their performer employees, the LFS’s industrial position was very different from theirs: the tenor of the LFS’s running advertisements in MPW criticising the MPPC provide evidence that, as far as Laemmle and Cochrane were concerned, undermining the MPPC necessitated taking risks. This willingness to take major risks sharply distinguished the ‘Independents’ from the MPPC, a distinction which deCordova elides by glossing over the relative youth of the ‘Independents’ at the time of the appearance of the first film star publicity. What Laemmle did after he set up IMP is very revealing: he left the country, spending the summer of 1909 in Europe. In c.1927 Laemmle recalled that, in 1909, after he made the decision to found IMP and commence production (so in roughly May 1909), he did everything he felt he needed to do to get the company operating (he opened a New York office, obtained a camera, engaged William Ranous (previously an employee of the MPPC member Vitagraph) as producer/ director, instructed Ranous to adapt Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha, gave him $1,500 to make it, and supervised his work on a scenario and planning for interior and exterior shooting) and then, having done all of this, he “made a trip to Europe during June, 1909, where I visited England, France and Germany for purposes of making a film survey of these countries”, a trip from which, he recalled, he “returned four months later”.48 This tallies with the contemporary evidence. The 5 June 1909 issue of MPW, printed on 29 May, included an announcement of the imminent establishment of the new company, in which Laemmle stated that he was “about to visit Paris, London, Berlin and other centers of Europe in order to make arrangements for marketing my product there as well as in America.”49 That he did not begin marketing his films in Europe until the second half of 1910 (see page 164) implies that his real motives were the ones that he recalled in c.1927. The 11 September 1909 issue of MPW (published on 4 September) stated that Laemmle was currently in Germany (i.e. his country of birth).50 He does indeed seem to have been in Europe for four months: on 19 October 1909 the name ‘Carl Laemmle’, aged 42 years and 9 months and resident in Chicago (and so definitely the Carl Laemmle of the LFS and IMP), featured on the list of passengers disembarking in

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New York from the Kaiser Wilhelm II, which had sailed from Southampton, on the south coast of the UK, on 13 October 1909.51 The 30 October 1909 issue of MPW, published on 23 October 1909, also stated that Laemmle had just returned from a trip to Europe.52 Carl Laemmle was therefore definitely in Europe (at the very least he was definitely in the UK) during the period when Pathé Frères were conducting a publicity campaign for Max Linder around parts of Europe. He left shortly after the third film to which Linder’s name was publicly attached had appeared in UK cinemas and while the fourth was being announced in the UK trade press (see Fig. 1.2). Given Laemmle’s circumstances, his stated purpose of making “a film survey” of these countries can be taken to mean that he went to Europe to glean advice about business and publicity methods from film production companies working beyond the MPPC’s sphere of influence,53 so it is reasonable to assume that Laemmle would have been exposed not just to the appearance of Linder’s name in the European trade press but also to discussions among senior trade figures, and just as reasonable to assume that these would have included discussions about Pathé’s publicity campaign for Linder. That is, while he was in Europe, Laemmle was probably exposed to an example of how to obtain the entire classification of production value not currently used by his competitors that he was being pressed by his circumstances to find, as well as to evidence that everything that his contemporaries in the US film industry thought they knew about the wisdom of systemic anonymity of their long-term performer employees in publicity was wrong. While Laemmle was in Europe, Biograph, an MPPC member company, dismissed Florence Lawrence. Lawrence, born Florence Annie Bridgwood, had been working for them from for nearly a year by this point (see page 121). Lawrence’s biographer Kelly Brown notes that she was dismissed from Biograph in late June or early July 1909, and that she joined IMP in September or early October 1909 (37–41). It is worth establishing these puts precisely, though. The Griffith Project dates Lawrence’s last work for Biograph in either the last few days of June or the first few days of July 1909, performing for Jones’ Burglar (not the last of Lawrence’s films for Biograph released by the company but the last one for which she performed (Loughney, 2)). Kelly Brown claims that Biograph dismissed her shortly after this because the management had learnt that she and her husband Harry Solter had written to Essanay inquiring after work; at the time the norm among the MPPC members was that transfers of staff were only permitted when initiated by the company (36, 40). After their dismissal, Lawrence seems to have decided not to continue her career performing for films. Although there is no hard evidence for this, the circumstances suggest it: while Lawrence could confidently consider herself blacklisted among the other ‘native’ member companies of the MPPC (Selig, Lubin, Edison, Vitagraph and Kalem), there were opportunities among the nascent ‘Independents’, and there is no evidence that she approached any of them. Instead, her return to film occurred because one of them approached her: Lawrence recalled in 1914–15 that

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I became an Imp player […] during the summer of 1909. Upon leaving the Biograph Company I accepted a road engagement with Ezra Kendall, and for a little more than a month appeared before the footlights instead of the camera. While playing a one night stand in some little town out in the middle west I received a telegram from Mr. William V. Ranous, the man who had tweaked my ears for trying to steal into the projection room at the Vitagraph studio some two years previous. […] “I am hoping to start a new moving picture company and want you for my leading lady. Come to New York at once,” it commanded. And I went. (‘Growing’ Part 4, 142)

In 1924 Lawrence seems to have told a Photoplay interviewer that she received this letter even before she began her tour with Ezra Kendall’s company (Frederick Smith, 103). Ezra Kendall’s 1909 play was The Vinegar Buyer, Herbert Hall Winslow’s 1902 adaptation of James Whitcomb Riley’s poem ‘Jap Miller’ (1889). The Vinegar Buyer had been performed around the US in 1903 and Winslow had revised it for this 1909 run. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle reported that Kendall had arrived in New York on 2 September 1909 to begin rehearsals,54 and the play seems to have begun its tour very soon afterwards: it was performed in Buffalo on 20 September 1909.55 It seems likely therefore that Lawrence was being more honest in the later interview, particularly as The Vinegar Buyer does not seem to have been booked for “a one night stand in some little town out in the middle west”, stopping instead in large towns and cities for stretches of several days, which would mean that she left Kendall’s company and joined IMP in early/mid-September 1909. A notice in the 16 October 1909 issue of Variety announced that “Miss Lawrence, the former star actress of the Biograph’s stock company has been with the Laemmle firm [i.e. IMP] for the past six weeks. She will appear in the first Laemmle release of October 25.”56 As Variety printed dates above most of its news items, and as most of the US news items in this issue of the magazine bore the date ‘14 October’, it is appropriate to regard this as the rough date of their reception of IMP’s announcement that they had employed Lawrence, meaning that, if her IMP contract had indeed started exactly six weeks previously, it started on 2 September 1909. Of course, this date may not be accurate, and it is possible that Lawrence was not even contracted to IMP at all when IMP telegrammed/mailed Variety, but if she was not she must have been very soon after: the 30 October 1909 issue of MPW, published on 23 October, included an advertisement for her first IMP film, Love’s Stratagem (only the second of IMP’s productions, due to be released on 1 November), as well as a report on a trade showing of the film, which indicates that she had already worked as a film performer for them by 20 October 1909 at the latest.57 When Laemmle returned from Europe, therefore, he found that he now had an ex-MPPC performer employee on his staff. What ensued after this was, it seems, very little. IMP made no mention of their newly employing Lawrence in their trade press advertisements until their advertisement for her fourth IMP film (IMP’s ninth film), Lest We Forget (due to be released on 20 December 1909), which appeared in their advertisement in the 18 December

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Fig. 2.1  IMP’s advertisement for Lest We Forget printed in the trade press on 11 December 1909.58



issue of MPW (printed on 11 December). This advertisement included a close-up photograph of Lawrence’s face accompanied by the declaration “She’s an Imp!” (see Fig. 2.1).59 Although it did not put a name to this face, enough characteristics (the assertion of an affiliation implying that this affiliation had changed, and the photograph) were provided – for those who did not know her Biograph films – to generate the rudiments of an identity, and – for those who did – make it possible to recognise her from them (clearly, publicising someone anonymously does not make it impossible to constitute an identity, an idea to which I will return in Chapter 6). After this advertisement, however, advertisements for another five of the films in which Lawrence appeared passed by without even this anonymous statement of her identity. Her name was then given in the advertisement for the next release (her tenth and the company’s fifteenth), Coquette’s Suitors (released 31 January 1910), in trade publications printed on 22 January 1910, which described the film as “[a] picture which gives Miss Lawrence the best opportunity she has had for months to work up some hilarious comedy” (see Fig. 2.2).60 Then IMP’s trade advertisements for another four of her films passed by without any mention of her identity, meaning that, by the middle of January 1910, IMP had used Lawrence’s identity in their trade advertising for just two of the fourteen films featuring her that they had so far announced. Their next advertisement, for Mother Love (released 7 March 1910), which appeared in the 5 March 1910 issue of MPW, published by 26 February, began by stating that “[i]n this picture Miss Lawrence […] does the most excellent of her remarkable career”,61 (see Fig. 2.3) and was the first of four advertisements (for those films that featured her) in a row which gave her name. The second of these, the advertisement for The Broken Oath, in the 12 March 1910 issue (printed by 5 March 1910), was also the ‘We Nail a Lie’ declaration which formed part of Laemmle’s plan to build publicity in advance of her and King Baggot’s weekend of public appearances in

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Fig. 2.2  IMP’s advertisement for Coquette’s Suitors and Sports in the Snow printed in the trade press on 22 January 1910.62

St Louis from 25 to 27 March 1910 (see Fig. 2.4).63 After one more mention of her name (alongside Baggot’s this time) in the advertisement for The Miser’s Daughter (released 4 April 1910),64 also linked to the St Louis venture, eight more IMP films featuring her were released before the end of May 1910, and just one of these eight trade press advertisements named her (the advertisement for A Doctor’s Perfidy).65 Overall, in these trade press advertisements IMP used only eight of 28 opportunities to link Lawrence’s identity with her films. This apparent dearth of publicity for Lawrence would seem to suggest that even the industrial incentives faced by IMP were not sufficient to motivate Laemmle and Cochrane to seek to utilise Florence Lawrence as a production value, and that, therefore, deCordova was right to regard the MPPC and ‘Independent’ companies as united in their attitude to film celebrity; Lawrence’s name was never routinely included in IMP’s advertising in MPW. Lawrence’s own later recollection that “[m]y motion

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Fig. 2.3  IMP’s advertisement for Mother Love and The Devotion of Women printed in the trade press on 26 February 1910.66

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Fig. 2.4 IMP’s advertisement for The Broken Oath (mistakenly called The Broken Bath) and The Time-Lock Safe printed in the trade press on 5 March 1910, which contradicted purported reports of Lawrence’s death.67

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picture public did not learn my real name until I became an Imp player” (‘Growing’, Part 4, 142) appears, it seems, to not be quite accurate: her film public did not learn her name, it seems, until at least three months after she became IMP player. This in turn seems to substantiate the idea that film stardom in the US was a general development, given that the date of the only significant use of her name in MPW tallies with the first elements of Vitagraph’s publicity campaign for Florence Turner, a public appearance which took place on 9 April 1910 at the Saratoga Park “moving picture parlor” in Brooklyn.68 Eileen Bowser concurred with deCordova in 1990. In her view, Lawrence “had been working for their [Carl Laemmle and Robert Cochrane’s] company for about six months before she was even named in their advertisements or releases”; Florence Lawrence and Florence Turner were really tied for the honor of being the first big movie stars. In the same month that Florence Lawrence and King Baggott [sic] were making personal appearances in St. Louis […], Florence Turner, the Vitagraph Girl, was making personal appearances in Brooklyn. […] If Florence Lawrence got the first big publicity for a movie star who was not already a celebrity in another field, it could only have been by a few days. (Transformation, 112–13)



Likewise, Gunning pointed out in 1991 that it seems odd to see Carl Laemmle taking the initiative to instigate a star system when he seems to have done nothing to publicise Lawrence during the roughly three months between employing her (on or before 16 October 1909) and the advertising for Coquette’s Suitors in mid-January 1910, and when he waited until March 1910 to orchestrate the publicity stunt leading up to her first personal appearance in St Louis. “Could it be”, he speculated, “that contrary to traditional accounts, he was inspired by the publicity the Trust was giving their actors?” (D.W. Griffith, 221-2) Abel differed very little from this model of simultaneity in 1999 (Red Rooster 148) and Gaines also adhered to it in 2012 (‘Anonymity’ 455n3). However, there is a major flaw in this argument, in that it relies on regarding trade publications as appropriate sources of evidence about employers’ publicity efforts. If IMP were intent on using Florence Lawrence as a production value, then their first priority in this was to produce publicity oriented at the general public. The 25–7 March 1910 St Louis venture might be regarded as their first attempt to do so, meaning that the negligible time lag between this venture and Vitagraph’s beginning their campaign for Florence Turner in early April 1910 implies nearparity between the ‘Independents’ and the MPPC over stardom, which in turn supports deCordova’s model of the primacy of the development of discourse as the precipitating factor. There is, however, significant evidence that IMP was actually producing publicity which named Florence Lawrence, publicity specifically for use direct to the general public, much earlier than the St Louis episode. Indeed, even deCordova deduced from a letter from a Baltimore cinemagoer to Lawrence dated 16 February 1910 that by this date IMP had issued some publicity naming her, “probably through local

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papers or local exhibitors” (PP, 57). Since the publication of deCordova’s work, I have discovered scraps of evidence of this publicity at both the local and the national scale. The first of these scraps is a photograph showing an instance of this publicity: the front of a postcard held in the Florence Lawrence collection at the MHL69 shows a Los Angeles cinema, the Shell Theater, using elaborate printed publicity for Lawrence (see Fig. 2.5a–c). As it was posted by a member of the cinema’s staff on, according to the postmark, either 25 or 29 January 1910, and addressed to “Miss Florence Lawrence” care of Carl Laemmle at IMP’s office in New York, presumably the photograph was taken and then printed as a postcard specifically to send to IMP in a gesture of solidarity, from a venue working independently of the MPPC’s licensing system to one of the young film production companies on whom they were relying to be able to do so: one ‘Independent’ to another. On the frontage of the Shell Theater, alongside another type of publicity produced by IMP (the poster showing a hand-drawn scene from Never Again) and the large one-piece board listing the titles and genres of six films (all from non-MPPC companies) that had presumably been supplied by the hiring company (possibly the LFS), a poster claims that “America’s most popular moving picture actress” is “Miss Lawrence”, and includes eight portrait photographs of her in the act of performing (the edge of the photograph used for the postcard cuts off one of these). The seven performances visible might be roughly classed as (from left to right) ‘joyful surprise’, ‘hopeful determination’, ‘shrewishness’, ‘shock/fright’, ‘incredulity’, ‘mischief’ and

Fig. 2.5  (a) Postcard sent from the Shell Theatre in Los Angeles to “Miss Florence Lawrence” care of Carl Laemmle, 111 East-14th Street, New York, and postmarked on the reverse either 25 or 29 January 1910. Correspondence, Florence Lawrence Papers, MHL, vf.211. (b) Detail from top right. (c) Reverse of the postcard shown in (a), showing postmark of 5pm on 25 or 29 January 1910. The message reads “With all/good wishes/From/“The Shell Theatre/Los Angeles/Cal[ifornia].”

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Fig. 2.5  (Continued)



‘innocent victimhood’. The words underneath the seven visible photographs read “America’s foremost Moving Picture Actress Appears in “Imp” Films” (see Fig. 2.5b). The release dates of the films advertised at this venue, along with the postmark (see Fig. 2.5c), permit the photograph of The Shell to be dated to between Monday 24 January and Friday 29 January 1910.70 As it was sent from the East Coast to the West, a train journey which took at least four days at the time (see Whitfield, 102), this publicity poster for Lawrence must therefore have been issued by IMP’s New York office during, at the very latest, the working week of 17–21 January 1910.

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Surprisingly, the photographs reproduced in the poster shown in this photograph have also survived (see Fig. 2.6). As can be seen in these ‘range’ photographs, an eighth photograph completed the poster, and the full text read “America’s foremost Moving Picture Actress Appears in “Imp” Films only”. In addition, as can just be discerned in Fig. 2.5b, the poster also named each of the emotions depicted by Lawrence in the photographs: the originals reveal that this text read “hilarity piety concentration horror determination mirth sadness coquetry”. Notably, the second of the eight photographs on this poster (‘Piety’) was also the photograph used in both the anonymous 18 December 1909 MPW advertisement for Lest We Forget accompanied by the line “She’s an Imp!” and the 12 March 1910 “We Nail a Lie!” advertisement for The Broken Oath (see Figs. 2.1 and 2.4): one of these eight photographs seems to have been chosen to facilitate recognition in IMP’s publicity to the trade. As the consistency of Lawrence’s clothes in these eight photographs (only the location of her headscarf and the arrangement of her hair vary) suggest that all eight of these photographs were taken in one session, it is reasonable to assume that, as this photograph appeared in the 18 December 1909 issue of MPW, which was printed by 11 December 1909, a photography session purposed to obtain a set of photographs illustrating Lawrence’s range – that is, those used in the poster seen in Fig. 2.5a and 2.5b and so the content of publicity materials which were to be used with the general public – had been undertaken no later than the first few days of December 1909, and it is also reasonable to assume that the publicity campaign directed at the general public began during December 1909.

Fig. 2.6 Undated photographs of Florence Lawrence taken in c.late November/early December 1909. Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research. Image 132974.71

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It is worth examining this piece of point-of-sale publicity, because it is purposed to do significant elements of the work of establishing a performer as a production value: it stresses the quality of Lawrence’s work by demonstrating her histrionic range, it places her at the forefront of a population of professionals, and it links her labour exclusively with a certain employer. It also seems to have been planned to be durable in that it was not linked to a specific film. That this poster was not advertised in the trade papers suggests that neither IMP nor the LFS charged for it (indeed the LFS had supplied publicity to exhibitors for free as early as July 1907),72 simply sending it to cinemas along with the prints of Lawrence’s films. It also constituted an ideal solution to the problem of aversion among venue managers to publicising the names of players: it cost them nothing, it provided them with something with which to dress their frontage, and it used the product identifiers which the venue managers could rely on (such as genres and brand names), while simultaneously adding the new production value which the production company wanted to foreground. On 25 February 1910 the Wagner Film Company, an ‘Independent’ hiring company based in St Louis, advertised a set of eight photographs of “Florence Lawrence, most popular motion picture actress”, for sale to the general public for 15 cents,73 and on 7 March 1910 the Hopkins cinema in Louisville, Kentucky advertised that it would be giving away copies of “[p]hotos of Florence Lawrence, famous picture actress, […] to female patrons” that night,74 both of which indicate that IMP’s publicity campaign for Lawrence involved making these publicity photographs available in multiple formats. A December 1909 date for the commencement of IMP’s publicity campaign for Florence Lawrence is also indicated by the publicity about her that began to feature in the local press in the US in the opening months of 1910, both in the form of advertisements and in articles and editorials which reflect either the use of her name at venues or the receipt, by the newspaper, of publicity sent direct to them by IMP or the LFS. For example, an article in the 9 January 1910 issue of the St Louis Post-Dispatch included an uncited quotation from another publication which ran as follows:



Miss Florence Lawrence, who until recently played ingenue parts for one of the so-called trust companies, is one of the most popular of these [i.e. film] actresses. A multitude of admirers know her by her face and stature and applaud her shadow when it trips on the screen as if she were present in person. Not long ago she became leading woman for one of the independent companies and a new face appeared in her parts. There was as much dissatisfaction as if some stranger had taken Mansfield’s role in ‘Cyrano de Bergerac’. Hundreds of men and women telephoned to the film exchanges to find out what had become of her. In South St. Louis, especially, when the news spread that she was acting with another troupe, a great number of people left the Edison [i.e. MPPC-affiliated] theaters and searched until they discovered her in another chain of houses.75

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This narrative of an entranced public following Lawrence from licensed to unlicensed cinemas clearly employs press copy supplied by IMP or the LFS. Elsewhere, an article in the 27 February 1910 issue of a Kansas daily newspaper on local entertainments indicates that her name was being made public at a local venue, the Fern Theatre: the “Imp” films, with Miss Florence Lawrence, playing the lead, are popular indeed. Miss Lawrence was employed by one of the biggest producers for some time, and it was but recently that she has been known as the “Imp Girl”. She is also featured as “The girl of a thousand faces.” She learns 300 different roles a year, is one of the highest salaried motion picture actresses and is photographed 1,000,000 times a year. She became famous as “The Salvation Army Lass” [Biograph; released in the US 11 March 1909] and will be remembered by all who saw that beautiful picture.76

As Gorham Kindem noticed in 1982, an announcement in the 27 February 1910 issue of the St Louis Post-Dispatch stated that “Miss Florence Laurence [sic], in a new motion picture, will be one of the features of the Gem’s new bill this week.”77 Thus well before her weekend of personal appearances in St Louis, her name was being included in publicity commissioned by the manager of one cinema in St Louis. Examples of this publicity for Lawrence are plentiful. On 7 March 1910 the Lotus in Arkansas City named her above the title of The Blind Man’s Tract in their local newspaper advertisement.78 On 11 March 1910 the same newspaper reprinted lengthy copy, clearly produced by IMP or the LFS, and supplied via the venue: Florence Lawrence commands a salary which equals about $25 a minute for the time she is actually engaged in a play. Most of the films are about 1,000 feet long and run 15 minutes. Miss Lawrence averages six minutes of actual work in one of these runs. Miss Lawrence recently signed a contract with the Independent Moving Picture Co. by the terms of which she is to receive a salary of $15,000 a year for life. This makes her the highest-salaried moving picture actress in the world. In the company that is supporting Miss Lawrence is King Baggott [sic], a young St. Louis actor who was in the Suburban Garden Stock Co. last summer. These two superb artists [are] to be seen in “The Rose of the Philipines” at the Lotus Friday and Saturday.79

Lawrence’s name can be found prominently placed in local press advertising for venues from across the US during March 1910.80 In the 19 March 1910 issue of MPW, printed on 12 March 1910, Thomas Bedding, writing under the pseudonym ‘Lux Graphicus’, remarked that [a]s there are about twenty film producing companies in the United States just now, it will be seen that the number of actors and actresses employed on the moving

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picture stage amount to quite a respectable total, constituting a considerable section of those who make entertainment work the business of their lives. [….] [I]t is tolerably sure that while these pictures attract the public they will also attract the stagestruck aspirant. There are probably many would-be imitators of Miss Lawrence, who has recently been so adroitly advertised in the newspapers.81



Local newspaper advertising had clearly already been used to build a public profile for Lawrence by about the end of February 1910, and as far as Bedding was concerned she was, at the time, the only performer “employed on the moving picture stage” who had thus far been the subject of such a campaign. IMP’s publicity campaign for Lawrence was escalated by a variety of full-page advertorials overtly placed by Robert Cochrane in major daily urban newspapers on 20 March 1910. One example, from the Chicago Daily Tribune, included both the eight ‘range’ photographs reproduced above and the above hyperbole about her work: “Florence Lawrence,” the large text immediately under the title read, “at Present Credited With Being the Most Popular and Highest Salaried Emotional Pantomimist in America, Plays 300 Roles a Year, Is Photographed 4,000,000 Times and Is Mistress of a Thousand Faces”.82 Another, printed in the Nashville American – this one adorned with IMP’s mischievous imp brand character (see Figs. 2.1–2.4) and openly authored by Robert Cochrane – used the same roster of information and the same photographs (‘The Girl’, 3). Another version appeared in the St Louis PostDispatch on the same day.83 The $15,000-per-year salary, Lawrence’s purported appearance in 300 films per year, and the nickname ‘girl of a thousand faces’ appeared consistently in these. There is evidence to suggest, therefore, that when Carl Laemmle was in Europe he learnt from Pathé Frères’ publicity campaign for Linder that, contrary to popular lore, it was actually feasible to turn an anonymous performer into a valuable asset by building a profile for that performer from scratch, particularly if there were signs that audiences were capable of recognising that person from one film to the next, and that if a performer had established a degree of recognisability the benefits of capitalising on that recognisability outweighed – in the eyes of the learned senior company Pathé Frères – the potential risks. Evidence of Lawrence’s recognisability had been printed in MPW shortly before Laemmle left for Europe when, in April 1909, they first referred to Lawrence anonymously using the nickname ‘The Biograph Girl’,84 and because this nickname was later mentioned in IMP’s publicity campaign for Lawrence (see Fig. 2.4), Laemmle must have learnt about it before early March 1910. Even if Laemmle, when he returned from this trip to Europe, did not already deem Lawrence to have established the same recognisability in the US as established in Europe by Linder, she would have been able to demonstrate her recognisability to Laemmle when they met after his return (i.e. in the last few days of October 1909): she possessed letters that mentioned film-to-film recognition sent anonymously to her when she worked at Biograph dating from as early as December 1908.85

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In addition, Lawrence was also recognised, in spite of her brief career hiatus and the switch between companies, in her first film for IMP: a St Louis cinemagoer wrote to Lawrence anonymously on 6 November 1909 via her local cinema manager (who sent the letter to IMP), remarking that she was “especially fond of the Biographs, but I see you have left that company and gone with the IMP Moving Picture Company. […] The applause was great the other night when you appeared in “Love’s Stratagem.””86 Evidence of her recognisability in her first film for IMP is also preserved in newspaper advertising for the Lyric, a cinema in Mount Carmel, Pennsylvania, which on 18 December 1909 included the line: “Headliner made by the “Imp” Co. with the little Biograph girl on LOVE STRATEGY [i.e. Love’s Stratagem]”.87 The phrase ‘Biograph girl’ was also used in the Lyric’s advertising in another local paper on the same day.88 The same venue gave the same anonymous marker in advertising for The Two Sons on 29 December 1909.89 As he ran a hiring company, and so was closer to the voices of cinemagoers than a person who was solely a production company executive, Laemmle was in a strong position to notice such evidence. While Laemmle would certainly have suspected that Pathé’s campaign for Linder would soon begin in the US, he would also almost certainly, given his lengthy experience of film hiring, have been aware that there would be a significant delay before this occurred. Because the formation of first the AEL/FSA and then the MPPC had included the condition that no member could put more than 4,000 feet per week of negative footage on the market, Pathé’s films were backlogged in America even more than they were in France (see Fig. 3.1). For example, Petite rosse/The Little Vixen, which had been issued in parts of Europe outside France around 10–13 November 1909,90 was released in the US on 28 March 1910, making for a delay of 135–8 days. Though this delay varied, the average delay for all of the films listed in Fig. 1.2 where issue/release dates are available (using the smallest possible delay when issue dates are estimates) was 114 days. An awareness of the backlog on Pathé’s imports to the US would have enabled Laemmle to anticipate that he had a brief window of time before Pathé’s campaign for Linder would commence in the US. In this sense the decision to use Florence Lawrence as a production value, a decision made either during or shortly after his trip to Europe, could be regarded as an attempt to steal a march on Pathé, a particularly desirable objective given that, in the US, Pathé were members of the MPPC and so would soon be adding Linder as a production value, and indeed, the film star as a classification of production value, to the armoury of Laemmle’s direct competition. This may explain why Laemmle’s biography gives no account of what happened during the trip to Europe, and indeed why it barely mentions Pathé at all: Laemmle, that is, may have felt that he had something to hide.91 A further piece of evidence to support the hypothesis that Laemmle’s trip to Europe was crucial in motivating IMP to launch a publicity campaign for Florence Lawrence is that it explains the brief but nonetheless curious delay between the time when Lawrence started work for IMP and the beginning of this publicity campaign.

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IMP’s trade publicity for Love’s Stratagem, Lawrence’s first IMP film, did not use her identity,92 and her second and third films for IMP (The Forest Ranger’s Daughter and Her Own Way) were also advertised in the trade press without any mention of her identity.93 Thus Laemmle’s biographer John Drinkwater’s remark that “[i]t was the settled policy of IMP from the first to find players worth advertisement, and to give them all they could ask of it” (134–5) is, though closer to the truth than hitherto thought, not strictly true: this policy seems only to have been adopted a few weeks after Lawrence’s appointment. Advertising for Love’s Stratagem needed to be ready a few days before the 23 October 1909 publication date of the 30 October 1909 issue of MPW in which the film was advertised, meaning that it would have been arranged shortly before Laemmle returned from Europe. Only after enough time had elapsed for Laemmle to, on top of his other duties, investigate the degree of Lawrence’s existing recognisability and arrange a photography session to produce some publicity material, did IMP launch its publicity campaign for her; the hypothesis that his trip to Europe was instrumental in the company’s decision to use Lawrence’s identity matches precisely with the c.late-November/early-December photography session (and the first use of her identity in the trade advertisement for her fourth IMP film, Lest We Forget, advertised in the 18 December 1909 issue of MPW, printed on 11 December 1909, for which copy had to be ready a few days earlier).94 There was, these scraps show, no delay of any significance between Laemmle’s return from Europe and the date of the company’s decision to launch a publicity campaign for Lawrence. In addition, because of Lawrence’s relative value as an erstwhile MPPC performer employee, IMP did not duplicate the rotation of performers between prominent and non-prominent roles that characterised the casting practices of the MPPC companies (see page 122). Instead, in the 28 films featuring her that IMP released before the end of May 1910, she was exclusively cast in prominent roles. That is, IMP employed a star system in its older, theatrical sense of consistently using a single performer to play leads, giving Lawrence a prominence which was necessary both for facilitating recognition and for a publicity campaign for her to be worthwhile, in that drawing public attention to her identity would be pointless if no films featuring her in major roles were soon to be released. This also implies the influence of the model that Pathé were establishing with Linder, in which a single performer consistently played leads in a significant proportion of the company’s output. DeCordova made no mention of Linder as a factor in the emergence of the picture personality in the US. Indeed, he made no mention of Linder whatsoever. He did, however, notice one instance of Pathé’s new interest in using performers’ names as production values: their use of Victoria Lepanto, without mentioning her stage experience, in copy about Carmen (released in the US on 16 February 1910) provided to MPW which they included in their 26 February 1910 issue (PP, 54).95 This is an understandable consequence of his concentration on the trade press, his restricting of inquiry to the US and the scattered character of the evidence surveyed

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here. Because the idea that the Linder campaign may have incited the decision by IMP to start their campaign for Florence Lawrence proposes such a reversal of the deCordova orthodoxy, I have sought to disseminate these findings before completing this book (see Works Cited). But it must also be acknowledged that the Linder model would not have been adopted by Laemmle if his own unusual industrial circumstances, described above, did not strongly encourage him to adopt it. That competition provided a motive has been implied in earlier histories of the emergence of film stardom in the US. Monte Katterjohn wrote in 1914 that [t]he name of Florence Lawrence was heralded far and near by the owners of the Independent Moving Picture Company when “The Biograph Girl” began to appear in pictures bearing the Imp brand. This was probably due to the fact that Imp films were the first independent pictures to be produced in America, and the owners felt it necessary to employ the popularity of a screen star to dispose of their films (29–30).

Similarly, Kevin Brownlow wrote in 1979 that in late 1909 “film manufacturers were agreed on the folly of duplicating theatrical stardom, with salaries cresting waves of imbecility. […] [But] [t]he Independents, however much they agreed on the principle, needed every weapon they could lay their hands on to break the power of the Trust” (156); Charlie Keil and Ben Singer likewise argued in 2009 that “[p]romotion of motion picture actors did not begin in earnest until the start of the 1910s, in part as a tactic by Independent producers to draw attention to their new offerings” (15). There is some truth in these broad claims: the Independents had little to lose, meaning that the risk, described in the Introduction, of generating wandering value in an employee was, for them, less of an impediment than it was for the MPPC members, which in turn meant that the new-medium deadlock was, for them, more brittle. In addition, Lawrence’s own particular characteristics also incentivised IMP to launch this first stardom-building publicity campaign in late 1909. Chief among Lawrence’s characteristics, and a basic fact to which deCordova paid virtually no attention (PP, 55–6), was that she was the first recognisable performer to cross the divide between the two wings of the US film production industry.96 Indeed, if Lawrence (and her then husband Harry Solter) approached other MPPC companies for work in July or August 1909, shortly after they were dismissed from Biograph, and they were refused employment (ostensibly because, having been dismissed by Biograph, they had effectively been blacklisted by the MPPC), the other MPPC companies were arguably being short-sighted about her usefulness as a production value to the opposition. Laemmle made much of Lawrence’s floor-crossing in his trade advertising: he used the phrase “She’s an IMP!” in the advertisement for Lest We Forget in the 18 December 1909 issue of MPW (see Fig. 2.1) as a way of stating ‘though you may think she is a Biograph, she isn’t a Biograph any more’, and the ‘We Nail a Lie’ advertisement in their 12 March 1910 issue overtly added to this effort to announce this acquisition of personnel from an

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MPPC company, stating that Lawrence was “formerly known as the “Biograph” girl (see Fig. 2.4).97 Publicly announcing the name ‘Florence Lawrence’, that is, was not publicly attributing creative contribution. In the point-of-sale poster reproduced in Fig. 2.5a and 2.5b, with its insistence that Lawrence “Appears in “Imp” Films only”, the key message was that IMP’s employee must not be mistaken for an employee of another company, a message which served Laemmle’s interests given that the old employer was a member of a group of companies currently threatening the very existence of Laemmle’s own business. And in this context a name was particularly useful: though a photograph alone could have sufficed to indicate which production value – that is, in this case, which person – was now the exclusive property of IMP, providing a name promised to make this act of recognition easier.98 This industry divide also provides an elementary explanation for Laemmle and Cochrane’s decision to stage the 25–7 March 1910 weekend of personal appearances by Florence Lawrence and her fellow performer King Baggot in St Louis, Missouri, even though St Louis is over 900 miles from New York City, where IMP’s office was located, and over 250 miles from Chicago, Illinois, where the LFS’s head office was located (Missouri adjoins Illinois): Laemmle had ample reason to expect events held in either New York City or Chicago to be disrupted by agents of the MPPC, as both cities were home to MPPC member production companies, and so selected another city from the heartland of the ‘independent’ hiring companies.99 This is a much more feasible motive than the motives given by deCordova (that Baggot had achieved some recognition in the summer of 1909 on the stage in St Louis (PP, 61)) and Kelly Brown (that it was Baggot’s home town), though Brown’s conjecture that St Louis may have been home to some of IMP’s financial backers seems sound (51). The importance of the recognisability that Lawrence had nearincidentally accrued at Biograph is also evidenced by IMP’s not orchestrating a publicity campaign centred on King Baggot, who started appearing in IMP films released no later than 27 December 1909100 (i.e. shortly after Lawrence), from the moment they employed him. Robert Cochrane’s later claim that the IMP company “published a series of ads boosting Florence Lawrence and next Mary Pickford and King Baggot and other players as fast as we added them to our staff” (‘Beginning’, 322) is not quite true: because Baggot had not established the same degree of recognisability with the general public as Florence Lawrence, IMP only made him the subject of publicity several months after employing him, and only off the back of their campaign for Lawrence.101 Given that IMP had already orchestrated a purposeful publicity campaign for Lawrence by late March 1910, the St Louis episode becomes less important in the history of film stardom, though it does not exactly pale into insignificance. “I shall never forget that trip to St. Louis”, Lawrence wrote in 1915. “It simply overwhelmed me. For two days and nights I made short talks – “clever little speeches,” so the newspapers said – telling how I came to enter motion pictures. Events came so thick and fast that I was dazzled” (‘Growing’, Part 4, 146).102 Exploring the events

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that led up to the St Louis episode can further illuminate Laemmle’s publicity campaign for Lawrence, as well as clearing up some historiographical confusion. In mid-February 1910 IMP seem to have arranged for Lawrence to visit several St Louis cinemas the following month, including the Gem, temporarily relocated to the Grand Opera House. IMP then released a story to various national and local newspapers around 26 February 1910, stating that on 19 February obituaries for Florence Lawrence had appeared in local newspapers in St Louis, and that these obituaries had caused a panic among the managers of several St Louis independent cinemas, among them Frank Talbot of the Gem, as well as the manager of Wagner, the city’s main independent hiring company, both of whom had then, the story claimed, frantically telegraphed the IMP company in New York to ask if these obituaries were accurate. (IMP may have released this ‘story about a story’ several times over the course of about three weeks.) The most complete surviving version of IMP’s press release reporting on these ‘events’ included an anonymous lament that a cinemagoer, it claimed, had written in response to the news of her death: IN MEMORY OF FLORENCE LAWRENCE (Died February 17, 1910.) The angel of death has come again, And gathered for his own, A Friend whom we have learned to love, Whose name we’ve never known. As a loving and faithful wife; Or a maiden full of grace; She had made us laugh and cry, And in our heart she’s found a place. On many a pleasant journey With her we have been, When the Man up in the gallery Flashed the picture on the screen. But now she is gone forever, And we have lost a pearl: We shed a tear in memory of The moving picture girl.103

Several newspaper editors seem to have been convinced by this press release’s claim that a story about Lawrence’s death had been printed somewhere, as versions of this ‘story about a story’ appeared in some local Mid-West newspapers, including the St Louis Post-Dispatch, on 6 March 1910;104 on 7 March 1910 a contributor to Louisville’s Courier-Journal remarked that “it was only the other day that a report had gained wide credence that this charming actress had met with an accident

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while posing on the streets of New York”.105 Thus although, as deCordova noticed, no obituaries for Florence Lawrence were printed in St Louis newspapers between mid-February and early March 1910 (PP 58), IMP cannily faked these obituaries by faking a horrified response to them.106 In mid-March 1910 IMP included the St Louis Post-Dispatch in those newspapers which it was supplying with full-page advertorials about Lawrence, to cultivate interest in the St Louis public in advance of the visit. From Tuesday 22 March 1910 the Gem announced in the local press that Lawrence and Baggot would be making personal appearances there the following weekend.107 The visit took place from 25–7 March, with the St Louis Times featuring the visit on their front page on 25 March.108 During the visit Cochrane ensured that Lawrence was interviewed by all of the St Louis newspapers.109 Clearly, in staging this story about a vicious rumour being spread and then resoundingly quashed, Laemmle and Cochrane were implying that the MPPC had been lying about their competition. This was a well-established habit: since May 1909 the ‘Independents’ had repeatedly used trade press advertising to paint the MPPC as deceitful.110 But IMP were also staging a press story about a public (who knew Lawrence by name, treated her as a production value and regarded her as “the queen of moving picture actresses”)111 collectively and loudly voicing their distress at hearing that she had been taken from them. This overt claim that she was being treated as a production value by audiences was purposed to make it more normal for members of the public to treat her as a production value and so to increase the number of people doing so. With this stunt IMP escalated their campaign for Lawrence, just as Pathé had escalated their Linder campaign in June 1910 when they started including the word ‘Max’ in the titles of Linder’s films, so as to increase her value as an asset.112 At this point it is worth discussing the one substantial piece of evidence of publicity to the general public that deCordova adduced in support of his claim that the MPPC and ‘Independent’ companies commenced their publicity campaigns simultaneously: the article in the 6 March 1910 issue of the Sunday Magazine of the St Louis PostDispatch which included material on Lubin and Edison performers in addition to material on Florence Lawrence (PP, 59–60). The opening text of this article is clearly a reprint of publicity material supplied by IMP or the LFS:



What American actress is most popular with the people? Whose face is most familiar to the greatest number? At once the names of Maud Adams, Ethel Barrymore, Julia Marlowe, Margaret Anglin, and other stage celebrities will occur to the reader in competition for first place in the affections of the great amusement seeking public, and as the one with whose features the public is most familiar. But none of these players, great as their popularity is and as well known as they are, can compete with those actresses of the “silent drama,” the moving picture shows whose names few, if any, of their admirers every [sic] heard. There is one actress playing in the silent drama, who is seen acting every night in every week simultaneously in the theaters in nearly every town in every

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state in the Union whose face is known to 10,000 people to the one who knows Maud Adams. Her name is Florence Lawrence, and she is a member of the stock company of a New York firm of moving picture film manufacturers. A few days ago the newspapers printed a report that she had been killed by a car [i.e. a tram] in New York, and for the first time her picture was shown in the public prints. She was at once recognized as a favorite of the “canned drama” and deep regret was expressed everywhere that she would be seen no more on the screen of the picture show. But the report proved to be a canard, the third that had been sent out by a rival of the filmmaker who is so fortunate as to control her services as an actress.113

After some filler detailing the steady realisation among production companies of the importance of quality in scenario-writing and acting, the writer added that Florence Lawrence commands a salary which equals about $25 a minute for the time she is actually engaged in a play. […] Miss Lawrence recently signed a contract with the Independent Moving Picture Co. by the terms of which she is to receive a salary of $15,000 a year for life. This makes her the highest-salaried moving-picture actress in the world. In the company that is supporting Miss Lawrence is King Baggott [sic], a young St. Louis actor who was in the Suburban Stock Co. last summer.114

The story about the reports of Lawrence’s death and their being subsequently revealed to be lies, along with the specifics of Lawrence’s salary and Baggot’s past in St Louis, all indicate that this copy had been supplied by IMP or the LFS. By contrast, the article’s material on the performers employed by the other companies was scarce and vague: Pilar Morin, the article reports, “came to this country from France as a pantomimist, and found her greatest opportunity in the rise of the moving-picture drama. She is one of the best-paid stars in the new business, and her face, if not her name, is known to thousands of admirers who see her act on the screen.”115 While the article, as deCordova points out, included no photograph of Lawrence (PP, 59), the 13 images that were included were all oddly vague: one was a photograph captioned merely “one of the Selig actors made up to represent Roosevelt” (i.e. the supplier did not give his name), two were scenes from Selig films that were captioned with the title of the film rather than the name of any of the performers, three images depicted named stage performers working for the A.G. Whyte stock company, shortly due to leave for a visit to Europe for a vaguely described performance that would be filmed (i.e. people who were not film performers), one was a named still of Pilar Morin in Comedy and Tragedy (released in the US on 2 November 1909), and one was a group photograph of 11 members of the Edison stock company with no accompanying names. The only named photographs of film performers were an image of Eleanor Caines of Lubin and four images of Edison employees: Rolinda Bainbridge, Bernardine Leist, Ethel Jewett and Ethel Browning. The text, near the end of the fifth of its five columns, listed the names of these five performers and five other Edison performer employees (all male), and the only specialist information that the

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text supplied (i.e. other than such non-information as Bernadine Leist’s part in Michael Strogoff being “one of her best parts”) was that Rolinda Bainbridge was “for five years with Richard Mansfield, under whom she was thoroughly well grounded in her art” and that Laura Sawyer was “with Ada Rehan and Otis Skinner, and received her training in stock and road companies for several years before she joined the Edison Stock.”116 At the very least, the vagueness and scarcity of this information show that these materials were not necessarily supplied by Edison and/or Lubin. I will even go one step further, to claim that all of this other information was supplied by IMP or the LFS as an elaborate smokescreen for a story whose purpose was publicising Florence Lawrence: the Edison names and images could have been easily derived from a combination of the trade press (which had mentioned Ethel Browning (see page 49n67)), the issues of the EK in late 1909 that had included titbits of biographical information (see page 27), discussions among trade personnel and publicity stills for old films (indeed, all but one of the films mentioned had been released in 1909); likewise the name of Lubin’s Eleanor Caines (about whom the article supplied no further information) could have been derived from gossip among the trade and the photograph of her could have been taken from a production still. These mentions and photographs of Edison and Lubin performers also seem to have been deliberately geared not to benefit their employers: Ethel Browning, for example, had stopped performing for films altogether by March 1910. Indeed, although it is conceivable that at least some of this material reproduced genuine publicity produced by the Edison Company, I have found no independent confirmation of the existence of any such publicity in either the film trade press or the popular press. Given that two weeks later the same publication carried an article which focused exclusively on Lawrence and which was much more brazenly an ‘advertorial’ supplied by IMP or the LFS (it used the title ‘The Girl of a Thousand Faces’, gave the figures of 300 roles a year and a $15,000-per-year salary and used seven of the eight ‘range’ photographs reproduced in Figs. 2.5a–b and 2.6 [labelled, corresponding to the originals, Determination, Sadness, Concentration, Horror, Hilarity, Piety and Coquetry]),117 it might be asked why Robert Cochrane at IMP felt it necessary to provide the newspaper with a much more stealthy version of the same material for this earlier issue of the same magazine. The answer is probably that in the case of St Louis, where he and Laemmle were already, at this point, planning to stage Lawrence and Baggot’s weekend of personal appearance, he wanted to play out a story in which full-blown publicity material seemed to be provided only in response to widespread public dismay; this narrative was already in action in the text printed in the 6 March 1910 issue. All of the above evidence points to a single governing cause for the inception of a film star system in the US: the industry divide that Thomas Edison had instigated when he decided to try to use patent legislation to oligopolise the production, rental and exhibition of films in the US from 1907. Even if Pathé Frères’ publicity campaign for Linder provided Laemmle with a model for a new business practice, it cannot be concluded that the film star system simply spread automatically from France to the US: Laemmle’s motives for adopting Pathé’s model derived from the peculiarities of

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the US film industry described above. It could even feasibly be claimed that Thomas Edison instigated the film star system in the US by accident, simply by fostering, via the AEL/FSA and then the MPPC, an industrial situation which, for as long as anonymity was the norm for the dominant faction, pressured those who, voluntarily or involuntarily, were operating outside the dominant faction to adopt it. The next chapter will look at some of the subsequent events, in both the US and Europe, to further illuminate the reasons for the inception of a film star system.

Notes 1. DeCordova was also somewhat reductive in his summaries of these works. He misrepresents even Frank Woods’s 1919 brief history, which is no more than 2,000 words long, in claiming that Woods proposed ‘events’ 3 and 4: Woods had claimed that “[t]he first of the producing companies to yield openly to the public demand for the names of their players was the Kalem company [a member of the MPPC] which commenced advertising Alice Joyce and others in posters and billing” (117). Though Woods was mistaken about Alice Joyce here, he was not arguing for the primacy of Laemmle and/ or the ‘Independents’. Likewise, Ramsaye made no mention of ‘event’ 1 (Million, 523). Similarly, Hampton made no mention of Lawrence (the focus of purported ‘event’ 3), championing, albeit mistakenly, Mary Pickford as the person whom Laemmle decided to make into the first film star (87). Such errors quite understandably motivated deCordova to regard these earlier histories as inaccurate generally. 2. For example, James Hoff wrote for MPW in 1918 that “Bob Cochrane [at IMP] was the man behind the gun, and for the first time motion picture players were featured in public print”, that is, in a non-specialist publication (320). Ramsaye likewise claimed that Florence Lawrence was the first film star in the US film industry (Million, 523), as did Alexander Walker (31–6). Anthony Slide claimed in 1973 that “the world’s first film star, was Florence Lawrence” (Griffith, 24), which of course also means that he thought that she was the first film star in the US. 3. See for example Staiger, ‘Combination’; Keil, ‘Advertising’; Bowser, Transformation; Quinn; and Alvarez. 4. See for example Anon, ‘The Compliments of the Season to all World Readers’, MPW 3.26 (26 December 1908), 519. 5. One of the communiqués summoning them appeared in the 2 January 1909 issue of MPW, printed on 26 December 1908: see Anon, ‘All Film Renters’, MPW 4.1 (2 January 1909), 4. 6. Bowser gives 150 exchanges (Transformation, 32), counting multiple branches of one hiring company as separate companies (understandably, given that the MPPC did the same). 7. See Anon., ‘To the Exhibitors of Moving Pictures’, MPW 4.4 (23 January 1909), 92–3, 92 (69 hiring companies), and Anon., ‘Moving Picture Patents Company’, MPW 4.5 (30 January 1909), 129 (70 hiring companies), 4.6 (6 February 1909), 157 (67 hiring companies), 4.7 (13 February 1909), 185 (68 hiring companies), 4.8 (20 February 1909), 219

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(70 hiring companies), 4.9 (27 February 1909), 253 (68 hiring companies), 4.10 (6 March 1909), 285 (67 hiring companies). 8. See ‘Independent Film Protective Association’, MPW 4.3 (16 January 1909), 66–7. 9. Advertisement for Laemmle Film Service, MPW 4.16 (17 April 1909), 480–1. When he cancelled his MPPC licence, Laemmle had branches in Chicago (the first, opened in November 1906), Minneapolis, Portland, Salt Lake City, Evansville, Omaha, Winnipeg and Montreal (the two Canadian branches established during 1908) and a new branch in Denver (Advertisement for Laemmle Film Service, MPW 4.17 (24 April 1909), inside front cover. No other contemporary hiring company had this many branches (see e.g. Anon., ‘Directory of Film Exchanges’, MPW 5.7 (14 August 1909), 232). See also Laemmle, ‘Extract from This Business of Motion Pictures’, Film History, 61). 10. See Anon., ‘Independent Film Renter’s Protective Association’, MPW 4.23 (5 June 1909), 776. 11. Anon., ‘Directory of Film Exchanges’, MPW 5.7 (14 August 1909), 232. 12. Anon., ‘The International Projecting and Producing Company’, MPW 4.8 (20 February 1909), 197–8. See Alvarez, 249. 13. Advertisement for Film Import & Trading Company, MPW 5.15 (9 October 1909), 492– 3. See also Keil, ‘Advertising’, 476. 14. Anon., ‘Meeting of Independent Film Renters in Chicago’, MPW 5.11 (11 September 1909), 343. 15. Advertisement for NYMPCo, MPW 4.19 (8 May 1909), 613. 16. Anon., ‘Now for the Pirates’, FI 4.21 (22 May 1909), 5. 17. The decision to form the new company, and the name ‘Yankee’, was announced in Advertisement for Carl Laemmle/Yankee Films Company, MPW (5 June 1909), 740, and the name ‘IMP’, along with the mischievous imp trademark, was announced in Advertisement for IMP, MPW 5.1 (3 July 1909), 22. 18. Anon., ‘The Powers Company’, MPW 5.14 (2 October 1909), 444. 19. The new companies alluded publicly to non-patent-infringing cameras, but were more likely actually using patent-infringing cameras to obtain footage while using non-patentinfringing cameras as decoys to distract anyone watching them at the instruction of the MPPC; their supply of film stock came from illicit dealings with Eastman Kodak and then, from September 1909, from the Lumière company (Bowser, Transformation, 74). 20. Advertisement for NIMPA, MPW 5.24 (11 December 1909), 862. 21. Its formation was announced in such trade press articles as Anon., ‘Independents Meet Today to Form New Film Company’ (9 September 1909), Variety 16.1 (11 September 1909), 12, and Anon., ‘National Independent Moving Picture Alliance’, MPW 5.13 (25 September 1909), 410–12. See also Alvarez, 250. 22. Advertisement for NIMPA, MPW 5.21 (20 November 1909), 739. 23. Anon., ‘Notes from National Independent Moving Picture Alliance’, MPW 5.15 (9 October 1909), 488. 24. The Danish company Nordisk seems to have been the only company issuing posters in North America in the first half of 1908 (Advertisement for Great Northern, MPW 2.14



(4 April 1908), 301).

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25. Advertisement for the Poster Title Co., MPW 3.1 (4 July 1908), 14. 26. Advertisement for Selig, MPW 3.26 (26 December 1909), 534. 27. See for example Anon., ‘Essanay Issues Handsome Poster’, MPW 5.9 (28 August 1909), 280, and Advertisement for Kalem, MPW 5.15 (9 October 1909), 502. 28. Advertisement for NYMPCo & Advertisement for Centaur, MPW 4.19 (8 May 1909), 613 & 614. 29. Advertisement for World, MPW 5.22 (27 November 1909), 748. 30. Anon., ‘The National Independent Moving Picture Alliance’, MPW 5.23 (4 December 1909), 795. 31. Anon., ‘The Poster End’, MPW 5.22 (27 November 1909) 752. 32. These posters were also either free or priced at a nominal 5 or 10 cents; by contrast, the lobby display board advertised by Kalem in early January 1910, showing anonymous images of 11 members of their stock company and the company’s trade mark, was a large (36in/91cm by 70in/177cm), wood-mounted and glass-fronted photographic poster, for which Kalem charged $16 (Anon., ‘Lobby Displays for M. P. Theaters’, MPW 6.2 (15 January 1910), 42), the equivalent of roughly $420 in 2017 (Williamson, ‘Seven’). 33. Anon., ‘The Kalem Stock Company’, NYDM 51.1567 (2 January 1909), 8. 34. Anon., Note, MPW 4.16 (17 April 1909), 468. 35. Kelly Brown claims that the first film for which Lawrence performed during her stint at Biograph, The Bandit’s Waterloo, was released on 4 August 1908 (160). The Griffith Project states that this film was filmed on 6 and 8 July 1908 (Graham, 67), although the Griffith Project itself first mentions Lawrence in relation to The Girl and the Outlaw, filmed around 31 July – 2/4 August 1908 (Gunning, ‘The Girl’ 88–90.) 36. Anon., ‘Will Make Pictures in Mexico’, MPW 5.12 (18 September 1909), 381. 37. Anon., ‘Edison Progress’, MPW 5.24 (11 December 1909), 833–5, 834. Edison’s modest crediting of three of them to the trade in the form of brief articles in the 15 September 1909, 1 October 1909 and 15 December 1909 issues of the EK (see page 27) also implies the existence of at least medium-term contracts. Musser remarks that it was following Horace Plimpton’s appointment as the studio manager at Edison in late March 1909 that a number of performers were hired full-time, though whether permanently is unclear (Before, 455). 38. The new norm was not, of course, that of only performing: it was normal, as Gaines points out, for someone habitually acting to also write or direct or produce, or do several of these, and still rank as an actor (‘Anonymity’, 451). 39. Gunning repeated this claim in 1999, writing that “Griffith featured her [Florence Lawrence] more frequently than his other women leads (Linda Arvidson, Marion Leonard), especially in roles that involved either a fair amount of action or light comedy, reserving Leonard for society ladies or vamps and Arvidson for tragic maidens” (‘The Girl’, 89). 40. Data on Lawrence’s prominence during her entire stint at Biograph taken from films 41–170 in The Griffith Project (see Works Cited under Usai). 41. Anon., ‘Photographs of Moving Picture Actors’, MPW 6.2 (15 January 1910), 50. 42. Gauntier recalled in 1928 that in the 1908–9 theatrical season this was still the case (‘Blazing’, Part 2, 169). 43. Anon., ‘Licensed Films’, MPW 5.9 (28 August 1909), 298.

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44. See Anon., ‘Independent Films’, MPW 5.10 (4 September 1909), 327. 45. Figures taken from ‘Latest Films’ lists in multiple issues of K&LW. 46. See for example Advertisement for the Laemmle Film Service, MPW 4.25 (19 June 1909), 818. 47. Advertisement for IMP/Hiawatha, MPW 5.18 (30 October 1909), 594. 48. Laemmle, ‘Extract from This Business of Motion Pictures’, Fort Lee: The Film Town, 29. 49. Advertisement for Carl Laemmle/Yankee Films Company, MPW (5 June 1909), 740. 50. See Anon., ‘Maurice Fleckles’, MPW 5.11 (11 September 1909), 343. 51. Ship Manifest, First Class or Saloon Passengers, Kaiser Wilhelm II, 19 October 1909, Statue of Liberty – Ellis Island Foundation, accessed 14 May 2014, . Kelly Brown, Lawrence’s biographer, mistakenly assumes that Laemmle was back from this trip by July 1909 (42). 52. Anon., ‘Carl Laemmle Returns from Europe and Enthuses Over ‘Imp’ Films, MPW 5.18 (30 October 1909), 605. 53. For example, shortly after his return he stated his plans for using colour film, which indicates that he was exposed to the Europe-wide publicity for Kinemacolor (spelt using the American Standard English spelling even in the UK, as it was named by the American-born Charles Urban), which had not yet been shown in the US (qtd. Anon., ‘An Interview With Carl Laemmle’, MPW 5.22 (27 November 1909), 764; Kinemacolor debuted in the US on 11 December 1909 (Anon., ‘Kinemacolor’, MPW 5.25 (18 December 1909), 873–4)). 54. Anon., ‘Gossip of the Stage’, Brooklyn Daily Eagle 70.244 (3 September 1909), 18. 55. Anon., ‘Comedy and Music Combined at Local Playhouses’, Buffalo Courier (21 September 1909), 8. 56. Anon., ‘Has Star Actress’, Variety 16.6 (16 October 1909), 13. 57. Advertisement for IMP/Love’s Stratagem, MPW 5.18 (30 October 1909), 615. Anon., ‘Carl Laemmle Returns from Europe and Enthuses Over ‘Imp’ Films’, MPW 5.18 (30 October 1909), 605. 58. Advertisement for IMP/Lest We Forget, MPW 5.25 (18 December 1909), 866. 59. Advertisement for IMP/Lest We Forget, MPW 5.25 (18 December 1909), 866. 60. Advertisement for IMP, MPW 6.4 (29 January 1910), 134. Advertisement for IMP, Billboard 22.5 (29 January 1910), 32. Gunning notes that Lawrence’s name was also given by IMP in connection with Coquette’s Suitors in the 22 January 1910 issue of Show World, so they presumably placed the same advertisement across the relevant trade papers (D.W. Griffith, 221.) 61. Advertisement for IMP, MPW 6.9 (5 March 1910), 323. 62. Advertisement for IMP, MPW 6.4 (29 January 1910), 134. 63. Advertisement for IMP, MPW 6.10 (12 March 1910), 365. DeCordova mistakenly ascribes this to the 5 March 1910 issue (PP, 58, 93n16), although this mistake is understandable as 5 March 1910 was the date when the 12 March 1910 issue was printed. The advertisement also appeared in Billboard 22.11 (12 March 1910), 29. The remaining two advertisements to mention Lawrence’s name were for His Sick Friend, released on 21 March 1910, and The Stage Note, released on 24 March 1910 (both in



Advertisement for IMP, MPW 6.11 (19 March 1910), 409).

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64. Advertisement for IMP, MPW 6.13 (2 April 1910), 497. 65. Advertisement for IMP, MPW 6.19 (14 May 1910), 811. 66. Advertisement for IMP, MPW 6.9 (5 March 1910), 323. 67. Advertisement for IMP, MPW 6.10 (12 March 1910), 365. 68. Anon., ‘Vitagraph Girl Feted’, MPW 6.16 (23 April 1910), 644 (MPW’s first mention of her name); Anon., ‘Gossip of the Stage’, The Brooklyn Daily Eagle 71.10 (11 April 1910), 19. On the corner of Broadway and Halsey Streets, this cinema was roughly 6 miles from the Vitagraph studio in Flatbush. These accounts reported that, during the programme, a singer, accompanied by song slides (and presumably the venue’s own musicians), sang ‘The Vitagraph Girl’ (commissioned by Vitagraph executive J. Stuart Blackton), with slides permitting audience participation. According to Slide, the song and slides “featured at nickelodeons across the United States” (Silent Topics, 85), although no account that I have found indicates that Turner herself left New York. Local newspaper advertising describes performances of the songs at the Globe in Ogden, Utah (Advertisement for Oracle/Isis/Globe/Joie, The Ogden Standard (12 April 1910), 6) and the Theatorium in Mount Carmel, Pennsylvania (Advertisement for the Theatorium, Daily News 32.173 (16 April 1910), 1) indicating that it was performed widely outside New York in her absence. The song sheet was also sold popularly, for home use. See Wlaschin, 10. 69. The postcard was deposited, according to the Library’s staff, in 1949 along with the items in the Florence Lawrence Collection used by deCordova in the 1980s (email from Val Almendarez to the author, 10 September 2014), and so it seems that while it was available to deCordova during his research, he overlooked it. 70. Release dates for the films listed are given in MPW as follows: Never Again (24 January 1910; IMP), Cursed Cage (15 November 1909; Aquila via the Film Import & Trading Co.), The Child Benefactor (8 January 1910; Great Northern), The Witch (5 November 1909; Le Lion via the Film Import & Trading Co.), In the Race (either The Sack Race (5 November 1909; Le Lion via the Film Import & Trading Co.) or The Run for the Money (7 December 1909; Powers)), and Rose of the Philippines (24 January 1910; IMP). 71. As the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research is based on the personal collections of Daniel Blum, to whom Lawrence gave her own collections of memorabilia (see Kelly Brown, 137), it is reasonable to assume that these eight ‘range’ photographs came from her. She, therefore, presumably obtained them from IMP when she left the company in September 1910. Each of the eight photographs is also stamped on the reverse with “Property of Photoplay Magazine Return to Library”, so she had presumably given them away before. 72. See Advertisement for the Laemmle Film Service, Show World (6 July 1907), 2. 73. Classifieds, St Louis Post-Dispatch 62.189 (25 February 1910), 16. 74. Advertisement for the Hopkins, Courier-Journal (Louisville, Kentucky) 113.15041 (7 March 1910), 7. 75. Anon, ‘Fair Matinee-Goers Worship at Shadowgraph Shrine as Though Actors Were Flesh and Blood’, St Louis Post-Dispatch 62.142 (9 January 1910), 1&3, 3.

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76. Anon., ‘The Stage’, Leavenworth Times (Leavenworth, Kansas), Sunday 27 February 1910, 9. 77. Anon., ‘Eva Tanguay is Olympic’s Star for Next Week’, St Louis Post-Dispatch 62.191 (27 February 1910), 9. Kindem, 81. 78. Advertisement for the Lyric, Arkansas City Daily Traveler 25.200 (7 March 1910), 8. 79. Anon., ‘Miss Florence Lawrence’, Arkansas City Daily Traveler 25.204 (11 March 1910), 5. A briefer version of this publicity for Lawrence had appeared in the same paper on the preceding two days (Anon., ‘Silent Drama Fiends’, Arkansas City Daily Traveler 25.202&203 (9&10 March 1910), 5. 80. See for example Advertisement for the Bijou Theatre, The Republic (Columbus, Indiana), 23 March 1910, 4. 81. ‘Lux Graphicus’, ‘On the Screen’, MPW 6.11 (19 March 1910), 420. 82. Anon., ‘The Maude Adams of the Moving Picture Drama’, Chicago Sunday Tribune 69.12 (20 March 1910), part 8, p. 6. 83. See for example Anon., ‘The Girl of a Thousand Faces’, St Louis Post-Dispatch Sunday Magazine, 20 March 1910, B1. 84. In a detailed review of Biograph’s Lady Helen’s Escapade, printed in the 24 April 1909 issue of MPW, after praising “the Biograph players” as a collective, the copywriter remarked that “the chief honours of the picture are borne by the now famous Biograph girl, who must be gratified by the silent celebrity she has achieved. This lady combines with very great personal attractions very fine dramatic ability indeed.” (Anon., ‘Notable Films of the Week’, MPW 4.17 (24 April 1909), 515.) Lawrence was also called the “Biograph Girl” by a contributor to MPW in their 3 July 1909 issue in a review of The Way of Man (Anon., ‘Comments on the Week’s Films’, MPW 5.1 (3 July 1909), 12–14, 12). 85. Maybelle Kelley, an employee of the Bell Theatre in Sacramento, California, wrote to American Mutoscope & Biograph, enclosing one of their bulletins showing an image from Tomboy Willie, asking for “the name of the young lady or if she would be so kind as to send me a picture of herself”. The letter was dated 11 December 1908 (Correspondence, Florence Lawrence Collection, MHL, vf.211 (see also deCordova, Picture Personalities 55)). 86. Letter from Sarah Bendall to Florence Lawrence, 6 November 1909, Florence Lawrence Collection, Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History. 87. Advertisement for the Lyric, Daily News, Carmel, Pennsylvania, 32.72 (18 December 1909), 1. 88. Advertisement for the Lyric, Mount Carmel Item 23.41 (18 December 1909), 1. 89. Advertisement for the Lyric, ‘The Lyrics is Shouting Imp’, Mount Carmel Item 23.48 (29 December 1909), 1, 4. 90. Anon., ‘The Very Latest’, Bioscope 160 (4 November 1909), 37–45, 41. 91. I am grateful to Richard Koszarski for this last idea. 92. Advertisement for IMP/Love’s Stratagem, MPW 5.18 (30 October 1909), 615. 93. Advertisement for IMP/The Forest Ranger’s Daughter/The Brave Policeman, MPW 5.20 (13 November 1909), 701; Advertisement for IMP/Her Own Way, MPW 5.22 (27



November 1909), 748.

North America  153

94. Advertisement for IMP/Lest We Forget, MPW 5.25 (18 December 1909), 866. 95. Anon., ‘Picture Personalities: Victoria Lepanto’, MPW 6.8 (26 February 1910), 294. 96. William Ranous was IMP’s very first ex-MPPC employee, and had left Vitagraph, Laemmle later recalled, “due to a disagreement” (Laemmle, ‘Extract from This Business of Motion Pictures’, Fort Lee: The Film Town, 28). Laemmle had the option of building a public profile for Ranous, but Ranous was a producer/director; that Laemmle decided not to embark on such a publicity campaign for Ranous indicates that only ‘faced’ employees were deemed worthwhile publicising. Similarly, although Centaur employed Joseph Golden, who had written scenarios for Biograph, as a scenarist and director in mid-1909, they only saw fit to announce this acquisition to the trade (Advertisement for Centaur/Film Import & Trading Co., MPW 5.6 (7 August 1909), 209). 97. Advertisement for IMP, MPW 6.10 (12 March 1910), 365. 98. Kelly Brown (48–9) and Tom Gunning (D.W. Griffith, 222–4) have both argued that Laemmle’s decision to mount a campaign for Florence Lawrence was probably impelled, if not wholly motivated, by his discovery of evidence that while even specialist viewers were capable of recognising her in spite of her accompanying brand name having changed, others were unable to. They both cite an example of recognition by a devout cinemagoer that would have been evident to any trade figure – a letter printed in MPW that had been written by a P.C. Levar at the Daily Coast Mail in the small, isolated coastal city of Coos Bay in Oregon, dated 30 January 1910, and sent to the editor of MPW in New York, pointing out that the woman hitherto known as the ‘Biograph Girl’ was now appearing in IMP films (see Levar, 262; this letter was noticed by Slide in 1973 (Griffith, 26), and has also been noticed by Hugues Marc Antoine Bartoli, who opines that it reads as if it was written by a journalist (72)). Courtesy of the manager of her/his local cinema (the Orpheum), Levar had seen MPW’s review of Biograph’s Through the Breakers (released 6 December 1910) printed in their 18 December 1909 issue, in which the anonymous MPW reviewer had claimed that a rumour that the woman known as ‘the Biograph Girl’ had left Biograph was clearly unfounded because she appeared in this most recent Biograph film (Anon., ‘Comments on the Films’, MPW 5.25 (18 December 1909), 880–2, 881). Levar pointed out that the woman appearing in Through the Breakers, which s/he had seen at the Orpheum during the week beginning 24 January 1910, was not the woman known as ‘The Biograph Girl’ (262). While neither writer knew the name of either woman, Levar was right: Florence Lawrence (the woman to whom these two people were referring as ‘The Biograph Girl’) had left Biograph and by 24 January 1910 eight of her films for IMP had already been released (Levar stated that s/he had noticed her in the second of these, The Forest Ranger’s Daughter (262)); the woman who appeared in Through the Breakers was actually Marion Leonard (see Gunning, ‘Through’, 119–22). That is, even though both of these people were unusually frequent watchers of films – the one was a member of the MPW staff whose job involved watching at least a portion of all films released nationally in the US and the other was close to her/his local cinema manager – only one of them was

154  The Origins of the Film Star System

able to recall the characteristics of Lawrence’s face and body with sufficient detail to distinguish them from Marion Leonard’s. While Laemmle would have been able to perceive from exposure to such remarks, in either written or spoken form, that, as Brown puts it, “Florence’s absence from Biograph had already been noticed by the fans” (48) and therefore that he had definitely acquired, in the person of Florence Lawrence, an asset worth advertising, such remarks would also have prompted him towards the prospect of publicly naming Lawrence because this had the potential to clear up remaining uncertainty about who she worked for. Gunning remarks as much (D.W. Griffith, 224). Thus though Laemmle had already decided to build Lawrence’s celebrity anonymously by the time he had the opportunity to read this letter (Levar stated that s/he had noticed that the 18 December 1910 issue of MPW also carried an IMP advertisement showing a photograph of her face accompanied by the line “she’s an IMP” [see Fig. 2.1]), indicating that he was, briefly, happy to publicise her altered allegiance, calling her simply ‘she’, his decision to name her may have been compensatory, an effort to resolve this continuing confusion. “An alarming rumour having spread around New York City”, the MPW contributor had written, that the famous Biograph girl – our girl, our only girl, whom we have silently worshipped in effigy these many months, and to whom, by the way, in this column we have made many references which surely indicate our favourable opinion of this lady – rumor having gone around that “she” was no longer to be seen in the Biograph pictures, we went specially to inspect Monday’s release for the purpose of satisfying not only our own doubts on the point, but those of many of our readers. For the number of this lady’s admirers is legion. She is the heroine of many charming stories on the silent stage. Indeed, she is just as much a personality in the Biograph Stock Company as any well-known actress would be at a Broadway house. Our doubts were set at rest as soon as the film “Through the Breakers” commenced to appear. (881, emphasis in original.) This confusion of Leonard with Lawrence by the MPW reviewer suggests that even with the current average shot distance in US film-making, faces were still not sufficiently recognisable to facilitate a star system which used performers. For example, Biograph personnel reading this review would have been justified in concluding that recognition was still too difficult for a system of celebrity to be feasible. But although it is possible that Levar’s letter, a small piece of copy in MPW, had come to Laemmle’s attention, the probable dating of the poster in Fig. 2.5 indicates that the Levar letter could not have done more than further impel a publicity campaign that Laemmle had already, by this point, decided to initiate. 99. Laemmle describes these disruptive activities in his 1927 autobiographical manuscript (see ‘Extract from This Business of Motion Pictures’, Fort Lee: The Film Town, 29–31). Pickford also recalled them in her autobiography (137), giving them as the reason why the IMP’s stock company was sent to Cuba for three months in early 1911. On the



geographical concentrations of the ‘Independents’ see Abel, Red Rooster, 94.

North America  155

100. According to Kelly Brown, Baggot’s first film was The Awakening of Bess, released in the US on 27 December 1909 (170). 101. Baggot’s name first appeared, alongside Lawrence’s, in local newspaper advertising placed by venues on 8 March 1910 (Advertisement for the Gem, St Louis PostDispatch 62.200 (8 March 1910), 14). 102. An example of an advance notice about one of these speeches (at St Louis’s Grand Opera House, temporary home of the Gem Theatre) appeared in the 2 April 1910 issue of Billboard, printed on 26 March 1910 (Will J. Farley, ‘St Louis, MO’, Billboard 22.14 (2 April 1910), 11). 103. Anon., ‘Rumor Hands a Hot One’, Billboard 22.10 (5 March 1910), 15. Tom Gunning noticed this in 1991 (D.W. Griffith, 221). 104. Anon., ‘Heroes and Heroines of Moving Picture Shows’, St Louis Post-Dispatch Sunday Magazine, 6 March 1910, 4. Anon., ‘Famous Picture Actress is Still in Posing Land’, Courier-Journal (Louisville, Kentucky) 113.15040 (6 March 1910), section 4, page 8; this article included two of the eight ‘range’ photographs and claimed that the fake obituaries had been printed on 4 March 1910. 105. Anon., ‘Love Picture and Two Star Comics’, Courier-Journal (Louisville, Kentucky) 113.15041 (7 March 1910), 10. 106. This explains why the claim that these manufactured reports of Lawrence’s death existed is so tenacious in film historiography: for examples of this claim, see Cassady 52, Schickel 11, Walker 31–2, Brownlow 156, Musser, ‘Changing’ 59, Dyer MacCann 45, Bowser, Transformation 112 and, even after deCordova pointed out that he had found no ‘original’ obituaries, Bartoli 73, Kobel 151 and Abel, Americanizing 232. 107. Advertisement for the Gem Theatre, St Louis Post-Dispatch (22 March 1910), 14. In a later advertisement the venue declared “You’ve Seen Them on the “Screen,” Come See Them in Person” (Advertisement for the Gem, St Louis Post-Dispatch 67.217 (27 March 1910), 11). 108. Anon., ‘Film Star Will Arrive on Time’, St Louis Times, 25 March 1910, 1. Kelly Brown, 55. 109. See Anon., ‘Ovation for Film Star at Union Station, St Louis Times, 26 March 1910, 3. See also W.R. Rothacker, ‘Ovation for Film Star in St Louis’, Billboard 22.15 (9 April 1910), 17. The weekend is described in depth in Kelly Brown, 55–8. 110. See for example ‘Independent Film Renter’s Protective Association’, MPW 4.23 (5 June 1909; printed on 29 May 1909), 776, a warning to exhibitors that the MPPC was trying to bluff them into becoming licensees, signed by 10 hiring companies, including the Laemmle Film Service, and Advertisement, Laemmle Film Service, MPW 4.24 (12 June 1909), 778. 111. Anon., ‘Rumor Hands a Hot One’, Billboard 22.10 (5 March 1910), 15. 112. Laemmle and Cochrane were also using this publicity campaign to attack the MPPC because the ‘Independents’ were threatened on other fronts: on 8 March 1910 the United States Circuit Court for the Southern District of New York granted an injunction restraining IMP and Pantograph, the two companies making films in New York, from

156  The Origins of the Film Star System

infringing Edison’s patent rights (Anon., ‘Edison Controls Pictures’, New York Times 59.19037 (9 March 1910), 8), which made IMP’s film-making activities more difficult. 113. Anon., ‘Heroes and Heroines of Moving Picture Shows’, St Louis Post-Dispatch Sunday Magazine, 6 March 1910, 4. 114. Ibid. 115. Ibid. 116. Ibid. 117. Anon., ‘The Girl of a Thousand Faces’, St Louis Post-Dispatch Sunday Magazine,



20 March 1910, B1.

North America  157

3

What Happened Next?

Kristin Thompson sees the formation of the MPPC and the emergence of the film star system in the US as no coincidence: in agreeing to settle for a steady minority share of the market and in agreeing to price standardisation, the eight MPPC production companies had both agreed not to overtly compete with each other and to deny themselves such methods of product differentiation as pricing; a star system promised alternative forms of competition (through advertising) and product differentiation (14). Even though, as I have shown, the ‘Independents’ were subject to a stronger pressure than the MPPC to adopt a star system in late 1909 and early 1910, the advantages over both each other and over the ‘Independents’ in the two-faction market meant that the MPPC companies were also motivated to introduce their own stars. The MPPC certainly had a sound industrial reason to respond to IMP’s Lawrence campaign in kind: as the upshot of this campaign was to establish Lawrence as a production value, IMP’s multiple nods to her previous anonymous celebrity at Biograph would have demonstrated to the executives in the MPPC companies that Biograph, one of their number, had unwittingly created value in Florence Lawrence in spite of carefully adhering to the rule of anonymity, the same realisation evinced among the executives at Pathé by news that viewers were recognising Linder after his roughly nine-month-long break from their films. As soon as they saw the advantages achieved by IMP suspending the norm of anonymity, the ‘native’ MPPC companies appear to have quickly responded in kind. In mid/late March 1910, Kalem responded with local newspaper advertising naming Gene Gauntier: advertorials entitled ‘On the Moving Picture Stage. Have you Seen This Face?’ appeared in local newspaper around the US and Canada from 17 March 1910.1 Vitagraph’s campaign of personal appearances by Florence Turner kicked off on 9 April 1910 (see page 133), in early May 1910 Biograph, as work forthcoming in Screen will show, began to use Mary Pickford as a production value in publicity issued outside the US, in July 1910 Essanay provided the NYDM with a photograph and brief biography of J. Warren Kerrigan,2 and echoes in the trade press indicate that Edison began publicising Mabel Trunelle in mid-September 1910.3 The MPPC companies also soon began to expand beyond an exclusive focus on a single person to a small cadre, just as IMP had when they expanded their spotlight to include King Baggot: Vitagraph named Maurice Costello and Edward Phillips at one of the Florence Turner events, an evening at the Knickerbocker Field

Club in Brooklyn (this one with no personal appearances but including a rendition of ‘The Vitagraph Girl’, with slides “which showed this popular actress in fetching poses”) on 4 May 1910,4 and Costello and Turner’s names were appearing together in venues’ own publicity by late May 1910, implying that Vitagraph’s had issued publicity materials naming them.5 In the 1914 article quoted in Chapter 2, Monte Katterjohn added that “[t]he owners of the Independent Moving Picture Company demonstrated to the industry that the creation of motion picture favorites was a wise move, and soon after companies began announcing the identity of their players and advertising them heavily” (32). In contrast to deCordova’s, Bowser’s and Gunning’s models, which see the MPPC affiliates and IMP as united in their attitudes towards publicity for their regular employees, this older model appears therefore to be at least partly accurate: a precise account of the events shows a gap of two to three months between the start of the Lawrence campaign in roughly late December 1909 and Kalem’s Gene Gauntier publicity in mid-March 1910, meaning that there was indeed sufficient time for IMP to have provoked the MPPC affiliates, either in the specific sense that the MPPC affiliates directly copied IMP’s Florence Lawrence campaign, or in the general sense that the increasing strength of the ‘native’ ‘Independent’ film production meant that product differentiation was now more important than it had been for the first, relatively unrivalled, year of the MPPC’s existence. But while it might seem therefore that Kalem was the second company orchestrating a publicity campaign for one of their regular performer employees in the US, second place actually, albeit by a small margin, goes to Pathé Frères and Linder. Figure 3.1 details the US release dates of the films included in Fig. 1.2 (as well as the previous films in this stint), demonstrating the backlogging mentioned above. Abel is mistaken in reporting that “[i]n the United States, Linder was first referred to by name as one of the best film comedians for his role in The Servant’s Good Joke [i.e. Aimé par sa bonne]” in the 25 September 1909 issue of MPW (Ciné, 513n135); as the trade paper’s accounts of the film reproduced in Chapter 1 indicate (see pages 94–5), although the MPW contributors recognised Linder they had not been informed of his name. But Pathé were nonetheless naming Linder popularly in the US no later than the second week of February 1910. Although his name first appeared in US film trade papers in mid-March 1910,6 ongoing projects to digitise American newspapers have revealed mentions of Linder’s name in local newspaper advertising and reviews of local film shows from 21 February 1910, in connection with Avant et … après/Before and After (released in the US on 11 February 1910), the third film featuring him that was released in the US after Le petit jeune homme (released in the US as Willyboy Gets His on 11 December 1909).7 That is, when the trade papers gave his name Pathé was already conducting a campaign, probably via posters sent to hiring companies and cinemas, directly to the general public in the US,8 a campaign that began no later than two months after the US release of the first film with which his name had been associated in



What Happened Next?  159

160  The Origins of the Film Star System

UK title and issue/release date (i.e. Europe-wide issue/release date)

1. Loved by His Servant Issued around 4–7 August 1909.

2. Theodore’s Beard Issued around 11–14 August 1909.

3. In Love with the Bearded Woman Issued around 1–4 September 1909.

4. A Young Lady Killer Issued around 8–11 September 1909.

5. A Conquest Issued around 29 September–2 October 1909.

6. An American Marriage Issued around 13–16 October 1909.

Original French title and issue/ release date

1. Aimé par sa bonne Issued c.20 August 1909.

2. La barbe de Théodore Announced in 23 August 1909 issue of Kinéma.9

3. Amoureux de la femme à barbe Probably announced in the 20 September 1909 issue of Kinéma.10 Showing at the Pathé Grolée in Lyon on 24 September 1909.11

4. Le petit jeune homme Issued by 24 September 1909.

5. Une conquête Issued by 22 October 1909.

6. Un mariage Américain Issued by 5 November 1909.

4. Miss Moneybags Wishes to Wednesday Released 10 January 1910.

9. A Conquest Released 26 March 1910.

3. Willyboy Gets His Released 11 December 1909.

unknown/not released

2. Sam’s Artistic Beard Released 13 November 1909.

1. The Servant’s Good Joke Released 25 September 1909.

US title and release date (from MPW)

86–9

175–8

91–4

–

91–4

49–52

Days between European and US issue/release dates

Fig. 3.1  The chronological order of Linder’s films, from Aimé par sa bonne until the first film with ‘Max’ in the original title, when released in France, the UK and the US. See Page 94 and Fig. 1.2 for references for datings not given here.



What Happened Next?  161

7. The Surprises of a Flirtation Issued around 20–3 October 1909.

8. A Tantalising Young Lady Issued around 10–13 November 1909.

9. Who Will Win My Heart? Released 16 November 1909.

10. The Gentleman Thief Released 1 December 1909.

11. Romeo Turns Brigand Released 4 December 1909.

12. A Student on the Spree Released 8 December 1909.

13. The Bootmaker’s Revenge Released 18 December 1909.

14. Before and After Released 24 December 1909.

15. The Adventures of Tartarin, the Younger Released 19 January 1910.

16. The Cure of Cowardice Released 2 February 1910.

7. Les surprises de l’amour Made c.October 1909.

8. Petite rosse Issued by 3 December 1909.

9. À qui mon cœur? Released by 10 December 1909.

10. Le voleur mondain Issued c.December 1909.

11. Roméo se fait bandit Shown from 17 December 1909.

12. En bombe Shown from 31 December 1909.

13. La vengeance du bottier Shown from 28 January 1910.

14. Avant et … après Shown from 7 January 1910.

15. Les exploits du jeune Tartarin Shown from 11 February 1910.

16. La timidité guérie par le serum Made c.January 1910.

7. A Cure for Timidity Released 11 March 1910.

unknown/not released

6. Before and After Released 11 February 1910.

22. One on Max Released 17 October 1910.

5. On A Racket Released 15 January 1910.

13. Romeo Turns Bandit Released 23 May 1910.

14. Max Leads Them A Novel Chase Released 25 May 1910.

12. Who Will Win My Heart? Released 18 May 1910.

10. The Little Vixen Released 28 March 1910.

8. Sporty Dad Released 12 March 1910.

(Continued)

37

–

49

303

38

170

175

183

135–8

140–3

162  The Origins of the Film Star System

UK title and issue/release date (i.e. Europe-wide issue/release date)

17. Servants and Masters Released 9 February 1910.

18. A Romantic Young Lady Released 16 February 1910.

19. The Pact Released 5 March 1910.

unknown/not released

20. The Orderly Released 16 March 1910.

21. A Prince’s Word of Honour Released 26 March 1910.

22. A Double Sight Released 30 March 1910.

23. Hubby Cures His Wife of Flirting Released 9 April 1910.

Original French title and issue/ release date

17. Une bonne pour monsieur, un domestique pour madame Shown from 11 March 1910.

18. Jeune fille romanesque Shown from 18 March 1910.

19. Le pacte Shown from mid-May 1910.

20. Je voudrais un enfant Shown from 8 April 1910.

21. Soldat par amour Shown from 15 April 1910.

22. Le serment d’un Prince Shown from 22 April 1910.

23. Mauvaise vue Shown from 29 April 1910.

24. Une ruse de mari Shown from 6 May 1910.

Fig. 3.1  Continued

unknown/not released

16. One can’t believe one’s eyes Released 1 June 1910.

15. A Prince of Worth Released 27 May 1910.

unknown/not released

unknown/not released

21. Max in a Dilemma Released 23 September 1910.

11. A Romantic Girl Released 6 May 1910.

unknown/not released

US title and release date (from MPW)

–

63

62

–

–

202

79

–

Days between European and US issue/release dates



What Happened Next?  163

24. At The Cinematograph Theatre Released 13 April 1910.

25. Poor Pa Pays Again Released 23 April 1910.

26. All’s Well that Ends Well Released 27 April 1910.

27. Baffles, Bandit Released 4 May 1910.

unknown/not released

28. A Difficult Task Released 25 May 1910.

29. A Short-Sighted Duellist Released 1 June 1910.

30. The Persuasive Powers of a Revolver Released 8 June 1910.

31. Max Tries Ski-ing Released 18 June 1910.

25. Une représentation au cinema Shown no later than 22 July 1910.

26. L’ ingénieux attentat Shown from 20 May 1910.

27. Tout est bien qui finit bien Listed in Ciné-Journal 21 May 1910.

28. Kyrelor, bandit par amour Listed in Ciné-Journal 28 May 1910.

29. Amour et fromage Listed in Ciné-Journal 11 June 1910.

30. Une epreuve difficile Listed in Ciné-Journal 18 June 1910.

31. Le duel de Monsieur Myope Listed in Ciné-Journal 25 June 1910.

32. Le revolver arrange tout Shown from 8 July 1910.

33. Max fait du ski Shown from 15 July 1910.

25. Max Goes Ski-ing Released 21 December 1910.

20. Max Has to Change Released 15 August 1910.

24. Max Has Trouble with His Eyes Released 31 October 1910.

23. Max in The Alps Released 28 October 1910.

26. Love and Cheese Released 10 July 1911.

19. Max Foils the Police Released 2 July 1910.

18. Perseverance Rewarded Released 22 June 1910.

17. Max Makes a Touch Released 17 June 1910.

unknown/not released

186

68

152

156

–

59

56

55

–

publicity in Europe. Indeed, Pathé’s US campaign for Linder might have begun as early as Le petit jeune homme / Willyboy Gets His, delayed by no more than the backlogging of Pathé’s exports to the US. Either way, they did not heed the unspoken rule of performer anonymity in publicity among the MPPC member companies. This may have been one of Pathé’s wider efforts to push back against the ‘native’ MPPC members’ attempts to limit their activities in the US (see page 168): in March 1910, for example, they established film production in the US in the form of a studio in New Jersey managed by director Louis Gasnier. Their first US film, The Girl from Arizona, was released on 16 May 1910 (Lherminier, 312; Abel, Red Rooster, 138). Describing the cinemas in Springfield, Illinois, a contributor to a December 1910 issue of MPW remarked that “[t]he ticket-seller’s window at the Royal, 216 South Sixth street […] is panelled with various pictures of the versatile Florence Lawrence of the Imp Company and this feature of the performance is a great drawing card for a desirable class.”12 Also in December 1910 FI, the MPPC’s trade publication, claimed that Laemmle’s recent “booming of the great Miss Lawrence” in the UK had been an abject failure.13 The phrasing implies that, at least in the eyes of the MPPC, using a performer’s identity as a production value was Laemmle’s modus operandi. Indeed IMP’s first export to the UK also evidences their commitment to using Lawrence as a production value: instead of Hiawatha, the first film that they released in the US, they led with their second film (which was Lawrence’s first film for them), Love’s Stratagem, which they released in the UK on 7 July 1910.14 Hiawatha was not released in the UK until two weeks later (on 21 July 1910). Their trade advertisements for Love’s Stratagem focused on Lawrence rather than the film, and they were the first advertiser in the UK trade paper K&LW to use such person-centred advertising.15 Later advertisements even stressed, to the paper’s mostly exhibitor readers, that audience members could be expected to pay to see Florence Lawrence rather than pay to see this particular film, IMP films in general or, by implication, the inside of any specific venue (see Fig. 3.2). Given this continuing provocation, it is unsurprising that in late 1910 or very early in 1911 the MPPC production companies made a collective decision to establish a new means of advertising their performer employees direct to the general public. This was Motion Picture Story Magazine, the first issue of which bore a cover date of February 1911. The cover of the first issue stated in bold capitals that it was “PUBLISHED FOR THE PUBLIC” (i.e. the general public rather than the trade),16 and this issue included named portrait photographs of Clara Williams, Alice Joyce, Charles Kent, Florence Turner, Lottie Briscoe, G.M. Anderson and Maurice Costello, all performer employees of MPPC affiliates (Kent and Anderson were also managers). This first issue was received by the Library of Congress on either 23 January or 25 January 1911, so it seems that although the initial proposal for the magazine put forward by J. Stuart Blackton in the 10 November 1910 meeting of the MPPC-licensed

164  The Origins of the Film Star System

Fig. 3.2  IMP’s advertising to the UK film trade in a 21 July 1910 issue of a trade publication.17 Note the text specifically on Lawrence in the right-hand column.

production companies only mentioned “story features […] based on licensed motion pictures” as its contents, and although the minutes for their 19 December 1910 meeting record a plan that the cover image would be a film still, which would rotate among the licensed manufacturers,18 in the last few weeks of 1910 or the first few days of 1911 the MPPC affiliates agreed to authorise a mass-circulation publication systematically featuring publicity for their performers. In addition, the minutes of their meeting of 14 February 1911 (i.e. a meeting held after the publication of the magazine’s first issue) record that the magazine’s publisher, the Motion Picture Publishing Company, “was authorized to print the names of motion picture manufacturers in connection with names and pictures of actors and actresses appearing in motion pictures”.19 This meant two things: these portrait photographs would now be gathered together into a photograph gallery at the front of each issue and so elevated to the same importance as the short stories that were ostensibly the magazine’s primary content, and each portrait photograph would be accompanied by a statement of the person’s employer; this commenced in the April 1911 issue of MPSM. There are clear signs, therefore, that the formation of the US film production, distribution and exhibition industry into two rival wings drove its gradual establishment of a system of film stardom, even though this was not the first such system in the world.



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A Note on Maxing Max A seemingly minor detail in Fig. 3.1 rewards a brief return to Pathé’s publicity campaign for Linder. As mentioned above, Pathé first made Linder the focus of a trade paper advertisement in Europe in the 14 April 1910 issue of the UK trade journal Bioscope: Your Receipts will go up by LEAPS and BOUNDS IF YOU BILL OUR NOVELTIES Every Week. We have always STAR SUBJECTS for you, and our Comics are the biggest attraction you can put in your Programs. NOTABLY those in which MAX LINDER appears are sure “Draws,” and should always be booked early, owing to the heavy demand for them.20

Later that summer, in an advertorial exclusively on Linder in the 30 July 1910 issue of the French film trade journal Ciné-Journal, Pathé claimed to exhibitors that Linder was known as “le Roi du cinématographe [the king of cinema]”. According to this advertorial, “[c]’est ainsi que l’ont baptisé les innombrables spectateurs [it is thus that he has been baptised by innumerable viewers]”.21 In their advertisement in the same issue, in which Linder and ‘Prince’ (Charles Petitdemange) were the only two people named, Pathé called them “les rois du rire [the kings of laughter]”.22 By the middle of 1910, that is, the scale of Pathé’s publicity for Linder evidenced a clear commitment on the part of his employer to using him as one of their primary production values. Indeed, June/July 1910 saw a very clear escalation of this campaign: the release, in Europe, of Max fait du ski, the first of a run of films whose titles included the name of Linder’s now regularly appearing character. Indeed, Fig. 3.1, which shows the release schedule of Linder’s films in the US, reveals much about this ‘Maxing’ phenomenon: even though their publicity campaign for Linder was initially attached to specific films, meaning that, as I have shown, it was delayed in the US as well as domestically, in mid-May 1910 Pathé’s publicists seem to have sought to overcome the delay that their US backlog caused to their publicity campaign for Linder by changing the titles of films that had been released in Europe before Max fait du ski but which were still awaiting their release in the US, starting with the US release of Le voleur mondain (as Max Leads them a Novel Chase) on 25 May 1910. Even though the first film with ‘Max’ in the title was not released in Europe until 18 June 1910 (see Fig. 3.1), the appearance of the notice of the release of Max Leads them a Novel Chase in the 28 May 1910 issue of MPW, published on 21 May 1910, for which copy would have been needed by mid-May 1910, suggests that Pathé had made the decision to begin this ‘Maxing’ of Linder’s films via titles by the beginning of May 1910.23 In all, out of eleven films from this point onwards that could be ‘Maxed’ for

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their US release, eight were given this treatment, including all of the last six films from Linder’s filmography before Max fait du ski. This ‘Maxing’ dovetailed with some elaborate publicity measures that Pathé’s American publicists were taking in the US for Linder, including announcements in December 1910 about his having survived appendicitis that sought to boost his popularity by implying that he might not appear in films again and then providing calming reassurances that he would.24 Indeed, when the editor of K&LW sent out a request for “photos and autobiographies of […] noted actors” during November 1910, Pathé was one of the first four companies to reply (the others were Edison, Vitagraph and IMP).25 This campaign was certainly being effective in making a production value out of Linder in the US, as can be seen in the admittedly skewed sampling of popular discourse that is the review: the NYDM’s reviewer first included Linder’s name in his review of Jeune fille romanesque / A Romantic Girl in the 14 May 1910 issue and continued to mention his name every time he reviewed a film featuring him for the rest of 1910, though in the case of Max Makes a Touch and Max in the Alps his surname was omitted, probably because it was not even deemed necessary, by this point, to give it.26 These reviews also consistently praised Linder. In late October 1910, for example, reviewing La vengeance du bottier / One on Max, he remarked that “[n]o farce that Max Linder has ever appeared in so well illustrates his exclusive capabilities as this one, the reason being that it is impossible to imagine any other picture comedian who would not have made the farce silly. With Linder, however, it is a continuous laugh.”27 Linder was, by this point, a successfully utilised production value in one of his employer’s primary export markets.

The Red Rooster Regardless of whether Pathé’s European publicity campaign for Linder provided IMP with a business model, there was another route via which this publicity campaign provoked the inception of film stardom in the US. In this account all of the US production companies were unified against Pathé because they were unified against European businesses and culture in general and French businesses and culture in particular. As Abel indicates, (1) Pathé films became the principal product in US film exhibition in the summer of 1905 at the latest, (2) Pathé “provided the single most significant condition of emergence for the nickelodeon” in the summer of 1905 by providing the film supply necessary to cater to the nickelodeon’s need for high film turnover (Red Rooster, 20), (3) at times Pathé were able to sell their films at prices that undercut the ‘native’ producers, and (4) even at the end of 1909 they were still releasing twice the footage per week of any other MPPC member,28 some commentators even claiming that they supplied significantly more than half of the film product – both negative and positive – in circulation (qtd. in Abel, Red Rooster, 48, 57, 87; Abel, ‘Perils’, 190). In November 1908 a contributor to the NYDM tellingly remarked that the films with which US cinemagoers were most familiar, after Pathé’s,



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were those of the ‘native’ production companies.29 Pathé reflected this prominence in their trade publications: the illustration on the cover of the 3 August 1908 issue of their weekly US trade bulletin, printed in New York, showed the Pathé chanticleer standing on a melon marked “moving picture trade” with a small man marked “independent” taking a very tiny piece of the melon. This implied that as far as Pathé were concerned, they were not just the leader among the MPPC licensees; they were the licensed trade.30 This was justifiable: when the Edison Company sent Joseph McCoy to view all of the films on show in New York cinemas throughout June 1908, he found that 177 (39%) of the 458 licensed films were Pathé’s, more than the next three most numerous brands combined (82 Vitagraph, 45 Edison and 42 Essanay) (quoted in Musser, Before, 417). The domestic film production companies allied with Edison tried several economic strategies to try to diminish Pathé’s industry dominance. Indeed, although no organisation formed in 1907, 1908 or 1909 could exclude Pathé entirely and still provide enough films to constitute a weekly programme, Edison used the AEL/ FSA and then the MPPC to try to limit and then diminish Pathé’s market share: a common 4,000 feet per-week limit on the amount of negative footage that each company could put on the market forced Pathé to release less footage in the US than they produced while permitting each of the ‘native’ companies enough room to at least double their output.31 On top of such economic strategies, the domestic production companies also strove to designate Pathé’s output as anathema to the values of United Statesians. In the period from late 1907, Abel indicates, the ‘American’ film subject, defined as wholesome, energetic, socially responsible, virile, depicting plausible events, uplifting, masculine, youthful, clearly and powerfully plotted, unpretentious, formally and technologically unobtrusive, utilising a verisimilar performance style and easily understood regardless of cultural heritage, was staked out in industry discourse as clearly distinct from, and superior to, the ‘French’ film subject, defined as risqué, salacious, sexually corrupt, morbid, immoral, degenerate, garish, catering to low humour, unsuitable for children, effeminate, reliant on artifice, unsubtly performed and using plots that were difficult for anyone without certain pieces of culturally specific prior knowledge to understand (Red Rooster, 95–102, 122–6, 136–7).32 In this effort they were supported by most of the trade press and by the National Board of Censorship, founded in March 1909, which discriminated negatively against non-‘native’ films (Abel, Red Rooster, 123–6, 136, 101). This industry effort also impelled the turn, among the ‘native’ production companies, to outdoor film-making in general and to making westerns in particular, which promised to contrast strongly with the interior and urban settings common to Pathé’s films.33 It also synchronised with the wider panics being orchestrated by white, Protestant, Anglo-Saxon moral reformers in the US during the high levels of immigration from mostly Catholic Southern European countries that the US experienced during the first decade of the twentieth century and so was not short of fuel. In addition, during 1909 it became apparent to the ‘native’ production companies that this effort was beginning to work (Abel, Red Rooster, 138).

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Although I have sought to differ from deCordova by drawing attention to the distinction between the two factions of the US film production industry, in their attitude towards nationality, at least, the MPPC companies and the ‘Independents’ were indeed as unified as deCordova suggested. As Abel has shown, fuelling a moral panic around French cultural values to try to sour the popular taste for Pathé’s films and thereby reduce Pathé’s dominance of the US film exhibition market was one of the few areas of agreement between the production and hiring companies licensed by the MPPC and the new crop of ‘Independents’ (see Abel, Red Rooster, 94-101, 118-26). The ‘Independents’ stood to benefit as much as the MPPC from Americanising film exhibition in the US. Indeed, the LFS had been an MPPC licensee for the first three months of the MPPC’s existence and, as Max Alvarez shows, for at least the first six weeks of this period Laemmle had wholeheartedly advocated the MPPC’s rules, praising such benefits of the licensing system as its capacity to prevent excessive concentrations of cinemas (248–9), so it is reasonable to assume that he also endorsed its function of limiting Pathé’s market share. Laemmle also made efforts to ‘Americanise’ domestic film production: his first trade press notice of the formation of the production company that was not yet called Independent Moving Pictures (provisionally bearing the name “Yankee Films Company”) avowed that the company “Will Make a Tremendous Speciality of American Subjects”; Laemmle told readers that the company “will make American subjects my specialty. […] I want strong, virile American subjects or typical American comics. I am going to make American ideas my strong play”.34 This explains why IMP’s first film, Hiawatha, adapted a poem by Henry W. Longfellow, an American poet whose poems were both already canonical and being commonly used to teach rhyme and metre in US schools (both of these aspects were reflected in Longfellow’s popular categorisation as a ‘Fireside Poet’ from no later than the 1880s),35 why they selected The Song of Hiawatha, a poem which emulated aboriginal North American folklore (thus combining European-American text with aboriginal-American content) in particular, and why advertising for the film claimed that it included location filming at the Minnehaha Falls in Minnesota,36 which had been a popular subject of engraving, pictorial photography and painting during the second half of the nineteenth century.37 Other early IMP films, such as Destiny (their third film, released on 8 November 1909) and His Last Game (their seventh, released on 7 December 1909), also included components of the western repertoire, including aboriginal North American characters; His Last Game even featured aboriginal North American characters playing baseball. IMP’s efforts to produce distinctively American products were certainly noticed: the anonymous writer of MPW’s review of Hiawatha remarked that it was “quite entitled right away to take rank as a first-class specimen of American-made film of an American subject by American labor.”38 While Abel implies that Linder’s recognisability could not have posed a threat to the ‘native’ US film production companies because his foreignness made him less preferable to North American audiences than their own United Statesian and Canadian performers,39 his overall argument in The Red Rooster Scare equally



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supports the hypothesis that it was witnessing Pathé extending the above distinctively French, and, in the US, undesirable, qualities into a new type of production value – stardom – via the campaign for Linder that they commenced in the US no later than mid-February 1910, that provoked the ‘native’ MPPC companies to seek to combat this perceived threat by using the same method that they were already using to try to combat Pathé’s output of fiction films: introducing their own distinctively ‘home-grown’ equivalents.40 Just as the industry-wide effort to associate the plots of home-made films with US-specific values sought to use patriotism to condition United Statesians away from their existing preference for Pathé films, so generating stars whose lives were seen to exhibit distinctively American values would serve to counter the brand of film-intrinsic stardom proposed by Pathé in the person of Linder. This causality is suggested by the contrast between the persona adopted by Linder and those of the rivals with which the ‘native’ companies responded to him. Pathé’s publicity for Linder built his persona on appearances in physical comedies about social class, heterosexual flirtation and the pursuit of both extramarital sexual pleasure and forms of physical excess: Le petit jeune homme and Une conquête, for example, both show the physical and financial excesses in which a young man indulges in his pursuit of young women; Les surprises de l’amour concerns the simultaneous wooing, by a father and his two adult sons, of a young woman, and their shared humiliation as she tries to hide each of them from the others; Le voleur mondain concerns a jewel thief who steals a diamond necklace and then escapes his pursuers; En bombe concerns extremes of drunkenness among unmarried young people. By contrast, IMP’s campaign for Lawrence stressed her dramatic capacities. In addition to the poster reproduced in Fig. 2.5, advertorials in the popular press stressed Lawrence’s vigorous health and lack of pretence: the 20 March 1910 advertorial in the Sunday Magazine of the St Louis Post-Dispatch mentioned in Chapter 2, for example, ‘quoted’ Lawrence remarking that I love the ones [films] where I can ride horseback. I was born in Hamilton, Ontario, and from the very earliest time I can remember I was always riding. The folks used to say that they never waited meals on me if they knew I was horseback, for I’d rather ride than eat. When I am riding before the moving-picture camera, I really forget the picture and everything else. And I always act better in such scenes because I am not acting at all.41

In the same vein, Kalem’s campaign for Gauntier stressed her physical capacities, stating that she was “an expert swimmer, and horseback riding is her favorite amusement”.42 In matching Pathé’s apparent furthering of their cultural ‘invasion’ of the US with their own ‘native’ performers, the ‘native’ production companies sought to cancel out this perceived advantage, and they did so in just the same way that they had been working to cancel out Pathé’s perceived advantage in the quality of their films: first, by copying precisely what Pathé was doing, and second by ensuring that their home-grown alternatives bore distinctively American characteristics that could be used to make audiences regard them as preferable objects of affection.

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Rather than responding to the perceived advantage that IMP had established with Florence Lawrence, therefore, the MPPC companies may have launched their first stardom-building publicity campaigns in response to the perceived economic and cultural threat posed by Pathé’s construction of the new classification of production value, particularly as it would have seemed to them that Pathé was trying to use this new type of production value to establish a new relationship with the US public. And it is just as likely that, several months earlier, Laemmle commenced his campaign for Florence Lawrence at the end of 1909 for the same reasons, unusually forearmed with the knowledge that a Linder campaign would soon start in the US. In this light, Pathé’s publicity campaign for Linder was just as significant an influence on the widespread adoption of the film star system in the US as the provocation provided to the MPPC companies by IMP’s campaign for Florence Lawrence. Via two paths, therefore, Pathé’s campaign for Linder can be seen as the force occasioning the emergence of film stardom in the US.

Notes 1. See The Pittsburgh Press, 17 March 1910, 14, The Spokane Press (Spokane, Washington) 8.119 (18 March 1910), 3, The Evansville Press (Evansville, Indiana) 4.226 (22 March 1910), 3, The Tacoma Times (Tacoma, Washington) 7.82 (28 March 1910), 6, and The Winnipeg Tribune (Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada) 21.85 (9 April 1910), 18. Gauntier’s publicity campaign was described in Anon., ‘The Kalem Girl’, FI 5.18 (7 May 1910), 3. 2. Anon., ‘Essanay Leading Man’, NYDM 64.1648 (23 July 1910), 28. 3. Anon., ‘Picture Personalities: Miss Mabel Trunelle’, MPW 7.13 (23 September 1910), 680. 4. Anon., ‘Moving Pictures Please the Classes’, MPW 6.19 (14 May 1910), 777. Anon., ‘Social Notes’, Brooklyn Life 41.1054 (14 May 1910), 34. 5. Anon., ‘St Elmo at the Grand Tonight’, Reno Gazette-Journal (Reno, Nevada) 34.116 (25 May 1910), 7. 6. Linder’s name first appeared in Nickelodeon in their 15 March 1910 issue (L.F. Cook, ‘Of Interest to the Trade: Pathé Prospectives’, Nickelodeon (15 March 1910), 161), in FI in their 19 March 1910 issue (which called Linder “the famous comedian who for years has made such a hit all over America in the Red Rooster Films” (Anon., ‘Pathé Pointers’, FI (19 March 1910), 7)) and in the 26 March 1910 issue of MPW (in connection with Petite rosse/The Little Vixen), which included “Max Linder, the famous comedian who has won such favour in the eyes of the American moving picture goers” (Anon., ‘Pathe Notes’, MPW 6.12 (26 March 1910), 469–71, 469) among its list of recent developments at Pathé and promised that “on March 28 Pathe will release a delightful comedy, full of vital humour and played with great gusto by Max Linder, the famous comedian who for years has made such a hit all over America in the Red Rooster films” (471). 7. Anon., Advertisement for The Majestic, Belvidere Daily Republican, Belvidere, Illinois, 18.34 (21 February 1910), 6. Anon., ‘Amusements’, The Leavenworth Times, Leavenworth, Kansas (6 March 1910), 8.



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8. Their trade advertisements first mentioned that they had a poster agent in mid-October 1909 (Advertisement for Pathé Frères, MPW 5.17 (23 October 1909), 557). 9. Anon., ‘Les nouveaux films’, Kinéma 27 (23 August 1909), 9. 10. This date is calculated on the basis of the difference between the date when certain films were listed in issues of K&LW and the dates when the same films were listed in issues of Kinéma and extending that time lag between Europe-wide and French issue/release dates into the period immediately after the surviving copies of Kinéma end (the last surviving issue is the 6 September 1909 issue). 11. Bousquet, Catalogue … 1907, 1908, 1909, 208. 12. Frank H Madison, ‘Springfield, Ill., Picture Shows’, MPW 7.25 (17 December 1910), 1420–1, 1421. 13. James S McQuade, ‘Chicago Letter’, FI 6.23 (3 December 1910), 7&27, 7. McQuade claimed that he had word of the failure of Laemmle’s efforts in the UK from Benito Nichols, head of Markt & Co., the joint UK sales agent set up by Biograph, Selig and Lubin in April 1909. 14. Anon., ‘Films of the Week’, Bioscope 193 (23 June 1910), 29–43. 15. Anon., ‘The First “IMP” Film’, K&LW 7.163 (23 June 1910), 411. 16. MPSM 1.1 (February 1911), front cover. It is revealing that most of the first generation of popular film magazines were set up by collaborations between production companies: MPSM was set up in late 1910 by the nine MPPC production companies, The Pictures was set up in late 1911 by the UK selling agent for three of the MPPC companies (at the time these were Biograph, Kalem and Lubin), and Moving Picture Stories was set up in the US in late 1912 by the 11 production companies affiliated with the new Universal Film Manufacturing Company. Only Photoplay, launched in the US in August 1911, was outside the control of production companies. 17. Advertisement for IMP/The Awakening of Bess, K&LW 7.168 (28 July 1910), 783. 18. Minutes of Licensed Manufacturers’ Meetings, Motion Picture Patents Company and General Film Company Collection, MHL, 2.f-11. The minutes for 10 November 1910 record that “Mr. Blackton stated that he investigated the costs and the probable advantages of a motion picture magazine and that as a result of his investigation he was assured that a magazine of this kind would be a great benefit to the trade and that it could be operated at a fair profit by conducting same along the lines of other weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly magazines”. 19. Minutes of Licensed Manufacturers’ Meetings, Motion Picture Patents Company and General Film Company Collection, MHL, 2.f-11. David Bowers argues that when the MPPC companies collectively launched MPSM in February 1911, although they were all (except Biograph) willing to provide information about their players on request, they still did not consider players’ identities as important enough to feature in popular advertising for films. For Bowers it was only MPSM’s use of titbits of information on players, combined with the predominance of requests for information on players in their ‘Answers Man’ column, that in 1912 convinced all of the production companies to introduce their performer employees’ names into advertising for films, first in the trade press and then more widely (39–45). The surviving evidence clearly does not support Bowers’s claim.

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20. Advertisement for Pathé Frères, London, Bioscope 183 (14 April 1910), 50. 21. George Fagot., ‘Les comédiens au cinématographe: Max Linder’, Ciné-Journal 101 (30 July 1910), 17. The term ‘roi du cinématographe’ would be applied to Linder frequently, but this is the earliest use that I am aware of. 22. Advertisement for Pathé Frères, Ciné-Journal 101 (30 July 1910), 16. 23. Anon., ‘Licensed Releases’, MPW 6.21 (28 May 1910), 902. 24. The 17 December 1910 issue of FI included the news that Linder had been hospitalised for appendicitis (Anon., ‘Max has Appendicitis’, FI 6.25 (17 December 1910), 3), and the 31 December 1910 issue announced that they had received a copy of Linder’s card (which the magazine reproduced) bearing a hand-written message reading “I have recovered and am again appearing in Pathe Frerés [sic] films” (Anon., ‘Max Sends Compliments’, FI 6.27 (31 December 1910), 2; the three errors in the accenting of ‘Pathé Frères’ on this note suggest that this piece of publicity was designed by the staff at Pathé’s New York office). Appendicitis would still have been a sobering prospect for readers at the time. Even following the antiseptic revolution in surgery that started in the late 1870s, which by the new century meant that routine recovery from an appendectomy was becoming possible, surgeons were still wary of abdominal surgery (see Porter, 600). In June 1902, for example, surgery on Edward VII for acute appendicitis was delayed for fear that such surgery was more likely than his appendix to kill him. Even by the early 1910s, when medical practice was faced with “[s]tatistics […] overwhelming in their unanimity in recommending surgical interference as the only method of successfully combating the ravages of this dread disease”, contemporaries still acknowledged that “operation must be early” for the patient to have a good chance of surviving (McGonigle, 1). 25. Anon., ‘Weekly Notes’, K&LW 8.185 (1 December 1910), 5. 26. These were all mentioned in the anonymously written ‘Review of Licensed Films’ column in the following issues of NYDM: A Romantic Girl in 63.1638 (14 May 1910), 18–21, 20, Who Will Win My Heart? in 63.1640 (28 May 1910), 20–3, 22, Romeo Turns Bandit in 63.1641 (4 June 1910), 16–18, 16, Max Leads Them A Novel Chase in 63.1641 (4 June 1910), 16–18, 18, A Prince of Worth in 63.1641 (4 June 1910), 16–18, 18, One Can’t Believe One’s Eyes in 63.1642 (11 June 1910), 18–20, 18, Max Makes a Touch in 63.1644 (25 June 1910), 19–20, 20, Perseverance Rewarded in 64.1646 (2 July 1910), 20–1, 20, Max Has to Change in 64.1653 (27 August 1910), 26–8, 26, Max in a Dilemma in 64.5175 (16 November 1910), 30–1, 31, One on Max in 64.5172 (26 October 1910), 20–1, 30, Max in The Alps in 64.5174 (2 November 1910), 30–2, 31, Max Goes Ski-ing in 64.5181 (28 December 1910), 29–31, 29. Max Foils the Police and Max Has Trouble with His Eyes were not reviewed in NYDM. 27. Anon., ‘Review of Licensed Films’, NYDM 64.5172 (26 October 1910), 20–1, 30. 28. In April 1907, for example, Pathé could put seven films on the market totalling 2,427 feet (Advertisement for Pathé Cinematograph Co., Views & Films Index (20 April 1907), 2), while in May 1907 even the most prolific US producers – Lubin and Vitagraph – were only able to put one 1,000-foot film each per week onto the market (Abel, Red Rooster 52). Releases for the week 28 August to 3 September 1909 listed in issues of MPW show



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none of the other MPPC companies releasing more than two reels a week, while Pathé was consistently releasing four. 29. Anon., ‘Earmarks of Makers’, NYDM 60.1560 (14 November 1908), 10. 30. Pathé Frères Weekly Bulletin, New York, 40 (3 August 1908), front cover. FJS-P, PRO-P432. 31. In June 1908, before the formation of the AEL/FSA, Pathé were issuing 5,000 feet of new films per week in the US (Abel, Red Rooster 64). By July 1908 Pathé was adhering to a limit of 4,000 feet per week in the US (Pathé Frères Weekly Bulletin (New York) 36 (6 July 1908), 37 (13 July 1908), 39 (27 July 1908), 40 (3 August 1908), 41 (10 August 1908), 42 (17 August 1908), FJS-P, PRO-P-428, 430–4). This was still the case in November 1909 (Pathé Frères Weekly Bulletin (New York) 109 (29 November 1909), MHL, P-L PAT.01.02). By contrast, in the free market in the UK Pathé was announcing the issuing of films in ‘Latest Productions’ lists in K&LW in the following volumes: 4,761 feet on 20 August 1908 (3.67 (20 August 1908), 334); 5,801 feet on 17 September 1908 (3.71 (17 September 1908), 428); 4,728 feet on 15 October 1908 (3.75 (15 October 1908), 2); 5,014 feet on 6 May 1909 (4.104 (6 May 1909), 1565); 5,193 feet on 15 July 1909 (5.114 (15 July 1909), 495); 5,325 feet on 5 August 1909 (5.117 (5 August 1909), 542). By contrast, throughout 1908 and 1909, no other AEL/FSA/MPPC members released more than 2,000 feet per week: the ‘natives’ had been given plenty of room to increase their output. 32. On acting styles in particular, see also Burrows, Legitimate, 59. See also Abel, ‘Perils’, 194–200, 203–4, 222n183. 33. On the turn to outdoor filming, see my The Cinema, 60–73; Bowser, Transformation, 149–65. On the rise of the western, see Abel, Red Rooster, 151–72. That Pathé regarded their Paris-made films as less than ideal for a US audience was one reason why, when they established their US studio in March 1910, this studio’s primary output was westerns. 34. Anon., Advertisement for Carl Laemmle/Yankee Films Company, MPW (5 June 1909), 740. 35. For example, a February 1884 news article called Longfellow “our fireside poet” (Anon., ‘Our Young Folks’, The Sacramento Daily Record-Union (Sacramento, California) 50.10246/28.5250 (9 February 1884), 3). 36. Laemmle later claimed that the footage showing the Minnehaha Falls was actually stock footage (‘Extract from This Business of Motion Pictures’, Fort Lee: The Film Town, 29), although Richard Koszarski opines that the footage of waterfalls that features in the surviving copy of the film was taken in New Jersey (email to the author, 22 August 2015). 37. For example, the Falls had been painted by George Douglas Brewerton in 1874 and Albert Bierstadt in c.1880. 38. Anon., ‘First Release of “Imp” films, October 25th’, MPW 5.17 (23 October 1909), 563. 39. Abel claims that while Linder may have been recognisable to audiences by the time of the writing of an article in the 14 November 1908 issue of the NYDM, in the US “Pathé was unable to exploit his star potential as fully as it did in Europe. However marvelous his comic craft, after all, Linder had performed, and continued to perform, in films too often judged in “bad taste.”” (Red Rooster, 150.)

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40. Indeed, a pattern where Pathé was the first company to innovate a certain business practice in the US, and where the ‘native’ production companies then copied them, is consistently borne out by Abel’s account. For example, Abel shows that Pathé adopted a trademark no later than 1903, while the domestic companies took until October 1907 (Vitagraph), January 1908 (Biograph), April 1908 (Essanay), June 1908 (Selig), December 1908 (Kalem), etc. (Red Rooster, 17, 92–3.) 41. Anon., ‘The Girl of a Thousand Faces’, St Louis Post-Dispatch Sunday Magazine, 20 March 1910, B5. 42. Anon., ‘On the Moving Picture Stage. Have you Seen This Face?’, The Pittsburgh Press, 17 March 1910, 14.



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4

Causality

This chapter looks briefly at the attributes that the Linder and Lawrence ‘firsts’ shared for what they tell us about how and why the film star system emerged, and then goes on to point out that a further common factor in their careers immediately before they became the object of a star system suggests that, in the light of emerging evidence, the story told in Part 1 should be completely rethought.

Common Factors Even without regard to either of the causal connections between Pathé Frères’s campaign for Linder and IMP’s campaign for Lawrence proposed in Chapters 2 and 3, the two events resulted from several common factors, some of which should already be clear: 1 Both Pathé and IMP were exceptionally connected with the business affairs of film hiring companies, Pathé because it owned its own hiring companies and IMP because it was set up by the manager of a hiring company to supply ‘Independent’ US hiring companies with product. 2 Both Pathé and IMP were also exceptionally connected with the business affairs of exhibition companies, Pathé because it owned its own cinemas and IMP because it was providing film supply purposed to try to obtain the industrial allegiance of exhibition venues. 3 When they were first publicised, both Linder and Lawrence were consistently playing lead roles in films and doing so exclusively for the first time in their careers. Both, that is, worked for employers who now favoured a hierarchy of employers over employer equality. For example, although Lawrence had played leads when she was at Biograph in 1908–9, she did so in haphazard rotation with her fellow performers, meaning that Biograph’s stock company could be said to have had no ‘leading lady’, whereas Ranous at IMP asked Lawrence to join the company as “my leading lady”, at least according to Lawrence (‘Growing’, Part 4, 142). 4 When they were first publicised, both Linder and Lawrence also had most of a long-term contract ahead of them, making the prospect of building a celebrity profile for each of them feasible, in the eyes of their employers, as a method of advertising future product.



5 Both Linder and Lawrence had very distinctive facial characteristics: Linder his broad forehead, angular face, large eyes, dark moustache and very dark and usually thinly plastered hair (copied very closely in Candido de Faria’s handdrawn poster for Petite rosse (see Fig. 1.4)), and Lawrence her wide jaw and cleft chin, her closely placed large eyes and prominent nose. 6 Both Linder and Lawrence were definitely recognised in films a) from previous film appearances alone, b) despite hiatuses in film work, and c) by both specialist film viewers and members of the general public. Gene Gauntier recalled in 1928 that when production company managers began “to realize that certain actors were drawing cards” this “was probably because exhibitors scattered over the country had taken to writing in opinions of those who were becoming familiar to them” (‘Blazing’, Part 2, 26). This suggests that Gauntier had seen examples of such correspondence during her time at Kalem. The first time that any dedicated forum for letters from cinemagoers was instituted, inquiries about the identities of recognised performers were plentiful: in MPSM’s first ‘Answers to Inquiries’ column (included in their August 1911 issue), 14 of the 33 answers, as far as it is possible to tell, responded to inquiries that were at least in part about the identities of performers.1 In the UK, when The Pictures magazine first featured an ‘Answers to Correspondents’ column (in their 18 November 1911 issue), 6 of the 10 answers responded to inquiries about the identities of performers;2 two weeks later, in the 2 December 1911 issue, 3 of 12 answers responded to inquiries about the identities of performers. The last answer in the latter column told the inquirer, a J.B. from Sheerness, that “[w]e have made enquiries, but regret that we are unable to obtain the artiste’s name for you”.3 These inquiries may, of course, have been a symptom of a desire which, as deCordova argues, was manufactured by discourse rather than naturally occurring (PP, 6), meaning that it may have come about after the beginning of the first publicity campaigns, but while the idea of a sea of cinemagoers clamouring for the names of recognised players is fanciful, as is the claim that cinemagoers would have been able to force employers to divulge the names of their regular performer employees just by insisting vociferously (a claim made by Abel, Americanizing 233), just a handful of statements of recognition would have been enough to communicate to those employers that it was feasible to use certain employees as production values. There is some truth, then, to the idea of the instrumentality of audiences in the emergence of the star system, although not in the sense, found in several histories of the period (see e.g. Bowser, Transformation, 107–8), that they demanded it: audience recognition was indirectly responsible for the emergence of the star system because it showed employers that a star system was at least feasible, industrial and technological impediments notwithstanding. If employers could imagine the greater risks to investment that would result from upwardly spiralling performer salaries should they collectively consent to using a star system, why did any of them, even Laemmle, decide to do it? The most likely answer is that

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examples of recognition by cinemagoers prompted them to realise that it had already begun regardless of their wishes. 7 Both Linder and Lawrence had established a small degree of stage celebrity. Lawrence’s name was mentioned, for example, in local newspaper publicity for The Seminary Girl in late 1907,4 and Linder’s attempts at making himself indispensable to the Paris stage populace are described in Chapter 1. Using ‘actors’ to refer to both women and men, Tom Gunning points out that, in the US, “by 1909 most film actors had professional stage experience” (D.W. Griffith, 218). Most of the people constituting these film stock companies had ended up working for film production companies because it had not been possible for them, for whatever reason, to establish a steady income from this work, but as the norm on the stage was that they be credited for their stage work in printed programmes and the trade press, it is feasible to regard them as already possessing a small measure of renown. Gene Gauntier and Mary Pickford, for example, were both also mentioned in local newspapers during their stage careers. A brief piece on Gauntier’s part in the play Editha’s Burglar in Kansas City was printed in the Kansas City Star in early January 1905, and an article on her and her sister Marguerite Liggett in the same newspaper in early September 1906 included a portrait line drawing of her (both instances admitted that ‘Gene Gauntier’ was a pseudonym; Gene Gauntier was born Genevieve Liggett (Tracy, Blazing the Trail) in 1885); the latter remarked that Gauntier was “known to theater goers of Kansas City”.5 Mary Pickford was named (having just adopted ‘Mary Pickford’ as a pseudonym) in reviews of William C. DeMille’s play The Warrens of Virginia both during the play’s New York stint in 1907–86 and during its subsequent tour in 1908–9.7 So while the people who became the first film stars were certainly not A-list stage celebrities, they nonetheless had reason to regard themselves as holding onto a rung – albeit in cases a relatively low rung – of the ladder of stage fame. And although deCordova, via Anthony Slide, relies on Robert Grau’s claim, in his 1914 book The Theatre of Science, that “the bulk of players employed in the film industry came not from the ranks of leading actors on the Broadway stage, not even from the ranks of Broadway’s supporting players, but from provincial stock companies,” (Slide, ‘Evolution’, 592; deCordova, PP, 5) some did nonetheless have experience of Broadway-level celebrity, including Kalem’s Hazel Neason, who had been a member of, first, the David Belasco company and, later, the Charles Frohman company,8 and Pickford: The Warrens of Virginia was produced on Broadway by Belasco, permitting Pickford to proudly badge herself as a ‘Belasco actress’ for roughly 15 months.9 Although, like Pathé’s publicity campaign for Linder, the earliest publicity campaigns in the US made either very little or no mention of the previous careers of these performers, it was nonetheless conceivable that their stage pasts might permit some popular recognition. Moreover, these stage pasts meant that their professional identities were not regarded by

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the production companies as utterly different from those of the theatrical stars whom they had temporarily employed so far, meaning that it was not inconceivable to begin publicising them. The presence of these seven common factors suggests that film stardom first emerged not just because Pathé Frères made the decision to initiate it but also because sufficiently large clusters of exceptions to contemporary and lasting norms in film production and film marketing came about independently. The above accounts also suggest that we should recognise the importance of historical contingency in demonstrating to employers the feasibility of stardom-building publicity campaigns. If Max Dearly had been less healthy in late 1908 and Linder had consequently been required to play the role of Blond more frequently, Linder might have caught his longsought-after career break on the stage by being cast in a starring role at a Paris theatre and consequently never returned to Pathé. Laemmle’s motive to copy Pathé’s publicity campaign for Linder when he launched his publicity campaign for Florence Lawrence was that it might help reassert a free market for film hiring companies in the US, and he would not have been motivated to do this had the MPPC not sought to utterly control US film-hiring. Likewise, had the MPPC not been formed with the intent of making it impossible for non-members to make films in the US, those refusing to purchase a licence would not have initially been nearly wholly dependent on a supply of films from Europe, and Laemmle would not have been motivated to visit “England, France and Germany for purposes of making a film survey of these countries” (see pages 126–7) and so might never have been exposed to the beginnings of the star system there.

Clues 21 juillet [1910] – Max fait du ski, premier film de la nouvelle série comique interprétée par Max Linder sous son nom, est présenté a l’Omnia. [21 July [1910] – Max goes skiing, the first film of the new comic series performed by Linder under his name, is shown at the Omnia.] Lherminier, ‘Chronologie’, 31210



There is, however, an eighth common factor. Clues to its importance are evident in both the Linder and Lawrence episodes, clues that have been overlooked by most historians of early film and regarded by none as causes of the emergence of film stardom. After identifying these, I will devote Part 2 of this book to laying out how they suggest a new approach to the causality of these decisions as well as a new model of film stardom. For Richard Abel, Linder only adopted the ‘Max’ character exclusively in the spring of 1910, when, “using the comic’s own name, Pathé re-titled the series in which he starred as simply Max” (Ciné, 240, emphasis in original), that is, with

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the release of Max fait du ski in parts of Europe outside France on 18 June 1910. But he had frequently used the ‘Max’ character in his films so far. Viewings of his surviving films show that he was playing the character long-term, albeit not exclusively, from Une conquête (issued in parts of Europe outside France in late September/early October 1909). This prompted Jean Mitry to date the inception of the first ‘Max’ series not to mid-1910 but to the last months of 1909 (299). Trade synopses indicate that of the first 11 films which definitely featured Linder starting with Aimé par sa bonne, nine used the principle of a desperate lover trying to win the consent of a young woman. Indeed, the fact that Linder was already playing ‘Max’ well before Max fait su ski can be deduced from the ‘Maxing’ in the US of the eight films that did not have the name ‘Max’ in the title when released in Europe (see pages 166–7). Indeed, the ‘Max’ character pre-existed even this late-1909 stint. When the writers of the MPW synopsis and review (in the 25 September 1909 issue and 9 October 1909 issues respectively) of Aimé par sa bonne / Loved by His Servant /The Servant’s Good Joke quoted above remarked that they recognised the lead performer from the May 1907 film Les débuts d’un patineur/The Unskilful Skater, there was a very good reason for this: Les débuts d’un patineur is sometimes identified as the first ‘Max’ film (see e.g. Mast, 40–1, who mistakenly dates the film to 1905). The surviving copy of the film does indeed feature Linder as a bourgeois, tophatted, black-frock-coated, white-waistcoated, moustachioed, enthusiastic pursuer of leisure, here trying ice-skating. By isolating his figure against a background which is mostly white, the main action of the film works to emphasise the four main visual characteristics of this character (black moustache, oiled black side-parted hair, black top hat and black frock coat). Given its concluding medium shot of the character (all previous shots in the film had been long or extreme long shots), it becomes unsurprising that the September and October 1909 MPW contributors cited this film when stating that they recognised him.11 While Les débuts d’un patineur did not call the character ‘Max’, Linder seems to have shared his characters’ first name in synopses and intertitles in both the UK and the US well before the release of Max fait du ski on 18 June 1910, and even before the period when Pathé started to publicise his identity: though I have not been able to view a copy of Aimé par sa bonne, the tendency of trade synopses in both French and English to call the character ‘Max’ is a good indication that Linder was reprising the Max character in this film, at least in costume and manner and probably in intertitles too.12 The fact that K&LW remarked, in their synopsis for Une conquête/A Conquest, the second film of Pathé’s campaign for Linder, that “we find Mr. Max Linder again with us in his favourite rôle of the young man of too susceptible a heart, determined to win and wear the laurels of victory”13 implies that this role had borne the name ‘Max’ in films before the period of Linder’s ‘nonymity’. In addition, there is a second respect in which Linder was associated with a recurring character shortly before he was publicly named. In the earliest known mention of his name in the UK trade press, the inclusion of his name in Bioscope’s

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synopsis for Le petit jeune homme (A Young Lady Killer) in its 2 September 1909 issue, there is a revealing detail. The synopsis runs as follows: A Young Lady-Killer.– Mr Max Linder, who “creates” the principal role in this picture, is, we think, one of the best cinematographic actors there is. He was responsible, we believe, for the numerous adventures of Theodore which Messrs. Pathe have from time to time produced, and now once more he gives a finished performance of a delightfully irresponsible young man who pursues two damsels through the public streets and is lured by them to destruction.14

In the previous week’s issue, a Bioscope contributor had described the plot of Linder’s previous film, Amoureux de la femme à barbe, as follows: “We have here yet another adventure of the sprightly Theodore, whose destiny seems much bound up with beards. This time it is he who succumbs to the fascinating hair, falling in love with a “bearded lady” at a fair.”15 Who, then, was Théodore? The “numerous adventures of Theodore” refers to a short series of films released by Pathé shortly before Le petit jeune homme, constituted by either the first two or all three of the following: 1 Le concert de Théodore [Theodore’s Concert], 676 feet, listed in Kinéma on 9 August 190916 and issued in parts of Europe outside France around 30 July 1909.17 2 La barbe de Théodore [Theodore’s Beard], 412 feet, listed in Kinéma on 23 August 190918 and issued in parts of Europe outside France around 13 August 1909.19 3 Amoureux de la femme à barbe [In Love with the Bearded Woman], 445 feet, showing in France, according to Henri Bousquet, at the Pathé Grolée in Lyon on 24 September 1909,20 and issued in parts of Europe outside France around 26 August 1909.21



I can identify no other ‘Théodore’ films from the period, so the remark about the “numerous adventures of Theodore” seems something of an exaggeration. In addition, Amoureux de la femme à barbe does not seem to have been a ‘Théodore’ film: Linder plays a school-age teenager, a much younger character than the adults described in surviving synopses for Le concert de Théodore and La barbe de Théodore. Moreover, while Linder almost certainly (see page 110n143) performed in the second Théodore film, La barbe de Théodore, there is no conclusive evidence to show that he appeared in the first, Le concert de Théodore.22 When the Bioscope contributor first identified Linder’s character in Amoureux de la femme à barbe as Théodore, s/he was therefore giving the character this name because he was played by the same person who had played Théodore in La barbe de Théodore: he brought a transtextual identity with him to this new film from his one (possibly two) outing/s as Théodore. As both Max and Théodore, therefore, Linder had been playing series characters in the years leading up to Pathé’s decision to release his name. The same phenomenon applied in the case of Florence Lawrence. P.C. Levar, in her/his 30 January 1910 letter pointing out that the erstwhile ‘Biograph Girl’ had been

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confused with another Biograph employee (see page 154n98), remarked that “[t]he Biograph Girl who won all the hearts, male and female, in this neck of the woods was the one who used to play Mrs Jones in the Jones comedies. I could mention a lot more of her parts, but that one is the easiest to clearly and briefly designate” (262). Later, IMP’s 5 March 1910 trade advertisement, the second to give the name ‘Florence Lawrence’, stated that “[i]n this picture [Mother Love] Miss Lawrence, known to thousands as “Mrs. Jones,” does the most excellent [work] of her remarkable career.”23 Advertising for the Theatrette in Fort Scott, Kansas, in late March 1910 stated that “Florence Lawrence, who won such fame as “Mrs. Jones” in the Biograph pictures, takes the lead” in Love’s Stratagem.24 Monte Katterjohn’s introduction to Lawrence’s 1914–15 series of autobiographical articles in Photoplay included the recollection that “as “Mrs. Jonesy” of a famous Biograph comedy series of pictures, Miss Lawrence was known to millions” (29). In the October 1919 Photoplay article mentioned by deCordova (see page 148n1), Frank Woods dramatised a fictional conversation, occurring in “the late fall or early winter” of 1908 (71), between a young girl, Lizzie, and her mother, in which Lizzie asks whether she can go to a newly opened “moving picture show” on Main street (70) (“it doesn’t matter what town it was” (71)) to see a film that, she has been told, tells the loveliest story about a girl being rescued from the outlaws by a noble Indian and the girl is called the Bitagraph Girl or something like that. […] Why this girl, Bitagraph – or maybe I haven’t remembered her name just right – Mamie says they sometimes call her Mrs. Jones because she plays the parts of Mrs. Jones in the funny stories – she’s the girl everybody likes so much in the pictures made by a company called the Bitagraph. (70-1)

Woods ‘explained’ that “[t]here were at that time […] a hundred thousand Lizzies and mothers conducting similar conversations” (71), and although this is part of a radical oversimplification of the events which Woods had glimpsed, the name which stayed with Woods was a transtextual character called Mrs Jones. So who was Mrs Jones? In the eight months preceding her departure from American Biograph in late June/early July 1909, Lawrence had performed for twelve comedies featuring a bourgeois husband-and-wife couple, the Joneses. The character of Mrs Jones was exclusively played by Lawrence, and the character of Mr Jones was exclusively played by John Cumpson. Each ‘Joneses’ film was a discrete narrative, with no aspects other than the personality traits of the two characters and their association with each other carried over from one film to the next. Eight of these twelve films bore titles that mentioned one or both of the Joneses. This series ran as follows, with US release dates given in brackets: 1 2 3 4

A Smoked Husband, 470 feet (25 September 1908)25 Mr. Jones at the Ball, 503 feet (25 December 1908) Mrs. Jones Entertains, 635 feet (7 January 1909) Mr. Jones has a Card Party, 583 feet (21 January 1909)

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5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

The Joneses Have Amateur Theatricals, 400 feet (18 February 1909) His Wife’s Mother, 523 feet (1 March 1909) Jones and His New Neighbors, 452 feet (29 March 1909) Jones and the Lady Book Agent, 585 feet (10 May 1909) Her First Biscuits, 514 feet (17 June 1909) The Peachbasket Hat, 666 feet (24 June 1909) Jones’ Burglar, 388 feet (9 August 1909) Mrs. Jones’ Lover, or “I Want My Hat”, 467 feet (19 August 1909)



Although these films did not follow a regular release pattern (two were released in March 1909 and none in April 1909, for example), the frequency of releases was relatively high: an average of one film was released every 30 days, a number that falls to 24 days if one begins the series only at the point when the name of one of the characters was included in the title. Issues of the Biograph Bulletin named the Joneses as Edward and Emma,26 and at least for a handful of staff at Biograph, the Mrs Jones character depended on the body of Florence Lawrence: they discontinued the series when Lawrence left the company. It is also unsurprising that Frank Woods remembered this series, as he had written the scenarios for all of them.27 Lawrence recalled that “[w]hen we undertook the first [Jonesy] picture there was no intention of making a series of comedy productions, but when the exchanges began asking for more and more “Jonesy” pictures, we kept it up until I left the Biograph Company” (‘Growing’, Part 3, 105). Russell Merritt’s scrutiny of Biograph’s order book for early 1909 indicates that the Joneses series had indeed become very popular with hiring companies: up to Jones and the Lady Book Agent “each of the Jones comedies had easily outsold its predecessor”, and while no records survive for orders for the ensuing Joneses films, “the speed with which they were put into production and released […] suggests the demand remained strong” (183). By the time of the last Joneses film, for Merritt, “[t]he Jones series had […] become Biograph’s cash crop” (182). Biograph clearly recognised that this series had identified Lawrence with Mrs Jones: when IMP began to release films in the UK (see page 164), Biograph sought to capitalise on IMP’s efforts by releasing two ‘Joneses’ films which had not been released in the UK in 1908–9: Jones at the Ball, on 4 September 1910,28 and Jones has a Card Party, on 23 October 1910.29 A common phenomenon had occurred, therefore, in the careers of Linder and Lawrence: both had already become recognisable in part because of consistently playing one character across multiple films. By eliminating all other variables, the early Max, Théodore and Mrs Jones all drew attention to the consistency of facial and bodily characteristics in the person who played them. Indeed, the importance of Mrs Jones to Lawrence’s recognisability has been noticed twice before: Gunning wrote in 1999 that the ‘Joneses’ series “was extremely successful […] . When she left to work for Carl Laemmle and the IMP company, IMP publicity described her as “known to 1000’s as Mrs. Jones” (‘Smoked’, 108). Hugues Bartoli wrote in 2004 that “Florence became famous for her part of Mrs Jones in one of the first series of the

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screen” (72).30 That is, Lawrence was already being used to constitute a production value out of a transtextual identity, in this case a fictional consistent transtextual identity, before her ‘real’ identity was used as a production value; already ‘faced’, she was named using a fictional name. Indeed the presence of series characters in the repertoire of these two performers in the year before they were made the subject of stardom-building publicity campaigns even implies that these two real people might be regarded as stars even before they were publicly named using their own self-created pseudonyms ‘Max Linder’ and ‘Florence Lawrence’. To explore the possibility that these series characters in particular, and series characters in general, were substantial causes of the emergence of film stardom, causes without which the events described above would not have occurred, I will use the next two chapters to examine the phenomenon of the series character in European and North American film production (in Chapter 5) and to chart its relevance to the emergence of film stardom, using Chapter 6 to demonstrate that the character-based series provided such a close equivalent of a star system that the film industries of both continents could be said to have been operating a star system for about a year before the events described above.

Notes 1. Anon., ‘Answers to Inquiries’, MPSM 2.7 (August 1911), 144–6. 2. Anon., ‘Answers to Correspondents’, The Pictures 1.5 (18 November 1911), 23. 3. Anon., ‘Answers to Correspondents’, The Pictures 1.7 (2 December 1911), 22. 4. Anon., ‘The Seminary Girl’, Hopkinsville Kentuckian (Hopkinsville, Kentucky) 29.118 (1 October 1907), 5. Lawrence had already worked casually for Edison and Vitagraph at this point, but did not yet have a long-term position working for any production company. See Kelly Brown, 10–12. 5. Anon., ‘Some People of the Stage’, Kansas City Star (Kansas City, Missouri) 25.112 (Saturday 7 January 1905), 45. Anon., ‘GNS a Kansas City Girl’, Kansas City Star (Kansas City, Missouri) 26.352 (Tuesday 4 September 1906), 3. 6. Anon., ‘“Warrens of Virginia” at the New Academy’, Brooklyn Daily Eagle 69.292 (20 October 1908), 11. 7. Anon., ‘“Paid in Full” at the Grand Tonight’, Freeport Journal-Standard (Freeport, Illinois) 30.278 (8 February 1909), 5. 8. This career was described in Anon., ‘Picture Notes’, The Pictures 2.36 (22 June 1912), 23–4, 23. 9. On the prestige that Pickford perceived to be attached to the status of ‘Belasco actress’ see Pickford, 91–105. 10. As Fig. 1.2 shows, the film actually debuted at the Omnia Pathé on 15 July 1910. 11. There were of course other aspects of Les débuts d’un patineur that made it memorable, including Linder’s use of the ‘perpetual fall’, a slapstick move where a skater, beginning to fall, runs (either forwards or backwards) with her/his feet to remain upright but only succeeds in perpetually arresting themselves at the point of falling, a move reprised

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by Chaplin in The Rink (1916). The hilarity of the perpetual fall suggests that a person falling over is usually found to be funny not because of their collision with the ground but because a fall highlights the discrepancy between the actions of a person’s body and the intended actions of the consciousness that is supposed to be in control of it. 12. Anon., Kinéma 26 (16 August 1909), qtd. Bousquet, Catalogue … 1907, 1908, 1909, 202 (in which Linder’s character is called ‘Max Greluchard’), Anon., ‘The Very Latest’, Bioscope 146 (29 July 1909), 19–29, 26. 13. Anon., ‘New Films and Their Makers’, K&LW 5.124 (23 September 1909), 989–97, 993. 14. Anon., ‘The Very Latest’, Bioscope 151 (2 September 1909), 19–25, 19, emphasis added. 15. Anon., ‘The Very Latest’, Bioscope 150 (26 August 1909), 19–20, 23. 16. Anon., ‘Les nouveaux films’, Kinéma 25 (Monday 9 August 1909), 9. 17. Anon., ‘The Very Latest’, Bioscope 145 (22 July 1909), 19–27, 23. 18. Anon., ‘Les nouveaux films’, Kinéma 27 (23 August 1909), 9. 19. Anon., ‘Latest Productions’, K&LW 5.117 (5 August 1909), 542. 20. Bousquet, Catalogue … 1907, 1908, 1909, 208. 21. Anon., ‘The Very Latest’, Bioscope 150 (26 August 1909), 19–20, 23. 22. Henri Bousquet states that this starred ‘Prince’ (Charles Petitdemange), Paul Landrin, Delphine Renot and Jane Rosnin-Derys, that is, not Linder (Catalogue … 1907, 1908, 1909, 198), and the only surviving evidence about the film, a production still, only shows ‘Prince’ (Le concert de Théodore, photogrammes, CF, PO0040361). Although the situation in the photograph implies that ‘Prince’ played the character of Paul rather than the character of Théodore, meaning that Linder might still have played Théodore, there is no evidence of this. 23. Advertisement for IMP, MPW 6.9 (5 March 1910), 323. 24. Advertisement for the Theatrette, Fort Scott Daily Monitor (Fort Scott, Kansas) 29.107 (28 March 1910), 6. 25. Although the protagonists of A Smoked Husband were referred to in intertitles as Mr and Mrs Bibbs, both Bowser and Gunning regard A Smoked Husband as a ‘Joneses’ film, because the characters were identical to the later Joneses (Bowser, ‘Jones’, 53–4; Gunning, ‘Smoked’, 108). Lawrence herself also later recalled A Smoked Husband as the first “Jonesy” film (‘Growing’, Part 3, 105). 26. Biograph Bulletin no. 267 (19 August 1909), MHL. 27. See entries for these films in Usai, ed., The Griffith Project, Vol. 1 & Vol. 2. 28. Anon., ‘Latest Productions’, K&LW 7.172 (25 August 1910), 1058. 29. Anon., ‘Latest Productions’, K&LW 7.178 (6 October 1910), 1486.



30. Bartoli identified 11 Mrs Jones films, though not by title.

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186

Part 2  Another Run at the Story

188

5

The Series Character

The head of Marvel studios has a poster on his office wall that maps out 14 years’ worth of linked superhero films. Up to 2028! We live in the age of the franchise Tom Lamont in The Observer, 3 May 2014, para. 7

When Tom Lamont wrote this, the returns from the Marvel Cinematic Universe films produced by Kevin Feige and distributed by Paramount, Universal and, more recently, Disney were motivating the entire US film industry to adopt ‘shared universe’ or ‘megafranchising’ film-making. Twentieth Century Fox had begun to bifurcate their X-Men franchise into multiple storylines in 2009; Warner Bros established their DC Extended Universe megafranchise in 2013. More recently, Universal launched their Dark Universe megafranchise in 2017. In 2016 just the first three of these four megafranchises generated six of the top 20 films at the US and Canada box office. Counting other ongoing franchises as well (including the Kung Fu Panda and Jason Bourne series, the Harry Potter Wizarding World, the Star Wars distant/ past galaxy and the Star Trek future) brings this number up to 12, so one might indeed agree with Lamont’s claim that “[w]e live in the age of the franchise”. But such an age did not begin with the release of Iron Man in 2008, or even with the earlier superhero film franchising era that debuted with the release of Superman in 1978;1 an age of ‘the franchise’ begins when a dominant cultural industry makes a widespread commitment to manifesting one or more fictional worlds across multiple works. Though this commitment in the US film industry is clearly widespread in the early twenty-first century, this ‘age’ began, in film at least, over a century ago, with the emergence in late 1908, initially in France, of a furious phase of franchising, in the form of the character-based series. This chapter will detail how and why this film-making phenomenon came about, to demonstrate one of the distinguishing characteristics of film-watching during the period when the events described in Part 1 occurred.

The Character-Based Series: “A New Departure in Film Production”2 The series, a type of fiction format, is best defined by distinguishing it both from the stand-alone work of fiction and from serial fiction. Unlike a stand-alone work,

a series work overtly utilises a story-space that has already been manifested in a previous work, while, unlike an episode in a serial, a series work is a self-contained narrative that does not require the viewer/reader/listener to have any knowledge of previous works in that series or to view/read/hear any subsequent works in that series to complete the story. As a self-contained narrative a series work is not technically an ‘episode’ of any larger work; a series work is associated with other works only insofar as it features characters and places previously featured in at least one other work by the same ‘author’ (whether a person or a company), whereas an episode in a serial is, is one respect, not a work at all: it is a part of a work, only made available to the public as a discrete component because of mediumspecific conventions that state that a multi-episode work cannot or should not be made public (on its first appearance at least) in its entirety. The primary manifest characteristic of a series, therefore, is that while it has a degree of continuity with other works, this continuity is kept beneath a very low ceiling so as to maintain functional independence.3 In the case of the character-based series, while the main character’s or characters’ abilities and jobs can be announced through publicity, and so do not need to be explained in any of the works (though they often are explained nonetheless), to remain outside the realm of the serial a work must convey all other information necessary for understanding the narrative internally. By the same token, if anything more significant than minor changes to the major characters’ circumstances or the arrival/departure of minor characters is maintained between ‘episodes’, these alterations move the work into the domain of the serial, meaning that with a ‘true’ series the death or retirement of a major character usually only occurs in the final work in that series as a way of ending it. While early film historians have been tempted to treat series and serials as two very similar phenomena,4 they are quite distinct. For example, a set of ‘true’ series works could actually be viewed/read out of its original order of publication, with no impact on the viewer/reader’s ability to understand each story. On a spectrum of a work’s avowed continuity with other works, a spectrum with utterly discrete works (0% continuity) at one end and never-ending stories where every episode ends in the middle of an event at the other (100% continuity), the series and the serial actually occupy two relatively distant points. Figure 5.1 is a version of this spectrum of continuity, and Fig. 5.2 places examples of various familiar series and serials on that spectrum. In late 1908 and early 1909, film industries in Europe widely committed to making character-based series that were, without exception, all ‘true’ series, located, on the spectrum in Fig. 5.1, just one step away from the leftmost extreme: all of the films were discrete narratives, continuous with the previous and succeeding films in the series only in that they used the same primary characters and story-space. European film industries had generated several casual character-based fiction series before late 1908. Drawing on the ‘Weary Willie and Tired Tim’ comic that had appeared in every issue of the weekly comic magazine Chips (a.k.a. Illustrated Chips) since May 1896, in 1903 William Haggar, based in South Wales, made three films, Weary

190  The Origins of the Film Star System

Fig. 5.1  A spectrum of a work’s avowed continuity with other works; or, the format continuity continuum.

Fig. 5.2 The norms employed by thirteen transtextual phenomena placed on the format continuity continuum.

Willie and Tired Tim – The Gunpowder Plot, Weary Willie and Tired Tim turn Barbers, and Weary Willie and Tired Tim – A Dead Shot, using members of his own family as performers. Between 1905 and 1909 Cecil Hepworth made at least eight films featuring the character of Rover (played by Blair, Hepworth’s own pet rough collie): Rescued by Rover (July 1905), issued along with Rover Takes a Call, a c.50-second



The Series Character  191

portrait film that could be used to permit ‘Rover’ to take a ‘curtain call’, The Lucky Necklace (November 1906), Dumb Sagacity or, Caught by the Tide (September 1907), Father’s Lesson (March 1908), The Dog Outwits the Kidnapper/Rover Drives a Motor (April 1908),5 The Dog Came Back (January 1909), The Shepherd’s Dog (March 1909) and His Only Friend (May 1909). Pathé Frères made at least five films during 1907 and 1908 featuring the character of Boireau (see Fig. 5.3), consistently played by André Deed (although few of the titles of these films included the name ‘Boireau’) (Gili, 296-7). The UK Gaumont company featured a character called Algy at least twice (in August 1907 and May 1908), and Nordisk’s character Happy Bob appeared in two films (in March and July 1908). The character-based series was, therefore, conceivable as a form of franchising before 1908. However, in the last third of 1908 an industry-wide and drastically more prolific phenomenon of character-based fiction franchising began in European film-making. In early September 1908 Éclair announced that they were issuing the first film in what was overtly specified at the outset as a series: Nick Carter: Le roi des détectives: Le guet-apens [Nick Carter: The King of Detectives: The Ambush]. While most twenty-first-century film viewers are familiar with the principle that franchising only activates when the first film is a breakaway success (the first film in a series is usually not a series film at all), a series can nonetheless be planned and marketed as a series from the outset, and this was the case with Éclair’s Nick Carter films. The 15 September 1908 issue of Ciné-Journal announced the series with the remark

Fig. 5.3 Pathé Frères’ poster for Les apprentisages de Boireau (c.May 1907). FJS-P, AFF-P-1224A.

192  The Origins of the Film Star System

that Éclair “a commencé la série des adventures extraordinaires de Nick Carter, le détective idéal [has begun the series of extraordinary adventures of Nick Carter, the ideal detective]”.6 A commentator in K&LW remarked that “[a] new departure in film production is inaugurated by the above firm [Éclair’s UK agents Walter Tyler] this week. They tell us that it is their intention to issue at frequent intervals a number of films each of which will illustrate one of the marvellous exploits of the versatile “Nick Carter””.7 Éclair’s poster (see Fig. 5.4) for the series, issued before the first film, conveyed the promise that the first film would be succeeded by further adventures, by advertising the character rather than any specific film. The second film, Nick Carter 2: L’affaire des bijoux [The Case of the Jewellery], was placed on sale in early October 1908, and by the end of November Éclair had put all six films in this series on sale, availing them to the market much more frequently and much more regularly than any previous casual character-based series: Ciné-Journal listed the

Fig. 5.4  Éclair’s poster for their Nick Carter series, c. early/mid-September 1908.8



The Series Character  193

first Nick Carter film in its list of new films in its 8 September issue, the second in its 22 September issue, the third in its 6 October issue, the fourth in its 20 October issue, the fifth in its 10 November issue, and the sixth in its 19 November issue, making for intervals between these six films of two weeks, two weeks, two weeks, three weeks and nine days respectively. Combined with consistent use of the character’s name in the title, this frequent and regular issuing distinguished Éclair’s Nick Carter films from the handful of character-based series films issued in Europe and North America so far, hence the K&LW contributor quoted above calling the series “[a] new departure”, and a later K&LW article, written after seeing the first Nick Carter film, remarking that the film “marks a new departure in the film business in that it is the first of a series of films in which the various exciting adventures of one character are to be illustrated.”9 In devising and marketing this distinctive product type, Éclair sought to raise a new island of film territory, giving it the chance of taking a significant portion of the market from the dominant Pathé Frères, at least for as long as Pathé issued no overt character-based series.10 The first commentary on the appearance of the Nick Carter films in K&LW referred to Carter as “the French idea of Sherlock Holmes and the hero of innumerable sensational stories”,11 and the second, remarking on the unusual regularity with which the films would, it was promised, be issued, informed readers that Carter “will make periodical appearances in films just as the famous Sherlock Holmes did in each month’s Strand”.12 In spite of this British/European myopia, these commentators were remarking on the adaptation in films of perhaps the most frequently reprised series character in contemporary prose fiction, an American character whose emergence predated that of Holmes. The first Nick Carter story, The Old Detective’s Pupil; or, the Mysterious Crime of Madison Square, a novel by John Coryell, was serialised in the New York Weekly, published by Street & Smith, from 18 September to 18 December 1886. Coryell wrote two further Nick Carter novels that were also serialised in the New York Weekly: A Wall Street Haul; or, A Bold Stroke for a Fortune, serialised from 12 March to 18 June 1887, and Fighting Against Millions; or, The Detective in the Jewel Caves of Kurm, serialised from 29 September 1888 to 19 January 1889. In late 1891 Street & Smith began publishing a weekly dime novel series devoted to Nick Carter, which ran as the Nick Carter Detective Library (8–22 August 1891), the Nick Carter Library (29 August 1891–26 December 1896), the New Nick Carter Library (2 January–13 February 1897), the New Nick Carter Weekly (20 February–16 October 1897), the Nick Carter Weekly (23 October 1897–14 February 1903), and the New Nick Carter Weekly (21 February 1903–7 September 1912). Along with numerous Nick Carter short stories, these dime novels were produced by a stable of authors, chief among whom was Frederick van Rensselaer Dey. When Éclair produced their Nick Carter film series, this detective had featured in over 700 discrete works of prose fiction in the US (Cox, 59–61 & 192–3). One of the reasons why Éclair chose Nick Carter as the subject of their series was that the Dresden-based publisher Alwin Eichler had started to publish the first German and French translations of some of the stories from this vast library

194  The Origins of the Film Star System

of Nick Carter fiction, in pamphlet form, in 1907. Ronald Fullerton observes that by 1908 these were reportedly selling at a rate of 45,000 a week (498, 499). The writer of Ciné-Journal’s initial commentary on the release of the first Nick Carter film observed that the launch of the series showed that Éclair was “attentive à suivre le goût du public [careful to follow the taste of the public]”;13 Nick Carter, that is, was already a popular fictional figure in France. Éclair’s choice to use a detective rather than any other classification of extant fictional character was also highly attuned to the specifics of producing series fiction in any medium: the profession of detective requires that the protagonist possess a popularly identifiable set of character traits and skills, a set that also distinguishes her/him from the other characters in the storyspace, and the convention of a fictional detective being brought a case to solve (and, usually, an effective deadline for solving it) meant that each story would bring these traits and skills into contact with a new set of circumstances and generate narrative drive without altering the character. It is hardly surprising therefore that detectives were both common in prose series fiction and the figure of choice for the first overt character-based film series. Contemporaries clearly deemed Éclair’s Nick Carter series to have been a success. The Danish company Nordisk put the first film in a Sherlock Holmes series on the market in mid-October 1908 (see Fig. 5.5), Éclair launched its second series character when it initiated a Rifle Bill series in mid-December 1908 (see Fig. 5.6), the Italian company Itala issued the first film of their Cretinetti series

Fig. 5.5  Nordisk’s poster for Sherlock Holmes, CF, A002-074.



The Series Character  195

Fig. 5.6  Advertisement for Éclair, Kinéma B.5 (22 March 1909), 10. Note the foregrounding of the company’s two contemporary production values, Nick Carter and Rifle Bill, albeit misspelled.

in late January 1909, and in mid-February 1909 Nordisk initiated a second fictional detective series with its first Nat Pinkerton film. The last of these alluded to the reallife detective Allan Pinkerton, founder in 1850 of the famous Pinkerton Detective Agency, but also adapted a fictional character originated by Alwin Eichler’s publishing company shortly after the success of its Nick Carter translations. Nordisk even gave the filmic Nat Pinkerton the same status – ‘king of detectives’ – that Éclair had given to Nick Carter (see Fig. 5.7). Éclair kept its finger in the fictional detective pie by issuing the first film in a second series of Nick Carter films in mid/late-February 1909. This fictional detective series phenomenon was so dramatic to contemporaries that it was subjected to parody within a few weeks: the French company Lux issued Gaffes, vice-roi de policiers [Gaffes, viceroy of policemen] in mid-February 1909.14 Taking their lead from Éclair, Nordisk and Itala, an entire international film industry soon altered its product range, as film production companies in France, Italy, Denmark, the UK and Germany began to pour character-based film series onto the market. Taking the UK as a mere sample of the European film market at the time, Fig. 5.8 shows the issue/release of character-based series films in the country from 25 September 1908 (the rough date of the issue of the first Nick

196  The Origins of the Film Star System

Fig. 5.7  Nordisk’s poster for Nat Pinkerton, CF, A003-001.

Carter film) up to the end of 1912. This chart refers to 87 characters appearing, between them, in 1,167 films. These films represent 6.7% of the total known films issued/released in the UK during this period. In eight of these films, characters from two normally distinct series appeared together (e.g. Cines’s Tontolini and Coco Rivals in Love, released in the UK on 29 October 1910), so if each of these ‘intersection’ films counts as an appearance for each of the two characters, this makes a total of 1,175 appearances. The characters came and went, but this table clearly shows the phenomenon intensifying: at the end of May 1910 there were 13 ongoing series characters, and at the end of February 1911 there were 35 ongoing series characters. Looking exclusively at UK-produced series and serials, Alex Marlow-Mann concludes that they were all crime or action films (158). As Fig. 5.8 shows, not only does this ignore some UK series film franchises (Professor Puddenhead, Drowsy Dick, Scroggins, Poorluck, Mugwump, Tilly the Tomboy, Frightened Freddy, Daddy’s Little Did’ums, Weary Willie & Tired Tim, Charley Smiler, Hawkeye, Constable Smith (see Fig. 5.11) and Peggy), it also gives a skewed impression of the nature of the series format across European production, because this phenomenon, though initially heavy on dramas, was predominantly comedic. Of the 1,167 films listed in Fig. 5.8, 989 (84.7%) were comedies, leaving just 147 drama films and 31 films of unspecified genre. Twenty-four (27.6%) of these 87 franchises were pure dramas, and 59 (67.8%) were pure comedies. The films in the drama franchises tended to



The Series Character  197

198  The Origins of the Film Star System

Genre

Drama

Drama

Drama

Comedy

Drama

Drama

Drama

Comedy

Drama

Comedy

Character(s)

Nick Carter

Sherlock Holmes

Rifle Bill

Foolshead [Cretinetti; Gribouille; Toribo; Schafskopf]

Nat Pinkerton

The Huguenots

Morgan the Pirate

The Joneses

Meskal the Smuggler [Meskal le contrabandier] (see Fig. 5.9)

Professor Puddenhead

Urban

Éclair

Biograph

Éclair

Éclair

Nordisk

Itala

Éclair

Nordisk

Éclair

UK

France

US

France

France

Denmark

Italy

France

Denmark

France

 4

 5

13

2 July 1909 to 24 September 1909

25 June 1909 to 9 July 1909

18 June 1909 to 31 March 1912

2 April 1909 to 8 September 1910

26 February 1909 to 12 March 1909

25 February 1909 to 19 March 1909

 3

 2

11

 4

 2

 2

5 February 1909 to 21 January 1912 (plus 77 later re-releases)

23 December 1908 to 5 February 1909

23 October 1908 to 10 September 1909

25 September 1908 to 28 December 1911

Location of Range of issue/release dates within the Number Production company company 1908–12 period of films

Fig. 5.8  The appearance of character-based series films in the UK film market from September 1908 to the end of 1912.15 The anglicized names used at the time in the UK are used here (e.g. Cretinetti became ‘Foolshead’), with original names and those used in other countries given in square brackets. Re-releases within this time frame are included.16 Characters marked with an asterisk were children.



The Series Character  199

Drama

Lieutenant Rose

Comedy

Drama

Dr Phantom

Mugwump

Comedy

Scroggins

Comedy

Comedy

Thynne [Coco]

Poorluck

Comedy

Drowsy Dick

Each film either comedy or drama

Comedy

Calino

Nick Winter

Each film either drama or comedy

Muggins

Comedy

Drama

Sexton Blake

Betty [Léontine]

Drama

Three-Fingered Kate

Comedy

Drama

The Vulture of Syria [Le ‘vautour’ de la Siria] (see Fig. 5.10)

Tontolini

Comedy

Théodore

Hepworth

Hepworth

Pathé Frères

Pathé Frères

Cines

Clarendon

Warwick

Cricks & Martin

Cines

British & Colonial

Gaumont

Cricks & Martin

Gaumont (British)

British & Colonial

Éclair

Pathé Frères

UK

UK

France

France

Italy

UK

UK

UK

Italy

UK

France

UK

UK

UK

France

France

30 June 1910 to 9 February 1911

30 June 1910–

29 June 1910 to 14 December 1912

18 May 1910 to 13 January 1912

14 May 1910–

12 February 1910–

21 January 1910 to 19 May 1910

14 January 1910 to 9 November 1911

7 January 1910 to 18 December 1912

7 January 1909 to 18 December 1910

31 December 1909–

17 December 1909 to 4 July 1912

29 October 1909 to 23 March 1910

15 October 1909 to 13 October 1912

20 August 1909 to 3 September 1909

30 July 1909 to 13 August 1909

(Continued)

 6

12

15

22

98

15

 6

11

 9

 2

49

 5

 2

 7

 3

 2

200  The Origins of the Film Star System

Genre

Comedy

Comedy

Comedy

Comedy

Comedy

Comedy

Drama

Comedy

Drama

Comedy

Comedy

Comedy

Comedy

Drama

Comedy

Character(s)

Bill [Patouillard]

Mr Bumptious

Tilly the Tomboy (& Sally)

Smith

Frightened Freddy

Mulcahy

Arsene Lupin

Tweedledum [Robinet]

Broncho Billy

Wiffles [Rigadin; Moritz]

Lea

Longlegs

Friscot

Dr Brian Pellie

Babylas

Fig. 5.8  Continued

Le Film des Auteurs/ Pathé Frères

Clarendon

Ambrosio

Aquila

Cines

Pathé Frères

Essanay

Ambrosio

Deutsche Vitascope

Essanay

Clarendon

Messter

Hepworth

Edison

Lux

France

UK

Italy

Italy

Italy

France

US

Italy

Germany

US

UK

Germany

UK

US

France

17 November 1910 to 1 April 1911

10 November 1910–

23 October 1910 to 24 October 1912

13 October 1910 to 3 August 1911

5 October 1910–

5 October 1910–

1 October 1910–

8 September 1910–

3 September 1910 to 22 April 1911

6 August 1910 to 12 October 1910

5 August 1910 to 10 September 1911

4 August 1910 to 27 December 1911

4 August 1910–

3 August 1910 to 10 June 1911

9 July 1910–

 5

 6

 9

18

28

41

17

63

 4

 2

 5

13

16

10

74

Location of Range of issue/release dates within the Number Production company company 1908–12 period of films



The Series Character  201

Comedy

Toto

Comedy

Comedy

Gontran

P.C. Hawkeye

Each film either comedy or drama

Captain Barnacle

Comedy

Drama

P.C. Sharp

Charley Smiler

Drama

Nat Pinkerton

Comedy

Comedy

Tommy

Weary Willie & Tired Tim

Comedy

Bobby [Bébé]*

Comedy

Comedy

Kelly

Arthene Dupin

Comedy

Daddy’s Little Did’ums*

Comedy

Drama

Jean

Fitznoodle

Comedy

Cri-Cri

Hepworth

Cricks & Martin

British & Colonial

Urban-Éclipse

Hepworth

Itala

Éclair

Vitagraph

Cricks & Martin

Éclipse

Éclair

Gaumont

Milano

Clarendon

Vitagraph

Urban-Éclipse

16 March 1911 to 14 March 1912

12 March 1911 to 27 July 1912

9 March 1911 to 28 November 1912

19 February 1911 to 28 December 1912

8 February 1911 to 13 June 1912

1 February 1911 to 30 October 1912

26 January 1911 to 25 May 1911

29 December 1910–

8 December 1910 to 21 November 1912

1 December 1910 to 17 November 1912

1 December 1910 to 18 April 1912

UK

UK

UK

1 June 1911–

18 May 1911 to 12 September 1912

13 April 1911 to 11 June 1911

UK or France 5 April 1911–

UK

Italy

France

US

UK

France

France

France

Italy

UK

US

UK or France 17 November 1910 to 25 January 1911

(Continued)

 8

10

 4

25

 3

18

28

 7

 3

21

 7

74

24

11

 7

 6

202  The Origins of the Film Star System

Drama

Drama

Comedy

Comedy

Comedy

Comedy

The Boy Detective

Lieutenant Daring

Little Willie

Mutt & Jeff

Arabella

Polidor

Pasquali

Lux

Nestor

Éclair

British & Colonial

Monofilm

Éclair

Drama

Pasquali

Zigomar

Each film either drama or comedy

Raffles

Lux

Ambrosio

Comedy

Bertie

Aquila

Comedy

Comedy

Pik Nik

Essanay

Tiny Tom

Comedy

Alkali Ike

Cricks & Martin

Pathé Frères

Comedy

Constable Smith

Italy

France

US

France

UK

France

France

Italy

France

Italy

France

Italy

US

UK

17 March 1912–

3 January 1912–

20 December 1911 to 13 March 1912

28 September 1911–

27 September 1911–

23 September 1911 to 3 January 1912

14 September 1911–

10 September 1911 to 22 February 1912

6 September 1911 to 2 November 1912

24 August 1911 to 15 August 1912

2 August 1911 to 25 October 1911

23 July 1911 to 19 October 1911

23 July 1911–

20 July 1911 to 27 July 1912

29

18

 2

24

 7

 4

 2

 5

 7

 4

 5

10

 7

 5

Location of Range of issue/release dates within the Number Production company company 1908–12 period of films

Jane [Rosalie]: a spin-off from the Comedy Betty [Léontine] series

Genre

Character(s)

Fig. 5.8  Continued



The Series Character  203

Comedy

Comedy

Comedy

Drama

Mr Stout [Checco]

Jenkins

Bidoni

The Iron Hand [Main de fer]

Comedy

Comedy

Simple Simon [Onésime]

Pimple

Comedy

The Katzenjammer kids*

Comedy

Drama

Dick Turpin

Bloomer [Kri Kri]

Comedy

Boniface

Comedy

Comedy

Zigoto

Peggy

Comedy

Algy

Drama

Comedy

Gavroche [Funnicuss]

Young Wild West

Comedy

Jim [Boireau]

Ecko

Cines

John Bull

Nestor

Gaumont

Cines

Cines

Cines

Gaumont

Selig

British & Colonial

Milano

Gaumont

Savoia

Éclair

Pathé Frères

UK

Italy

UK

US

France

Italy

Italy

Italy

France

US

UK

Italy

France

Italy

France

France

10 November 1912–

30 November 1912–

14 November 1912–

12 October 1912 to 27 November 1912

29 September 1912–

28 September 1912–

21 September 1912 to 23 October 1912

31 August 1912–

22 August 1912–

25 July 1912 to 12 September 1912

7 July 1912–

30 June 1912–

23 June 1912 to 29 September 1912

8 June 1912–

6 June 1912–

20 March 1912–

 2

 3

 2

 6

 2

 5

 4

 3

13

 7

 3

 6

 6

 5

 4

13

Fig. 5.9  Éclair’s poster for their fifth series character, Meskal le contrebandier (the smuggler), early June 1909.17

204  The Origins of the Film Star System

Fig. 5.10  Éclair’s poster for their sixth series character, Le ‘vautour’ de la Siria (The Vulture of Syria), early August 1909.18



The Series Character  205

Fig. 5.11  Cricks & Martin’s poster for Constable Smith’s Dream of Promotion, released in the UK on 20 July 1911. BFI Special Collections PD 20912.

206  The Origins of the Film Star System

be longer than the comedies, but even if these percentages are recalculated by footage, the 147 dramas totalled 141,777 feet, constituting just 21.1% of the total phenomenon, while these 989 comedies totalled 500,187 feet, constituting 74.4% of the total phenomenon. Though 11 of the first 14 of these character-based series were dramas, and though the phenomenon’s innovator, Éclair, took until its seventh series character, Tommy, to move into comedy, the phenomenon as a whole was therefore predominantly comedic. Indeed, if one ranks the franchises listed in Fig. 5.8 by number of films, the top 14 are all comedies: Tontolini (98 films), Foolshead/ Cretinetti (77 films), Bill/Patouillard (74 films), Bobby/Bébé (74 films), Tweedledum/ Robinet (63), Calino (49 films), Wiffles/Rigadin (see Figs. 5.13–5.16) (41 films), Polidor (29 films), Lea (28 films), Gontran (28 films), Arthene Dupin (25 films), Kelly (24 films), Little Willie (24 films) and Betty/Léontine (see Fig. 5.12) (22 films). Even looking at just those franchises that were definitely produced in the UK, only eight were pure dramas while 15 were pure comedies. The informal ‘Max’ and Théodore in France and Mrs Jones in the US, all comedy characters, were therefore typical of the wider series phenomenon. To show the prominence of these characters in the UK film market, Fig. 5.17 is a word cloud generated from the titles of every film released in the UK during the period from February 1907 (when K&LW first started listing the week’s new releases) to the end of 1912 (18,975 films in all). Derived from a total word count of roughly 46,500 words (not including common pronouns and conjunctions), this word cloud shows

Fig. 5.12 Publicity production still for Les Pétards de Léontine [Léontine’s fireworks], released in parts of Europe outside France on 2 July 1910.19 FJS-P, PHO-P-1588.



The Series Character  207

Fig. 5.13  Publicity production still for Rigadin a un sosie [Rigadin has a lookalike], released in parts of Europe outside France on 19 November 1910.20 FJS-P, PHO-P-1629.

Fig. 5.14  Publicity production still for Rigadin poète [Rigadin, poet], released in France on 26 January 1912.21 FJS-P, PHO-P-1713.

208  The Origins of the Film Star System

Fig. 5.15  Pathé Frères’ poster for Rigadin a tué son frère [Rigadin has killed his brother], released in France on 3 May 1912.22 FJS-P, AFF-P-00001459.



The Series Character  209

Fig. 5.16  Pathé Frères’ poster for Le ménage [de] Rigadin [Rigadin’s housework], released in mid-June 1912.23 FJS-P, AFF-P-402.

210  The Origins of the Film Star System

Fig. 5.17  Word cloud derived from the titles of all known films issued/released in the UK from February 1907 to the end of 1912.

the most plentiful 147 words, the size of each word reflecting the frequency with which these words occurred. Among ‘love’, ‘little’, ‘life’ etc. the names of these series characters – Foolshead, Tontolini, Calino, Tweedledum, Wiffles and Bobby – appear with surprising prominence. Series characters also contribute to the prominence of the words ‘Rose’, ‘Jones’, ‘Jim’, ‘Bill’ and ‘Willie’. Figure 5.18, which shows the release of character-based series films across the time period covered by Fig. 5.8, both by number of films and by amount of footage, indicates that a sharp rise in the output of character-based series films began in the UK film market in the middle of 1910. This rise was due in part to the rapid increase in the number of new series characters appearing: three new characters appeared in 1908, 15 in 1909, 30 in 1910, 23 in 1911 and 18 in 1912. In the last quarter of 1910 alone, 12 new series character franchises appeared on the UK film market.24 In addition, this dramatic mid-1910 rise was also the product of an increase in the frequency with which existing franchises were releasing films. The release patterns of certain character-based series indicates that by late 1909/early 1910 it began to be deemed feasible, by some, to supply hiring companies and, in turn, cinemas with a new ‘episode’ in the life of each series character as frequently as once a week: for example, after issuing smatterings of Cretinetti/Foolshead films roughly a week apart in November and December 1909, Itala released Cretinetti/Foolshead films on 5, 12, 19 and 26 February 1910; having debuted their Tontolini series in May 1910, Cines had adopted a weekly release rate by late June 1910. This seems to have become an operational routine for some companies: in the 365 days from 15 April 1911 to 13 April 1912 (a leap year), Lux released 52 Patouillard/Bill films (i.e. at a mean rate of one a week) and 42 of these 51 intervals were exactly a week. After Pasquali started their Polidor series in March 1912, they achieved a weekly release rate by the end of June and continued this, virtually without interruption, until the middle of December. By late 1910/early 1911, some companies even achieved a twice-weekly release rate: for



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212  The Origins of the Film Star System 0

5

10

15

20

25

30

35

40

45

50

Number of films per month Total footage per month

Fig. 5.18  Monthly variation in the release of character-based series films in the UK from September 1908 to the end of 1912.

Number of films per month Aug-08 Sep-08 Oct-08 Nov-08 Dec-08 Jan-09 Feb-09 Mar-09 Apr-09 May-09 Jun-09 Jul-09 Aug-09 Sep-09 Oct-09 Nov-09 Dec-09 Jan-10 Feb-10 Mar-10 Apr-10 May-10 Jun-10 Jul-10 Aug-10 Sep-10 Oct-10 Nov-10 Dec-10 Jan-11 Feb-11 Mar-11 Apr-11 May-11 Jun-11 Jul-11 Aug-11 Sep-11 Oct-11 Nov-11 Dec-11 Jan-12 Feb-12 Mar-12 Apr-12 May-12 Jun-12 Jul-12 Aug-12 Sep-12 Oct-12 Nov-12 Dec-12 0

5,000

10,000

15,000

20,000

25,000

30,000

35,000

Total footage per month

example, Cines released Tontolini films on 15, 19, 22 and 26 October 1910, Gaumont released Calino films on 18 and 22 December 1910, and Itala released Cretinetti/ Foolshead films on 12, 16 and 19 March 1911. This indicates that production companies at least perceived a demand among popular audiences for one characterbased series film in every new programme, and that these companies sought to ensure that any cinema could use their character alone to meet this demand. Notably, although some US film production companies did make character-based series films, this phenomenon seems to have been smaller in the US than it was in Europe: in the UK market at least, the US character-based series phenomenon – compared to the 28 French series characters featuring in 464 films, the 19 Italian series characters featuring in 418 films, and the 24 UK series characters featuring in 154 films – was rather modest, with just 10 characters appearing in 76 films (see Fig. 5.19). There were of course other US series characters whose films were not issued in the UK, including Kalem’s ‘Girl Spy’ Civil War drama series (which debuted in the US on 21 May 1909; the second film was released on 1 April 1910), Yankee’s the Girl Detective (which debuted in the US on 10 October 1910), and Vitagraph’s Betty (which debuted in the US on 14 March 1911), a nod to Pathé’s Léontine/ Betty. While Biograph’s ‘Joneses’ series was relatively regularly released and longrunning, an equivalent which included the name of the character in every title did not appear in the US until Edison’s 10-film Mr Bumptious series, which debuted in the US on 7 June 1910. Nonetheless, some US companies specialised in characterbased series; Essanay in particular features prominently in Fig. 5.8, and after Florence Lawrence left Biograph, ending the ‘Joneses’ series, Biograph deemed it worthwhile to initiate another married couple series, the Wrights series, using Mary Pickford as Bessie Wright and William Quirk as Harry Wright. These were the Wright films, with US release dates in brackets: 1 2 3 4

They Would Elope, 572 feet (9 August 1909) His Wife’s Visitor, 526 feet (19 August 1909) “Oh, Uncle!”, 292 feet (26 August 1909) The Test, 545 feet (16 December 1909)

As Lawrence later recalled, “[a]fter I had left the Biograph studio Mr. Griffith directed him [Billy Quirk] in the famous “Muggsey” comedies with “Little Mary” playing opposite him, and these attained even greater popularity than the “Jonesy pictures” (‘Growing’, Part 3, 107). (Here Lawrence confused Mr Wright with Muggsy, protagonist of Muggsy’s First Sweetheart, released on 30 June 1910 (Kaufman, 108-9), which was not a series film; presumably she mixed the two characters up because both were played by Billy Quirk). The Wrights were not an attempt to cover up for the absence of Lawrence by directly replacing the Joneses: Mr and Mrs Jones were a comfortable middle-class couple with servants who had been married for some time, while the Wrights were only married during They Would Elope. Rather, the production of this new series shows Biograph concentrating on character-based series films in general and character-based comedy series in particular.25



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Fig. 5.19  Breakdown by nationality of the films listed in Fig. 5.8. Country

Number of character-based franchises

Number of films

France

28

464

Italy

19

418

UK

24

154

US

10

 76

UK or France

 2

31

Germany

 2

17

Denmark

 2

7

Confusing series with serials,26 or omitting to distinguish between them,27 would not just be a scholarly error. It would obscure a distinction between the two formats that would have been very clear to viewers at the time: in 1928 Gene Gauntier recalled that The Adventures of the Girl Spy, one of the films made during their November 1908 to March 1909 stint in Florida, “made a tremendous hit and exhibitors wrote in for more. Thus began the first series made in films and I kept them up for two years” (‘Blazing’, Part 2, 170). As she referred to The Hazards of Helen as a “serial” later in the same memoir, she used the series/ serial distinction that I use here (‘Blazing’, Part 4, 14). Admittedly, cases can be found where this distinction was not reflected in contemporary vocabulary,28 but a contemporary awareness of the distinction is very clearly manifest in the fact that European and US film-makers widely took to making series fiction over two years before they widely took to making serials. The first overt film serial was the Edison Company’s What Happened to Mary, featuring Mary Fuller, released monthly in the US from 26 July 1912, accompanied by prose tie-ins in the monthly magazine The Ladies’ World (at the time the US’s fourth highest circulating monthly) which began in its August 1912 issue, also published on the 26 July 1912.29 Although What Happened to Mary did not stand on the rightmost extreme of the format continuity continuum sketched in Fig. 5.1, in that each film had its own narrative arc, each nonetheless primarily contributed a segment to a larger story.30 There was, that is, a delay of over three years before the first overt character-based series and the first overt character-based serial. As the earlier of these two phenomena has received relatively little scholarly attention relative to its scale,31 I will use the rest of this chapter to look in detail at (1) the motives behind its widespread adoption by the industry, (2) its cultural precursors and (3) its prominence in film exhibition.

214  The Origins of the Film Star System

Motives for Adoption The Bottom Line One of the primary motives behind the adoption of the character-based series by the film industries of Europe and North America in this period is probably very clear: franchising is generally beneficial to cultural industries. The capitalist ideal of perpetually producing, en masse, identical versions of a single template product would seem to be inapplicable to a cultural industry, whose template products will not normally be purchased more than once by any given consumer, and therefore, unlike such products as food and cosmetics, exhaust their consumer base and so need to be replaced with different template products after a time limit measured in days, weeks or months, when sales have fallen below a certain threshold. But this does not mean that cultural businesses are forced to reinvent their product every few months/weeks/days by issuing a product that has no resemblance to any previous product. While the idea of a core handful of near-permanently marketed sibling products – a ‘product line’ – might not seem applicable to an industry which by its nature is compelled to frequently replace all of its products with palpably different products, such an industry can nonetheless achieve something close to this nearpermanence by drawing the product ‘line’ diachronically rather than synchronically: in such a model of business practice, multiple products from a siblinghood of products are made available one after the other, each product being replaced by its sibling product after its value has been exhausted. This diachronic product line is, of course, one of the functions of genre, defined by Steve Neale as “simultaneously, a coherent and systematic body of film texts, and a coherent and systematic set of expectations” (Genre, 54–5). Any genre, as Neale puts it, provides “a cost-effective equivalent to lines and ranges, producing a demand [in industry practice] for similarities within the variety of product on offer and therefore minimalizing the degrees of difference involved” (Genre & Hollywood, 231); though every product must differ from its contemporaries and predecessors, genre permits this difference to be minimised, making for products with some characteristics of being part of a diachronic product line. Of course, Neale has also shown that genre only functions as a process of systematisation because in addition to ensuring a degree of sameness, it also serves the opposite purpose: it makes available stocks of knowledge that, in turn, ensure that anyone making a new work observes a minimum degree of difference between that work and its precursors (Genre, 49–50). This is one reason why Neale regards the term ‘genre film’ as redundant: all films are genre films because the norm for culture-producing industries is to employ populations of genres as a way of systematising a compromise between sameness and difference. But cultural works in any given genre can vary widely, while the members of a diachronic siblinghood of products do not need to be more than superficially different;



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indeed if one template product is successful, the capitalist ideal is that if it is necessary to replace that template product, the template product replacing it should differ from that successful template product as little as possible. Once a successful formula is arrived at, the members of this temporal siblinghood of products should all be very similar, indeed so similar that multiple works in this siblinghood can be identical as far as their makers are concerned, as long as they are not identical as far as their consumers are concerned. This is franchising. It provides a way of achieving product loyalty in spite of the obligation to regularly change one’s template products. This product loyalty can be seen in action in the remarks of a columnist of a Massachusetts newspaper in early February 1909: “[e]veryone who saw “Mr Jones at the ball,” the biggest comedy hit of the season,” the columnist wrote, “will want to see “Mr Jones at the card party,” which is equally as funny, and in which poor Jones gets into all the trouble that he didn’t succeed in getting into at the ball.”32 In conferring product loyalty, franchising promises to provide any company able to practise it with a much more predictable income than the use of genre or the complete reinvention of the template product, because last week’s/month’s/year’s sales figures now provide a guide to the following week’s/month’s/year’s. As franchising in film also establishes some of the basic characteristics of each film, it diminishes scenario-writing work and production work on each film, which reduces costs and speeds up the film-making process. And a cultural business can also produce multiple diachronic siblinghoods, a synchronic line of these diachronic product lines. As Fig. 5.8 indicates, some companies had as many as four character-based series in operation at any one time. Unlike producing cultural works in a certain genre, which does not automatically place any of these works anywhere to the right of the leftmost extreme of the format continuity continuum, franchising automatically means moving a cultural work one increment away from this leftmost extreme. Of course a related danger is that this continuity between products may put a potential customer off any one of these products because it appears to that potential customer to have value only if that customer has obtained earlier products, which means that any business wanting to avoid turning its products into small components of a single larger product must carefully limit the degree of this continuity between products. There is evidence that before 1908 film production companies were already capable of recognising the feasibility and usefulness of releasing a product that possesses a degree not just of similarity but of continuity with one or more of their other products: the term ‘series’ had been used to designate films as belonging to a group long before 1908. Pathé’s catalogues had, at least since late 1903, been sorted into groups with each group given a number so that at the head of each group would appear a title like “2me sèrie / Scénes comiques”, etc.;33 sèrie translates directly as ‘series’. LeForestier also argues that it is not quite right to regard these designations as equivalents to genres, as films within each sèrie were numbered, which implies that each film was located within a sequence (‘From Craft’, 192). Admittedly though, as LeForestier admits, this sequence did not involve regular issuing of that series: “it was a way of giving order to films once they began to appear

216  The Origins of the Film Star System

in catalogues in very large numbers […,] a consequence of mass production” (‘From Craft’, 192). The regularly issued series seems to have first emerged as a strategy for non-fiction film production in Europe in the years around 1907. LeForestier notes that near the end of 1906 Pathé Frères first issued a sub-group within their sèrie 1 (“Scènes de plein air [Outdoor Scenes]”) called Au Japon [In Japan], regularly issued films surveying the country’s inhabitants and landscape (‘From Craft’, 195). A buyer/ hirer/exhibitor had the option of obtaining each film separately or using them to take viewers, instalment by instalment, on a ‘tour’ round this distant archipelago. This was a deliberate strategy for attracting product loyalty from customers, a strategy that, as Simon Brown finds, the Hepworth Manufacturing Company employed from 1907 onwards (99–101). For example, in the period from August 1907 to April 1908 Hepworth issued “more or less monthly” an eight-film series of industrial films taken in the UK (100), in the period from December 1907 to February 1908 they issued a three-film series taken in Canada, between January and March 1908 they issued a four-film series taken in Belgium and Holland, between May 1908 and April 1909 they issued a sixteen-film series taken in Egypt (“one in May 1908, one in June, four in October, two in November, two in December, three in January 1909, two in February and one in April” (100)), in June and July 1908 they issued a five-film series of views of Surrey, and in May and June 1909 they issued a three-film series of views of London (99). Each series was purposed to make the most economical use of any film-making excursion by splitting up the footage resulting from each excursion and presenting it to the market so that each film avoided competing with the other films, and each series was purposed to cater to exhibitors’ and renters’ propensity to seek out films that repeated characteristics of films that they had deemed successful. As Brown observes, Hepworth released these series films at a rate of roughly one per month (101). Series film-making had, therefore, served as a long-term production strategy before the appearance of Éclair’s Nick Carter films in late 1908, but the characterbased series phenomenon that emerged from late 1908 onwards employed a different expectation of the market behaviour of the product: the new ideal was that each film would only replace, instead of either supplementing or replacing, its predecessor. This new form of series film-making began to come about because of two shifts in the wider industry: the first was the gradual rise of fixed-site film exhibition described on page 59, which caused a new norm to emerge in which exhibitors were exhausting each film after a matter of one or two weeks at the most, rather than, as was the norm for itinerant exhibitors, using a film for months by moving to a new town or city when they had exhausted audiences; the second was that, as the market for production companies became crowded, achieving product loyalty became drastically more desirable. This new type of series was fictional rather than factual for precisely the same reason that film-makers in general had begun to shift from factual films to fiction films as their primary product around 1905: because it is not tied to real-world events, and therefore does not necessitate travelling to filming locations, and because it is somewhat insulated from the seasons, fiction production



The Series Character  217

is a more appropriate type of work for a cultural business seeking to achieve a regular and frequent year-round output. Balancing repetition with variation was not important when production companies were selling their films to travelling exhibitors who could replace worn-out films with new copies of the same or very similar films, but with the new pressure to update their output at least weekly, the production companies had to demonstrate that their products observed at least this minimum degree of difference from their previous releases. It is unsurprising, therefore, that the industry widely adopted character-based film franchising just a year before the formal adoption of release dates: release dates were a very clear sign of this shift from the ‘storehouse’ model of selling one’s products to the ‘weekly updating’ model of selling one’s products. The character-based series also made for a minimum degree of difference between one production companies’ films and those of its rivals: the characters of seven rival companies might all be comic, for example, but human bodies and personal character traits are so variable that any two series characters were very unlikely to be indistinguishable. Fictional series films were also very useful to production companies supplying markets in which the norm was that they would sell, rather than hire, copies of their films at a set per-foot/metre price: if the volume of sales of positive prints of the first film counts as unsuccessful, then the studio has made a stand-alone fiction film, the losses from which are no worse than the losses from any other stand-alone fiction film. If the volume of sales of positive prints of the first film is judged a relative success then more films set in this story-space can be produced at short notice, and viewers’ familiarity with the first film can be used to advertise the second film both to the trade (as in the trade advertisements reproduced in Figs. 5.20 and 5.21) and to the general public. The same decision can then apply with respect to the third film, and so on. While fictional series do not have to be character-based (think, for example, of the Jurassic Park, Terminator and Star Trek franchises, based primarily on story-spaces rather than characters), series characters were nonetheless useful, when channels of communication between production companies and audiences were limited, for both managing product renewal and communicating that product renewal to audiences: costume and personality traits provide one of the simplest types of fictional content to reprise (one of the reasons for the relative success of superhero franchises during the past decade), the implied passage of time in the fictional life of the fictional character between films would testify that the film would describe new events, and the nearuniversal use of the character’s name in the title,34 alongside variations in the rest of the title text, would communicate this futurity to prospective viewers.

Overcoming Levels of Removal Character-based series were also attuned to the vertically organised but vertically nonintegrated film industry that was the norm in Europe. Franchising in general offered a type of product that catered to the rise of hiring companies: as the value of a film in the eyes of exhibitors would gradually diminish with time, hiring companies could

218  The Origins of the Film Star System

Fig. 5.20 Advertisement for Clarendon/Lieutenant Rose, K&LW 6.142 (27 January 1910), 660.



The Series Character  219

Fig. 5.21  Advertisement for Clarendon/Lieutenant Rose, K&LW 6.156 (5 May 1910), 1438.

220  The Origins of the Film Star System

not indefinitely exploit any exceptionally successful film, and so would be looking for a different product with the same qualities. But character-based franchises were especially keyed to these multiple stages of removal from the product’s end user. I mentioned on page 40 that using advertising for a specific film to motivate the general public to press their local exhibitor to hire that film, and thereby indirectly to press hiring companies to buy that film, was implausible in the case of anything but prestige films. Even advertising to the public that used the production company’s brand was far-fetched when these end users were at three levels of removal from the production companies, particularly as it was in the interests of the production companies to key these brands to the hiring companies and exhibitors rather than to the public: using these brands to advertise products to the general public would be like using the brand of a company that makes building supplies for advertising new houses to the general public. Given that, as Simon Brown points out, “[i]f it was the subject that sold, the maker, in principle, was irrelevant” (89), then production companies seeking sales in a competitive marketplace needed to make their own company identities synonymous with the subjects of their films. In a situation where the name of the production company might not make it through to the viewer, the ideal method for the production companies to achieve consumer loyalty to their brand was where simply viewing one film by that company accustomed the viewer to an aspect of form or content that would feature again in only that company’s subsequent films. In this context, the character-based series was something of an inspired solution. Because the character would appear consistently in the films of just one company, any member of the public asking their local exhibitor to show a film featuring that character would be asking for a supply of films from a specific production company. While genres, both factual and fictional, could serve to demonstrate the similarity between a new product and a previous successful product, genres were accessible to competitors, no matter how devotedly one company might specialise in a certain genre, and even real-world locations were not exclusive to one production company, even if they might be inaccessible to most. By contrast, using a combination of distinctive costume elements, select physical traits and select character traits would make a fictional character as distinctive a product identifier as a brand name or logo. As P.C. Levar wrote when describing Mrs Jones (see page 154n98), this particular role was “the easiest to clearly and briefly designate” (262). And as long as it appeared in the title, the fictional person’s name, a proper noun, could serve as an unambiguous product characteristic (see also Simon Brown, 111), while it could also be imagined that trademark laws might make that character not just practically but legally exclusive to the originating company. (That is, the industrial circumstances described in the introduction to Part 1 pressured film production companies to adopt strategies that did not necessarily involve using the identities of real people.) These aspects together made for diachronic product lines that, as long as the first film was popular, could easily be both patronised by audiences and requested (of the hiring companies) by exhibitors, making it possible for the popularity of this product among its end users to exert influence all the way back along the chain of supply to the production company.35



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The names of these series characters certainly did come to function as brand names. For example, advertising for the Lyric in Mount Carmel, Pennsylvania, in early November 1910 read like so: ----------Today----------

LYRIC ----------Tonight---------Imp and Foolshead Comedy THE TWO DAUGHTERS Imp Drama ---------FOOLSHEAD IS CHAFFEUR [sic]36

For this venue at least, ‘Imp’, a company name, and ‘Foolshead’, the name of a fictional character, both served as product-differentiating brand names. Ivo Blom identifies this principle when he remarks that the competitors on the European film market, who were all seeking to market themselves “by guaranteeing […] continuity in a steady output”, achieved this sought-after continuity “by developing comical characters that would […] stand for a certain brand name” (‘All the Same’, 473). “Looking at the films,” he remarks, having viewed many of the Italian character-based comedy series films listed in Fig. 5.8, it often becomes clear how strong the production companies’ hold was on their “golden goose” […]. The company was already continuously visible through logos on intertitles and leaders at the end of films. It was also visible through the continuous output of their comical films with recognizable and ever[-]returning comical heroes. (‘All the Same’, 472)

This dovetailing between character-based franchising and company brand identity, Blom adds, was often literalised: several of the surviving films show these comic characters encountering a version of the company name or logo in the final shots of the film: One of the first within the genre is Cretinetti ha rubato un tappeto [Cretinetti has stolen a carpet] (Itala 1909). Cretinetti steals a carpet and is chased by a queue of followers up a roof. Finally he rolls himself up in the carpet, everybody falls down the roof and on the carpet a text reads: “Itala Film.” In Cocciutelli affissatore [Cocciutelli billposter] (Milano 1911), poor Cocciutelli tries to fix his posters but is chased everywhere. He ends up in jail, where he finally can fix his poster upon the wall. Of course it is a poster for … the Milano Film Company. (‘All the Same’, 472, ellipsis in original)

Other examples include the last shot of Foolshead’s Christmas [Il Natale de Cretinetti], issued in the UK on 22 December 1909, which shows Cretinetti/Foolshead in medium close-up holding a sign bearing both the text “Foolshead wishes a Merry Christmas” and the Itala Company’s logo.

222  The Origins of the Film Star System

The production companies’ shared intention to use series characters to generate exclusive properties is also evidenced by their common urge to use or invent names that were virtually unique: looking at the names used in the domestic market of each production company, roughly 60 of the 87 names listed in Fig. 5.8 (including all of the characters drawn from existing franchises) seem to have been designed to be either unique words or unique combinations of words. Conspicuous in this list are Cretinetti/ Foolshead, Professor Puddenhead, Three-Fingered Kate, the two Lieutenants, Tontolini, Poorluck, Mugwump, Patouillard, Frightened Freddy, Rigadin, Longlegs, Daddy’s Little Did’ums, Gontran, Fitznoodle, Pik Nik, Funnicuss, Zigoto and Onésime. Such unique or near-unique names would be the easiest for renters, exhibitors and audiences to both commit to and recall from memory. A fictional character would also be a much hardier product identifier than a logo; as mentioned in the introduction to Part 1, while hiring companies or exhibitors could replace title footage featuring logos and scratch out the logos from individual frames, one could not scratch out a human figure and still hope to have a product. Generating consumer loyalty to producerdependent aspects of the experience of watching a film also promised to lessen the control of both hiring companies and exhibitors over the film product. Because a character-based series individualised the output of a specific production company, it provided a means of achieving a brand image with the general public, a means to achieve product loyalty with the public in the way that companies’ logos sought to achieve product loyalty with hiring companies and exhibitors. As Simon Brown points out, “Hepworth’s character-titled series […] effectively encouraged the audiences to make connections across films in a way that until then had only been made by Hepworth within the trade press”, that is, to hiring companies and exhibitors (111). In turn, audiences would, so this principle predicted, exert pressure on exhibitors and, in turn, hiring companies, so becoming mechanisms for controlling these middlepeople’s actions. Examples of this control can be seen in exhibitors’ advertising for the ‘Joneses’ series in the US: local newspaper advertising for the Elite, a venue in Coffeyville, Kansas, in late January 1909 stated that “Mr. Jones Has a Card Party […] is another good Jones picture. Don’t miss it.”37 In mid-May 1909 this venue advertised Jones and the Lady Book Agent as “[a]nother Jones comedy that is great.”38 In December 1909, advertising for the Bijou Theatre in Columbus, Indiana, remarked that “[y]ou know the Foolshead subjects are all good”.39 Character-based series had put all of these exhibitors under pressure to act as mouthpieces for the production companies concerned (Biograph and Itala). Lux’s advertisement for their Patouillard films reproduced in Fig. 5.22 also shows this exertion of control over middlepeople in action. This exertion of control is evident in local press reports. In late November 1908, at the Circus in Hull, a local newspaper reported, “[a] series [i.e. a film: a ‘series’ of views] dealing with an adventure from the life of Nick Carter was popular, the skill of the detective being displayed in [an] exciting film, “The Imprints.”40 Nick Carter: The Imprints [Les Empreintes], the fifth Nick Carter film, had only been listed in K&LW in the 19 November 1908 issue,41 suggesting that this venue ordered the film before



The Series Character  223

Fig. 5.22  Advertisement for Lux/Patouillard, Cinema-Revue 5 (August 1911), 14. The text reads “Exhibitors! Remember that “Lux” comic films are the most valued by the public and without “Patouillard” there is no good programme. He fills the room and the cash desk. Lux!”.

224  The Origins of the Film Star System

it was advertised, which in turn implies that when the earlier films in the series were successful at the Circus, the venue had placed an order with their hiring company for the rest of the first series. Such requests from exhibitors were exactly what the character-based series was purposed to elicit. Three weeks later, a local newspaper remarked that, at the Circus, “[t]he series dealing with the adventures of Nick Carter, the detective, are exceedingly popular, and plenty of excitement was caused by the officer in unravelling a mystery in connection with the “Blackcoated Brigands.””42 At the same time, ““Nick Carter and the Kidnappers” is this week’s subject on the bioscope” at the Hippodrome, a Hull music hall.43 The popularity of Nick Carter seems to have been enough to prompt at least the Circus to show the entire series; the local press mentioned showings of at least eight of the fourteen Nick Carter films.44

Personhood In addition, members of the public would be more likely to ask for this particular classification of film in the first place because a character is a much more relatable type of product for a member of the general public than the brand of a company that makes building supplies. This is a second respect in which the character-based series individualised the product: it veneered film with personhood. Joe Kember has shown that, in the UK at least, the earliest film-makers and film exhibitors were motivated to associate the image with personhood of one kind or another. This was in part because meaningful personal contact seems to be a rather widely soughtafter aspect of cultural experience, in part because of “the alienation effect popularly associated with conditions of industrial capitalism and particularly with modern media” (Kember, 14), in part because of the anonymity attributed to the new technology by one stream of contemporary discourse (Kember, 24), and in part because of the widespread employment of personhood in the institutionalised cultural forms of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Kember, 10). Even before 1908, Kember shows, cinema was capitalistically motivated to be highly anthropocentric (8), in spite of not yet being dominated by character-based fiction. Kember explores an array of forms of personhood which were made available in film practice, and with ‘whom’ film-makers and film exhibitors invited viewers to engage, in the years before 1908. These sort into three major categories: (1) live performances at the site of exhibition, (2) people shown in the image and (3) personhood implied by the image. The third category includes the filmic equivalent of the implied author, which, as Kember summarises, has been more usefully classified in early film studies as a monstrator, a gesturing agency rather than a storyteller (41–2). This implied agency was implied to be a joke-teller by some films, a voyeur by others, a conjuror by others, an ethnographer by others, etc. The third category also includes camerapeople, scenario writers and other film-making personnel whose work was made evident in some way by the finished product. By 1909, however, this early array of forms of personhood had begun to alter. With the rise to dominance of film-only exhibition venues around North America in the 1906–9 period and around



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Europe slightly later, some of the early forms of live accompaniment were phased out, and the second and third categories of personhood came to be called on to serve the functions that these on-site people had previously served. In such a situation, any observer could reasonably expect to find a new sub-category of personhood emerge in either the second or third of these categories. The search for a relevant form of personhood is evident in the opening editorial of The Pictures magazine in late October 1911. Explaining why a magazine of short story versions of forthcoming films was deemed to be necessary, the editor remarked that “[i]f, like the Lady of Shalott, bewildered by the multitude of sights afforded by her magic mirror, he [the reader], is beginning to long for human company in addition to that of shadows, beings who talk and feel as well as move and act, his desire will be gratified by this Magazine.”45 Elsewhere this editorial promised that this human dimension might come from “the picture actors”, and yet in the same sentence also promised that it might come from fictional characters, the stories “lay[ing] bare their characters, motives, passions, and mutual relations.”46 Indeed, while personhood could be delivered using real people, film production companies’ shared need to be able to produce a steady output of films regardless of real-world political events and personal diaries, combined with the disincentives to publicising their long-term performer employees described in the Introduction, also directed their search for new forms of personhood towards fiction. Although fictional characters might conceivably be received by audiences as mere functions of textual mechanics, forms of contact with personhood might nonetheless be established with fictional characters if the characters could be placed, in some way, exterior to the works in which they featured. Series characters supplied this removal from textual mechanics: the character-based series films that emerged in late 1908 and throughout 1909 were not simply films which contained a familiar character; by designating each work, via implicit and explicit frames, as an insight into the life of that character, they implicitly insisted that each character pre-existed and outlasted it. For example, most of these titles would describe the character involving themselves in an activity, role or challenge, connoting the idea of a stable personhood coming into contact with new circumstances. This principle was the basis of the films’ plots, the overwhelming majority of which brought a character with a fixed set of traits into contact with circumstances not initially apparent in the opening shot or scene of the film: Nick Carter’s skill at disguise was confronted with the seemingly insuperable barrier constituted by social class, Cretinetti’s clumsy enthusiasm was brought to tasks that require physical or social precision, Mr Poorluck’s proneness to accidents was juxtaposed with implicitly dangerous situations and fragile objects, etc.

Competition For as long as it was the province of just a few companies, character-based franchising offered a way for young production companies to break into a crowded market: notice that it was commenced not by either of the dominant players in the French film production industry – Pathé Frères and Gaumont – but by the underdog Éclair,

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and that although Pathé Frères had used a proto-series in the form of the Boireau character (in films with titles that seldom featured the word ‘Boireau’) before 1908, it did not embark on a long-term and consistent character-based series until May 1910, when it launched its Léontine/Betty series. Éclair, which had only been founded in May 1907 and which had only established a weekly output in the summer of 1908 (Abel, ‘Éclair’, 91), was faced in mid-1908 with an industry dominated by two major players and crowded with other competitors and so was highly motivated to cast about for a cultural formula not currently employed in film-making. As Figs. 5.4, 5.6 and 5.8–5.10 show, Éclair made series films its particular speciality, issuing six by late summer 1909. In the UK in October 1909 the new company British & Colonial (B&C) likewise used character-based film franchising to attempt to break into a crowded market: when they debuted their Three-Fingered Kate series (see Fig. 5.8), they had only been producing fiction films for several weeks (see Turvey, 200), and, like Éclair, they went on to specialise in character-based series, initiating three more (Drowsy Dick, Weary Willie & Tired Tim, and Lieutenant Daring) before the end of 1911.

Alliances Any company planning to use a character-based series to realise the benefits listed above faced a systemic hindrance: the potential of a series to achieve consumer loyalty would only be realised when the recognisability of the character’s name and physical and behavioural traits had been established with audiences via the first few films in this series, and establishing this recognisability would mean relying on audiences being exposed to these first few films even though neither hiring companies nor exhibitors had, at this point, any particular motive to, respectively, buy or rent them consistently. Unsurprisingly, then, the industry-wide shift to making character-based series films began with a glut of characters chosen to overcome this impediment because they had already been rendered recognisable in other cultural forms: Éclair’s decision to use Nick Carter for their character-based series was of course motivated by the potential for one of the world’s most widely known fictional characters to function as advertising for one of their product lines. Likewise with Nordisk’s first series character, Sherlock Holmes: just a year after the appearance of Nick Carter in the US, Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes had appeared in the UK in two long stories printed in periodicals (A Study in Scarlett [published in Beeton’s Christmas Annual in 1887] and The Sign of the Four [published in the February 1890 issue of Lippincott’s Magazine]), and then as the protagonist of a series of 23 short stories in the Strand from July 1891 (shortly after the magazine’s launch in January 1891). After his ‘death’ in December 1893, Sherlock Holmes appeared again in a serialised novel, The Hound of the Baskervilles (serialised in the Strand from August 1901 to April 1902), and then in a further 32 short stories and one novel (The Valley of Fear [serialised from September 1914 to May 1915]) in the Strand between turning out to not be dead in October 1903 and his final appearance in 1927. Carter and Holmes were the two most famous series characters in the Western world at the time.



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In Europe, the full roster of series characters in print publications during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries included A.J. Raffles the gentleman cracksman and Stingaree the Australian bushranger (both created by E.W. Hornung), Doyle’s soldier Etienne Gerard and pirate Captain Sharkey, Emma Orczy’s the Scarlet Pimpernel, Hal Meredeth’s detective Sexton Blake, Maurice Leblanc’s gentleman burglar Arsène Lupin, C.J. Cutcliffe Hyne’s naval Captain Kettle, and John Barnett’s Hannibal Bax the eighteenth-century court dwarf. In North America, contemporary print series characters included Nick Carter, Frank Merriwell (created by Gilbert Patten), the Cisco Kid (created by O. Henry (the pseudonym of William Porter)) and Tom Swift (created by Victor Appleton). That seven extant print series franchises (Carter, Holmes, Pinkerton, Blake, Lupin, Weary Willie, and Mutt & Jeff) feature in the film output represented in Fig. 5.8, at least some of which were produced without the permission of the writer concerned, indicates the strength of the perceived advantage conferred on film production companies by such adaptations. Film production companies were of course also motivated to make characterbased series by the attractiveness of alliances between the nascent institution cinema and existing cultural forms that sported enviable levels of cultural prestige, larger audiences, or both. As several historians have pointed out, in the years around 1910, the film industries of the developed world, partly to improve their cultural legitimacy and partly in a pragmatic bid to increase the size of their public, were seeking to popularly redefine the medium by making the first deliberate, rather than automatic, contacts with cognate media.47 And while this intermedial association can be constituted overtly by the adaptation of specific content from an existing cultural form, it can also be constituted on an implicit level, by adopting that cultural form’s rudimentary modes of operation. The character-based film series was just such an alliance, in that it sought to model cinema after the cultural institution of short fiction in prose by emulating one of its newest, rudimentary – and indeed most fundamental – contemporary modes of operation.48 Admittedly, the fictional series has a lengthy history: as Paul Cobley notes, the series “arguably, has its roots in oral culture with selected tales of individuals such as Sinbad or tales of groups such as the heroes of Troy” (257). Although the Iliad and the Odyssey are not true series stories because information from the Iliad is necessary to understand some aspects of the Odyssey, the Sinbad/Sindbad tales, first recorded in the late 800s or early 900s ce (Severin, 16–17), are all discrete narratives. And as Cobley notes, even these earliest instances of series fiction used character as their element of continuity: “[t]ypically,” he adds, “it will involve consecutive adventures in the life and career of an individual” (257). But the Holmes-preoccupied K&LW contributors quoted above were expressing their awareness that character-based series had only become a conspicuous characteristic of print culture during the roughly twentyfive years before 1908. Short fiction was a particularly hospitable environment for characters who were reprised across multiple self-contained narratives, and the format which we know as the short story, distinguished by multiple contemporary commentators from early short fiction with the label ‘true short story’, experienced

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its naissance in the 1880s and 1890s.49 Duplicating this recent prose convention in film promised to add cultural prestige to the entire cultural institution of film. In the context of contemporary readers’ fascination with series characters in short stories and dime novels/pamphlets, making character-based series films implicitly asserted that cinema possessed a degree of literariness. In contrast with the intermedial alliance with theatre attempted via the ‘art film’ phenomenon described in the Introduction and Part 1, the cultural aspirations of the character-based series were rather modest. Just as the early twenty-first-century phenomenon of the superhero film, which derives its content from comic books, a cultural form with a substantial market and very little prestige, evidences that the cultural dignity of the neighbouring cultural form is less important than the size of its audience, the international film industry used character-based series films to knock on the door of a rather lowly neighbour: a K&LW contributor noted that ‘Nick Carter’ was “a name which savours rather of the penny dreadful it is true, but which has associations in the average person’s mind, which should be helpful to the showman.”50 Series characters also asserted a second and even more modest alliance – with the regularly appearing characters of the comic strip, hence the inclusion of the comic strip characters Mutt and Jeff in the above list of overt borrowings. Mutt the fanatical horseracing gambler had first appeared in a comic strip in the San Francisco Chronicle in November 1907, and he was joined by the like-minded Jeff in March 1908. An alliance with prose and comic strip also promised to be much less financially risky than other alliances with cognate media; for example, as Richard Abel notes, Film d’Art’s costs for making their version of La Tosca, including the fee paid to Sarah Bernhardt for starring in it, were entirely wasted because Bernhardt did not approve the film for release, meaning that the film had to be completely reshot (the film as issued in March 1909 starred Cécile Sorel in the title role), contributing to the company’s crippling level of debt – over two hundred thousand francs by the summer of 1909.51 Although, as it is common for cultural historians to observe, series narratives avoid requiring the reader/viewer/listener to acquire any specific knowledge to be able to understand each new narrative, a reader/viewer/listener’s knowledge derived from previous narratives is not irrelevant to her or his engagement with the works: character-based series narratives in particular implicitly permit the reader/ viewer/listener to accrue knowledge about each character’s career, an accruing that both serves as a form of consumer pleasure in itself and serves to provoke interest in future narratives. For example, a patron of a venue regularly showing Cretinetti/Foolshead films would, after a year of such viewing, know of roughly 20 ways in which the character had interacted unusually with others and with his environment, and so would be able to anticipate viewing new interactions with others and with his environment, just as readers of Carter or Holmes fiction would know of solutions to previous mysteries that they could use to race the detective to solve the mystery in each new piece of prose fiction. Interest in a fictional person’s history and awareness of a roster of achievements both serve to habituate viewers/ readers to a franchise.



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Influences The influences involved in the film industry’s deliberate alliance with character-based franchising in prose and comic strips were paralleled by the unconscious influences that older cultural forms exert on newer cultural forms regardless of such deliberate points of contact. The habitual contents of the various permutations of variety (music hall/café-concert in Europe and vaudeville in US), simply by virtue of stocking the ubiquitous entertainment form of the first decade of the twentieth century, were among the most likely to unconsciously shape film content. Discussing the UK, Catriona Parrat remarks that “[b]y the 1870s the increasingly capitalized, newly licensed music hall was shaking off its worst reputation and emerging as a widely popular entertainment venue attracting every gradation, stratum, and caste of the working and lower middle-classes” (124). It was particularly likely that variety would exert an influence on the nascent film industry given that the less prestigious variety venues and the first cinemas targeted the same range of entertainments consumers, as evidenced by their comparable ticket pricing.52 Moreover, as Kember shows, when early film-makers and film exhibitors “designed the experience of the film show to ensure that it reproduced desired qualities of intimacy for audiences,” they “did so in such a way that it might redeploy the cultural functions served by earlier entertainment forms” (42), including variety. And drawing on the types of personhood endemic to variety meant drawing on a transtextual, fictional personhood, because the single most fundamental component of the institution of variety was the comic song performed in character. In 1890 Percy Fitzgerald, in his survey of the variety institution entitled Music-Hall Land (subtitled An Account of the Natives, Male and Female, Pastimes, Songs, Antics, and General Oddities of that Strange Country), observed that a contemporary rise in the frequency of dramatic sketches betrayed “the purely music-hall element – namely, the comic song set off by grotesque dress and action” (2–3).53 That is, even in the era in which “[s]ome music-halls now ambitiously style themselves “theatres of varieties,” or theatre of some kind” (2) and sketches were becoming more common aspects of music hall programmes, comic songs performed in character were the fundamental component of the cultural practices of variety. Although it was common for each comic song to be delivered in a character appropriate to the message of the song (the super-swell of Fred Gilbert’s ‘The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo’ (1892), for example), many music hall celebrities built their fame by near-exclusively appearing in a consistent character. Indeed, Fitzgerald employed the idea of certain performers consistently using certain characters, and the resultant limited population of music hall characters, as the main conceit of Music-Hall Land: across eight chapters Fitzgerald described a population of 10 characters, to some of whom he gave invented proper names. These were: (1) the gentleman swell, (2) the fun-loving working-class man in thrall to ‘the missus’ (see Fig. 5.23), (3) the Sisters Wriggles (a pair of duettists), (4) Miss Skilly (the male impersonator), (5) the female impersonator (exemplified by Little Tich and

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Fig. 5.23  The fun-loving working-class man in thrall to his wife (Fitzgerald, 14).

Dan Leno; see Fig. 5.24), (6) the stimulator of good morale (see Fig. 5.25), (7) Clara Thomas (‘the chic’ or gentlewoman), (8) Sam Redman (the patterer), (9) Bonnie Kate Keane (the brawny middle-aged woman inclined to boast of her attractiveness; see Fig. 5.26) and (10) Fast Fanny Fonblanque (the frolicsome young ‘woman of the world’). The ‘natives’ of the book’s subtitle, therefore, were both a population of broad character types particular to the institution and a population of specific cross-song personae adopted by certain performers. To add to this, of course, were trained non-human animals, contortionists, acrobats, balancers, aerialists, ventriloquists, clowns (including knock-about pairs), comedy musicians, comic performers, impersonators, lightning-change artistes, clog dancers and sketches. But for the latter Fitzgerald only gave real people as examples: only the types of comic singers were given these invented names. As the subtitle of Fitzgerald’s book suggests, these personae implied the existence of a separate world of which



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Fig. 5.24  The female impersonator, on this occasion denoted using a real person, Little Tich (born Harry Relph) (Fitzgerald, 20).

they were all inhabitants. The principle of a transtextual series character in film can therefore be related as much to variety as it can to the above print franchises. Music-Hall Land evidences the necessity of personae for celebrity in variety near the end of the nineteenth century. Kember observes that in the increasingly gentrified UK music halls of the late nineteenth century, where audience participation was becoming less normal, the distance between performer and audience was growing and performers therefore had more to do to establish rapport with their audiences (146). One way of doing this was through making their personae sharply distinctive: by the new century, “[u]nlike performers in the legitimate theatre, stars of the [music] halls had developed a number of eloquent mechanisms for projecting personality, individuality and charm directly to their silent audiences” (Kember, 146). The first generation of music hall performers, Fitzgerald’s ‘Old School’ (see Fig. 5.27), was already an assortment of very clearly distinguished character types. For example,

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Fig. 5.25  The stimulator of good morale (Fitzgerald, 23).

[m]any years ago there was a professor called George Leybourne [whose persona was the swell known as ‘Champagne Charlie’], who gave the ton in all matters of gentlemanly deportment and conduct. No matter what he said, or what he sang, he was never seen out of a dress-suit. “George” was the pink and perfection of the roysterous, gay, and perhaps refined – as compared with his fellows – viveur. He was looked up to, and followed fondly. There was really an idea that he took part in the brilliant scenes he enacted, and consorted with “dooks” and “markises.” [dukes and marquesses] His one (sung) principle seemed to be that nothing highminded, or even practical, could be done in life without – champagne! It set the seal – or its seal – to everything. (Fitzgerald, 5–6, italics in original)

Other examples of these sharply distinguished personae include G.H. Chirgwin’s ‘White-Eyed Kaffir’ persona, first employed in 1877, which featured blackface make-up with a white diamond around his right eye (the two colours were sometimes reversed) and a very tall top hat which he also used as a prop. Fitzgerald wrote that



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Fig. 5.26  Fitzgerald’s invention, Bonnie Kate Keane (Fitzgerald, 31).

““Chirgwin, the White-eyed Kaffir,” thus strangely named, appears in general negro guise, his face well blacked, and an odd white diamond painted on one of his eyes. This eccentricity is, as it were, patented, and distinguishes him from his fellows” (48). Less conspicuous but just as consistent personae included Marie Lloyd’s permissive commentator on sexual mores, Harry Champion’s blissfully ignorant working-class Cockney, Harry Lauder’s exuberantly jovial kilt-wearing speaker of lowland Scots, and even the Cockney accent used regardless of role by the male impersonator Vesta Victoria, who was born and raised not in London but in Leeds. While an entertainment form oriented around singing might seem incompatible with the components of silent film, it is important to recognise that, as Fitzgerald pointed out, performing a comic song was not an exclusively auditory affair: he remarked that “[t]o give a good comic song properly requires real histrionic gifts” (3). He added that delivering a comic song could mean sketching a detailed narrative, both verbally and physically: “[t]here are certain music-hall artists, of a certain rank,

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Fig. 5.27 The first generation of UK music hall celebrities, represented in character (Fitzgerald, 6).



The Series Character  235

who are regular farceurs […]. Each song is a regular little drama, adroitly worked up to a crescendo” (12). For him, “[a] music-hall song or “act,” delivered skilfully and, by one of the first-class performers, is a work of much art. Within the space of a few verses is compressed point, suitable delivery, dramatic action, and illustration; there is also restraint and reserve. […] The leaders – such as your Herbert Campbell, James Fawn, Charles Coborn – are simply perfect in this way” (5). In addition, the fact that most music hall personae were, to at least a small extent, implicit light-hearted satires of the social groups they were supposed to represent gave their performances basic comic overtones; this corresponds to the predominance of comedy in the characterbased film series phenomenon, particularly as the tiny uneducated buffoon who optimistically throws herself or himself into unknown situations, the most common type of series character in film during the 1910s (including Cretinetti, Tontolini, Calino, Rigadin, Patouillard, Robinet, Gontran and Polidor) was also a common species of comic persona in variety. As Fitzgerald remarked, in impersonating a comedy swell, “we must ever recollect to strut and stride rather than walk” (5). The persona came as much from physical mannerisms as from the lyrics of the song. Lastly, just as each persona served its performer the more distinctive it was (making it more difficult for others to copy without infringing performance rights), series characters served the interests of film production companies by dint of being more specific than stock characters.54

Exhibition and Audiences Of course, that 1,167 character-based series film were issued/released in the UK in the 51 months from late September 1908 to the end of 1912 does not mean that a single foot was projected, as they were all made available for outright sale to hiring companies who were not required to buy them and who, in turn, availed films for rent to exhibitors who were not required to rent them. Nonetheless, the longevity of many of these series suggests that there was indeed a strong demand for them among hiring companies, which suggests, in turn, that they perceived a strong demand for them from exhibitors. In 1961, aged 92, Lewin Fitzhamon, an erstwhile Hepworth employee, recalled Hepworth telling him that the Tilly films were the company’s best-selling films, ‘single’-handedly paying for the building of an indoor studio.55 A look at film programmes from the period also suggests that series films in general achieved a prominent place in film exhibition from early 1909. Figs. 5.28–5.38 show posters from the RWC dating from 1909 to 1912, each announcing a film (or mixed film/variety) programme featuring either one or two character-based series films. By the middle of 1909, it seems, character-based series films provided an essential ingredient of a successful programme, at least as far as some cinema managers were concerned. Some of these posters also treated such films as prestige products, further evidencing their perceived value with audiences.

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Fig. 5.28  Poster for the Empress Picture Palace, Northgate, Hartlepool, week commencing 11 January 1909, RWC. DF.WOD.4109. Note the prominence of Nick Carter on the programme.



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Fig. 5.29  Handbill for the Town Hall, Hartlepool, March or April 1909, RWC. DF.WOD.6147. Note the inclusion of both Nick Carter and Cretinetti/Foolshead.

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Fig. 5.30  Handbill for the Town Hall, Hartlepool, April or May 1909, RWC. DF.WOD.4717. Note the text specifying that a film without the series character’s name in the title is a Morgan the Pirate film.



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Fig. 5.31  Poster for the Empress Picture Palace, Northgate, Hartlepool, week commencing 20 September 1909, RWC. DF.WOD.3992. Note the inclusion of a Professor Puddenhead film.

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Fig. 5.32 Poster for the Royal Electric Theatre, Hartlepool, week commencing 25 April 1910, RWC. DF.WOD.4056. Note the prominent description of the Lieutenant Rose film.



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Fig. 5.33  Poster for the Empress Theatre, Northgate, Hartlepool, week commencing 9 May 1910, RWC. DF.WOD.3961. Note the inclusion of a Calino film.

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Fig. 5.34 Poster for the Empress Theatre, Northgate, Hartlepool, week commencing 17 October 1910, RWC. DF.WOD.F1611. Note the inclusion of Lieutenant Rose and the Stolen Submarine.



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Fig. 5.35 Poster for the Empress Theatre of Varieties, Northgate, Hartlepool, week commencing 31 July 1911, RWC. DF.WOD.G1851. Note the inclusion of two series characters: Patouillard/Bill and Daddy’s Little Did’ums.

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Fig. 5.36 Poster for the Empress Theatre of Varieties, Northgate, Hartlepool, week commencing 23 October 1911, RWC. DF.WOD.2356. Note the inclusion of a Patouillard/Bill film and a Bébé/Bobby film.



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Fig. 5.37  Poster for the Town Hall, Hartlepool, week commencing 5 February 1912, RWC. DF.WOD.4800. The first half of the week features Constable Smith and Willie, and the second half of the week features Urban’s Nat Pinkerton and Cretinetti/Foolshead.

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Fig. 5.38 Poster for the Town Hall, Hartlepool, week commencing 15 April 1912, RWC. DF.WOD.4715. Note that the Zigomar vs Nick Carter film is retained for both of the week’s two programmes, and the Kelly film in the second of these programmes.



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A look at some samples of programme summaries likewise indicates that character-based series films were a prominent feature of the film experience during the period between late 1908 and the end of 1912, and, indeed, that a new type of person-to-person audience engagement with film had already become widespread by the Spring of 1909. On 7 April 1909 the HDM reported that [t]he new programme at the Circus is varied and well selected. There are items to suit all tastes. Lovers of adventure will follow with interest “The Vengeance of Morgan the Pirate.” The world of romance is illustrated in “An Abduction in the Reign of Louis XI.” and “When lips are sealed.” The sporting element is represented in the view of “Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race” and “Grand National, 1909;” the interest of the audience was evidenced by the hush of suspense followed by loud acclamations when the winning post was reached. There are also several amusing items, “Troubles of a stranded actor,” “Foolshead on the Alps,” and [“]Collar’d Herring” making great fun. The audience dispersed laughing heartily at the “Suffragette’s Awakening from her dream[”].56

In this programme character-based series (Morgan the Pirate and Foolshead/ Cretinetti) provided two of the seven memorable fiction films. A few days later, the Nottingham Evening Post summarised a local film programme: An excellent programme is provided at the King’s Theatre for the holiday week. “The Exploits of Nick Carter” form the foundation of an interesting dramatic film. The humorous films are admirably adapted to suit the tastes of holiday makers. “The Servants of an Acrobatic Family” and “Foolshead King of the Police” being exceedingly good. Some interesting films of crocodile hunting are shown, and the cinephone gives “The White Man.” Mr E. Williams’s solo, “Baden-Powell’s Scout,” is illustrated with slides of the local units.57

At this venue, series characters (Nick Carter and Foolshead) featured in two of the three memorable fiction films. And this was by no means a scattered phenomenon specific to certain cinemas. In the first half of the week beginning 3 October 1910, if one went to a venue exclusively showing films in Hull, one’s two main choices were the Circus, which was showing, among other films, Poorluck’s First Tiff and Tontolini as Nero, and the Prince’s Hall, whose programme included an unidentified Muggins film and Tweedledum’s Aeronautic Adventures.58 Not only were character-based series films one of the staple components of film programmes for several years, the amount of this staple intensified. The following films were notable among those shown during one night in mid-May 1910 at the Electric Theatre on the pier in St Leonards: “Toilers on the Seashore” is a realistic film showing the hard life to be endured, whilst “Prison in preference to starvation” is a drama of high order and creates much enthusiasm. “Muggins” and “Foolshead Receives” are samples of the humour of the evening’s enjoyment, and excite loud laughter. Other films which are greatly enjoyed are: “The Innkeepers Daughter,” “Lieutenant Rose,” and “The Colonel’s Canary.”59

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Fig. 5.39  Cricks & Martin’s poster for Muggins, V.C., issued in the UK in December 1909. BFI Special Collections PD 20302.



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Three series characters were included in this programme: Muggins (see Fig. 5.39), Foolshead and Lieutenant Rose. A description of some of the films making up an evening show hosted by Walker & Co., at the Music Hall in Aberdeen, in late September 1910 reads like so: The films are almost entirely new, and they form a combination of the grave and gay, the humorous and the pathetic. Such scenes as those depicted in “Mother Love,” “The Girl from Arizona,” and “The Marriage of Muggins, V.C.,” are so realistic as to at once absorb attention and arouse keen interest. Then the buffalo hunting pictures are full of the vivid attraction that absorbs to the full the eyewitness. Among other humorous cinematograms, such examples at [sic] “Tilly the Tomboy,” “Foolshead in a Lion’s Cage,” and “The Short-Sighted Errand Boy” are excruciatingly funny. And last, but not least, might be instanced as specimens of the up-to-dateness of Messrs Walker’s pictures the illustrated news of the world and local and football flashes.60

By this point the inclusion of three character-based series films in one programme (here Muggins, Tilly and Foolshead) seems to have been unremarkable. I have even found one programme including five character-based series films: in the B.B. Pictures shown at the Palace Theatre in Dundee on Monday 10 April 1911, [t]he outstanding picture was “Exploits of Nat Pinkerton, Detective,” which shows most exciting incidents in the smuggler’s den. “Calino as a Fireman” is an amusing film, while “Puritans and Indians” depicts a stiff hand-to-hand fight. Other films were:- “When Tilly’s Uncle Flirted,” “The Border Ranger,” “Tontolini, Traveller in Glue,” “Duped by Dupin,” “Selling Old Master,” while photographs of all the latest topical events were shown by the Pathe Gazette.61

Five of the eight films mentioned here (if one includes Pathé’s Animated Gazette) featured series characters (Nat Pinkerton, Calino, Tilly, Tontolini and Arthene Dupin), and only the last of these films was the putatively one-off first in the series. In mid-April 1911, at the King’s Hall, a cinema in Westgate Street in Gloucester, “[t]he laughable items were sustained by “Lea Discovers a Way,” “When Tilly’s Uncle Flirted,” and “Duped by Dupin.””62 Series characters, that is, provided all the comedy in this programme. While cinema managers were inclined to build a programme from a variety of genres, they seem to have been willing to make an exception to be able to include multiple appearances by one character in a single programme: a 30 December 1910 summary of the Christmas programme at the Royal Assembly Rooms in Leamington Spa announced both Foolshead’s Cannon Duel and Foolshead’s Christmas,63 while among the eight films named in a 1 April 1911 advertisement placed by the London Picture Palace Company for a one-off show at the Exchange Hall in Grantham were Foolshead as Policeman, Tweedledum as Jockey and Foolshead’s Greediness.64 Character-based series films therefore seem to have achieved more than an even share of the market (i.e. more than 6.7% of UK film programmes).

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Advertisements in local US newspapers also show that character-based series films were, though less plentiful than in European cinema programmes, common in US cinema programmes nonetheless.65 There are some instances of venues showing more than one character-based series film. For example, on the weekend beginning 25 June 1909 the Crescent in Kearney, Nebraska, was showing the fifth of Nordisk’s Sherlock Holmes films, Cab no. 519, its “big feature”, announced as “another one of those famous Sherlock Holmes Detective Stories”, in the same programme as Foolshead’s Wrestling.66 In the week beginning 23 August 1909, the Orpheum in Pensacola, Florida, was showing a programme that included the third of Nordisk’s Nat Pinkerton films and the second of Éclair’s Rifle Bill films.67 On 16 February 1910 several cinemas around the US had two Foolshead films (Foolshead Receives and Foolshead Preaches Temperance) in their programmes.68 These were all ‘Independent’ cinemas with their consequently high proportion of films from Europe, though MPPC-licensed venues were not entirely without character-based series films. For example, on 8 June 1911 the Star in Cherryvale, Kansas, was showing a programme that included Edison’s Mr Bumptious, Detective and Pathé/SCAGL’s Wiffles’ Double (Rigadin a un sosie).69 On 4 September 1911 the Folly in Eugene, Oregon, was showing Pathé’s Nick Winter Turns a Trick and Vitagraph’s Captain Barnacle’s Baby.70 Evidence of audiences’ familiarity with these series characters is abundant. Local newspaper advertising indicates that in both the US and the UK it was Cretinetti/ Foolshead with whom the largest number became ‘acquainted’. To start with the US, at the end of December 1909, for example, advertising for the Walter Theatre in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, announced that they were showing Foolshead Has Swallowed a Crab, “[o]ne of those interesting Foolshead Comedies welcomed by everyone”.71 The 27 February 1910 article from a Kansas daily newspaper mentioned in Chapter 2 (see page 138) included a telling detail just before the statement of Lawrence’s name: “There are,” it ran, “two film producers whose pictures are favorites. “Foolshead” is popular with everyone who wishes to laugh and the “Imp” films, with Miss Florence Lawrence, playing the lead, are popular indeed.”72 Advertising for the Bijou in Austin, Minnesota, in mid-September 1910 referred to “[o]ur old friend Foolshead” appearing in Foolshead Wants to Marry the Governor’s Daughter,73 and a spectator at the same venue referred to the appearance of “our old friend Foolshead […] in the “Cannon Duel” in late November 1910.74 Advertising for the Jewel Theatre in Winfield, Kansas, in late June 1911 announced: “Well, here is our old friend, Foolshead again” in Foolshead Somnambulist.75 In the UK the evidence is very similar. At the Royal Assembly Rooms in Leamington Spa, in the week ending Friday 7 October 1910, a contributor to the Leamington Spa Courier and Warwickshire Standard opined, “[t]he best “comic” film is that dealing with yet another adventure of the ubiquitous Foolshead.”76 In the films at the Dundee Palace on 17 October 1910, “[t]he audience were again introduced to the laughter-raising “Foolshead,” who appeared in the role of a fisherman.”77 A review of films at the Exeter Empire Theatre early in the week beginning 31 October 1910 remarked that ““Foolshead” is again much in evidence. He has appeared “On skates” and “At the



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bank” since the Empire has opened in the city. This time he poses as a fisherman with merry results.”78 A Derby Daily Telegraph contributor remarked that during the week beginning 7 November 1910 at Derby’s Grand Theatre (a music hall), “[t]he Grand bioscope will show another adventure of the incomparable Foolshead, who this time will be seen in a lion’s den.”79 In the films on at White’s Electric Theatre in Leamington Spa in the week ending on Friday 4 November 1910, a columnist noticed, although ““Foolshead” does not figure on the programme […] “Poorluck” and his honeymoon troubles form an excellent substitute.”80 Cretinetti/Foolshead, that is, was such a staple of the cinema’s programme as to need to be substituted if ‘unavailable’. While Cretinetti/Foolshead was certainly the most discussed series character of the period, audiences seem to have achieved the same degree of familiarity with many such characters. Among the films at the Electric Picture Palace in Luton in the first part of the week beginning 17 October 1910, one reviewer remarked, “[t]hat eccentric individual Tontolini caused much diversion by his efforts to learn the “noble art,””.81 That is, this reviewer was familiar enough with the character (Tontolini films had first debuted at the UK in May 1910) to dispense with naming the film, and confident that her or his readership would know who Tontolini was too. One summary of the films at the New Electric Theatre in Dundee in late May 1911 reported on the inclusion of a Tontolini film not with the title but simply with the remark that “Tontolini, as is his custom, gets into as many scrapes as he conveniently can.”82 In December 1910 a review of the programme of films at the Queen’s Hall in Dover included the remark that “[t]he piece de resistance is undoubtedly a further adventure of the everpopular Lieut. Rose and his sweetheart”.83 In March 1911 a summary of the films at the Palace Theatre in Dundee explained that, in one notably unnamed film, “[u]ncle Poorluck appears as the donor of a railway excursion, with which event, as usual with Poorluck’s outbursts, there is chained up a whole lot of amusing happenings.”84 In July 1911 a summary of the films shown at the same venue explained, again without mentioning the title of the film, that “[o]ur old friend Wiffles has another adventure. He is down on his luck, and, picturing the comfort of a new prison, tries to get arrested.”85 A review of films shown at the Electric Theatre in Aberdeen on Monday 11 September 1911 included the remark that, in Tilly, Matchmaker, “the favourite “Tilly” had some more of her exciting adventures.”86 Each of these journalists had achieved a degree of intimacy with her or his respective fictional ‘acquaintance’, calling them “[u]ncle”, “friend” and “favourite” respectively. Indeed, even in the rare case of those character-based series where the subsequent films did not include the name of the series character, venues were inclined to state them anyway. When the Palace in Dundee advertised the chief film on the programme at the end of the first week in November 1910, The Blue Diamond, they took care to add “(Arsene Lupin)” after the title.87 In addition, while only the first three ‘Tilly the Tomboy’ films actually had the nickname ‘the Tomboy’ in the title, viewers remembered it nonetheless: in April 1911, five months after the last film with ‘the Tomboy’ in the title, an Aberdeen viewer remarked that, in the programme at the Coliseum, ““Tilly the Tomboy” is again represented in a highly

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diverting film, “When Tilly’s Uncle Flirted.””88 This demonstrates Hepworth’s success at building the character brand with the general public.

A New Backdrop The character-based series was clearly a substantial development in the history of film production, as it added a new dimension to those that could be used to differentiate products, a dimension at right angles to genre, where the distinctions were to be made according to personhood: this was a way of clearly marking out comedies made by company A from comedies made by company B, even if those products were otherwise very similar. This branding-via-personhood (usually by including the character’s name in the film’s title, where possible) seems to have been very effective. For example, a June 1910 article in a Pennsylvania newspaper claimed that “[t]he Foolshead series are the greatest comedies that are made.”89 An accurate description of the experience of going to see a film show during the 1909–12 period must, therefore, involve the phenomenon of encountering a population of named fictional selves, selves whose names the film-viewer was being invited to commit to memory and/or recall, selves whose characteristics remained relatively intertextually consistent, selves whose fictional lives, the form implied, continued between the spans of time constituting each of their films. In Chapter 6 I will show how this phenomenon engendered a film star system.

Notes 1. The Superman films released in 1978 and 1981 ranked first and third, respectively, in their respective annual domestic (US/Canada) box office grosses, and Tim Burton’s Batman was the highest-grossing film of 1989 domestically. All figures taken from Box Office Mojo at http://www.boxofficemojo.com. 2. Anon., ‘New Films and Their Makers’, K&LW 3.71 (17 September 1908), 427–35. 3. For an example of this distinction in action in a work of cultural history see Jennifer Hayward, 90. 4. See for example Marlow-Mann, 147–61. Indeed, I once confused a series character with a serial character (‘She looks’, 56). 5. The latter title was that given by the company in the trade press: see Advertisement, K&LW 2.51 (30 April 1908), back cover. 6. Anon., ‘Éclair’, Ciné-Journal 5 (15 September 1908), 4, emphasis in original. 7. Anon., ‘New Films and Their Makers’, K&LW 3.71 (17 September 1908), 427–35. 8. Reproduced in Anon., ‘Remarkable Film Subjects. No. 9. “Nick Carter, the King of Detectives”’, K&LW 3.72 (24 September 1908), 453. 9. Anon., ‘Remarkable Film Subjects. No. 9. “Nick Carter, the King of Detectives”’, K&LW 3.72 (24 September 1908), 453. 10. Richard Abel has also noticed this industry strategy (see Ciné, 38).



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11. Anon., ‘New Films and Their Makers’, K&LW 3.71 (17 September 1908), 427–35. 12. Anon., ‘Remarkable Film Subjects. No. 9. “Nick Carter, the King of Detectives”’, K&LW 3.72 (24 September 1908), 453. 13. Anon., ‘Éclair’, Ciné-Journal 5 (15 September 1908), 4. 14. Advertisement for Films Lux, Ciné-Journal 2.27 (18 February–4 March 1909), 1. 15. Data drawn from K&LW and Bioscope. I have excluded one-off films with character names in the titles that seem to have been aborted attempts to launch character-based series (e.g. The Adventures of Miss Lawson. 1. Love, the Decoy, 1735 feet, released in the UK on 24 July 1912). 16. For example, Itala re-released several Cretinetti/Foolshead films when the films that André Deed made during his second-stint as Boireau at Pathé began to appear on the market. 17. Reproduced in Advertisement for Éclair, Cine-Journal 2.42 (5–11 June 1909), insert. 18. Reproduced in Advertisement for Éclair, Cine-Journal 2.50 (2–8 August 1909), insert. 19. Anon., ‘Latest Productions’, K&LW 7.163 (23 June 1910), 452 (the film was released in the UK as Betty and the Fireworks). 20. Anon., ‘Latest Productions’, K&LW 7.182 (3 November 1910), 1782 (the film was released in the UK as Wiffles’ Twin). 21. Advertisement for Pathé Frères, Ciné-Journal 5.178 (20 January 1912), 2. 22. Advertisement for Pathé Frères, Ciné-Journal 5.192 (27 April 1912), 2. 23. Advertisement for Pathé Frères, Ciné-Journal 5.198 (8 June 1912), 2. 24. At the point when this sample of data ends, the rate at which new series characters were appearing was slowly diminishing, but as Fig. 5.18 indicates, there was no sign that the phenomenon was in its demise: indeed, even with no new characters appearing, any given period will see no demise in the amount of character-based series films released as long as the existing franchises maintain their current output. 25. The Wrights series seems to have been short-lived only because the company spent a four-month stint filming in California from late January to early April 1910, during which time they judged the best way of maximising their access to outdoor locations to be historical film-making. 26. For example, Simon Popple and Joe Kember remark that 1908 saw “the launch of the film serial by Éclair films in France, who adapted the popular series of novels featuring the detective Nick Carter. The serial […] brought an episodic storyline to audiences of moving pictures, an adaptation of the literary tradition of the serial publication of stories in periodicals” (18). Aware of the distinction between the series and the serial, they nonetheless mistake the Éclair Nick Carter films for a serial. 27. See for example Kelleter, 99–102, where he first mentions the standard scholarly series/ serial distinction and then goes on to use the two terms as if they are synonyms. 28. For example, when the first serials emerged, the MPW repeatedly called them “series” (see e.g. Epes Winthrop Sargeant, ‘Advertising for Exhibitors’, MPW 13.3 (20 July 1912), 238–9, 238, and Anon., ‘Licensed Release Dates’, MPW 14.6 (9 November 1912), 606).

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29. For details see Stamp 102–54 and Singer 494. The twelve instalments of What Happened to Mary were all released to coincide with the monthly publication date of The Ladies’ World; the twelfth and last instalment was released on 27 June 1913. In the UK, prose versions of What Happened to Mary were published in the weekly Home Chat from 15 September 1912 to 1 December 1912. 30. Singer identifies 58 more film serials released in the US up to the end of 1918 (500–1). 31. For example, in her history of cinema in the US 1907–15, Bowser only briefly mentions the series because its characters “anticipated the serial queen” (Transformation 186); the serial, by contrast, Bowser discusses at length as both a genre and an interim format between single-reel films and multi-reel feature films (186–8, 206–10). Similarly, no equivalent of Raymond Stedman’s The Serials (1977) on series yet exists, while Stedman’s own discussion of the series/serial distinction indicates that he is unaware of the thriving and regular series films made in Europe from the late 1900s (7). Rare exceptions include Abel, ‘G.M. Anderson’, 41, where he notices the role played by series films in fostering repeat cinema patronage in the US. 32. Anon., ‘Amusements’, Fitchburg Sentinel (Fitchburg, Mass.) 26.231 (Thursday 4 February 1909), 6. 33. In Pathé’s English-language catalogue supplement for September and October 1903 seven genres/series were already in place, and the correlation of the names for each genre/series with slightly later French-language Pathé Frères catalogues and supplements indicates that this was a direct translation of a system already adopted in French. The same numbered genres/series were used invariably in their catalogues and supplements in French, Spanish, German, English and Italian for the next few years (FJS-P, catalogues) and, as expounded in the Introduction, this system had expanded to twelve sèries by the time of their 1907 annual catalogue, issued in early 1907. 34. I am grateful to Isak Thorsen for the insight that on those rare occasions when series films did not bear the name of the character in the title (e.g. the titles of Nordisk’s Sherlock Holmes films did not feature the character’s name), this occurred in situations where this would draw attention to copyright infringement. 35. There were other attempts to solve the problem of removal, including sending publicity material for specific films directly to exhibitors for them to use in local newspaper advertising, and so prompting them to hire the film concerned. 36. Advertisement for the Lyric, Daily News (Mount Carmel, Pennsylvania) 33.40 (7 November 1910), 1. 37. Advertisement for the Elite, The Coffeyville Daily Journal, Coffeyville, Kansas, 17.23 (27 January 1909), 3. 38. Advertisement for the Elite, The Coffeyville Daily Journal, Coffeyville, Kansas, 17.116 (15 May 1909), 3. 39. Advertisement for the Bijou Theatre, The Evening Republican (Columbus, Indiana), 10 December 1909, 4. 40. Anon., ‘The Variety Theatres’, HDM 7202 (24 November 1908), 3. 41. Anon., ‘Latest Productions’, K&LW 3.80 (19 November 1908), 702.



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42. Anon., ‘The Variety Theatres’, HDM 7221 (16 December 1908), 7. Nick Carter: The Bandits in Evening Dress [Les Bandits en noir] was the sixth Nick Carter film and the last of the first series (the first film in the second series was advertised in late February 1909) (Anon., ‘New Films and Their Makers’, K&LW 3.81 (26 November 1908), 731–7, 735). 43. Anon., ‘The Variety Theatres’, HDM 7221 (16 December 1908), 7. This was probably the first Nick Carter film (for which one of the subtitles circulated was The Kidnapper’s Plot), listed on 17 September 1908. 44. The remaining six films were, in mid-March 1909, an unspecified Nick Carter film that was either Nick Carter in Danger, the seventh, or The Double, the eighth (Anon., ‘The Variety Theatres’, HDM 7297 (16 March 1909), 3), in late September 1909 The Suicide Club, the ninth (Anon., ‘Fresh Pictures at the Circus’, HDM 7465 (29 September 1909), 3), in early December 1909 a film in which Carter “makes a clever capture of some luggage thieves”, so probably The Mysterious Packet, the eleventh (Anon., ‘Novel Pictures at the Circus’, HDM 7524 (7 December 1909), 3), in early April 1910 Nick Carter, Acrobat, the twelfth (Anon., ‘Interesting Pictures at the Circus’, HDM 7625 (6 April 1910), 3), in early February 1912 an unspecified Nick Carter film that was probably The Mystery of the White Bed, the thirteenth (Anon., ‘A Victim of the Mormons’, HDM 8215 (27 February 1912), 6), and on 15 May 1912 Zigomar vs Nick Carter, the fourteenth (Anon., ‘“Halls” & Pictures’, HDM 8281 (15 May 1912), 3). 45. Anon., ‘To Introduce Ourselves’, The Pictures 1.1 (21 October 1911), 1. 46. Ibid. 47. On automatic and deliberate versions of intermediality see Gaudreault & Marion, ‘A Medium’, 4–15. 48. A 1914 magazine article hints at why, in the period when the overwhelming majority of films in Europe and North America were under one reel (1,000 feet) in length, this alliance was made via a convention in short stories and dime novels/pamphlets rather than via a convention in novels: “It is true that lots of good plays can be told in one reel and produced so as to be wondrously successful and entertaining, but this class corresponds with our short story of today, and, while very good and of literary value, yet they do not appeal to the average reader like a well-developed novel, that could be adapted for three or four reels of exciting action.” (Raymond L Schrock, ‘Getting the Right Stride’, MPSM 7.1 (February 1914), 111.) 49. On contemporary commentary on the ‘true short story’ and on its practitioners during the late 1870s, 1880s and 1890s see Harris, 91, 95–154. On the causes of the rise of the short story see Chan, 3; and Baldwin, 35–65. 50. Anon., ‘Remarkable Film Subjects. No. 9. “Nick Carter, the King of Detectives”’, K&LW 3.72 (24 September 1908), 453. 51. Abel, Ciné, 39. Anon., ‘The Pathé Films d’Art’, Bioscope 126 (11 March 1909), 22–3. 52. For example, on 27 May 1910 the Palace, a music hall in Sunderland, priced the overwhelming majority of its tickets at 2d, 3d or 4d (Anon., ‘Variety Theatres’, Sunderland Daily Echo and Shipping Gazette 11.337 (27 May 1910), 1); the nearby Hartlepool cinema advertising its programme for the week commencing 2 May 1910 in the poster reproduced in Fig. 1.21 priced the overwhelming majority of its tickets at 1d, 2d or 3d. At the same

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time, a theatre in Sunderland was pricing the majority of its tickets at 4d, 6d or 1s (Anon., ‘Theatres’, Sunderland Daily Echo and Shipping Gazette 11,337 (27 May 1910), 1). 53. For Fitzgerald the latter was also “losing its attraction” (3) because of poor execution. 54. Stock characters were nonetheless used by film production companies at the time. For example, the character of ‘Henpeck’ featured in films made by six different companies between 1909 and 1912. These were Anglo-American’s Henpeck’s Revolt, issued in the UK in April/May 1909 (Anon., ‘Latest Productions’, K&LW 4.103 (29 April 1909), 1524), Pathé Frères’ Henpeck’s Goodbye, released in the UK on 20 July 1910 (Anon., ‘Latest Productions’, K&LW 7.166 (14 July 1910), 654), Thanhouser’s The Rescue of Mr Henpeck, released in the US on 6 June 1911 (Advertisement for Thanhouser, MPW 8.22 (3 June 1911), 1226), Nordisk’s Joke on Henpeck, released in the US on 13 April 1912 (Advertisement for Nordisk, MPW 12.3 (20 April 1912), 188), Powers’ Henpecked’s Bid For Freedom, released in the UK on 6 November 1912 (Anon., ‘Latest Productions’, K&LW 11.284 (3 October 1912), supplement) and Cricks & Martin’s Henpeck’s Double, released in the UK on 30 November 1912 (Anon., ‘Latest Productions’, K&LW 12.288 (31 October 1912), supplement). 55. Interview with Lewin Fitzhamon, 1961, Denis Gifford Tapes, British Film Institute, GL19. 56. Anon., ‘The Variety Theatres’, HDM 7316 (Wednesday 7 April 1909), 7. 57. Anon., ‘Local Amusements’, Nottingham Evening Post 9548 (13 April 1909), 3. 58. Anon., ‘The Variety Theatres’, HDM 7781 (Wednesday 5 October 1910), 7. 59. Anon., ‘Current Amusements’, Hastings and St Leonards Observer 2743 (Saturday 14 May 1910), 7. 60. Anon., ‘Messrs Walker and Company’s Cinematograph’, Aberdeen Daily Journal 17382 (Tuesday 27 September 1910), 7. 61. Anon., ‘The Palace Theatre’, Dundee Courier 18043 (Tuesday 11 April 1911), 7. 62. Anon., ‘The Picture Theatres’, The Citizen (Gloucester) 36.91 (Tuesday 18 April 1911), 6. 63. Anon., ‘Local News’, Leamington Spa Courier and Warwickshire Standard 83.52 (Friday 30 December 1910), 4. 64. Anon., ‘Notices’, Grantham Journal, Saturday 1 April 1911, 5. 65. Indeed, a clear indicator that character-based series films were less plentiful in US cinemas than they were in Europe is that searches for the series characters listed in Fig. 5.8 on Newspapers.com, an online archive of mostly North American newspapers, produce results in which the Australian newspapers The Sydney Herald and The Age (printed in Melbourne) feature more frequently than newspapers from the US and Canada. In a search for ‘Tontolini’ between the beginning of 1910 and the end of 1912, for example, 40 of 41 results are from these two Australian newspapers. 66. Advertisement for The Crescent, Kearney Daily Hub (Kearney, Nebraska) 21.207 (Friday 25 June 1909), 1. 67. Advertisement for The Orpheum, Pensacola Journal (Pensacola, Florida) 12.201 (22 August 1909), 7. 68. Advertisement for The Lyric, Daily News (Mount Carmel, Pennsylvania) 32.122 (16 February 1910), 1; Advertisement for The Star Theater, Evening Star (Independence, Kansas) 10.269 (16 February 1910), 8.



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69. Advertisement for The Star Theater, Daily Republican (Cherryvale, Kansas) 13.289 (8 June 1911), 3. 70. Advertisement for The Folly, The Eugene Daily Guard (Eugene, Oregon) 36.246 (4 September 1911), 5. 71. Advertisement for The Walter Theatre, Gettysburg Times (Gettysburg, Pennsylvania) 8.59 (Thursday 30 December 1909), 1. 72. Anon., ‘The Stage’, Leavenworth Times (Sunday 27 February 1910), 9. 73. Advertisement for the Bijou Theater, Austin Daily Herald (Austin, Minnesota) 27.219 (21 September 1910), 3. 74. Anon., ‘Social Events’, Austin Daily Herald (Austin, Minnesota) 27.270 (1 December 1910), 8. 75. Advertisement for the Jewel Theatre, The Winfield Free Press (Winfield, Kansas) 22.28 (Friday 30 June 1911), 4. 76. Anon., ‘Local News’, Leamington Spa Courier and Warwickshire Standard 83.40 (Friday 7 October 1910), 4. 77. Anon., ‘B.B. Pictures’, Dundee Courier 17893 (Tuesday 18 October 1910), 7. 78. Anon., ‘Exeter Empire Theatre’, Western Times 19130 (Tuesday 1 November 1910), 5. 79. Anon., ‘Next Week’s Amusements’, Derby Daily Telegraph 60.9727 (Saturday 5 November 1910), 3. 80. Anon., ‘Local News’, Leamington Spa Courier and Warwickshire Standard 83.44 (Friday 4 November 1910), 4. 81. Anon., ‘Luton’, Luton Times and Advertiser 2866 (Friday 21 October 1910), 5. 82. Anon., ‘The New Electric Theatre’, Evening Telegraph and Post (Dundee) 10705 (Tuesday 23 May 1911), 4. 83. Anon., ‘The Queen’s Hall’, Dover Express 2735 (Friday 2 December 1910), 10. 84. Anon., ‘B.B. Pictures’, Dundee Courier 18013 (Tuesday 7 March 1911), 6. 85. Anon., ‘B.B. Pictures’, Evening Telegraph and Post (Dundee) 10747 (Tuesday 11 July 1911), 5. 86. Anon., ‘The Electric Theatre’, Aberdeen Journal 17682 (Tuesday 12 September 1911), 6. 87. Advertisement, Evening Telegraph and Post (Dundee) 10534 (Friday 4 November 1910), 2. 88. Anon., ‘The Coliseum’, Aberdeen Journal 17560 (Saturday 22 April 1911), 6. 89. Anon., ‘A Great Comic Picture at Lyric Tonight’, Mount Carmel Item (Mount Carmel, Pennsylvania) 23.179 (Wednesday 1 June 1910), 1.

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6

The Series Character and the Star System

Before the star system emerged, and film audiences came to shows to see specific actors, this character-based series system, in which the characters’ names became a familiar sign of quality and entertainment[,] was a new way to bypass the whims of the renters and showmen and reach out directly to audiences. If they wanted the next Poorluck film, and showmen knew that they did, when it appeared with the Poorluck name in the title, the showmen would know, and would demand it from the renters. Simon Brown, 2016, 111

Given the contents of the preceding chapters, it may not be necessary to state that, in the absence of the widespread vogue for making character-based series films that began in late 1908, all else remaining unchanged, Pathé and IMP would not have been motivated, in August 1909 and November/December 1909, respectively, to launch the publicity campaigns for Linder and Lawrence that engendered the film star system. This chapter explores that causality. I will show that one of the most relevant of the circumstances brought about by character-based series films was a specific type of audience-film relationship which fostered the widespread recognition among viewers of certain anonymous performers from films alone that in turn, when news of it reached the employers, dissolved the new-medium deadlock described in the Introduction and so enabled the inception of a star system that used performers. But I will also explore five more ways that the series character phenomenon positively engendered the star system, including both those ways in which it established components of a film star system for viewers and those ways in which it fostered conducive habits among film production companies.1 I will also use the second half of this chapter to go one step further, demonstrating that the character-based series, in addition to constituting a primary factor in the emergence of the star system, had another very marked effect on the film star system, one which Simon Brown implies both in the remarks quoted above and when he calls it “the character system” (105): that of rendering it redundant.

SECTION 1 – CAUSALITY There were three ways in which character-based series films engendered audience recognition of certain anonymous performers from film to film and thereby

indirectly initiated a film star system. I will explore each of these in turn before turning to other aspects of character-based series films that indirectly led to the inception of a star system by installing components of a star system with viewers, as well as those that directly prompted film production companies to initiate one.

Recognition The Closer Camera Character-based series involved shot distances that were generally shorter than the contemporary norm, showing the performers larger in the frame than the general standard and so easing recognition of the performer from film to film. The companies making these films had two particular motives for this: first, because each character’s psychological or physical traits were generally important to the plot, close shot distances were often required for details of facial expressions and body parts to be clearly legible; second, clear branding required that the character, whose characteristics were likely to rely on those of a habitual performer, be identifiable from film to film. I will deal with each of these in turn. In these descriptions, I will identify shot distances even more precisely than the scholarly standard of distinguishing between only seven shot distances (extreme close-up (eye, finger, etc.), close-up (face, hand, etc.), medium-close (chest and head), medium (waist upwards), medium-long (knees upwards), long (entire human figure occupying more than 50% of the height of the height of the frame) and extreme long (entire human figure occupying less than 50% of the height of the frame) (see Brewster & Jacobs xii)), in part because the dividing line between, on the one hand, the variety of shot distances in which facial features are clear and, on the other, the variety of shot distances in which they are not lies within the ‘long shot’ classification. The importance of character traits to plot in the character-based series film is evident even in the first Nick Carter film, Nick Carter: Le roi des détectives: Le guetapens, issued in France in early September 1908. Although Carter, played by Pierre Bressol, is first seen in a relatively distant long shot, his figure occupying roughly half the height of the frame, the second shot of him, which shows Carter assume a disguise (the special skill of both the print Carter and this filmic Carter), is a mediumlong shot, filling the frame with his body from his knees upwards. Indeed, having viewed all of the surviving Nick Carter films, Abel observes that medium shots in which Bressol/Carter dons a disguise were a constant at least up to the end of the second series (Ciné, 198). In Lieutenant Rose, R.N., or the Robbers of Fingall’s Creek, released in the UK on 12 February 1910, the shots of the Lieutenant breaking out of the little boat are close long shots, his figure occupying the full height of the frame, to emphasise his strength. This occurred with comedy characters too. For example, in Calino a peur de feu (Calino is afraid of fire, issued in the UK as

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Calino’s Fire Extinguisher on c.21 January 1910), Calino receives a written warning that he will perish in a fire, and so seeks to avoid this by carrying a fire extinguisher with him on his back; he proudly displays the massive device to the camera/viewer, and the film iterates the comedically excessive degree of his reaction by showing this in a medium-long shot in which Clément Mégé’s face is very clear. Lieutenant Daring and the Plans of the Mine Field / Lieutenant Daring Captures a Spy, released on 24 November 1912, features relatively close shots of Daring getting into and out of the biplane that he uses to fly to Folkestone, including a frontal medium shot of him sitting at the controls of the biplane. It also includes a frontal medium shot of Daring on a little launch that would have made recognising the performer (by this point Daring was being played by Percy Moran) from film to film very easy. In general, because the series character would be the single constant in these films, character-based series films also tended to begin by introducing the character in relatively close and uncluttered shots so as to make it clear to the viewer who she or he should keep an eye on during the rest of the action, even if that action would play out in shots of standard distance. For example, the opening shot of the first Mr Poorluck film, Mr Poorluck’s Lucky Horseshoe (also known as Mr Poorluck’s First Tiff), released in the UK on 30 June 1910, most of which plays out in long shot or extreme long shot, shows Poorluck in medium shot, through an oval frame, holding up his horseshoe. Although most of Tilly the Tomboy Visits the Poor (released in the UK on 22 September 1910) is played out in relatively distant long shots or extreme long shots, it begins with a relatively close long shot in which Tilly (Alma Taylor) and Sally (Chrissie White), shot from the shins upward, occupy roughly 90% of the height of the frame, both facing the camera while their uncle issues instructions. In Tontolini e l’asino (Tontolini and the donkey, released in the UK on 28 September 1911), where most of the action is shown in distant long shots or extreme long shots, an opening tight long shot sets up the film’s situation by showing Tontolini left alone in his house by his parents. Even in those character-based series films which featured crowds, the titular characters were prominently placed. In both Tontolini si batte in duello (Tontolini fights a duel) and Il Natale de Cretinetti (Cretinetti’s Christmas), released in the UK on 14 May 1910 and 22 December 1910 respectively, group scenes (in the former a group scuffle and in the latter a duel with an audience) were staged so that the titular character was in the middle of the event and at the front. Camera distances that were shorter than the contemporary norm were also purposed to foster recognition of the character from film to film. In Cretinetti sulle alpi [Foolshead in the Alps], issued in the UK on c.19 March 1909, most of the action plays out in relatively long shot distances (where the vertical space occupied by the human figure is just smaller than the empty vertical space), but in some shots Cretinetti/Deed occupies more than three quarters of the height of the frame, and there is also one shot of Deed putting on a pair of skis in which his entire body is visible but in a shot distance roughly equivalent to a medium shot (his entire body fits into such a close shot because he is sitting down). In Come Cretinetti i paga i debiti (How Cretinetti pays his debts, issued in the UK as How Foolshead Pays His Debts on c.7 May 1909), which shows Cretinetti fleeing and hiding from his debtors, most

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shots are set up so that Deed occupies more than three quarters of the height of the frame, and in the last shot, where he bows to the camera, he occupies the full height of the frame. In Rigadin a un sosie (Rigadin has a lookalike, released in the UK as Wiffles’ Twin on 19 November 1910), the shot of Rigadin listening to his girlfriend playing the piano is a medium shot, a very rare shot distance even in 1910. Léontine en apprentissage (Léontine in training, released in the UK as Betty Tries to Learn a Business on 5 November 1910) is shot so that, though she is only roughly five feet tall, at times Léontine occupies nearly three quarters of the height of the frame. In Rosalie et Léontine vont au théâtre (Rosalie et Léontine go to the theatre, released in France in mid-June 1911), when the pair are seated in the theatre they are shot very close, in the equivalent of medium-long shots. Even in Robinet si dedica agli sports invernali (Robinet devotes himself to winter sports, released in the UK as Tweedledum Tries Winter Sports on 15 February 1911), during some of which Robinet is virtually unrecognisable because of his winter costume, care is taken to have scenes where he removes his balaclava or hat to reveal his features better. Cricks & Martin seem to have developed an alternative method: in their Constable Smith and the Magic Baton, released in the UK on 25 January 1912, Smith tends to exit shots by walking towards and then past the camera, which briefly provides a view of him in mediumlong/medium shot.

The Emblematic Shot Starkly individuating these fictional characters also prompted production companies to use what Barry Salt calls the emblematic shot, a shot type pre-dating these films which involved showing an element of the story-space abstracted from its environment as a summary of the entire film (Film Style 54–5). Character-based series films used emblematic shots that showed the series character from a relatively close distance, outside of any story-space circumstances and usually interacting with no-one apart from the camera/viewer. Alex Marlow-Mann has noticed the tendency of series films to include these shots (154–5). Examples include the last shot of Il Natale de Cretinetti described in Chapter 5 (see page 222) and the first shot of Calino veut être cow-boy (Calino wants to be a cowboy, released in the UK as Calino as a Cowboy on 19 October 1911) which, through multiple exposure, shows two Calinos in medium-long shot: on the left he wears his usual outfit of white bowler hat, white collar and high-waisted white trousers, and on the right he wears the wide-brimmed hat and neckerchief of a cowboy ‘riding’ a step-in horse costume and playing with a toy trumpet and a toy rifle; the two Calinos even playfully interact (see Fig. 6.1). Each of B&C’s ThreeFingered Kate films, issued between mid-October 1909 and October 1912, ends with an emblematic shot where the master criminal Kate faces the camera and defiantly raises her mutilated hand; in Kate Purloins the Wedding Presents, released in the UK on 11 August 1912, this plays out in a medium-close shot, showing her from the chest upwards. Although there is some footage missing from BFINA’s copy of The Adventures of Lieut. Daring, R.N. – # 1 – In a South American Port (released in

262  The Origins of the Film Star System

Fig. 6.1  Two Calinos in the opening emblematic shot of Calino veut être cow-boy.

the UK on 27 September 1911), meaning that it is not possible to tell whether the first shot is abstracted from the story-space, it probably is, as it shows Daring salute towards the camera in medium shot. Marlow-Mann also notes that an emblematic shot was used at the end of Lieutenant Daring Quells a Rebellion, released in the UK on 22 September 1912 (155). Lieutenant Daring and the Plans of the Mine Field / Lieutenant Daring Captures a Spy, released on 24 November 1912, also ends with an emblematic shot, this one showing Daring and his dog Nero calmly seated, facing and looking at the camera, in the equivalent of a medium shot. The most direct precursor for such shots in existing media was a cover illustration for a novel or the preliminary illustration for a short story, but these emblematic shots also functioned as curtain calls, or as situations in which the performers posed, in costume, for a moving portrait. These shots therefore both provided excellent raw material for the recognition of a performer from one film to the next and drew viewers’ attention to the fact that the performer had a life beyond their work in the enacting of a story.

Reappearance Isabelle Aimone, who briefly describes the rise of the profession of the film actor in France, notes that the series was a major cause of the emergence of this professional role because “la vogue des séries […] nécessite une certaine régularité dans l’interprétation [the vogue for series […] necessitated a degree of consistency in realisation]” (83). Abel alludes to this dynamic in his account of the importance of Broncho Billy in the stardom of Gilbert M. Anderson (‘G.M. Anderson’ 26). In addition to driving this professionalisation of film performance, the series character, by drastically increasing the consistency with which a small population of film performers would appear prominently in each company’s output, also drove the recognition required for the emergence of a star system. During the first two decades of the twentieth

The Series Character and the Star System  263

century, if a stage play was successful, a stage performer might play one role for six months or even longer, while film performers would play around thirty to forty roles a year. In contrast to this norm, the character-based series provided circumstances in which one film-only performer (or a very small number, given that some series characters, such as Tilly the Tomboy and Lieutenant Daring, were portrayed by multiple performers) would appear repeatedly in the same role, meaning that such performers would effectively play one role for a stretch of time roughly equivalent to, or even longer than, the longest stretches of time for which stage performers would play a role. Most series character performers were the only people to play their character and most played only their series character, at least while the series was active. In addition, the costume, demeanour, character traits and genre conventions attached to each character all provided constants, uniform ground against which a performer’s body would be rendered so that, during viewings of second and subsequent character-based series films, audiences’ attention would be drawn to the question of whether the body and face were the same as the body and face that had presented this series character before, and this uniform ground meant that if a series character was played by more than one person, it was starkly evident. Such constants had not applied in film so far, even in the case of those films that used stock characters. In addition, as series character performers would provide the faces for their characters, posters produced by their employers were likely to do the same and so automatically foster recognition (e.g. see Fig. 6.2), and this applied even in the case of pre-existing characters: for example, in the poster reproduced in Fig. 5.5 Sherlock Holmes has Viggo Larsen’s face, including his flat top lip and high forehead. As indicated in Chapter 5, by 1910 many exhibitors deemed the character-based series film to be an important component of any film programme, even if that programme changed every three working days. Thus although the increasing frequency of programme changes meant that the population of bodies appearing during any one week’s film viewing grew in spite of the contemporary increase in mean film length, the increasing frequency with which films were changed provided more opportunities for one performer to be recognised from film to film during a period of just a few days. That these three factors – closer shooting distances, emblematic shots and the consistent appearance of a small population of film performers – were conducive to audience recognition of performers from film to film is evidenced by the fact that, though little evidence of audience recognition of film performers survives, the little that does survive centred on performers playing series characters. Commenting on Nordisk’s first Nat Pinkerton film in February 1909, a K&LW contributor “confess[ed] to being a little tired of the detective films which have been so prominent a feature of this season’s output. […] Nat Pinkerton, in whom we recognise the gentleman who impersonated Sherlock Holmes for this firm, under a new name, is just a little too infallible.”2 This was K&LW’s first ever statement that a viewer had recognised a film-only performer: indeed, Viggo Larsen, who performed as Sherlock Holmes in Nordisk’s series, had only appeared in three Sherlock Holmes films in the UK when the Nat Pinkerton series was launched. Of course, the recognition by the

264  The Origins of the Film Star System

Fig. 6.2  Gaumont’s poster for Bébé au Maroc (Bébé/Bobby in Morocco, released in France in February 1912), CF, A190-007. René Dary lends Bébé his face, while racial discourses of the period generate de-individualised representations of all other characters.

The Series Character and the Star System  265

K&LW contributor was recognition by a journalist whose job involved watching many more films than the average film viewer, but there is also evidence of recognition by non-specialists. In 1956 Viggo Larsen recalled in an interview with a Copenhagen newspaper that Nordisk Film var jo kendt over hele verden, og man havde altsaa lagt mærke til mig. – Der kommer Sherlock Holmes, raabte drengene efter mig paa gaden i Berlin. De havde set mig som detektiven i en række seriefilm, vi havde taget ude i Valby, men mit navn kendte de ikke. Vore navne kom aldrig frem, hverken paa filmene eller i programmerne. Alle, skuespillere, instruktør, forfatter og fotograf, optraadte dengang helt anonymt. [Nordisk Film was known over the whole world, and someone had noticed me. – “Here comes Sherlock Holmes,” shouted the boys after me in the streets of Berlin. They had seen me as the detective in a film series, which we had shot in Valby, but they didn’t know my name. Our names never appeared, neither on film nor in the programmes. All, actors, directors, writers and cameraman, appeared quite anonymously at the time.]3

At least as Larsen recalled it, he was first publicly recognised as the performer of a recurring role. The fact that Larsen had ‘faced’ and ‘bodied’ a character who was already a household word for millions of Europeans also aided this act of recognition. Much of the evidence that series characters were being recognised from film to film concerns André Deed, the first person to perform a long-term comedy series character and the second most frequently appearing out of all performers playing series characters. In a brief synopsis for Itala’s new release Le due ordinanze (issued in the UK as The Two Orderlies) in the 28 October 1909 issue of K&LW, a contributor summarised the film: “[t]he beautiful daughter of a peppery old Colonel has two admirers, both odious to her father. She favours the shorter (acted by our old friend Foolshead).”4 The advertisement placed in the same issue of K&LW by Itala’s agent in the UK, Walter Tyler, describes the films as “[a] laughing Headliner, in which Foolshead has the assistance of another comedian almost as good as himself.”5 K&LW and Walter Tyler were, it would seem, referring to the character of Cretinetti/ Foolshead rather than to the person playing him: these acts of impersonation seem to be those that occur in the story-space rather than those that constitute it. Except that they were not: a complete version of Le due ordinanze has survived (a German version titled Die Beiden Ordonnanzen, held by BFINA), and this was definitely not a Cretinetti film.6 It seems to have been one of very few non-Cretinetti films for which André Deed performed in 1909. ‘Foolshead’ is used here as the name of the performer rather than of the part: Foolshead is a “comedian” – one who adopts a comedy persona – and not the comedy persona itself. Admittedly this recognition of Deed’s face/body was achieved by people whose jobs required them to watch more films, and to watch films more regularly, than the average cinemagoer, but they show that recognition was possible, even though, at this point, Cretinetti/Foolshead

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films were not yet issued/released at the three to four per-month rate that they would later achieve (when Le due ordinanze was issued, just 12 Foolshead films had been issued since the launch of the Foolshead series in late January 1909, a rate of just over one a month), and even though the period since the beginning of July had seen only three released (a rate of one every 5½ weeks). Clearly Deed’s consistent playing of Cretinetti/Foolshead, along with the use of that name in the title of every film, was fostering recognition. This phenomenon of a viewer recognising Deed as Cretinetti/Foolshead when he appeared in a non-Cretinetti film can also be observed in the US. Patrons of the Fern Theatre in Leavenworth, Kansas, a local newspaper reported in early June 1909, had “laughed themselves “sick” over the silly antics of the comedian who has been dubbed “Foolshead.” Today and tomorrow “Foolshead” will do some more comedy stunts in a motion picture “Lessons in Electricity.””7 Before the second half of 1909, that is, this columnist saw it as apposite to use the name of the character to refer to the performer playing that character. The same column remarked, in midNovember 1909, that ““Red Hot Days,” is a comedy reel with the same comedian playing the leading role who played the funny part in the “Foolshead” pictures.”8 In early January 1910 the same column noted that, at the Fern, ““Foolshead” who is becoming famous as the motion picture funny man, is this time seen playing a boy part, paying a visit with his parents to a neighbor.”9 Though the columnist did not mention the name of the film, the description of the role suggests that this was also not a Foolshead film. Twice, then, this column evidenced an ability to recognise Deed from one film to the next in spite of his varying roles, an ability founded on his consistently, albeit not exclusively, playing a series character.

Consistency of impersonation The character-based series, by engendering the frequent and long-term appearance in films of a small population of film performers, did not just make this small population significantly more recognisable for viewers; it also aligned this population with the consistency of impersonation that was the norm in theatre. Series characters drew attention to the work involved in maintaining a certain character across multiple performances, in strict contrast to the norm in film viewing so far, where performers would reappear in radically different roles from film to film and thus from week to week. Consistency of impersonation emphasised the work behind a part. Both Abel and LeForestier point out that while comedy film norms established c.1904 in France involved repeating a single device, such as a flight-pursuit scenario, both within and across films, the comedy series based on a consistent character encountering a different adventure each time departed starkly from this norm.10 Trade discourse shows that character-based series films evoked a heightened awareness of the work of film performance. In January 1910, for example, one UK trade article alluded to “the “Nick Carter” artiste”.11 In June 1910 a synopsis in K&LW called Tontolini in Love “[a]nother of those excruciating comics by this inimitable

The Series Character and the Star System  267

comedian”,12 and in July 1910 Cines’s advertising called Tontolini as a Sharpshooter “[o]ne of the best of this irrepressible Comedian’s adventures”.13 Reviews written by the staff of MPW, based on viewing the films, as distinct from the synopses reprinted from trade publicity sent to them by production companies, also evidence this heightened sense of long-term professional labour. For example, a December 1910 review column included the following two reviews, one of a character-based series film and one of a non-series film: “Foolshead Knows How to Take Precautions” (Itala). – This comedian appears in a film which affords opportunity for him to do some of his extremely funny stunts. The work of preparing the actors was performed by a master and then the people did their parts to perfection. Foolshead is one of the comedians who always seems to have something new and something entirely unexpected to offer. His fun is original and though it is rough in some instances, he never forgets that he is there for the purpose of making the audience laugh, and that he succeeds in doing so. […] “The Pilgrim” (Nestor). – A Western film, with some cowboys in it, but they do not occupy the center of the stage. The young man from the East and the girl are both attractive characters and what they do is of sufficient interest to keep an audience pleased throughout the length of the film. The acting is good and the climax, where the boys file in with their coat of tar and feathers ready, but are balked by a marriage certificate, is one of the cleverest bits of acting this firm has sent out in some time. The film will prove popular because it tells its story simply, but clearly and causes the audience to want more like it.14

In the former, awareness of the work of enacting the part of Foolshead is evidenced by both the repeated use of the term ‘comedian’ and the sheer amount of the review devoted to discussing the perceived aims of the performer, compared to the dearth of attention to film work in the latter; indeed, in the former review, the name of the part is being used here as a placeholder for the name of the person enacting this part. Popular discourse likewise used the names of these series characters as if they were the names of the performers, expressing a heightened awareness of longterm professional work. In early June 1910 a spectator at the Lyric in Mount Carmel, Pennsylvania, remarked, upon seeing Foolshead Learns to Somersault (at least the ninth Foolshead film shown at that venue), that “[o]ne wonders how this same Foolshead goes through such a mass of bumping without injury.”15 In September 1910 the same column referred to “Foolshead, the greatest of all comedians”.16 In May 1911 a spectator at the Star Grand in Rushville, Indiana, explained that, in Foolshead at the Kinematograph, “[t]he famous comedian attends a moving picture show and takes exception to the acting of the characters on the screen, getting into a peck of trouble.”17 At the beginning of June 1911 the same column included the remark that Foolshead More Than Usual “is a comedy put on by “Foolshead,” the greatest moving picture comedian in the world.”18 In early August 1911 advertising for the Lyric Airdome in Ada, Oklahoma, announced “‘Foolshead as Police’ / That funny

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man that makes everybody laugh.”19 In mid-October 1911 a spectator at the Star in Fort Wayne, Indiana, stated that “[t]his man Foolshead who plays in this picture is the greatest comedian in the world.”20 In all of these cases (just a small sample of mentions of Foolshead in local US newspapers at the time), the name of the character was used to refer to the performer. The particular strength of this urge to name the performer reflects an awareness of the existence of a distinct professional realm behind the realm of film work; it also reflects the idea that films evidenced this professional realm. Even though the ostensible function of the series character for employers was that the performer temporarily don, like an outfit, a production value owned by the company (i.e. no person ‘embodying’ the McDonald’s ‘restaurant’ mascot Ronald McDonald or the Milky Bar Kid should attain celebrity thereby), this work nonetheless seems to have showcased the skills of the performers. One example of this implicit attribution of credit is evident in a newspaper review of the films on show at the King’s Hall, a cinema in Gloucester, on Monday 15 April 1912: the contributor dwelt on Polidor dalla modista [Polidor the milliner], released in the UK as Polidor at the Milliner’s on 14 April 1912, “in which we renew acquaintance with an old friend under a new name.”21 This was only the third of the Pasquali company’s Polidor films: in calling the performer an “old friend”, this viewer, recognising Ferdinando Guillaume from his roughly 100 appearances as Tontolini for the Cines company, demonstrated her or his perception that both Tontolini and Polidor displayed Guillaume’s personal abilities.

Individualising characteristics It was in the interests of the film production companies making character-based series films to starkly differentiate their characters both from each other and from those of their competitors; after all, the usefulness of a brand would be diminished if it was difficult to distinguish from a rival brand. Though there were some commonalities (for example, Itala’s Cretinetti, Ambrosio’s Robinet and Cricks & Martin’s Charley Smiler all combined enthusiastic optimism with clumsiness), the constellation of series characters seems to have emerged according to the principle of stark differentiation. This meant that the performers who played series characters were advantaged if they possessed one or more starkly distinguishing physical characteristics, either in shape or in behaviour. Even the two Lieutenants (Clarendon’s Lieutenant Rose and B&C’s Lieutenant Daring) were distinguished using aspects of costume, Daring usually wearing a much longer jacket than Rose. Daring, when played by Percy Moran, is also an extremely forceful character, as he makes bold (though not big) physical gestures and interacts with most people and objects with a degree of violence. In Lieutenant Daring and the Plans of the Mine Field / Lieutenant Daring Captures a Spy, released in the UK on 24 November 1912, the shot of the two foreign agents being arrested shows Daring in the background looking on: his bravado stance distinguishes him from the surrounding people. Figure 6.3 lists the physical characteristics and costume characteristics of those series characters whose film appearances I have been able to view.

The Series Character and the Star System  269

Fig. 6.3  Details of the physical and costume characteristics of some of the series characters listed in Fig. 5.8. Name of series Name(s) of character performer(s)

Characteristics

Cretinetti

André Deed (born Markedly shorter than his fellow characters, Henri André Augustin with a thin face and large nose, a straightChapais) legged walk with the legs apart to emphasise his shortness, a consistently enthusiastic and optimistic approach to life and a slightly dandyish demeanour. The early Cretinetti wore a relatively smart light three-piece suit and a matching bowler hat and no noticeable make-up, but by Cretinetti re dei ladri (Cretinetti king of thieves, issued in the UK as Foolshead, King of the Robbers on c.14 May 1909), this had been switched for a looser suit with light horizontal stripes and a dented bowler hat.

Calino

Clément Mégé

Tall, with wide eyes and a wide-eyed obliviousness to imminent dangers and to offence caused to others, a tendency to use prim facial expressions and to smile with an open mouth, a tendency to be rather delicate with objects even though prone to accidents. His costume includes white trousers tucked into tall boots, black frock coat, mid-grey waistcoat, white collar, cane, a variety of hats, all of which are always crumpled and which he wears even when is in a bathing costume (see Fig. 6.8), and no evident make-up (see Fig. 6.4).

Poorluck

Harry Buss

A portly man with variable costumes but always wearing his hair slicked to one side and always, as the name suggests, very unlucky.

Coco

Pacifico Aquilanti

Tall and thin, with a long face and a large nose, a stoop that emphasises his willowiness, and extreme timidity.

Tontolini

Ferdinando Guillaume Extreme timidity, but, unlike Coco, his trademark characteristic is to be the butt of the practical jokes of a group of friends.

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Name of series Name(s) of character performer(s)

Characteristics

Léontine

Unknown22

Young and short with a wide mouth and a playful manner, and a costume including a checked dress cut just below the knee, dark belt, big floppy spotted cravat, socks and boots, a flower in her hair, and her hair tied in a loose plait at the back, and, when she is outside, a wide-brimmed hat with the front of the brim turned up against the crown (see Fig. 6.5).

Broncho Billy

Gilbert M. Anderson (born Max Aronson)

A big jaw, broad shoulders, a gallant manner, and a costume including a white shirt, a black neckerchief, leather forearm braces, dark boots, cowboy hat (often removed in the presence of women), and, when he is riding, chaps.

Rigadin

Prince (born Charles Petitdemange)

Rather tall with a withdrawn upper lip making his upper teeth visible and his smile rather toothsome, a hairline that looks like a horizontal version of this: {, a slightly balding pate and a costume initially including a dark grey jacket and waistcoat with a buttonhole and a hat that is too small for him. In Rigadin se trompe de fiancée (Rigadin makes a mistake in his fiancée, released in the UK as Wiffles’ Sad Mistake in June 1911), Rigadin/Wiffles’ uncle writes a letter to him, shown in intertitles, referring to “your idiotic bashfulness”.

Patouillard

Paul Bertho

Thick curved dark eyebrows (created using make-up) and a perpetual smile.

Daddy’s Little Did’ums

Unknown

A child of about five years of age and of uncertain sex, with a mass of light curly hair, who wears white dresses, who victimises ‘his’ initially single father, throws tantrums, interferes with ‘his’ father’s efforts to find a wife, and gets spanked a lot. (Continued)

The Series Character and the Star System  271

Fig. 6.3  Continued Name of series Name(s) of character performer(s) Bébé

René Dary

Characteristics A dark-haired boy of about nine years of age who behaves with the confidence of an adult and is treated by those around him as if he is an adult. For example, in Bébé Apache (Bobby Apache, released in the UK on 12 January 1911), he impersonates a street criminal to gain access to the Paris underworld to find the person who attacked his policeman father, and even carries a switchblade. Much of the humour in his films derives from a child behaving, and being treated, like an adult. For example, in the Bébé film released in the UK as Bobby Becomes a Millionaire (on 23 March 1911), he takes a young male beggar into his carriage regardless of the protestations of two women who appear to be his mother and a servant, and later swaps clothes with him.

Tilly The Tomboy Initially just Unity and Sally Moore as Tilly. Then Alma Taylor as Tilly and Chrissie White (born Ada Constance) as Sally

The two dress identically, in very light grey dresses with black belts, black stockings, black shoes and soft white bonnets that fall off easily, and both have long loose hair, Tilly’s dark and Sally’s light.

Constable Smith Kelly Storrie

A squat policeman with sideburns, facial make-up in lines exaggerating his age, portliness achieved using a hyperbolic fat suit, and a cockney walk that emphasises his unfitness. Constantly seeking to earn his sergeant’s stripes, he dreams and/or fantasises elaborate situations in which he makes the brave arrest necessary to earn them. In Constable Smith and the Magic Baton, released in the UK on 30 May 1912, Smith magically creates a squad of policeman who all walk like him, emphasising this distinguishing feature.

Pimple

White make-up on the lower part of the face, with black lines exaggerating the facial creases, turning the mouth into a permanent smile and creating an upturned nose, with long hair parted in the middle and wearing a small cricket cap, tight cricket blazer and baggy trousers.

Fred Evans

272  The Origins of the Film Star System

Fig. 6.4  Poster for Calino et le petit restaurant tres bien (Calino and the very good little restaurant, c.1911), CF, A002-035.

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Fig. 6.5 A frame from Léontine est incorrigible (Léontine is incorrigible, c.August 1910), CF, PO0018473-g.

Film production companies certainly intended recognition of the character to be an aspect of the appeal of character-based series films. For example, in a November 1909 trade advertisement for Biograph (who at the time released no series in the UK) featuring testimonials from cinema managers, none mentioned the recognition of performers as an aspect of the audience’s admiration for ‘AB’ films;23 by contrast, in a trade synopsis for Foolshead Ceremonious released at roughly the same time, it was remarked that “[t]hose who have seen the earlier Foolshead subjects should not miss the adventure of this popular character issued by Messrs. Tyler this week. […] [D]isplaying the old favourite in quite a new guise, [it] should be extremely popular with his many English admirers.”24 Figure 6.6 suggests that Cines expected the bodily characteristics of their Lea and Kri Kri characters to be recognisable even with their eyes covered and most of their bodies obscured by military uniforms. The effect of such invitations to identify characters from film to film seems to have gone beyond the intended effect and drawn attention to the performer as well as the character. This is suggested by the fact that some audiences seem to have participated in an informal naming of the performers who played series characters. Not content with the fictional name ‘Foolshead’, the audience at the Lyric in Mount Carmel, Pennsylvania, among whom “the Foolshead series […] is so popular”,25 seem to have nicknamed Deed “French Jimmie”: on 4 May 1910 the Lyric was showing ““Foolshead at the Ball,” with French Jimmie as Foolshead.”26 On 15 March 1910 they were showing ““Foolshead Chief of the Reporters,” with French Jimmie as Foolshead.”27 On 5 May

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Fig. 6.6  Cines’s poster for Kri Kri e Lea Militari (Kri Kri and Lea, Soldiers, released in the UK on 13 July 1913 as Bloomer and Lea, Soldiers). CF, A211-042.

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1910 they were showing ““The Fashionable Sport.” Do not fail to see French Jimmie on roller skates”.28 And on 31 January 1911 they were showing “a great Foolshead comedy, “Foolshead as Inspector of Hygiene.” Do not fail to see “French Jimmie” in this funny comedy.”29 Audiences seem to have desired a ‘real’ name behind the fictional persona. That these audiences landed on ‘Jim/Jimmie’ as the ‘real’ name of the Fooslhead/ Cretinetti performer seems to evidence knowledge of Deed’s 1907–8 stint for Pathé as Boireau/Jim, meaning either that some were recognising Deed as the player of a role that he had stopped playing several years earlier or that Itala’s US agents, the New York Motion Picture Company, were producing publicity giving ‘Jim’ or ‘Jimmie’ as Deed’s real name in an attempt to capitalise on the kudos of having a player who was no longer the property of an MPPC member. The latter is implied by an advertisement for the Lotus in Arkansas City in mid-March 1910 which announced that Foolshead was a “new character in motion pictures created by a comedian famous the world over as “Pathe Jim.” An old friend in a new guise. When Foolshead comes you can be sure of a good amusement.”30 Either way, this nicknaming of the Foolshead performer in the Lyric’s publicity indicates an impulse to discover a consistent identity behind the consistent portrayal of a fictional character. Deed even seems to have been nicknamed regardless of the efforts of the New York Motion Picture Company: a summary of the programme at the Empire Theater in Santa Ana, California, in late May 1910 included the remark that “[t]he splendid acting of Miss Lawrence in the Imp. films, and Mr. Spears as Foolshead for the comic Itala films, have aroused the enthusiasm of their [the Empire’s] many patrons.”31 ‘Mr. Spears’ was presumably a nickname assigned according to Deed’s resemblance to a local Santa Ana figure.32 No matter how superficial series characters were, character-based series films presented viewers with insights into transtextual personhood, at least insomuch as it remained consistent across films. Encouraging such insights into a character drew attention to the body and character of the performer used to produce this fictional personhood, either through the easy default assumption that the fictional character’s personhood derived from elements of the performer’s personhood (casting tends to be carried out so that as little impersonation as possible is necessary) or, if it was evident that impersonation was occurring, by drawing attention to the idea of the consistent real-world personhood from which the character must differ. The series characters thus established an element of the star system by fostering the individualising of a handful of film performers.

Comedy As mentioned in Chapter 5, the dominant genre of the character-based series film was comedy: if it is broken down by negative footage, nearly 75% of the total phenomenon before the end of 1912 can be categorised as comedy. The genre has certainly attracted enough attention from historians to feature in discussions of the emergence of film stardom. Ginette Vincendeau remarks that “[c]omic series,

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organized around a male comic, provided an intense focus on the individual” (48), implying that this phenomenon, in which Pathé was a major player, impelled the shift in popular perceptions of film production from manufacturing companies to individuals. Uli Jung and Martin Loiperdinger make a very similar remark in noting the dominance of comedy in early European film star discourse in their work on the early German film star Asta Nielsen. “Before Asta Nielsen appeared on film [in September 1910], all the actors who were known by name – Max Linder, Prince, André Deed etc. – were more or less fixed to the genre of comedy shorts. They stuck in the memory of audiences just because they kept appearing in ever new variations of the same” (9). Neither Vincendeau nor Jung/Loiperdinger, however, shows that it was a genrespecific aspect of comedy films that encouraged these aspects of film stardom; their remarks could apply to detective films. I will show, by contrast, that there were two ways in which the genre of comedy indirectly precipitated a film star system: a) its dominant performance mode and b) its dominant story principle. One norm of acting quality assesses the quality of a piece of acting according to degree to which a performer renders her or his own self non-evident. Their ability to act is their ability to render any of their own naturally occurring or acquired abilities either invisible or attributable to their role rather than them. Other modes of performance, by contrast, disregard this ideal of a disconnection between performer and part. Among the latter are those types of performance that display the physical abilities – agility, balance, strength, flexibility, etc. – of the performer. Such performance modes either tend to operate outside the realm of acting altogether or, if they are used within media where the normal activity is acting, they roughly align the abilities of the character with those of the performer. Such a mode was the highly physical type of comedy utilised in pre-synchronised-sound cinema, where valued abilities included falling without injury, climbing, swimming, running, handling flaming objects, lifting other people, operating at dangerous heights, fighting without causing injury, throwing, catching, roller-skating, skiing, ice-skating and passing through tight spaces. Of all existing performance modes, the closest to physical comedy at this moment in film history was acrobatics. As most of the series characters and most of the series films utilised this mode (see Chapter 5), and as these films also seem to have been more popular among hiring companies and exhibitors than the dramas, the overwhelming majority of the series character phenomenon worked to draw attention to each performer’s physical characteristics and abilities. This was the case from very early: in the third Cretinetti film, Cretinetti sulle alpi (issued in the UK as Foolshead in the Alps around 19 March 1909), for example, the physical comedy includes some particularly risky stunts involving skiing. Something like acting was of course also needed, but for most series character parts this was minimal; much of the work of physical film comedy displayed the performer’s own characteristics, utilised their own abilities and showed them pushing at their own limits. A July 1910 Ciné-Journal contributor, for example, opined that Linder would execute “des plus abracadabrantes acrobaties [the most preposterous stunts]”.33 Thus though deCordova may have been right when he remarked that ““[l]ying down, rolling over and jumping” are not what one thinks of

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when one thinks of an acting performance” (PP, 35),34 such non-equivalence was irrelevant: these acts of physical comedy were nonetheless performance acts, merely from one of the many categories of performance other than acting, and were therefore relevant work. Indeed, the commonality of this non-histrionic form of performance may have been more important than any discourse on acting to the emergence of the discursive figure of the film star: an impression that film performance was roughly equivalent to acting suggested that films provided insights into fictional people rather than real-world people; by contrast, physical comedy was implicitly framed as providing insights into the person of the performer. A sense that physical comedy provided insight into the person of the performer is reflected in the attention paid by commentators in the trade and popular press to the idea of a realm of endeavour behind films when discussing series comedies. In describing Itala’s Cretinetti/Foolshead films in March 1909, a journalist in the UK trade press noted that “[t]he chief character is enacted by a delightfully humorous performer, who does not spare himself in the endeavour to secure the maximum amount of humour from each scene.”35 In early October 1909 a trade synopsis for Foolshead Too Beautiful announced that “[o]nce again the famous “Foolshead” disports himself for the amusement of the British public”.36 In early December 1910 the Bijou in Austin, Minnesota, announced Foolshead’s Trousers as an opportunity to see “[t]he world’s greatest moving picture comedian in a series of new stunts.”37 The reviewer of Foolshead Knows How to Take Precautions quoted above pointed out the opportunities it provided to “[t]his comedian […] to do some of his extremely funny stunts”.38 This continued into the period of naming, of course; Bioscope described Linder’s La vengeance du bottier with the remark that “[t]he plot is slight but gives Mr. Linder an opportunity for those antics and extravagances amongst which he is so particularly at home.”39 The story principle that pervaded character-based series comedies also prompted the emergence of an aspect of film stardom: characters would adopt a specific activity or profession in each film, this activity or profession often differing radically from those of previous and subsequent films and often differing radically from the activities and professions for which the character’s given traits were suited. These acts of diegetic impersonation were overtly stated in film titles; indeed they were usually the only piece of information other than the name to appear in the title of each film. The tasks and roles which characters would take on would vary to the extreme. Across the 50 Calino films issued before the end of 1912, for example, Calino’s roles and jobs included policeman, lawyer, member of the aristocracy, bullfighter, postman, firefighter, juror, foreman of works, hunter, several different types of sportsperson, locum, builder, cowboy, tourist guide, landlord, cab driver, boxer, lion-tamer and station master. The films would derive much of their humour from the radical incongruity between a stable character and a set of situations into which the character was inserted. The shot reproduced in Fig. 6.7, for example, graphically iterates Calino’s incongruity with the bar full of cowboys, an incongruity which the action of the film plays out repeatedly. These acts of diegetic impersonation were also acknowledged in contemporary commentaries. For example, an April 1909 trade synopsis for Foolshead Wrestling

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Figs. 6.7 & 6.8  Stills from the opening and penultimate scenes, respectively, of Calino veut être cow-boy.

remarked that “Foolshead […] is more absurd than ever as he tries his hand at Wrestling”,40 while in June 1910 a MPW reviewer facetiously reported, discussing Cretinetti facchino (released in the US as Foolshead as a Porter on 4 June 1910), that “Foolshead appears in a new role in this picture and shows how expert he is in performing the duties which belong to such a position. Foolshead is one of the greatest tumblers in the business and whatever he does the audience can rest assured of a long list of comical situations.”41 That ‘Foolshead’ was the character in the first sentence and a nickname for the performer in the second indicates the analogous relationship between part and performer here. The same understanding is evident in a weekly column reviewing local entertainments in the Hull Daily Mail.

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In the 15 June 1910 column the contributor mentioned that, among the films shown at the Circus, ““Foolshead on skates” is a particularly topical and laughable film, which deals with an empty-headed dandy’s adventures in learning how to skate”.42 Just over two months later, in the 24 August 1910 column, the columnist informed readers that, at the Circus, “[t]his week “Foolshead” is to be seen in the role of a railway porter. He gets into an awful mess in trying to carry out his work.”43 Now Foolshead both a) constituted a transtextual person and b) remained this person in spite of adopting varying roles professionally. Three months further on, in the 23 November 1910 column, the columnist remarked that in the programme at the newly opened Prince’s Hall cinema, “[t]he immortal Foolshead again renews his acquaintance with the public. This time he is employed at a Bank.”44 Now, in November 1910, ‘Foolshead’ was the name of a person whose appearances in films (and not the work of the character impersonated) constituted the act on which his career was based, whose appearances in films implied a form of personal contact (as if that person was present in the venue), and whose work had a following among the venue’s public. The very story principle of character-based series comedies, therefore, played out, within the story-space, the phenomenon of a transtextual personhood remaining the same in spite of their taking on wildly varying roles in quick succession, a direct analogy for a film star system based on performers. Given that comedy films thereby installed two discursive aspects of a film star system, it is unsurprising that the earliest known instance of a performer being lured from one film company to another occurred in the case of the one consistent series character of the pre-Nick Carter period: André Deed’s move from Pathé Frères in Paris to Itala in Turin in late 1908 was made possible by the degree of recognisability that he had established at Pathé as Boireau/Jim, and Itala capitalised on it by getting him to continue, as much as possible, to play the same character, Cretinetti/ Foolshead. Deed’s recognisability, at least among the trade, is indicated by an MPW review of Itala’s Cretinetti riceve (released in the US as Foolshead Receives on 12 February 1910), in which a contributor remarked that “[w]hen with another house the actor who performs the principal part was a comedian of merit, and his work with this firm has been satisfactory.”45 The importance of comedy to the inception of the film star system, which Abel has implicitly acknowledged,46 is implied by the fact that the series characters which Linder and Lawrence played immediately before their first publicity campaigns were all comedy characters.

Stardom disguised as industrial authorship All of the aspects of the character-based series described above worked through viewers, generating the circumstances that were conducive to the general public’s recognising a handful of performers and regarding them as both production values and transtextual selves. They therefore led to the emergence of a star system indirectly. The series character also worked to generate the star system directly though,

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by altering the business practices of employers. As outlined in the Introduction, employers were inclined to view the prospect of using performers’ identities as means of product differentiation with suspicion because such business practice would pose a threat to the principle of industrial authorship. Indeed, for as long as publicity was under the control of employers, the brands used by film production companies at the time functioned like an immune system, resisting, in both the companies’ own business practice and in popular discourse, the various potential star systems that might be operated using their employees, like antibodies resisting pathogens. In this situation, one of the few ways that an ‘infection’ – and I use the metaphor advisedly, to iterate the antagonism between industrial authorship and star systems – might take hold would be if a company’s immune system began to generate antibodies that were pathogenic, which would therefore infect the system without being noticed by existing antibodies: in the film industry, that is, a star system might emerge if something disguised one or more of the possible classifications of employee as the company itself. This was exactly what happened with the series character: searching for sub-brands to increase the precision of their product differentiation, the film production companies hit upon a classification of sub-brand which did not threaten industrial authorship but which nonetheless also shared enough characteristics with a performer star system to be practically indistinguishable from it: this version of industrial authorship a) constituted a form of transtextual personhood, b) possessed consistent distinguishing features, c) featured in the company’s output with predictable regularity and d) derived from the performances of (usually) one performer. When the vogue for character-based series film-making took hold, film production companies were widely developing immune systems that, as part of their normal functioning, were generating infections to which they were blind. One way in which this antibody-turned-pathogen functioned was by establishing personal relationships between viewers and the performers that were disguised as relationships between viewers and the company-owned characters. For example, in late October 1910 advertising for the Bijou in Austin, Minnesota, claimed that “[t]here never was a comedian in the world who has caused more laughs than this same funny Foolshead.”47 The laugh-eliciting qualities of Deed were here being praised under the guise of praise for the Itala sub-brand of Foolshead/Cretinetti. In mid-November 1910 a reviewer of local entertainments in Aberdeen remarked that in the week beginning 21 November the Coliseum would be showing ““Tilly the Tomboy,” “Tweedledum and Foolshead in New Sketches,””.48 As the most likely correction of the typesetter’s errors here is “Tilly the Tomboy, Tweedledum and Foolshead in new sketches”, this commentator was reporting her or his own anticipation that these three performers (respectively, Alma Taylor, Marcel Perez and André Deed) would shortly appear in new filmic displays of their abilities, with this anticipation likewise appearing under the guise of anticipation about the reappearance of characters. Even those wishing to define stardom as fame across the industrialised world in general would not be able to debar Deed as Cretinetti/Foolshead from fitting the definition: advertising for the Pergola in Allentown, Pennsylvania, referred to “[t]he world-renowned Foolshead”49

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in late April 1911, and the Edisonian in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, referred to “the world renowned Foolshead” in mid-May 1911.50 There is also evidence that the series character contributed to bringing about the hierarchisation of pay that constitutes a significant component of a star system. In the ledger recording the expenditures on wages for the S.C.A.G.L. company’s productions from 15 February 1910 to 13 March 1911, Rigadin films start to feature in June 1910 (the first, Rigadin dans le monde, with Georges Monca in charge of production, is dated 10 June 1910 with a ‘bande terminée’ date (i.e. a ‘wrap’ date) of 14 June 1910), and 35 Rigadin films are recorded before the ledger runs out, these 35 films making up 34% of the 103 films made by S.C.A.G.L. in the period 10 June 1910 to 13 March 1911. At some points the Rigadin work made up the majority of the company’s operations: during August 1910 the company made nine Rigadin films and only one other film of any kind (Philémon et Baucis). And at the top of every list of staff names for these 35 Rigadin films was the name ‘Prince’, the professional pseudonym of Charles Petitdemange, who played Rigadin. These entries include the wages paid to each employee, and Petitdemange/Prince was a relatively expensive employee: from the first film he was paid 65 francs per day of filming (where daily wages for the majority of his co-workers on Rigadin dans le monde (Rigadin in ‘high’ society), for example, were in the 5–25 francs range), and by 25 June 1910 he was on 70 francs per day (including on Rigadin vient dormir tranquille (Rigadin comes to a restful sleep), on which none of his co-workers earned more than 15 francs a day), a wage that he was still receiving when the ledger ran out on 13 March 1911. This wage put him between the temporary stage borrowing on the one hand (Jeanne Delvair, whose name and Comedie Française affiliation was placed above the title on the poster, was paid 100 francs a day for her seven days’ work for Les deux petits Jésus (The two little Jesuses) in March 1910), and, on the other hand, the non-lead performer, who would earn an average of roughly 15 francs a day.51 As the default consistent star of these films, Prince was placed above each of his fellow performers in a production hierarchy. That the consistent use of one performer, or a very small number of performers, to play a series character prompted employers to operate a form of stardom is evidenced by the fact that some of the earliest instances of a company using the identity of a film performer for publicity purposes occurred in one of the rare cases when the norm of impermanence of employment was suspended: non-human animals. As mentioned in Chapter 5, starting in 1905 the Hepworth Company issued a ‘Rover’ series featuring Cecil Hepworth’s own pet rough collie, Blair. These films were: 1 Rescued by Rover (July 1905) 2 Rover Takes a Call (July 1905), a c.50-second ‘portrait’ film sold to accompany Rescued by Rover 3 The Lucky Necklace (November 1906) 4 Dumb Sagacity or, Caught by the Tide (September 1907) 5 Father’s Lesson (March 1908)

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6 The Dog Outwits the Kidnapper/Rover Drives a Motor (April 1908), the latter title used in at least one trade press advertisement 7 The Dog Came Back (January 1909) 8 The Shepherd’s Dog (March 1909) 9 His Only Friend (May 1909) As Hepworth owned Blair, meaning that, unlike any of the human performers appearing in Hepworth’s films at the time, this performer would definitely be with the company for the foreseeable future, this was a rare exception to the contemporary norm of casual employment among film performers, meaning that there was no systemic impediment to discourage Hepworth from publicising this performer’s identity. Indeed, even if Blair died (he survived until 1914),52 Hepworth would have been able to replace him with little chance of viewers noticing. And publicising Blair does at least seem to have been exactly what Hepworth did. For example, Hepworth informed the trade of more than the mere involvement of the ‘Rover’ character in the April 1908 film: one of their October 1907 trade advertisements for Dumb Sagacity called the film “[a]nother exceptional production in which Black Beauty and Rover surpass themselves”.53 This trade advertising sought to install aspects of a transtextual subjecthood, and such marketing efforts seem to have been effective among the trade: Simon Brown finds that in a review of Saved from a Terrible Death (issued early/mid-August 1908) a K&LW contributor stated that “one of the most remarkable features of the Hepwix animal studies […] was that, with a wide difference in plot and setting, they for the most part employed the same actors”, and added that “it was usually ‘Rover’ who occupied the centre of the stage, either alone or with this equine friend “Black Beauty””.54 These efforts all imply that a public profile follows automatically from the permanence of employment entailed by series films; “within the trade Rover and Black Beauty were stars”, Simon Brown opines, “recognised as being leading performers with commodity appeal” (106). A form of proto-stardom resulted from repeated anonymous performances of the same character. The distinction between specialist and popular publicity mentioned in the Introduction is nonetheless relevant here: though the company might build a profile for non-human performers among the trade, publicity efforts directed at the general public seem to have been lacking. As Brown has pointed out, the company a) did not use titling, the one reliable method of reaching the general public at the time, to draw attention to the appearance of Rover/Blair in every film,55 and b) let substantial periods elapse between each appearance: a year between Rescued by Rover in July 1905 and the next non-human animal film, Black Beauty, in August 1906, then four months until the reappearance of Rover in The Lucky Necklace and then almost another year until the next Rover appearance in Dumb Sagacity in September 1907 (107). And even though this changed – Brown adds that “[i]t is noteworthy that after a period of eleven months between Rover [July 1905] and Black Beauty [August 1906] and Black Beauty and Dumb Sagacity [September 1907], it was only seven months

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between the latter and Father’s Lesson [March 1908], and only a month between it and The Dog Outwits the Kidnapper [April 1908]”, which shows that by the middle of 1908 the pressure to regularly replace a specialised output was now on (107) – the fact that humans have more difficulty in individuating non-human animals than they have in individuating humans nonetheless limited the extent to which Hepworth thought they could use Rover/Blair as a star with the general public.

Anonymous identification The final respect in which the character-based series indirectly initiated the film star system was that it closely duplicated an idiosyncratic version of publicity that had been commonly used in Western print culture for several centuries: that of building an identity for a cultural worker while deliberately neither naming a person nor using a pseudonym. As John Mullan points out, concentrating on Britain, although, “[i]n the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the majority of novels published […] were anonymous” (57), publishers attributed works nonetheless by using either a) appellatives or b) that writer’s bibliography. For example, the title page of Jane Austen’s first published novel, Sense and Sensibility (1811), read: “sense and sensibility: / a novel. / in three volumes. / by a lady”. In spite of the absence of either a genuine name or a pseudonym, the avowed attribution to “a lady” nonetheless provided a very rudimentary identity: she was ‘a woman who does not have to work and whose attitude towards prose fiction mixes skill and enthusiasm about it with awareness of the cultural taboo against women of her class writing it (given that she either a) produces it in spite of not wanting to be identified as a writer of prose fiction, or b) has agreed for it to be published in spite of her publisher or printer’s refusal to name her as the author)’. That is, a basic identity profile could be deduced from the combination of the text “by a lady” and the circumstances in which that name appeared.56 Vague though this attribution was, it could be, and was, made more precise by the attributions on the title pages of the rest of her output. The title page of Pride and Prejudice (1813) stated that it was “by the / author of “sense and sensibility.””, the title page of Mansfield Park (1814) stated that it was “by the / author of “sense and sensibility,” / and “pride and prejudice.””, the title page of Emma (dated 1816 but published in late 1815) stated that it was “by the / author of “pride and prejudice,” / &c. &c.”, and the title page of the combined Northanger Abbey and Persuasion (dated 1818 but published in late 1817), published posthumously, stated that the two novels were written “by the author of “pride and prejudice,” / “mansfield park,” &c.”, this title page continuing to use the nameless identity – one part bibliography and one part implication – that had been established by the four previous publications even though this volume also included Henry Austen’s ‘Biographical Notice of the Author’, in which he gave his sister’s name three times and described, in some detail, her personality traits.57 Anonymity here did not mean the absence of a public identity. On the contrary, it went hand-in-hand with a rough professional equivalent of an identity,

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an ‘anonym’, an identity which continued to be useful to Austen’s surviving family members as an identifier even when they had decided to announce her name.58 The idea that anonymity involves the construction of a public identity of sorts is one reason why Mullan, in his history of literary anonymity, treats anonymous publication and pseudonymous publication as inseparable: both prevented readers from tracing works to their real authors, yet both contributed to transtextual identities of a sort and neither prevented these authors’ previous works from being used to advertise future works.59 A star, that is, can exist without the public circulation of either their real name or any name, as long as publicity mechanisms constitute a distinct enough public identity and a clear enough attribution of forthcoming work to that identity to permit those forthcoming works to benefit from the success of that person’s previous works. In not publicly naming the performers playing series characters, therefore, film production companies were not necessarily avoiding using their performer employees for publicity purposes; other methods of doing so were available, and deriving an anonym from the identity of a series character can be regarded as one of them. By simply stating the name of the series character in the title of the film, a production company could advertise the probable reappearance of a specific performer, just as the attribution ‘by the author of X’ in newspaper advertising announced the imminent reappearance of the work of a specific writer without stating her or his name. With none of the actors regularly playing series characters being publicly named for almost a year after the character-based series film phenomenon began, and with most remaining anonymous for over two years, film viewers were treating series characters’ names as identifiers for their performers by early 1909 at the latest. When the K&LW contributor quoted above remarked in February 1909 that “Nat Pinkerton, in whom we recognise the gentleman who impersonated Sherlock Holmes for this firm [Nordisk], under a new name, is just a little too infallible”,60 her or his use of the phrasing “under a new name” indicates that she or he regarded the names ‘Sherlock Holmes’ and ‘Nat Pinkerton’ as more like pseudonyms than the names of fictional people. There is even evidence to suggest that some film production companies planned for series character names to serve the public as anonyms or pseudonyms for the performers. While the earliest surviving evidence of Itala using André Deed’s name on their posters dates from September 1910 (see Fig. 6.9), 20 months after he had started performing as Cretinetti for the company, a whole year earlier, in September 1909, Itala’s trade advertising for the Cretinetti films already called him “[t]he most famous picture comedian in the world”.61 A trade synopsis for Il Natale de Cretinetti in December 1909 explained that “[t]he title of this film will give rise to pleasant anticipations in the minds of all who have followed the diverting adventures of this famous comedian”.62 In the summer of 1910 Itala even seems to have orchestrated a fake story about ‘Foolshead’s death (or, as with Laemmle and Lawrence, a real response to a non-existent story) in order to provoke anxiety about the possibility of his disappearance from films, which they followed up with reassurances that he was still alive and had signed a new contract with Itala, still without yet using the name ‘André Deed’.63

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Fig. 6.9 Poster for Cretinetti impiegato di banca [Cretinetti the blank clerk] (c.August/ September 1910). CF, A008-032. Note the use of Deed’s own name.

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Other employers who overtly used their series characters’ names as if they were pseudonyms for their performers include Gaumont, in such instances as the title footage for the Bébé film released in the UK as Bobby Becomes a Millionaire (on 23 March 1911), which reads: “BOBBY BECOMES A MILLIONAIRE / AS PLAYED BY THE WONDERFUL LITTLE ACTORS / “BOBBY” AND “TOTO””.64 These were the characters’ names rather than the names of the performers, and yet their employers saw fit to use them to publicise the “wonderful little actors”. In September 1911 an Evening Times contributor referred to Gaumont’s “boy comedian who goes by the name of “Bobby.” Not a single habitue of the picture theatre but has enjoyed the acting of this clever boy, who, by the way, is engaged exclusively by the Gaumont Company at a weekly salary that would enable you or I to retire from business in a few years.”65 This copy, bearing the hallmarks of Gaumont, shows a production company, perhaps unwittingly, using a series character name as René Dary’s anonym.66 These anonyms were certainly effective in constituting the various series character performers as production values. In August 1909 a columnist in an Indiana newspaper was referring to John Cumpson under the anonym of ‘Jones’ when she or he remarked that “[a]nyone attending the picture shows is acquainted with Jones, the fat comedian, and everyone knows that Jones is funny.”67 After Cumpson had moved to the Edison Company, where he played a new series character called Bumptious, a contributor to a Pennsylvania newspaper observed that “Mr. Bumptious was once the funny Mr. Jones with the Biograph Co.”;68 the previous series character designation, that is, sufficed to properly attribute Cumpson’s previous work. In April 1910 a contributor to K&LW used the name ‘Foolshead’ as a pseudonym for the performer when she or he referred to “that delicious humour which Foolshead alone seems capable of among present day living picture actors”.69 In December 1910 a MPW reviewer remarked that in “Joke on Bumptious […] [t]he club members played a joke on Bumptious, the popular fat comedian”.70 Here the name of the character served this trade commentator as a way of identifying the performer who played him. It served Cumpson’s employer the same way: Edison’s trade advertisement for A Family of Vegetarians (released in the US on 28 December 1910) drew attention to John Cumpson’s presence not by giving his name but by stating that it was a “Feature Comedy Reel with “Jones” playing the lead role”;71 the ‘Jones’ profile that Cumpson brought from Biograph functioned as his public identity. Likewise, a contributor to a July 1910 issue of FI opined that Pathé “have two of the world’s greatest moving picture comedians working for them at the present time, Max Linder and Betty [i.e. the series character Léontine]”,72 using ‘Betty’ here as an anonym for this character’s habitual performer. It is also quite common to find historians of early cinema classifying the names of series characters as pseudonyms for their performers,73 a mistake, strictly speaking, but a revealing mistake because it indicates confusion between two very similar phenomena. The series character identity was so similar to the literary anonym that when Ferdinando Guillaume left the Cines company in Rome, where he had played

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the character of Tontolini in over 100 films, in early 1912, and joined the Pasquali company in Turin as performer in (and director of) a new character-based series (see Blom, ‘All the Same’, 466), Pasquali advertised this acquisition in the trade press not by publicising his real name but by announcing “Polydor! / Mais… c’est l’ancien Tontolini de la Cinès [Polidor! But… it’s Cines’s old Tontolini]” (see Fig. 6.10), using the name ‘Tontolini’ to cite his film work thus far exactly as the literary anonym cited the bibliographies of published writers. The advertisement even treated Guillaume’s own face as that of both Tontolini and Polidor. Pasquali continued to use Guillaume’s ‘anonymous’ face in their trade advertising as a way of citing his Tontolini/ Polidor filmography.74 The public did the same: in May 1912 a local UK newspaper journalist remarked that in an unnamed film, “Polidor, the Italian comedian, […] acts a complete farce himself, taking five characters.”75 The character’s name served as Guillaume’s anonym. Even after employers began to publicly name the performers playing series characters, the characters’ names continued to function as anonyms for these people: in March 1912 a London newspaper reported that “[p]icture play habitués will be interested to learn that M. André Deed – or “Foolshead,” as he is popularly known – is now acting again for the cinematograph, but this time with Messrs. Pathé Frères.”76 As an anonym for Deed, ‘Cretinetti’ had been very useful for Itala: while no company would be inclined to advertise a product that is not in some way exclusively

Fig. 6.10  Advertisement for Pasquali/Polidor, Ciné-Journal 5.187 (28 March 1912), 62–3.

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theirs, and while no company would be inclined to generate an asset that might take its potential to realise profit to a rival (see pages 25–6), this does not mean that companies were entirely averse to advertising their regularly featured employees; if the employing company could somehow make that employee take the form of a product over which they held ownership, then they could retain the investment in that performer’s public profile even if the employee left the company, preventing that investment from ‘wandering’. And as Cecil Hepworth later admitted, his solution to the ‘wandering value’ problem, which involved applying a company-designed pseudonym or “nom de guerre” to the performer that they could not use after leaving the company, turned out not to be legally enforceable (Came the Dawn, 81–2). The series character was an earlier (and, by contrast, effective) solution to this problem. Like Guillaume’s Tontolini/Polidor transition, when Emilio Vardannes, who played Toto for Itala from c.March 1911 to c.April 1912, moved to the Milano Company, Milano had him continue to play a comedy series character but called it ‘Bonifacio/Boniface’. They announced in the French trade press in May 1912 that “[l]e créateur des films comiques “TOTO” s’appelle maintenant / BONIFACE / et continue sa désopilante série pour la Milano-Film [the creator of the ‘Toto’ comic films is now called ‘Boniface’ and continues his hilarious series for Milano-Film]”.77 In both cases, the new employer anticipated and avoided copyright infringement. Some film historians have treated identification in spite of anonymity as constituting stardom. In the 1926 work that deCordova classified as part of film history’s “standard account” of the emergence of stardom in the US, Terry Ramsaye claimed that when Florence Lawrence “was the outstanding visible and obvious figure of that [Biograph’s] product […] [s]he was in fact a star, although the motion picture world did not know it” (Million, 523). More recently, Tom Gunning designates the recognition of an anonymously appearing performer as stardom, producing what he calls the “paradox of an unknown star” (D.W. Griffith, 219). Jane Gaines concurs, writing that “[t]his phenomenon in which a player could be recognized by viewers in more than one screen appearance but remain publicly unnamed produced the paradoxical condition of […] popular anonymity” (‘Anonymity’, 447, emphasis in original). If Ramsaye, Gunning and Gaines were all right to use the term ‘star’ in this context,78 then the MPW reviewer who, reviewing Lady Helen’s Escapade in April 1909, remarked that “the chief honours of the picture are borne by the now famous Biograph girl, who must be gratified by the silent celebrity she has achieved”79 (see page 153n84), was evidencing the existence of just such anonymous stardom, long before Lawrence’s ‘real’ name was used as the basis of a publicity campaign. While it might be objected that stardom, as I have defined it in this book, cannot apply to a person whose name is not publicly circulated, a star system only requires that an identity be circulated, which can be achieved without naming. The series character seems therefore to be what stardom looked like when one common but not essential aspect of a star system – the circulation of a person’s real name or selfadopted pseudonym – was not sanctioned.

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At this point, a widely cited phenomenon of the period warrants some in-depth examination. The following are just a few examples of the common claim, in histories of this period, that this or that young female film performer was ‘known as ‘the ## Girl’’. In early 1915 Lawrence herself recalled that “it was under his [D.W. Griffith’s] tutelage that I […] woke up one bright morning to find myself world-famous as “The Biograph Girl.”” (‘Growing’, Part 3, 97) In 1931 John Drinkwater wrote that “[o]ne of his [Carl Laemmle’s] first successes was the acquisition of Florence Lawrence, then famous as ‘The Biograph Girl.’” (132) Leslie Wood wrote in 1947 that “[t]o satisfy the public, who wanted some means of identifying popular players when talking about them to their friends, the companies attached their own names to the girls — The Vitagraph Girl, The Lubin Girl, The Biograph Girl, and so on. If a star went to another company, her successor was given her crown” (206). In 1959 Ralph Cassady wrote that “the very popular Florence Lawrence was known as the “Biograph Girl” by the public even though she remained anonymous” (52). Charles Musser wrote in 1987 that [f]rom 1907 through 1909 […] the stock company system meant that some actors appeared weekly in a studio’s offerings. Regular moviegoers soon recognised the leading players and nicknamed them “The Vitagraph Girl” (Florence Turner), “The Kalem Girl” (Gene Gauntier), or “The Biograph Girl” (first Florence Lawrence, later Marion Leonard and Mary Pickford). (‘Changing’, 58)

Tom Gunning wrote in 1991 that in the years before Biograph first began to credit its performers, “[t]he rubric “Biograph girl,” like the contemporary “Vitagraph girl” which described Florence Turner, was created first by audiences to describe the leading ladies they recognized from film to film. For want of anything better the term [sic] was named after the production company” (D.W. Griffith, 218). The first Biograph girl, he points out, was Florence Lawrence, and the name was transferred to Mary Pickford after Lawrence left. Richard Dyer MacCann wrote in 1992 that because their letters to MPPC companies “asking for the names of certain players” were going unanswered, “[a]udiences in the nickelodeon theaters of the time had to find their own names; one favorite was given the title of “the Biograph girl.”” (45) Hugues Bartoli remarked in 2004 that by the beginning of 1909 Florence Lawrence “was getting a great deal of fan mail from all over the world, though she was only known as “the Biograph Girl”. At that time, performers’ names were not publicly known and were still only identified by their studio affiliation, as the production companies were reluctant to divulge their players’ identities despite repeated requests from filmgoers” (72). Pickford’s biographer Eileen Whitfield wrote in 2007 that “[f]ans, with no other name at their disposal but yearning to lay claim to their favorite, began to call her [Lawrence] “the Biograph Girl” – an honour that would later pass to Pickford” (81–2). Ken Wlaschin wrote in 2009 that “audiences knew her [Florence Turner] by nickname” (‘The Vitagraph Girl’) by early April 1910 (1). Most such remarks lack supporting evidence. The dominant causation, for such works, is that these monikers emerged from viewers. Gunning exemplified this perception when he claimed in 1991 that

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“Lawrence’s star reputation [while at Biograph] was not the result of publicity, studio or otherwise, but the outcome of audience preference” (D.W. Griffith, 219). He added in 1999 that, “[d]ue undoubtedly to both her immediate physical appeal and her liveliness, it was [Florence] Lawrence [i.e. rather than Marion Leonard or Linda Arvidson] that film viewer’s [sic] identified with the company and began calling “the Biograph Girl.”” (‘The Girl’, 89) These nicknames, the dominant account goes, resulted from employers’ resistance to the star system. I mentioned in Chapter 4 that the idea of a deadlock systemically dissuading any production company from publicising the names of their regular employees gives some credibility to the picture of a situation in which viewers were recognising players across films and regarding them as production values even though the production companies were not. The nicknames ‘Biograph Girl’, ‘Vitagraph Girl’ etc. could be regarded as symptoms of this situation: if the performers could not be ‘identified’ by their real names, cinemagoers could invent identities using the brand names of their employers. A bottom-up situation seems plausible. However, the scraps of evidence supporting the claim that these performers were popularly referred to as ‘the ## Girl’ show trade publications and exhibitors, rather than the general public, innovating these appellations, belying the idea that they were “created first by audiences”. In addition to MPW’s use of the term ‘Biograph Girl’ to describe Florence Lawrence from April 1909 (see page 139), other contemporary uses of the ‘## Girl’ moniker include a gently satirical portrait of a poor patron of Chicago’s nickelodeons in an early October 1909 MPW column, which included the remark that “[he] knows all about them – Selig’s Indians and Edison dramas and Vitagraph films d’art, and Pathe’s wonderful trick pictures – and he just raves about them, but first and last he loves that Biograph girl.”80 In Frank Woods’s October 1919 ‘Why is a Star?’ article, although Woods glossed over the question of whether the public originated these nicknames, he also revealingly added that when the manufacturers “reluctantly saw the light” and reversed their principle of anonymity, this revelation prompted them not to name these stars but to adopt these company epithets: “[t]hen followed the Kalem Girl, Alice Joyce, and the Edison Girl, Mary Fuller, and the Lubin Girl, Lottie Briscoe, if my memory serves me right” (72). In August 1915 a contributor to MPM recalled that Blanche Sweet had been known, during her extended anonymity at Biograph, as “the Biograph Blonde” (Courtlandt, ‘Interviews’ 91). Yet the few mentions of this nickname in MPSM’s inquiries column during Sweet’s time at Biograph are unclear about whether the label came from cinemagoers or from employers.81 The fact that this term was also used in the UK suggests that it came from her employer.82 While performers were quite likely being nicknamed by the general public, the use of a nickname which incorporated the name of the company hints at efforts on the part of the employers. Pickford wrote in her 1956 autobiography that during her April 1909 to December 1910 stint at Biograph, “I was billed in theater lobbies as “Blondielocks” and “Goldielocks.” In other places I was known as “The Girl with the Curls,” though the name that stuck longest was “The Biograph Girl” (143). While

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the former nicknames were likely to be assigned by cinemagoers or cinema staff, the latter was the nickname most likely to be assigned by the employer. That I have found no source written by a cinemagoer which uses any ‘## Girl’ nickname, even with the aid of such resources as Luke McKernan’s picturegoing.com, suggests that these anonyms were company inventions.83 One oft-mentioned phenomenon of the ‘period of naming’ is revealing in this respect: J.A. Leggett’s lyrics to ‘The Vitagraph Girl’, the song commissioned by Vitagraph in late March or early April 1910 specifically for their Florence Turner campaign (see Chapter 2), did not once mention her name. These are the full lyrics: [Verse 1] Who hasn’t been to a picture show, And gazed with surprise and delight, At scenes that are happy and scenes that are sad, And pictures of daytime and night But there is one picture, a feast for the eyes, It sets all our hearts in a whirl A vision of loveliness, peaches and cream, You know her the Vitagraph girl. [Chorus] I’m in love with the Vitagraph girl. The sweet little Vitagraph girl, Each movement a picture of romance or hate, Her tragedy’s bully, her love simply great, I’m entranced with her charms and her grace, That I see as the pictures unfurl; Of all girls that I’ve met She’s the very best bet, I’m in love with the Vitagraph girl. [Verse 2] The boys are all happy when she’s in sight, The girls simply rave at her style, Proposals she’s had by the thousand or more, The chorus girls beaten a mile And if she is chased by some villain or brute, All pity this cute little pearl. She laughs, they laugh with her, She weeps, they weep too, With the dear little Vitagraph girl.84

This song was not about Turner. Rather, it was about the act of relating to a person known only under an anonym, and it continued the ‘## Girl’ phenomenon even though Vitagraph was now openly naming Turner. The chorus in particular (with which audiences at Vitagraph’s special screenings where this song was performed were invited to join in)85 also described a scenario which played out the principle of anonymous identification at its most extreme: the persona was able to elicit the intensity of interpersonal connection that we call love. Even in late

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January 1911, nine months into Turner’s period of ‘nonymity’, MPSM still saw fit to style her “The Vitagraph Girl”,86 suggesting that they had been the ones to constitute this anonym.

A major cause To summarise, the series character phenomenon (1) brought about filmic and viewing conditions conducive to audiences recognising film performers from film appearances alone, (2) increased and magnified the contribution that performers made to the finished product and so elevated performers to primary creative status for the public and (3) worked to individualise film performers. In the case of comedies in particular, the phenomenon (4) made performers’ physical characteristics and abilities highly conspicuous and (5) dramatised the principle of a consistent transtextual personhood. The series character phenomenon also (6) constituted a means of industrial branding that unintentionally installed aspects of the star system and (7) identified film performers in a manner very closely resembling an existing means of anonymous identification. To return to the deadlock described in the Introduction, film viewers were not going to provide production companies with evidence of their interest in the identities of performers in films (the act that would have drawn attention to the existence of some public reputation) if their attention was not in some way drawn to the regular or frequent appearance of a certain body across multiple films by such means as the publicising of a name, and production companies were not going to seek to overcome the systemic impediment to spending money on publicising the names of employees who did not already possess a degree of public notoriety. Because it overcame this deadlock on both sides, the series character was the most significant factor in the emergence of the star system. In the last five months of 1909, then, the flourishing of the character-based series film meant that many aspects of a star system were already in place when the exceptional circumstances centred on Linder and Lawrence and discussed in Chapters 1 and 2 came about, including making possible the acts of recognition by audiences that were, in turn, fundamental to Pathé Frères’ and IMP’s decisions to launch the publicity campaigns that made their ‘real’ identities known. In this respect the star system was not just first attempted in France; it was invented in France. Éclair had innovated the filmic character-based series (the device that fostered functional elements of star publicity), and Pathé had commenced the first publicity campaign based on naming a familiar performer, a performer who was associated with two series characters, and even if the United Statesians made a major contribution to the development of film stardom, they did so because of a combination of (1) the model of Pathé’s European publicity for Linder and (2) Lawrence’s recognisability as laid down by a format – the character-based series – which the French had done the most to establish in industry practice.

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The direct links between series characters and decisions to launch stardombuilding publicity campaigns that I have highlighted in the case of Linder and Lawrence are not unique. Such links are plentiful in the years 1909–11, even in North America. For example, the third publicity campaign in the US, Kalem’s campaign for Gene Gauntier, stressed that she was “the popular heroine of the Kalem “Girl Spy” series”87 or “Gene Gauntier, of […] “Girl Spy” fame”.88 The caption for a portrait photograph of Mabel Normand printed in the 17 May 1911 issue of the NYDM, one of the first pieces of publicity that Vitagraph produced concerning her, read “MABEL NORMAND / The popular “Betty” of the Vitagraph Stock”.89 Normand had played the character of Betty in a comedy series initiated by Vitagraph in early 1911. These films included Betty Becomes a Maid (released in the US on 14 March 1911), Troublesome Secretaries (released in the US on 21 April 1911; the character is named as Betty on a letter shown in close-up) and How Betty Won the School (released in the US on 22 August 1911, after she had left Vitagraph).90 That her employer saw fit to generate the first rudiments of her ‘real’ identity out of her series character shows that this anonym had a significant influence on their decision to publicise her ‘real’ identity in the first place. Normand’s ‘Betty’ roles were recalled in late 1911 by the ‘Inquiries’ columnist of MPW, who told a correspondent that “Miss Mabel Normand was the Betty [of the Vitagraph company]”.91 This fictional identity, featuring a prominent Alice band (usually white), unpinned hair, a dark dress with a wide white falling collar, and a playful manner, had constituted the rudiments of Normand’s stardom out of an anonym.

SECTION 2 – REDUNDANCY Several Lizzies wrote to me wanting to know about the Vitagraph Girl, or the Biograph Girl, or whether Mr. and Mrs. Jones were really married or not, or if Broncho Billy had a wife, before I took serious notice. Frank Woods, October 1919, 117 Although character-based series films unintentionally served to initiate the film star system, my research also indicates that these films simultaneously provided a functional equivalent for that system. I draw here on a hypothesis established by Michael Appleby, a recent Masters student at Newcastle University, who showed in 2012 that, both filmically and parafilmically, Michael Myers, Jason Vorhees and Freddy Krueger, the lead series characters, respectively, of the Halloween (1978–2009), Friday the Thirteenth (1980–2009) and Nightmare on Elm Street (1984–2010) horror franchises, took on the industrial functions served by ‘real’ stars. For example, posters for all three franchises tend to feature images of the body and/or face of the series character in places and arrangements normally reserved for ‘real’ stars, and the films of all three franchises tend to include only crossover stars from music and television rather than established film-only stars,

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implying that, in the eyes of the production and financing companies, these slasher series characters render film-only stars superfluous. This section applies Appleby’s hypothesis to the first years of the series character in film. I will show that the series character and the film star were redundant in two senses: a) functional equivalence and b) the earlier system rendering the later system superfluous. In demonstrating this, I will concentrate on the functions of the film star for the film industry and for stars – the functions that constitute the film star system proper – and not the functions of film stars for audiences or for the parent culture at large: the star’s social functions. For example, the star’s function of mediating, naturalising or tempering ideological positions in specific historical circumstance92 is a function which cultures do not exclusively call upon film stars – or even stars in general – to serve, meaning that for series characters to serve this function would not evidence their functional equivalence to film stars. It is, however, indicative of the overlap between the public’s regard for ‘real’ stars and their regard for fictional characters that many of these social functions, to which star studies pays much of its attention, could equally be fulfilled by fictional characters.93

Redundancy A: Functional Equivalence Several of these equivalences will be evident already. Like the film star, the series character was a form of transtextual personhood amenable to featuring in audienceoriented publicity. Like the film star, the series character involved a degree of transtextual sameness in spite of variations in film content from one film to the next (maintaining a relatively consistent set of character traits in spite of the profession or task taken on in each film). Like the film star (at least for the duration of the star’s contract),94 the series character is an exclusive product, to which rivals do not have access. Like the film star, the series character dyes the image with personhood, promising that audience-film engagement is similar to interpersonal interaction. For example, Biograph’s trade advertisement for one of the Joneses films, The Peachbasket Hat (released 24 June 1909), stated that “our old friends, Mr. and Mrs. Edward Everett Jones, are the leading characters”.95 Gaumont’s advertisement for Calino Joins the Police Force in early March 1910 announced that “[o]ur friend Calino becomes a policeman.”96 Calino and the Joneses were expected to achieve the degree of intimacy with cinemagoers that we call friendship. And series characters do seem to have achieved this. In December 1910 a review of the films at the Prince’s Hall in Hull pointed out that “[t]here was friend “Foolshead” again – more frenzied than ever.”97 But there are many other functions of stardom. Figure 6.11 lists these functions and shows that most of these were also served by the series character phenomenon – some by the series characters themselves and some by the practical aspects of making series films.

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While the distinction between a professional life and a private life that is relevant to several of these star functions may seem to be without an equivalent in the case of series characters, this is belied by one of the more surprising aspects of film marketing during the early 1910s: at least one series character made personal appearances. In the UK in late 1911 B&C organised for performers dressed as their series character Lieutenant Daring to make personal appearances at London

Fig. 6.11  The functional equivalence of ‘real’ stars and series characters. ‘Real’ stars

Series characters

Film stars ‘populate’ the medium, laying out an image of people working solely in film, as opposed to a profession of people who both act for films and also work as cleaners or typists. Subsisting on their work, stars insist that the medium has a profession behind it.

Most of the series characters listed so far were unique to the cultural realm of film. On top of demonstrating the existence of a professional realm by having a limited number of bodies regularly and exclusively appearing as certain characters, series characters also insisted that long-term professional screenwriting work and management planning was needed to be able to constitute the franchise.

Film stars iterate the institution’s responsiveness to its public. Whether they appear in films, the frequency with which they appear and the size of the roles they play demonstrate that the industry is keeping an eye on how well their characteristics cohere with generally held values.

If a prospective audience member noticed a new film in a character-based series advertised, they could reasonably assume that the previous film had been popular. Some planned character-based series were aborted, and as the variability of the number of films in each franchise (see Fig. 5.8) indicates, some character-based series films were more successful than others.

Film stars give their employers a degree of power to set prices for film sale/hire, while also nonetheless avoiding alienating customers (i.e. hiring companies and exhibitors) because they equip them with marketing mechanisms that they can also use (Klaprat 351–76).

As discussed in Chapter 5, film production companies used the character-based series to try to override the choices of hiring companies and exhibitors about what films to acquire by appealing directly to the public, while also providing hiring companies and exhibitors with reliably consistent product lines that could easily be identified in publicity. In acquiring character-based series films, hiring companies and exhibitors were relinquishing control into the hands of production companies, in part because it is much harder to change the title of a film which has the name of the main character in it, particularly when that character is known by audiences.

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‘Real’ stars

Series characters

Film stars make the financial performance of films more predictable by pre-selling products via an easily identifiable and easily communicated image and/or set of words, the connotations of which need to remain relatively consistent over time, which refers the viewer to previous appearances and so forms a relatively detailed implicit message about the type of entertainment to expect.98

As Ivo Blom observes, in Europe by 1910, “[c]oncerning short comedies, character names were now coming strong. Even if one did not know the plot line of the film, the names of Max Linder, Boireau and Rigadin for France and Kri Kri, Cretinetti and Robinet for Italy would guarantee a certain quality in the genre” (‘All the Same’, 473). Any viewer familiar with a series character would be able to call to mind a list of distinguishing characteristics, both graphical and behavioural (see Fig. 6.3), which remained relatively consistent over time, when they read a character’s name in the title of a new film, and so be able to form relatively detailed expectations about the type of entertainment to expect. By indicating that the character was encountering a place or situation different from that encountered in the previous film, titles stressed the consistency of the character’s self. This was one reason for the inclusion of the emblematic shots discussed above.

Film stars provide a mechanism for generating a theoretically infinite repertoire of products differentiated from others, in that each new film can be regarded by audiences as a new chapter in the story of a star’s career. The hierarchical organisation of stars also helps to keep this repertoire manageable.

Series characters could generate as many films as there were situations that the characters might encounter. Although there were common types of series character, the population of series characters included multiple detectives, multiple criminals, multiple slapstick tricksters and multiple buffoons, all nonetheless differentiated by dress and personality.

Film stars cue prospective audiences to regard the media object as a fiction centred on character (i.e. insisting ‘person X, whom you know to be a performer, will be playing role Y, making the film, at least in part, an exploration of that fictional character’) rather than fictions centred on collectives or actualities centred on individuals.99

By drawing on a habit established in prose fiction, character-based series franchises insisted on the fictionality of the film product, and by foregrounding the name of the character in titles and by using that character’s traits as plot points, they ensured that character had at least a minimum degree of importance to the narrative.

(Continued)

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Fig. 6.11  Continued ‘Real’ stars

Series characters

Film stars have private lives that can be used to attest to the characteristics of the institution (see e.g. McDonald, The Star System, 31).

As most of the series characters were criminals, villains, slapstick tricksters or buffoons, it might seem that using these characters to attest to the virtues of the institution was impossible. However, these characters stressed incongruity: the extreme actions of most of these characters, which varied between anti-social and criminal, implied the impossibility of the performers playing them being the same, implying at the very least a higher degree of virtue in the private lives of the performers than in the on-screen lives of the characters they habitually played.

Film stars signify commercial value (McDonald, ‘The Star System’, 180), permitting production/financing companies to, for example, assure prospective audiences of their willingness to spend lavishly on any film in which the star is cast, because they must be able to afford the star’s fee (see e.g. Anderson, 353–4).

Given that one of the functions of the series character was to avoid the run-away fees that characterise a star system, there would seem to be no possibility of equivalence here. However, performers selected to play series characters were implicitly designated by this act of selection as exceptionally talented. They were also occasionally explicitly designated as such. For example, when Pathé picked Charles Petitdemange/ Prince to play Rigadin, they announced to the trade that “[t]outes les qualités de M. Prince le prédestinaient en effet à ce merveilleux moyen d’expression qu’est le cinématographe [all of the talents of Mr Prince were predestined, in fact, for the marvellous means of expression that is the cinématographe]”. These were “[u]ne mobilité de physionomie extraordinaire, des gestes éloquents tant ils sont naturels, une bonne face réjouie, un ahurissement qui sait masquer une grande finesse [an extraordinary mobility of facial expression, gestures as eloquent as they are natural, a delighted face, a bewilderment that is known to hide great finesse]”.100 The extremity of physical performance in the comedies also implied that these performers possessed talent that was likely to be expensive: in July 1912, for example, a local newspaper reported that in an unspecified film, “Polidor goes through another of his thrilling adventures – how he lives through them, we cannot tell.”101

Film stars permit production/ financing companies to generate ‘makers’ whom the products automatically market.

As indicated above, character-based series films demonstrated the cultural labour of maintaining character consistency across works.

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‘Real’ stars

Series characters

Film stars demonstrate the None. democracy of the medium, as they lack institutional power and so, ostensibly, attained their position through merit (e.g. extraordinariness or charisma). A star, the implicit logic runs, is one who has triumphed over others in a situation where standards are exacting and there are far fewer places at the top than there are people who want them (as observed in McDonald, ‘Reconceptualising Stardom’, 196–7). Film stars stimulate curiosity about future film appearances via their purported private lives, in that viewers cannot know whether one or more of a star’s ‘real’ habits, likings, views etc. is kept back from the aggregate of all of the characters that they play in their films, and so are invited to anticipate learning more about the star from future film appearances.

Series characters adequate at least the purported private life of the star, because the series character has an implied life between episodes. For example, a trade synopsis for Cretinetti sulle alpi (Foolshead in the Alps) in March 1909 described it as “the third adventure of that amusing person Foolshead”,102 while the May 1910 advertisement for Lieutenant Rose and the Foreign Spy reproduced in Fig. 5.21 referred to this film as a depiction “of the Lieutenant’s further adventures”. Even more blatantly, a September 1910 trade synopsis for Tontolini ruba una bicicletta (Tontolini Steals a Bicycle) explained that Tontolini “appears in the character of a tramp, having evidently fallen upon bad times.”103 Series characters also drew on a form of prose fiction where the principle that the narrative was an account of a real person’s life (i.e. Watson reporting on the life of Holmes) was a common conceit, a conceit that was so prominent an aspect of series prose fiction that it led to some instances of genuine confusion. For example, between 21 November 1895 and 8 June 1923, the Metropolitan Police received 20 letters from correspondents in various European countries all asking, independently of each other, whether Sherlock Holmes was a real person and requesting that, if he was, the letter, each of which also outlined a real mystery that needed to be solved, be forwarded to him.104

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cinemas (see Fig. 6.12). During these events and in the corresponding publicity about them that B&C released to trade publications and popular newspapers, the name of Daring’s film performer was consistently omitted. A contributor to the 16 December 1911 issue of the Evening Standard & St James’s Gazette, for example, reported that he “became engaged in conversation with this popular hero of the silent stage” during this tour, as if he met the fictional character.105 An advertorial in the 21 December 1911 issue of K&LW describing the first of Daring’s personal appearances (and credited to “Lieut. Daring, R.N.”; i.e. the performer playing Daring was not named and the character’s name was not given in inverted commas) demonstrates the variety of ways in which a series character could serve the same function as a star. The personal appearances described were staged to coincide with the release of Lieutenant Daring, R.N. and the Secret Service Agents / Lieutenant Daring Saves H.M.S. Medina, Percy Moran’s first appearance as Lieutenant Daring, on 21 December 1911; of course, Moran did not necessarily write the article. By touring Daring in a car “plentiously decorated with the national bunting and emblazoned with my own name and the B. and C. trade mark”, the company clearly indicated their intent to place a form of personhood at the same level as their own industrial authorship. The article also asserted intimacy between Daring and the general public: ‘Daring’ stated that his two-week personal tour of roughly 160 venues in London was made “in response to the repeated requests of the British public” and that during the tour “no one asked me who I was, for immediately the car drew up, voices exclaimed, “Here’s Lieut. Daring.”” The article even mentioned the quintessential indicator that a person had succeeded in achieving a maximal affinity with the public: the marriage proposal from a stranger: ‘Daring’ closed with the remark that “I have been besieged by personal letters, some of which are ludicrous in the extreme, bearing impossible requests; and two members of the fair sex have done me the honour of placing their hands at my disposal should I require them”.

Fig. 6.12  Photograph printed in ‘My Tour of London. By Lieut. Daring, R.N.’.

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Though this claim may have been an utter contrivance, the fact that B&C thought it useful to communicate it to the trade press indicates that they saw a benefit in having at least some members of the industry believe it. In this advertorial ‘Daring’ wrote as both performer and character: he reported that when he arrived at a cinema in Tottenham Court Road where “[m]y adventure with the anarchists at Portsmouth was being screened […] I was welcomed as if I was the saviour of England’s sovereign and the inaugurator of national peace.” That is, even though the article was written in character as Daring, this did not prevent him from acknowledging that he was a performer; he shifted smoothly between these two positions within one sentence. He switched just as smoothly in the opposite direction in the next sentence: My experience as I stepped in front of the crowded audiences was unique. Although a “mummer,” I had not yet developed the eloquence of a lecturer, and for a moment I was at a loss. However, with the encouragement I saw in the faces before me, I soon regained my composure and told them of the various adventures I had already taken part in, and many others to follow.

The ‘I’ here was both performer and part, admittedly a “mummer” and the hero of several adventures. ‘Daring’ even quoted the cinema entrepreneur Montagu Pyke, greeting him at his Cambridge Circus Theatre on Charing Cross Road:106 “Good evening, Lieutenant, I am more than pleased to welcome you to the Cambridge Circus Theatre. It speaks well for the British branch of the trade, when the public force upon the manufacturers, by their continued demands for ‘Daring’ films, the necessity of touring the hero himself, that their delight may be publicly expressed”. In this likely fictionalised account of Pyke’s statements, Pyke’s claim that there even was such a thing as “the hero himself” likewise iterated the idea that the performer and the part were interchangeable. B&C were using the part as the public persona of the still anonymous performer. Though this advertorial was stocked with hyperbole, the marketing choices which it reflects indicate a system virtually indistinguishable from ‘real’ stardom being relied on to serve several of its purposes. B&C also used Daring as a public figure in the UK’s first popular film magazine, The Pictures, launched in late October 1911, which was owned during its first 60 weeks by Markt/MPSA, who took on the agency for B&C’s films in late February 1912.107 The name ‘Lieutenant Daring’ featured alongside the names of the stars of the other companies paying for publicity in its pages, as if it was the identity of a real person; indeed, as B&C launched their campaign for Dorothy Foster in late May 1912,108 ‘Daring’’s appearance in B&C’s publicity in The Pictures predated the appearance of any of their other performer employees. In one February 1912 issue of The Pictures a photograph of Percy Moran featured alongside photographs of several named players (see Fig. 6.13). The caption uses the name of the character as both a placeholder for the name of the performer and a subtle assertion of the fictional character’s extra-textual existence. B&C consistently used the name ‘Lieutenant Daring’ as if it was the name of the performer who played the character well into 1912. A piece of publicity released to the national press in March 1912 is a clear example. It told how, during filming for Lieutenant Daring Avenges an Insult to the Union Jack (released in the UK on

The Series Character and the Star System  301

Fig. 6.13 Percy Moran in character as Lieutenant Daring, featured among publicity for named film performers in The Pictures in February 1912.109

302  The Origins of the Film Star System

25 February 1912), the performer was thrown off a cliff. The anecdote as printed by the Evening Standard & St James’s Gazette explained that “[t]he popular film actor, “Lieutenant Daring,” who recently had a remarkable escape from death whilst taking part in a picture-play, informs me that he has now quite recovered from the shock of his 80ft. fall from a cliff at Brighton, and has only sustained a sprained wrist.”110 The contributor explained that “[t]he film, being rehearsed, showed an attack by Spanish brigands, the leader of the gang striking Lieutenant Daring, and in the struggle which followed the officer was thrown from the cliff.”111 His fellow actors climbed down to help, and “with the assistance of the coastguards, who procured a boat, the actor was rescued.”112 B&C continued this practice of treating Lieutenant Daring as if he had an extra-filmic existence for quite some time. In May 1912 they provided the trade and popular press with an interview with Daring which admitted that Daring was not a real person but which nonetheless both a) used the name ‘Daring’ to identify the actor who played him and b) claimed that the life of the real performer was just as filled with adventure as that of the fictional character: “Lieut. Daring, the famous English film actor, is a player of many parts, and one who has experienced many adventures during his career.”113 ‘Daring’ told the interviewer that “[m]y father – an old Army man – was a boxing and fencing instructor, and I received my tuition from him, and at the age of ten I made my first appearance in the ring, and continued there, with some success, until I went on stage.”114 That is, the performer’s upbringing had been indistinguishable from that of the fictional character. The ‘adventures’ experienced while playing/being Daring recounted by this article included being knocked into the stern of a pinnace by a cross-current while swimming in the Solent, the incident at Brighton described above, and narrowly escaping a fatal stabbing during studio filming for Lieutenant Daring and the Ship’s Mascot. The interviewee finished with “I assure you a picture artist’s life is not all honey.”115 B&C effectively asserted that the performer’s name might as well be ‘Lieutenant Daring’, as he initially possessed at least some of the characteristics of the fictional naval officer and had then gained the rest of these characteristics while imitating him. For example, in August 1912 B&C announced that “[i]n preparation for a coming picture Lieut. Daring has learned to fly in an aeroplane.”116 Moran did indeed operate a biplane in some shots in Lieutenant Daring and the Plans of the Mine Field / Lieutenant Daring Captures a Spy. In March 1912 O’Neil Farrell, on the staff of B&C, reportedly proposed to several other UK production companies that they organise a fancy dress ball/garden party, in London, at which staff of hiring companies would have the opportunity to meet “such well-known picture people as Lieutenant Daring, R.N., Muggins, V.C., Tilly the Tomboy, Nat Pinkerton, Lieutenant Rose, etc.”.117 Advising their domestic competitors (Cricks & Martin, Hepworth, Urban and Clarendon, respectively) to adopt this strategy of constituting series characters extra-textually shows just how profitable B&C deemed it to be. That is, they offered it as a trade weapon at the national level. This perception of value also explains why, even when B&C publicly revealed the identity of Percy Moran, it did so gradually. For example, the cinematography columnist of the Evening Standard & St James’s Gazette, passing on news from the trade, reported on

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Fig. 6.14 Lieutenant Daring appearing “[p]lain-clothes” on the cover of The Pictures in October 1912.118

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22 June 1912 on “the death of Mr. “Mike” Moran, brother of that popular picture player, “Lieutenant Daring.””,119 and remarked in July 1912 that in B&C’s Great Anarchist Mystery, an adaptation of a work by Silas Hocking, “that popular pictureplayer, “Lieutenant Daring” (Mr. Percy Moran) takes the leading rôle.”120 Even after releasing this information, B&C still used ‘Lieutenant Daring’ as the public name for Moran. In October 1912 it was Daring rather than Moran who appeared on the cover of The Pictures with the caption “[a] Plain-clothes Photograph of Britain’s most Popular Photoplay Hero” (see Fig. 6.14),121 suggesting that this was Daring out of his naval uniform rather than his performer out of character, and in November 1912 it was Daring rather than Moran who was credited on the cover of The Pictures as the author of an article entitled ‘When I was a Boy Boxer’,122 and although the article was attributed to Moran inside the magazine, even this attribution ran “[b]y Percy Moran, Known to fame as “Lieut. Daring” (Moran, 4). The name of this fictional character was likewise given as if it was the name of a real person in a November 1912 list of postcards on sale by the Picture Publishing Company, the company that produced The Pictures, in an advertisement which also promised that “[t]he best way to learn the identities of your favourites is by our postcards”,123 as if the name ‘Daring’ denoted a real-world identity. One c.early April 1913 article in The Pictures, which told that, during B&C’s recent stint filming in Jamaica, Moran, challenged to a boxing match by a local boxing champion, had beaten him in three rounds, called the performer ‘Daring’ three times and ‘Moran’ only once, reporting, for example, on an exchange of dialogue between the anonymous boxing champion and “Daring, otherwise Moran”.124 One c.late April 1913 gossip column in the magazine, after mentioning that Daring was played by Percy Moran, added that “the rumour that Lieut. Daring has married a Jamaican lady is unfounded.”125 Fan magazines were still using the name ‘Lieutenant Daring’ as if it was the name of a real person in 1914. For example, in a July 1914 article in P&PG, headed ‘Courting Death for a Living: The Perils of a Popular Picture Hero. By “Lieutenant Daring”’, Moran, without once mentioning his name, described all of the dangerous feats that he had achieved while performing for films for B&C. One still was captioned, “[h]ere I am showing my model submarine to members of the Board of Admiralty in “Lieut. Daring and the Stolen Invention” (502). Though the inverted commas around the character’s name in the title of the article indicated that, here, ‘Lieutenant Daring’ was a nickname for the performer who played him, the article also treated Daring as if the films were a record of the fictional character’s real-world existence. This occurred, in part, because B&C strove to conflate the selves of Moran and Daring for several years, even when not overtly calling Moran ‘Daring’. For example, the November 1912 ‘When I was a Boy Boxer’ article mentioned above concentrated on his tutoring by his father “Professor Mike Moran, Boxing Instructor to the Army and Navy” and the boxing career to which this led him between the ages of 10 and 14, during which time, he claimed, he never lost a match, and he narrated several instances of bravery involving water, including two attempts, one successful, at saving the life of drowning men (4). The above July 1914 article, which described

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Moran’s work for his entire filmography rather than just his Daring films, foregrounded the film work which necessitated martial fearlessness (“I have, I supposed, courted death so many times now that I have ceased to consider anything I may do that is out of the ordinary in that light. I have simply trained myself not to think of the risk of death or injury” (Daring, ‘Courting’, 502)), emphasised his exceptional physical resilience (“I am an all-round, trained athlete, having been used to doing all sorts of “stunts” ever since I can remember; so what to me is possible and fairly safe, barring unforeseen accidents, to the ordinary man would be little short of suicidal” (503)) and paid special attention to experiences involving water: [i]n order to provide thrills for the films I have […] several times dived from second and third storey windows of houses on the banks of the Thames into the river, […] ridden a motor-cycle along the edge of a wharf at high speed, and dived with the machine (and without slacking speed) into the water, been tied in a straight-jacket and thrown into the water, dived nine consecutive times into the river in the depth of winter, been handcuffed and thrown from Walton Bridge, dived several times from Westminster, London, and Hungerford Bridges (sometimes when bound hand and foot), dived handcuffed from an aeroplane into the river, dived from a train travelling at full speed over a bridge into the water, dived into the river from a motor-car, also travelling at full speed, been tied to a railway track crossing a bridge in such a way that a train that came along cut the cords that bound me and allowed me to drop though the sleepers into the water many feet below (502).

In both articles a picture of a) military characteristics and b) a particular talent around water insisted that, although the identity of the Daring performer was public knowledge, Moran already possessed enough of Daring’s character traits and achievements to make ‘Daring’, practically speaking, just an alternative name for Moran. Thus while it is tempting to dismiss a comparison between series characters and stars on the basis of the seemingly clear difference that the life of the series character is restricted to the primary media object, while star personae are derived from the primary media object and a variety of epitexts such as magazine articles, interviews, postcards and public appearances, this difference is not borne out by the evidence. B&C effectively conducted a full-scale publicity campaign for an extra-filmic self with their publicity for Lieutenant Daring. That this extra-filmic self was fictional does not seem to have placed it beyond any of the principles of film star publicity. B&C’s Daring ‘campaign’ was even anticipated by a small-scale trade equivalent over a year earlier, when Pathé Frères launched their new series character ‘Léontine’. Renamed ‘Betty’ in the UK, she was announced in Bioscope in late April 1910 like so: The well-known firm of Pathé Frères are to be congratulated upon having discovered Betty. That young person will shortly appear upon the screen as “star” turn in a series of pictures which will shortly be released, and those persons in England (there are very few indeed) who have had the opportunity of making her acquaintance, predict that Betty will soon be all the rage. She is best described as a frolicsome, mischievous, rebellious, disobedient girl, and she manages to cause trouble and fun wherever she goes. The first film of the series is entitled

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“Rebellious Betty,” and will be released on Wednesday, May 18th. The rise and progress of the latest addition to Messrs. Pathé Frères[’] already large staff of artistes will be watched with much interest by showmen all over the world, and she certainly has our best wishes.126

This copy, presumably supplied by Pathé’s London office, strongly resembles a working star system. Labour was stipulated to be a unique resource of particular value to a specific type of cultural work, scraps of a professional life were made public, the person concerned had been ‘discovered’ from among many people who lacked the requisite skills, the person was treated as a production value that the product’s initial users, at the very least, ought to know about in advance, and promises were made about her popularity with the general public and the likelihood that she would establish both personal and emotional relationships with audience members through her works. The text even called the person concerned a ‘star’. Every claim was made about a fictional character. Clearly, Pathé’s decision to start establishing a ‘real’ star constellation described in Chapter 1 did not prevent the company from operating, using at least one of their series characters, a character system that was a very close equivalent to a ‘real’ film star system. Other elements of trade publicity for Léontine/Betty are reproduced in Figs. 6.15 and 6.16. In both advertisements, Léontine/Betty the fictional character existed extratextually at least to the degree involved in being introduced by Pathé Frères rather than invented by them. In the second, Léontine/Betty, “a winsome, frolicsome lass, full of mischief and the joy of life, with a merry face, laughing eyes and a rather wide mouth, which opens frequently in a broad smile and reveals a sparkling row of teeth”, is a fictional character possessing the spontaneity of the performer’s own given shape and behavioural characteristics. “[W]ilful, saucy, tomboy Betty” is a fictional character incorporating the performer playing her. The second advertisement also described Léontine/Betty as so independent of her creators that “what she will do or what she will not do in the future is not at all easy [for them] to say.” Léontine/Betty was independent enough of her textual existence to be able to hope “to be a big success” and to be “quite willing” to “stand or fall on her own merits […] knowing full well” that the UK public would judge her fairly. All were conceits, of course, but were nonetheless conducive of the larger conceit that series characters existed independently of their films. The series character phenomenon, at least from its appearance in late 1908 to roughly mid-1911, seems therefore to have constituted an alternative system of personhoodbased product differentiation to that which came into existence around ‘real’ stars slightly later. A rough equivalence between the two systems can also be detected in the application of the vocabulary of ‘real’ stardom to series characters. For example, an advertisement that Gaumont placed in the UK trade press in January 1911 ran: Amidst the constellations which illumine the Picture Theatre Screens – A New Star has arisen His Name is “Bobby” And who is “Bobby?” He is Calino’s Youngest Brother (Who has not heard of Calino?)”127

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Fig. 6.15  Advertisement for Pathé Frères/Betty, K&LW 6.154 (21 April 1910), 1322.

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Fig. 6.16  Advertisement for Pathé Frères/Betty, K&LW 6.155 (28 April 1910), backmatter.

The Series Character and the Star System  309

A further indication that the series character system and the ‘real’ star system served the same purposes is that both systems began with one person per company. Both systems, that is, served employers’ common aim of ‘facing’ both their output and their company brand. Indeed, the fact that Linder was playing a series character with his own name and the fact that Lawrence could no longer play the series character that she had been playing for Biograph suggest that employers only started naming their performer employees and so constituting a star system as a consequence of rare circumstances that brought about exceptions to the ubiquitous sufficiency of the earlier series character system for differentiating products through personhood. ‘Sufficiency’ may even be too modest a description, as the series character seems to have been more financially useful to film production companies than a system of ‘real’ stardom. First, given that film production companies could claim copyright over the names of their series characters, if an employer was to invest in building the public profile of a character, they would not run the same risk of ‘arming’ their competitors that they would run if they did the same thing with a real person. The worst outcome would be that because a character depended on the body of a specific performer, the employer would have to discontinue the character. Second, as series characters could be played by more than one person and so were not necessarily killed the moment a performer left the company, each character was at least potentially independent of the performer’s body and so could survive perpetually; the filmic James Bond is the most notable such survivor, now a property of Eon Productions for some 56 years. Third, a series character is a ‘pure’ marketing tool in that the aggregate that is her or his self is not contaminated by real-life events occurring beyond their appearances in films and publicity stunts organised by the company: the persona is subject to no ‘interference’ from events occurring in the private life of an individual. Fourth, a series character is the author of nothing, meaning that the character provides none of the ‘undertow’ to the current of industrial authorship which can come from live performers. Fifth, a transtextual personhood inherent in the films did not require viewers to possess limited specific knowledge. Sixth, as employers did not need to rely on the body of a person pre-existing the films, the series character could be more efficiently utilised as a publicity mechanism; for example, ‘personal’ appearances by local performers dressed as a series character could take place at dozens of venues simultaneously, in contrast to the personal appearances that formed parts of such ‘real’ film star publicity campaigns as described in Chapter 2. An article in The Pictures in early June 1912 mentioned that the manager of Higham’s Park Electric Theatre in Walthamstow had been advertising his venue in advance of showings of Lieut. Daring and the Ship’s Mascot (released in the UK on 5 May 1912) by having “a smart-looking man in the attire of a naval lieutenant and three men, one of them a negro, dressed as able seamen”, driven around Walthamstow in “a big touring motorcar” hung with posters about the film and the venue; the article included photographs of this car-load of men setting off on their advertising journey.128 Because B&C could plausibly claim copyright in the character, it is likely that this was done with B&C’s permission and it may even have been done at their instigation.

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Redundancy B: Rendering Extraneous As will have been evident so far, the series character phenomenon continued well into the period when the film star system began, and so by no means gave way to it. Collectively, the European production companies certainly concentrated on the series character method, rather than stardom, as their primary form of product differentiation, at least as far as 1912. If one divides the 52 months between September 1908 and December 1912 in half, the second of these 26-month periods was definitely the more prodigious: 958, or 82.3%, of the 1164 character-based series films represented in Fig. 5.8 were released in this second 26-month period, representing 82.8% of the total by footage. Figure 5.16 shows that there was a radical rise in the frequency of character-based series between April 1910 (during which seven such films were released) and April 1911 (during which 46 were released), and that they maintained this significantly higher level for the remainder of the period for which I have data, the monthly figure never once dropping below 29. The monthly average for the period from September 1908 to April 1910 was just 4.7 films, while the monthly average for the period from May 1910 to December 1912 was 33.4 films. As Fig. 5.16 makes clear, even by the end of 1912 there was no indication that the character-based series was giving way with the rise of the star system. Pathé even overtly operated both of these systems of ‘person-ality’ in one film when they made Max Linder contre Nick Winter, released in France in late May 1912129 and in parts of Europe outside France on 20 April 1912, in which Linder, playing ‘Max’, constantly outfoxes the comedy detective. Linder/Max even, at one point, sticks on fake versions of Winter’s distinctive moustache and eyebrows and steals Winter’s characteristic items of clothing (long thick double-breasted jacket, pale bowler hat and oversized pipe), in order to impersonate Winter to his own police constables: Linder the performer temporarily puts off his star persona to put on Winter the series character. Contemporary commentaries implicitly witness these two systems running in parallel. For example, in November 1910 MPW printed a letter from W.H.H. Lane, an Australian author, dated 27 September 1910, in which Lane claimed that during a week spent trying to attend all “eighty-three [of Sydney’s] moving picture shows, open nightly to the public” he had found cinemagoers “sitting with all the seeming ease of one of the city theatres and enjoying the antics of Catilino [sic] or Max Linder or the doings of Miss Lawrence or that winsome little soul of the A. B. Co., who has admirers out here by the thousands” (1302). Here two systems are operating simultaneously, the one using a fictional character (Calino) and the other using names (Lawrence and Linder) and anonyms (the [American] Biograph girl, at this time probably Mary Pickford). The writer of an article about fiction film-making in the February 1911 issue of the Strand also treated a series character and a real person as interchangeable. Explaining that “it has been said that in the theatre the most sparkling epigram is less effective in arousing laughter than the spectacle of a man sitting down on his hat – and this is entirely the kind of humour on which the biograph theatre has to

The Series Character and the Star System  311

depend [because of its muteness] for its effect”, he remarked that “[p]erhaps the most popular series of films of this nature are those which are known as “The Adventures of Foolshead,”” (Guy, 158). The contributor then provided summaries of three Foolshead/Cretinetti films accompanied by production stills, the last of which was Foolshead on Roller Skates (which had been released in the UK on 14 August 1910). Cretinetti/Foolshead brings down fellow skaters in a skating rink and furniture in its refreshment room, which exhausts the patience of the manager, and Foolshead is thrown into the street. He lands outside a house door, where stands one of the large wicker arrangements used by children learning to walk quickly. Creeping inside this, he progresses down the street in triumph, save for one tumble caused by unexpectedly meeting his late fair companion and her new attendant. We now pass on to another favourite of the biograph theatre, Max Linder, who [in Le petit jeune homme (see page 69)] impersonates a youth supposed to be smitten with the charms of two damsels. (Guy, 160)

This writer segued smoothly here between a fictional character and a real-world person: Foolshead/Cretinetti the fictional character was one “favourite of the biograph theatre” and Linder the real person was another. This similarity indicates that the writer deemed the distinction between a situation of anonymity (Cretinetti) and a situation of nonymity (Linder) to be insignificant. Likewise, Frank Woods’s 1919 article, after listing the various instances of ‘## Girl’ publicity adopted by the various MPPC companies during 1910, tellingly observed that “for the Essanay [company], Broncho Billie served the same purposes” (72). For all of these commentators, the extant system – the series character system – rendered the new – a ‘real’ star system – somewhat superfluous. I will use this section to explore further evidence of this type of redundancy in action. When, in July 1910, Pathé made Charles Petitdemange/Prince the subject of their first trade advertorial on a performer employee, although they had been intermittently stating his name in trade synopses for the past seven months,130 their motive for using him was that the Rigadin series was about to debut. The article stated that “M. Prince, dans une série de bandes comique, va personnifier un nouveau type «Rigadin»” [Mister Prince, in a new series of comic films, will perform a new character, Rigadin].131 Prince had a degree of celebrity from his career so far as a variety performer, but this trade publicity using his ‘real’ identity served his employer’s aim of advertising the fictional identity of a series character. ‘Real’ celebrity, that is, was subservient to the series character system. Subsequently, Pathé seem to have deemed the professional pseudonym ‘Prince’ disposable: I can find no evidence of this professional pseudonym featuring on any publicity that Pathé directed at the general public before the poster for Rigadin a tué son frère (released in France on 3 May 1912) reproduced in Fig. 5.15. For nearly two years, it was Rigadin who was being publicised, and to whom Prince loaned his face. Publicising character rather

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than performer, in spite of the performer’s existing celebrity, Pathé indicated their preference for investing in assets that could not wander.132 In April 1913, one selling agent described the perceived benefit of a ‘real’ star system’s ‘person-ality’ when she or he advertised their publicity materials with the remark that “[w]e have been gradually acquiring the belief that the average picturetheatre patron is more likely to be attracted inside a Hall by an announcement that his favourite artiste is showing there than by the lurid poster of some cowboy suspended from a tree by his heels.”133 This ‘person-ality’, however, the industry seems to have chosen to derive from series characters rather than real people. The posters for series characters reproduced in Figs. 6.6, 6.17–6.19, all from the period when star publicity was becoming a norm for some companies, all omitted the names of the performers, suggesting that this ‘person-ality’ was adequately supplied by the identities of fictional characters. Other examples of this continued anonymity for performers playing series characters include Éclipse’s early/mid-1911 posters for their version of Nat Pinkerton, all of which included a hand-drawn/painted cameo image of Pierre Bressol (recently moved from Éclair) but none of which stated his name;134 Éclipse first included Bressol’s name on their Nat Pinkerton posters in April 1912, the earliest mention of Bressol’s name in general-public-oriented publicity of which I am aware.135 Likewise Éclair’s February/March 1912 poster for Zigomar contre Nick Carter did not name the performers playing either of these series characters,136 and their May 1912 poster for their series character Gavroche, which depicted a caricature of the character in medium-long shot against a plain background, also did not state the performer’s name.137 Similarly, although the editor of K&LW, having asked many European and US film production companies for information about film performers in the last weeks of 1910,138 received responses from Vitagraph, the American Film Manufacturing Company, IMP, Edison, Essanay, Kalem, Lubin, Champion, Itala, Nordisk and Éclair which gave performers’ names, the only information provided by the Italian Ambrosio company and the British Clarendon company concerned their series characters. In their ‘People in Pictures’ special issue K&LW printed copy about Robinet (Tweedledum in the UK), accompanied by a photograph of him, explaining that Tweedledum is the hero of a series of excellent Ambrosio comics, and is, by common consent, one of the most successful of the many “serial” film characters of the day. A born humorist, with a remarkable power of pantomime, who has other qualities peculiarly useful to one of his profession, among which one might almost include arms, neck, and ribs, to all intents and purposes, unbreakable, an accomplished acrobat and tumbler, Tweedledum seems to survive unhurt falls that would kill nine out of ten, and this quality makes the subjects in which he appears always full of excitement and interest. He is also an expert cyclist, as a recent adventure sufficiently proves, and will ride out, through or over anything, if there is an effective picture to be obtained in doing so.139

The Series Character and the Star System  313

Fig. 6.17  Gaumont’s poster for Calino polygame (Polygamous Calino), released in France in early October 1911. CF, A189-090.

314  The Origins of the Film Star System

Fig. 6.18  Pathé Frères’ poster for Nick Winter, a series character who first appeared in June 1910. CF, A099-073.

The Series Character and the Star System  315

Fig. 6.19  Gaumont’s poster for Onesime et l’affaire du Tocquard Palace (Onesime and the case of Tocquard Palace), released in France in 1913. CF, A003-025.

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Alongside all of these companies naming their players (including Itala, who informed the trade that Cretinetti was played by Deed), Ambrosio explored the personhood of a series character as a viable alternative to naming Marcel Perez. Clarendon did the same, sending only a photograph and copy on their series character Lieutenant Rose. The photograph was captioned “Lieut. Rose, who is playing nightly to audiences so large that no one building could hold them.”140 Both articles preferred series characters to real film performers as publicity mechanisms. Around 1911 Pathé took the significant step of producing statuettes for purchase by the general public. Such hardy and ornate objects were clearly meant to cater to long-term fandom among cinemagoers. But these statuettes, instead of publicising performers, publicised series characters; here Prince is posed as his series character Rigadin (see Figs. 6.20 and 6.21). The relative importance of each of the two parallel systems to the film industry can also be gleaned from the Milano Company’s announcement in the French trade press that “Le créateur des films comiques “TOTO” s’appelle maintenant / BONIFACE / et continue sa désopilante série pour la MilanoFilm [The creator of the ‘Toto’ comic films is now called ‘Boniface’ and continues his hilarious series for Milano-Film]”.141 This announcement included a full-length photograph of Emilio Vardannes showing him looking over his shoulder at the camera, which also bore the barely legible signature “E Vardannes”, but the prominence given to his character’s name indicates that his employer deemed it to be a more important asset than the name ‘Emilio Vardannes’. This was in part because of the work that Itala had put into generating the name ‘Toto’ as an asset; such investments meant that the series character system was somewhat self-sustaining. Similarly, after Deed returned to Pathé in early 1912 and started to perform in a second and now regularly released Boireau series, they used both his ‘real’ name and his series character’s name in publicity, calling the first film in this stint Gribouille redevient Boireau (Gribouille becomes Boireau Again) in France (where it was released in France on 16 February 1912) and Andre Deed becomes Jim Again in the UK (where it was released on 20 March 1912), seeking to capitalise on Itala’s lengthy investment in the Cretinetti/Gribouille/Foolshead/ etc. character; they later made Boireau pris pour Gribouille (Boireau mistaken for Gribouille[Cretinetti]), released in France in c.January 1913 (see Fig. 6.22). A sense of the relative importance of series characters and film stars to film marketing can be gleaned from a poster that Pathé issued in early May 1912 showing 15 production stills (see Fig. 6.23).142 The films featured here are, anti-clockwise from top left, Méprise fatale (two stills), Rigadin et la divorcée récalcitrante (two stills), Ducostea contre la force publique (two stills), Le monsieur au gardenia (one still), Pour sauver madame (two stills), Les confitures du Boireau (two stills), Un tragique amour de Mona Lisa (two stills) and Rosalie vend son silence (two stills). Not only does this array of publicity demonstrate the presence of character-based series films on the film programmes that Pathé supplied in mid-1912, the absence of performers’ names is still the norm. Charles Petitdemange/ Prince is not named on either of the publicity stills for Rigadin et la divorcée récalcitrante and Sarah Duhamel is not named on either of the publicity stills for Rosalie vend son silence. Even 32 months after the beginning of a system of building film stardom in

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Fig. 6.20  Statuette of Prince, c.1911. FJS-P, OBJ-P-1.

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Fig. 6.21  Statuette of the series character Nick Winter, c.1911. FJS-P, OBJ-P-2.

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Fig. 6.22  Poster for Boireau pris pour Gribouille (Boireau mistaken for Gribouille[Cretinetti]), released in France in c.January 1913. FJS-P, AFF-P-1684.

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Fig. 6.23 Poster issued by Pathé for use by exhibition venues, featuring publicity stills from 8 of their films, in early May 1912. CF, A005-031.143

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France, that is, Pathé still deemed film titles and character names to be sufficient means of product differentiation. This poster’s one exception to this trend (Deed’s name is given in the captions on both of the stills from Les confitures de Boireau) was still not yet a norm. In using Deed’s name, Pathé were capitalising on Itala’s c.September 1910 issuing of his name, whereas Rosalie and Rigadin remained anonymous on this publicoriented publicity because neither Duhamel nor Petitdemange/Prince had acquired filmic celebrity before signing their current contracts with Pathé. One last piece of evidence in support of the hypothesis that the series character rendered stars redundant is that it was one of the ‘quieter’ series characters, Linder’s ‘Max’ character, which led to the first publicity campaign naming a regular film performer. The ‘Max’ character was quiet both in the sense that, before and well into Linder’s period of nonymity, the name did not appear in film titles, and in the sense that it was only very minimally distinct from its constitutive performer by virtue of sharing Linder’s first name. On top of fostering the recognition among cinemagoers which prompted Pathé Frères to start their campaign for Linder, the ‘Max’ character also fostered this outcome only by exceptionally diminishing its capacity to render such a campaign redundant. A situation where a series character bore the same first name as the performer who played him was also one where the two parallel systems were brought so close as to be virtually indistinguishable, making the leap to a ‘real’ star system a very small one. While Vincendeau comments that “the correspondence between his [Linder’s] ‘real’ name and the name of the character” was one way of “highlighting his individuality both in advertising and on screen” (48), the above accounts all show that when they decided to start calling Linder’s character ‘Max’ in film titles in May 1910 (see page 78), Pathé utilised an existing system rather than serving a star system, an early system that was already, to an extent, stardom. Therefore, while I argued in 2012 that the series character was an unacknowledged interim phase in the appearance of the star system (‘The Invention’, 473–5), the above evidence shows that the series character system is best understood not solely as a phenomenon out of which ‘real’ stardom grew but also as a parallel system of filmic personhood, one with settings that, though different from ‘real’ film stardom, are functionally equivalent, and even in some cases superior, to it.144

Notes 1. deCordova did briefly mention series characters, remarking that, in the US, “[t]he series is a particularly strong example of the discourse that worked to produce the picture personality because the same character with the same personality appeared repeatedly in film after film” (PP, 89). The series character, for him, was a feature of the flavour of film discourse between 1909 and 1913, when performers were popularly deemed to possess the traits of their fictional characters. Similarly, Abel implies in a recent article that series and serials had a particular propensity to encourage employers to make knowledge about their performers public (‘Movie Stars’ 85). By contrast, this chapter

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shows that the series character was a cause for the emergence of the star system in the first place, and that this cause was both economic and discursive. 2. Anon., ‘Remarkable Film Subjects. Nat Pinkerton’, K&LW 4.93 (18 February 1909), 1113. 3. Hr. Bert, ‘Dansk film kan fejre sit 50 aars jubilæum’, undated newspaper clipping inscribed ‘Pol. 24/4-[19]56’, Nordisk Archive, Danish Film Institute, Copenhagen. Politiken was a daily newspaper founded in 1884 and published in Copenhagen. Valby is an area in the south-west part of Copenhagen where the Nordisk Company’s studios were situated. Thanks to Isak Thorsen for this quotation, and for help with the translation. 4. Anon., ‘New Films and Their Makers,’ K&LW 5.128 (21 October 1909), 1211–18, 1215. 5. Advertisement for Itala, K&LW 5.128 (21 October 1909), 1188. 6. Deed does not wear either of the Cretinetti costumes described on page 270: he wears white trousers that are too short, striped socks, white shoes, a grey jacket, white gloves, and a light grey wide-brimmed hat with the front of the brim folded back against the crown. His character is also amorous, a trait normally absent from Cretinetti. While the character does have Cretinetti’s knack for trickery, he does not have his demeanour or unabashed enthusiasm; indeed he is rather timid. 7. Anon., ‘Amusements’, The Leavenworth Times (Leavenworth, Kansas) (6 June 1909), 2. 8. Anon., ‘Amusements’, The Leavenworth Times (Leavenworth, Kansas) (21 November 1909), 7. I have been unable to identify the film; presumably it was re-titled by the venue. 9. Anon., ‘Independent Feature Film at Fern Theatre’, The Leavenworth Times (Leavenworth, Kansas) (11 January 1910), 8. 10. Abel, Ciné, 109. LeForestier remarks that “[b]eginning in 1908 we certainly see the use of comic series around a recurring character [who] […] has a different adventure each time (whereas earlier the same device was repeated from film to film – a chase, for example – with minor variations, in particular the characters depicted: mothers in law, policemen, etc.)” (‘From Craft’, 197). 11. Anon., ‘The Latest From Paris’, K&LW 6.140 (13 January 1910), 515. 12. Anon., ‘New Films and Their Makers’, K&LW 7.160 (2 June 1910), 239–51, 239. 13. Advertisement for Cines, K&LW 7.160 (2 June 1910), 596. 14. Anon., ‘Comments on the Films’, MPW 7.26 (24 December 1910), 1476–81, 1480. 15. Anon., ‘Big Buffalo Fight – Lyric’, Mount Carmel Item 23.184 (7 June 1910), 4. This publication included mentions of the Lyric showing the following Foolshead films on the following dates: How Foolshead Paid His Debt (15 November 1909), Foolshead’s Holiday (19 January 1910), Foolshead Receives and Foolshead Preaches Temperance (16 February 1910), Foolshead at the Ball (4 March 1910), Foolshead Chief of the Reporters (15 March 1910), Foolshead Wishes to Marry the Governor’s Daughter (14 April 1910), and Foolshead Marries Against His Will (1 June 1910). The remark duplicates text from MPW’s review of the film (Anon., ‘Comments on the Films’, MPW 6.21 (28 May 1910), 888–91, 891). 16. Anon., ‘Excellent Program at the Lyric Tonight’, Mount Carmel Item 23.272 (20 September 1910), 1.

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17. Anon., ‘Amusements’, The Daily Republican (Rushville, Indiana) 8.56 (17 May 1911), 5. 18. Anon., ‘Amusements’, The Daily Republican (Rushville, Indiana) 8.69 (1 June 1911), 5. 19. Advertisement for the Lyric Airdome, Evening News (Ada, Oklahoma) 8.105 (Saturday 5 August 1911), 1. 20. Anon., ‘At the Star’, The Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette (13 October 1911), 10. 21. Anon., ‘The Picture Theatres’, The Citizen (Gloucester) 37.91 (16 April 1912), 5. 22. The identity of the performer who played Léontine appears to be one of the mysteries of French film history. See for example Bretèque, 316–18. 23. Advertisement for Biograph, K&LW 6.131 (11 November 1909), 24. 24. Anon., ‘New Films and Their Makers’, K&LW 6.134 (2 December 1909), 215–24, 224. 25. Anon, ‘IMP Night - Lyric’, Mount Carmel Item 23.139 (Thursday 14 April 1910), 4. 26. Anon, ‘Lyric Tonight’, Mount Carmel Item 23.105 (Friday 4 March 1910), 4. 27. Anon., ‘Western! Lyric Western!’, Mount Carmel Item 23.114 (15 March 1910), 1. 28. Anon., ‘Three Big Features – Lyric’, Mount Carmel Item 23.156 (4 May 1910), 1. 29. Anon., ‘Reliance Feature at the Lyric’, Mount Carmel Item 24.78 (31 January 1911), 1. 30. Advertisement for The Lotus and The Lyric, Arkansas City Daily Traveller (Arkansas City, Kansas) 25.206 (Monday 14 March 1910), 8. 31. Anon., ‘An Enthusiastic Audience’, Santa Ana Daily Register (Santa Ana, California) 5.155 (Saturday 28 May 1910), 5. 32. For another example of a venue nicknaming a series character performer, see Abel, ‘G.M. Anderson’, 25. 33. George Fagot., ‘Les comédiens au cinématographe: Max Linder’, Ciné-Journal 101 (30 July 1910), 17. 34. On the opposition between gags and psychological fiction see Crafton, ‘Pie and Chase’, 119; and Gunning, ‘Response to “Pie and Chase”’, 121. Gunning characterises the relationship between gags and narrative as dialectical rather than mutually exclusive. 35. Anon., ‘New Films and Their Makers’, K&LW 4.98 (25 March 1909), 1315–21, 1315. 36. Anon., ‘New Films and Their Makers’, K&LW 5.126 (7 October 1909), 1103–9, 1109. 37. Advertisement for the Bijou Theater, Austin Daily Herald (Austin, Minnesota) 27.284 (7 December 1910), 4. 38. Anon., ‘Comments on the Films’, MPW 7.26 (24 December 1910), 1476–81, 1480. 39. Anon., ‘The Very Latest’, Bioscope 165 (9 December 1909), 37–48, 39. 40. Anon., ‘New Films and Their Makers’, K&LW 4.102 (22 April 1909), 1477–83, 1475. 41. Anon., ‘Comments on the Films’, MPW 6.24 (18 June 1910), 1048–9, 1049. 42. Anon., ‘The Variety Theatres’, HDM 7685 (Wednesday 15 June 1910), 8. 43. Anon., ‘The Variety Theatres’, HDM 7745 (Wednesday 24 August 1910), 7. 44. Anon., ‘Hull Variety Theatres’, HDM 7823 (Wednesday 23 November 1910), 7. 45. Anon., ‘Comments on the Films’, MPW 6.8 (26 February 1910), 298–300, 300. 46. “Given the 1907–1908 films he appeared in as a presumptuous young dandy interested in sports and amusements,” Abel remarks, “one can speculate that the Pathé company may have considered constructing a series around Linder that would complement the Boireau films. For some reason, however, these films did not establish

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Linder as a major comic, and Pathé seems to have turned to [René] Gréhan, whose elegant, swaggering Parisian dandy, Gontran, might supplement Deed’s work for the company. According to Jean Mitry, Gréhan’s character apparently proved too dependent on music hall verbal comedy, at least initially, and Pathé turned back to Linder again, once Deed had gone off to Italy to star in the Cretinelli [sic] series, Gréhan had been hired at Eclair, and [the director Louis] Gasnier had returned to Paris” (Ciné 237; Mitry, 298). 47. Advertisement for the Bijou Theater, Austin Daily Herald (Austin, Minnesota) 27.251 (28 October 1910), 3. 48. Anon., ‘The Coliseum’, Aberdeen Journal 17428 (Saturday 19 November 1910), 6. 49. Advertisement for the Pergola, The Allentown Leader (Allentown, Pennsylvania) 34 (26 April 1911), 10. 50. Advertisement for the Edisonian, Portsmouth Herald (Portsmouth, New Hampshire) 26.192 (Tuesday 16 May 1911), 8. 51. Cahier de le S.C.A.G.L. 1910–1911, Documents divers concernant la société Pathé, Collection Jaune, CF, CJ1676-B216. Poster for Les deux petits Jésus, FJS-P, AFF P – 823. 52. His obituary appeared in Anon., ‘Screen Gossip’, P&PG 6.3 (7 March 1914), 69. 53. Advertisement, K&LW 1.21 (3 October 1907), 358. According to the 1908 edition of The Stage Year Book, Dumb Sagacity had been Hepworth’s most profitable output of 1907 (Anon., ‘The Triumph of the Animated Picture’, The Stage Year Book (London: Carson & Comerford, 1908), 47–9, 49). ‘Black Beauty’, Lewin Fitzhamon’s horse Tariff (Fitzhamon was in favour of tariffs on imports), also featured in multiple ‘animal hero’ films, starting with Black Beauty (August 1906); Dumb Sagacity was the second. For more on the Hepworth Manufacturing Company’s ‘animal hero’ films see Simon Brown, 105–9. 54. Anon., K&LW 3.65 (6 August 1908), 285. See also Simon Brown, 106. 55. Brown writes that “the manner in which Hepworth titled his films did not tell audiences that it was another Rover film in advance. Instead the H[epworth] M[anufacturing] C[ompany] was relying upon the showmen to advertise to audiences for them” (109). 56. As John Mullan notes, by the beginning of the nineteenth century ‘By a Lady’ was a common technique of anonymous attribution, dating from no later than 1652 and having been used over 150 times between 1750 and 1811 (50, 57). 57. Caroline Austen, Jane Austen’s niece, remarked in her later account of Austen’s life that by 1815 Austen’s authorship was actually quite widely known (11–12). For example, though knowledge of her authorship was initially confined to her immediate family, close friends and publisher, by late 1815 this knowledge had spread as far as one of the Prince Regent’s physicians, who initiated the meeting with the Prince Regent’s librarian that resulted in her being obliged by the Prince Regent to dedicate Emma to him (Caroline Austen, 12)). Nonetheless, this steadily growing population of insiders remained much smaller than those readers to whom Austen’s works were anonymous. 58. As a synonym for ‘pseudonym’, the term ‘anonym’ dates from the middle of the nineteenth century, the Oxford English Dictionary citing an 1866 usage (‘anonym, n.’, Oxford English Dictionary), and Charles Dodgson referring to the name ‘Lewis Carroll’

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as his ‘anonym’ in a December 1881 letter (113). I am not aware of any previous use of the term ‘anonym’ to denote a nameless designation. 59. For example, Mullan’s opening discussion of Jonathan Swift, all of whose satirical works were published either anonymously or pseudonymously, treats the two techniques as practically interchangeable for the purposes of what he identifies as the intent behind them (9–19). 60. Anon., ‘Remarkable Film Subjects. Nat Pinkerton’, K&LW 4.93 (18 February 1909), 1113. 61. Advertisement for Itala, K&LW 5.125 (30 September 1909), 1040. 62. Anon., ‘New Films and Their Makers’, K&LW 6.137 (23 December 1909), 385–93, 391. 63. See Anon., ‘Trade News of the Week’, K&LW 7.167 (21 July 1910), 671–3. 64. BFINA 49015. 65. Anon., ‘The Motion Picture and Photo-Play’, Evening Times, 23 September 1911, p. 6. 66. In the unpublished manuscript quoted in Chapter 1, Henri Langlois also identified the series character as a means of attaining stardom: Max Linder avait avec André Deed la gloire d’être partage la premier apparition a l’écran de la star et […] au cours de la 1ere ètape du cinéma francaise sont personnage n’avait pu s’imposer avec la même qualité de vie que Boireau. [Max Linder had, with André Deed, the honour of sharing the first appearance on the screen of the star and […] during the first years of French cinema no character could impose upon themselves with the same degree of life as Boireau.] (Cahiers 27/1, Fonds Henri Langlois, CF, LANGLOIS28-B2, n.p.) That is, Langlois treated Boireau as a way for Deed to attain stardom in spite of anonymity. 67. Anon., ‘The Gaiety’, Fort Wayne Daily News, Fort Wayne, Indiana (20 August 1909), 12. 68. Anon., ‘Riots of Fun, Theatorium’, Mount Carmel Item 23.220 (20 July 1910), 1. 69. Anon., ‘Foolshead on Roller Skates: A Coming Laughter Makers’, K&LW 6.152 (7 April 1910), 1207. 70. Anon., ‘Review of Licensed Films’, NYDM 64.5181 (28 December 1910), 29–31, 29. 71. Advertisement for Edison, FI 6.25 (17 December 1910), 18. 72. Anon., ‘Good Comedy Subjects’, FI 6.1 (2 July 1910), 21. 73. For example, in his 1962 history of French cinema, Georges Sadoul called ‘Boireau’ a “sobriquet” (nickname) for André Deed and told how “l’acteur de theatre Prince […] prit, pour l’ecran, le sobriquet de Rigadin [the theatre actor Prince […] took, for the screen, the nickname ‘Rigadin’]” (12, 15). More recently, Thomas Brandlmeier remarks that “many comedians performed[ed] under several names, since each name is bound by contract to an individual production company. André Deed […] worked as Boireau for Pathé, and from around 1909 on as Cretinetti for Itala” (25). Likewise, Michael Temple and Michael Witt treat ‘Rigadin’ as Charles Petitdemange/Prince’s last name (13). Ian Christie similarly regards the series character name Cretinetti as an alternative to the professional pseudonym ‘André Deed’ (Deed’s real name was Henri André

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Augustin Chapais), and regards the series character name Rigadin and its international versions Moritz, Wiffles and Tartufini as pseudonyms for Charles Petitdemange/Prince (‘From Screen Personalities’, 362n12). Geoffrey MacNab even seems to think that Tontolini, which he misspells as “Tortelloni”, was a performer’s real name (10). 74. See for example Advertisement for Pasquali/Polydor, Ciné-Journal 5.196 (25 May 1912), 16. 75. Anon., ‘Hull Amusements This Week’, HDM 8281 (Wednesday 15 May 1912), 3. 76. L.D. ‘Cinematography: A Weekly Review of the Latest Films’, Evening Standard & St James’s Gazette, 30 March 1912, 14. 77. Advertisement for Milano-Film, Ciné-Journal 5.196 (25 May 1912), 52. 78. Elements of the star system can definitely function without names: when the cast of Les Misérables (dir. Tom Hooper, 2012) performed a medley of the musical’s songs on stage at the 2013 Academy Awards, recognition of the film’s stars on the part of viewers did not require any viewer to know any of their names; it just required that they be known by sight. 79. Anon., ‘Notable Films of the Week’, MPW 4.17 (24 April 1909), 515. 80. G.P. von Harleman, ‘Among the Chicago Shows’, MPW 5.15 (9 October 1909), 494. 81. See Anon., ‘Answers to Inquiries’, MPSM 4.7 (August 1912), 158–74, 168, and Anon., ‘Answers to Inquiries’, MPSM 4.9 (October 1912), 156–70, 166. 82. See Anon., ‘Motion Picture News’, The Pictures 4.83 (3 May 1913), 22, which used ‘The Biograph Blonde’ as the title of a section on Sweet. 83. The closest is a use of the term ‘Vitagraph Girl’ in local newspaper advertising for venues in Ogden, Utah, in mid-February 1910 (Advertisement for Oracle, Isis & Globe, The Ogden Standard (Ogden, Utah) (16 February 1910), 6), though here even the cinema’s staff may have been echoing Vitagraph publicity pre-dating Turner’s period of nonymity rather than their customers. 84. ‘The Vitagraph Girl’, words by J.A. Leggett and music by Henry Frantzen, New York: F.B. Haviland, 1910, Frances G. Spencer Collection of American Popular Sheet Music, Crouch Fine Arts Library, Baylor University, M935–37. 85. Anon., ‘Vitagraph Girl Feted’, MPW 6.16 (23 April 1910), 644. 86. Anon., ‘Miss Florence E. Turner’, Moving [later Motion] Picture Story Magazine 1.1 (February 1911), 64. The issue was date-stamped 23 January 1911 by the Library of Congress. 87. Anon., ‘Theatres’, Leavenworth Times (Leavenworth, Kansas), 9 October 1910, 7. 88. Anon., ‘Wesern, Western at Theatorium’, Mount Carmel Item 24.91 (15 February 1911), 6. 89. Anon., ‘Motion Pictures’, NYDM 65.1691 (17 May 1911), 28. 90. Although Normand performed for a film called The Indiscretions of Betty (her first film for Vitagraph, released in the US on 29 March 1910), William Sherman judges that it was not a ‘Betty’ film, in part because synopses indicate that it was a drama and in part because Vitagraph’s Betty series seems to have been a direct response to Vitagraph’s Betty/Léontine series, which did not debut in the US until July 1910 (33).

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91. Anon., ‘Inquiries’, MPW 10.12 (30 September 1911), 986, answer to ‘B.R.T.’. 92. On this star function see for example Shingler, 46–62. 93. For example, none of the five cinematic identificatory fantasies or the four extracinematic identificatory fantasies in which Jackie Stacey observes her respondents indulging about their female film stars of the ’40s and ’50s (138–70) could not be indulged about fictional characters. Similarly, stars’ function of iterating a “coherent continuousness” of self in spite of philosophical challenges to individualism (Dyer, Heavenly Bodies, 10–11) is also performed by fictional characters. 94. As observed in, for example, Staiger, ‘The Hollywood’, 101. 95. Advertisement for Biograph, NYDM 61.1592 (26 June 1909), back cover. 96. Anon., Advertisement for Gaumont, K&LW 6.148 (10 March 1910), backmatter. 97. Anon., ‘Comedy and Clearness’, HDM 7835 (Wednesday 7 November 1910), 3. 98. For example, Richard Maltby observes that “[t]he star system provided one of the principal means by which Hollywood offered audiences guarantees of predictability […]. The audience’s recognition of a star, in both the movie and its publicity, led viewers to expect a certain kind of performance, and as a result a certain kind of experience” (Hollywood Cinema, 2nd ed., 145), and Ginette Vincendeau defines ‘stars’ as “celebrated film performers who develop a ‘persona’ or ‘myth’ […] which the audience recognizes and expects from film to film” (viii). 99. For example, Miriam Hansen claims that “[t]he casting of a star binds the viewer all the more firmly into the fictional world of the film by drawing on more sustained structures of identification, mobilizing long-term psychic investments[,] in particular ego ideals and primary object substitutes” (246). 100. George Fagot., ‘Les comédiens au cinématographe: Prince’, Ciné-Journal 100 (23 July 1910), 17. 101. Anon., ‘Hull Amusements This Week’, HDM 8341 (Wednesday 24 July 1912), 6. 102. Anon., ‘New Films and Their Makers’, K&LW 4.96 (11 March 1909), 1233–9, 1237. 103. Anon., ‘New Films and Their Makers’, K&LW 7.173 (1 September 1910), 1107–17, 1113. 104. ‘Sherlock Holmes, fictional detective: enquiries from many parts of the world regarding his authenticity’, Records of the Metropolitan Police Office, National Archives, Kew, UK, MEPO 2/8449. Thanks to Stacy Gillis, one of our finest historians of detective fiction, for locating these. 105. L.D., ‘Cinematography: A Weekly Review of the Latest Films’, Evening Standard & St James’s Gazette, 16 December 1911, 14. 106. Christopher Pyke records that this cinema, a 690-seater, which had opened at 105/7 Charing Cross Road on 26 August 1911, was the sixteenth and last in Montagu Pyke’s chain of cinemas (196). 107. Prose versions of their films first appeared in The Pictures 1.19 (24 February 1912). 108. See Anon., ‘Interview with Dorothy Foster’, The Pictures 2.32 (25 May 1912), p. 19). 109. ‘Lieutenant Daring’, The Pictures 1.19 (24 February 1912), 2. 110. L.D., ‘Cinematography: A Weekly Review of the Latest Films’, Evening Standard & St James’s Gazette, 16 March 1912, 19. 111. Ibid.

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112. Ibid. 113. Anon., ‘Interview with Lieutenant Daring’, The Pictures 2.30 (11 May 1912), 17. 114. Ibid. 115. Ibid. 116. Anon., ‘Motion Picture News’, The Pictures 2.45 (24 August 1912), 31. 117. Anon., ‘Editorial’, The Cinema News & Property Gazette 1.3 (1 April 1912), 3–5, 4. Thanks to Gerry Turvey for pointing this out. 118. The Pictures 2.52 (12 October 1912), front cover. 119. L.D., ‘Cinematography: A Weekly Review of the Latest Films’, Evening Standard & St James’s Gazette, 22 June 1912, 4. 120. L.D., ‘Seen on the Screen’, Evening Standard & St James’s Gazette, 13 July 1912, 4. 121. The Pictures 2.52 (12 October 1912), front cover. 122. The Pictures 3.57 (16 November 1912), front cover. 123. Anon., ‘Your Favourite Photo-Players’, The Pictures 3.56 (9 November 1912), iii. 124. Anon., ‘Motion Picture News’, The Pictures 3.77 (date unspecified, c.early April 1913), 22. 125. Anon., ‘Motion Picture News’, The Pictures 4.80 (date unspecified, c.late April 1913), 22. 126. Anon., ‘Four Fine Films’, Bioscope 185 (28 April 1910), 7. 127. Advertisement for Gaumont, K&LW 8.193 (19 January 1911), 708–9. The advertisement included a photograph of René Dary. 128. Anon., ‘To Advertise Lieutenant Daring, R.N.’, The Pictures 2.36 (22 June 1912), 17. 129. Advertisement, Ciné-Journal 5.196 (25 May 1912), front cover. 130. Their trade synopsis for Femme de chambre improvisée (A Pseudo Lady’s Maid), for example, stated that “[t]his is a cleverly acted sketch, in which M. Prince, who has lately been doing excellent work for Messrs. Pathe, plays an important part.” (Anon., ‘The Very Latest’, Bioscope 162 (18 November 1909), 41–8.) 131. George Fagot., ‘Les comédiens au cinématographe: Prince’, Ciné-Journal 100 (23 July 1910), 17. 132. This is one reason why Stéphanie Salmon refers to Prince as ‘Prince-Rigadin’ (330): while he was not kept anonymous, it was ‘Rigadin’, rather than his professional pseudonym, in which his employer invested, a name which was nevertheless dependent on his body and performance. 133. Anon., Advertisement for posters, The Top-Line Indicator 1.27 (30 April 1913), 5. 134. Posters reproduced in Advertisements for Éclipse, Ciné-Journal 4.129 (11 February 1911), facing inside front cover, 4.133 (11 March 1911), 45, 4.136 (1 April 1911), 7, 4.140 (29 April 1911), 14. 135. Poster for Nat Pinkerton, reproduced in Advertisement for Éclipse, Ciné-Journal 5.189 (6 April 1912), 66–7. 136. Reproduced in Advertisement for Éclair, Ciné-Journal 5.184 (2 March 1912) 70. 137. Reproduced in Advertisement for Éclair, Ciné-Journal 5.193 (4 May 1912), 35. 138. His inquiries were mentioned in Anon., ‘Weekly Notes,’ K&LW 8.185 (1 December 1910), 5. 139. Anon., ‘Ambrosio’s Comic “Tweedledum”’, K&LW 8.203 (30 March 1911), 82.

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140. Anon., ‘A Hero of English Films: Lieut. Rose of the Clarendon Co.’, K&LW 8.203 (30 March 1911), 83. 141. Advertisement for Milano-Film, Ciné-Journal 5.196 (25 May 1912), 52. 142. All but one of these films were listed as recent releases in the 11 May 1912 issue of Ciné-Journal (Anon., ‘Nouveautés Cinématographiques’, Ciné-Journal 5.194 (11 May 1912), 69–70, 70). 143. The poor resolution of the text on each production still is a feature of the original poster. 144. For an example of a film historian noticing the similarity of the two systems while not registering the possibility of a relationship between them, see Abel, ‘Éclair’, 88–109, where he remarks that series films were organised around a central character identified both by a name and “by an actor, or emerging “star”” (89).

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7

The Ontology of Film Stardom

The earliest known instance of a letter from a European cinemagoer asking the name of a film performer was received by Éclair in Paris in early December 1909.1 In spite of not knowing the performer’s name, the writer nonetheless addressed the letter to a person: Nick Carter. The letter was written in Finnish; Ciné-Journal printed a French translation in early January 1910. Helsingfors, 1er Décembre 1909 Monsieur Nick Carter, Moi, une jeune fille finlandaise de 20 ans, je vous aime, Monsieur Nick C. Si vous saviez seulement comme je vous adore, si vous saviez comme il bat mon cœur quand je vous regarde au théâtre, Dieu seul sait comme pure elle soit l’amour de mon cœur, qui vous déclare son ardeur et quel sentiment me prend en voyant les pièces joués par vous et M. Patsy. Vous n’avez aucune ideé de la force des sentiments d’une jeune finlandaise, qui aime pour la première fois et dont vous êtes le seul objet, monsieur. Maintenant, j’ai votre adresse, oh! que je suis heureuse? Veuillez m’ecrire, monsieur, dites moi votre nom, m’aimer, mon amour, comme je vous aime moi. Si vous voulez sachiez avec qui vous aurez à faire. Votre, jusque à la mort fidèle. [Helsingfors [Helsinki], 1st December 1909 Mister Nick Carter, I, a young Finnish girl of 20, love you, Mr. Nick C. If you only knew how I adore you, if you only knew how my heart beats when I watch you at the theatre, God alone knows how pure is the love of my heart, which declares to you its ardour[,] and what feeling takes me when watching the films played by you and Mr. Patsy. You have no idea of the strength of feelings of a young Finnish girl, who loves for the first time and of whose love you are the unique object, sir. Now, I have your address, oh! how happy I am[!]? Please write to me, sir, tell me your name, love me, my love, as I love you. If you want to know with whom you will be dealing. Yours faithful until death.]2

The writer demonstrates a keen awareness of the nature of the public identity of Pierre Bressol, who played Éclair’s Nick Carter during 1908–9: the letter and the declaration of love were both clearly addressed to Carter the fictional character, but

the writer also asked for “your name,” demonstrating that, instead of mistaking a fictional character for a real person, she was knowingly addressing Carter’s publicly anonymous habitual performer. She nonetheless also saw fit to use the name ‘Nick Carter’ as if it was the performer’s real name. And even though her acquaintance derived only from seeing Bressol’s body in overt fictions, she also seems to have perceived enough in either the fictions or the implied work involved in contriving them to warrant expressing intense attachment. This letter, along with the tendency among viewers, exhibitors and employers to use series characters’ names as if they were the names of their performers (see pages 266–88), may seem like a patchwork of failures of understanding, the consequences, perhaps, of a discourse of film performance that, not yet ready to support a star system, was nonetheless called on to support one, and so malfunctioned, so that it traced fictional roles, rather than people, from film to film. But this chapter will show that the double identity set out by this Finn, where a real person is synonymous with a fictional character, is directly equivalent to the model of ‘live’ stardom that has, for various reasons, come about in film. This claim requires clarification of what I mean by ‘stardom’. As mentioned in the Introduction, in 1998 Paul McDonald opined that “overuse of the term ‘star’ to describe any well-known film actor obscures how with most film performers, knowledge is limited to the on-screen ‘personality’” (‘Reconceptualising’, 178). McDonald used ‘star’ here in the sense expressed and reinforced by deCordova: a film star is a person who is publicly acknowledged as having a private self that is at least appreciably different from the sense of personhood conveyed by their performances, this difference seeing its apogee in the emergence of accounts of stars’ marital difficulties and sexual conduct in the early 1920s (see PP, 117–19). DeCordova was part of a chorus expressing this definition at the time. In 1991, for example, Christine Gledhill insisted that “[a]ctors become stars when their off-screen life-styles and personalities equal or surpass acting ability in importance” (xiv). Similarly, John Belton claimed in 1994 that “[a] star is an actor whose persona transcends the sum total of his or her performances” (American Cinema, 89; unchanged in American Cinema, 3rd ed., 96). But film industries, including both those where performers work under long-term contracts and those in which they work as freelancers, as well as film performers themselves, all have strong capitalist incentives to obviate such discrepancies, to define ‘star’, by contrast, as a public persona that can be seen in a performer’s film work. As an economic category, that is, the ‘star’ need not have any basis in the private life of a film performer. The figure whom deCordova calls the picture personality is, as far as the industrial film star system (as distinct from the system of ideas that produces the concept of film stardom) is concerned, a star: ‘personal’ information that refers only to their work in films is, for the institution that runs the system, the ideal form of ‘personal’ information. As deCordova admitted, the discursive developments that made the sex lives of film performers into matters of public interest by the early 1920s peeled away from stardom as it was operated by the industry (‘The Emergence’, 28; PP, 128–9).

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This chapter shows that while McDonald is right to observe that “with most film performers, knowledge is limited to the on-screen ‘personality’”, he is wrong to conclude that this means that there are actually very few stars: a personality assembled out of filmic appearances is a basic property of the type of film stardom to which (a) the events of the late 1900s and early 1910s gave rise, (b) some of the basic properties of the filmic image contribute and (c) the constants of a capitalistically arranged film industry which uses performers led. Tackling these three areas, the next three sections show that the series character phenomenon is not just an alternative to stardom, because the ‘real’ star was not actually the ideal form of personhood on which the film industries of Europe and North America collectively alighted; instead, the film star persona is a series character. That is, Nick Carter is to Pierre Bressol as Tilda Swinton is to Katherine Matilda Swinton, as Charlie Sheen is to Carlos Estévez, as Meryl Streep is to Mary Streep and as Eric Bana is to Eric Banadinović.

The star persona as the descendant of the series character Max In 2004 Popple and Kember jointly implied the instrumentality of the series character to the emergence of the star system when they wrote that Linder “establish[ed] his own identity as Max from 1907 and help[ed] to initiate the star system in cinema” (16). That is, for them a fictional series identity was the same thing as a star identity. As Linder was likely the first named film star in the world, it makes sense to start a survey of the shape of film stardom in popular discourse with the identity that he and his employer Pathé Frères generated during late 1909 and early 1910. This identity involved a clear conflation between performer and part. The following synopses from the UK trade press, either directly via the staff at Pathé’s London office (the more likely origin of this copy) or indirectly via the impression that his films and publicity made on K&LW’s contributors, evidence this. While some synopses acknowledged the act of impersonation (K&LW’s account of Une conquête, for example, stated that “we find Mr. Max Linder again with us in his favourite rôle of the young man of too susceptible a heart”),3 the dominant trend was performer/part conflation. Bioscope’s synopsis for Une conquête remarked that “[o]f all M. Max Linder’s amusing exploits in his numerous roles this, perhaps, is the most humorous. The pursuit of the tender passion has never led him into more hopelessly inextricable complications than in the present picture, where he follows a captivating female through the streets, making the most various and extravagant purchases.”4 Their synopsis for Un mariage Américain conflated performer and part even more enthusiastically, announcing “Mr Max Linder again! And this time within the very jaws of matrimony! He has applied to an agent for the arrangement of marriages, and is hastily summoned to appear before an American heiress.”5 In the next film but one, Petite rosse, Bioscope announced, “Mr. Max Linder’s unstable affections have once more changed their object, and this week we see him an ardent suitor for the hand of a somewhat rampageous young



The Ontology of Film Stardom  333

lady. The gentle Max suffers sadly from her rough treatment, but at length he extracts the promise that she will marry him when he has learned to juggle with three balls.”6 All described Linder’s films as episodes in his real life. Such commentaries were remarkably consistent. In his next film, Á qui mon cœur?, Bioscope reported, [e]ver foremost in love, Mr. Max Linder is again beheld in pursuit of a seductive female – despite his recent matrimonial experiences. The young lady with whom he is concerned in this week’s picture has offered her heart to the man who shall be with her first on the top of a high mountain. […] But her hand and affections are reserved for the irresistible Max, whom, from the first, she had selected as the desirable suitor.7

Two films later, in their synopsis for Roméo se fait bandit, Bioscope remarked that Mr. Max Linder is included in the dramatis personae […]. We sorrow to note that he is evidentally [sic] an old hand at the evasion of papas. In this picture he is first seen being refused the hand of a young and lovely maiden by a ferocious and inexorable parent. With a company of friends Max then departs to plan how he may most successfully frustrate the old man. They decide to abduct the daughter (with her own consent) and demand ransom of £500, upon which the sagacious Max is to step forward and offer to rescue his daughter by strength of arms alone. The scheme works admirably, and Mr. Linder, as blissfully irresponsible as ever, is seen once more the accepted lover of a different lady.8

Though this conflation was not ubiquitous and could hardly be expected to have been given that in some of his films Linder was playing named parts (e.g. Les exploits du jeune Tartarin, the twelfth film of his period of nonymity), it was certainly persistent. In early February 1910, describing Jeune fille romanesque, K&LW likewise used ‘Max’ as the name for the fictional part: The maiden is so impressed by the exploits of Arséne Lupin that she declares she will entertain no lover who cannot prove himself equally adventurous. Max, one of the favoured ones, accepts her condition, and offers his rivals a supper, for which he will undertake not to pay. […] When the reckoning is presented Max persuades each member of the party to insist on paying.9

For Bioscope, Linder’s next film, Le pacte, was an amusing picture, played by Mr. Max Linder, which is in no way likely to endanger his reputation as a humorist. In a condition of dire poverty he nevertheless proposes for a fair maiden’s hand; but, although she is willing to give her consent, her father, a gentlemen of stern and forbidding appearance, makes strong and decided objections to the alliance, and turns the wretched Max summarily into the street. The poor youth goes home and attempts a horrid suicide, but his

334  The Origins of the Film Star System

courage fails him and he employs a burglar […] to undertake that he shall be dead by midnight in return for a consideration of money. Immediately the thief has departed, however, a solicitor enters to inform Max that he has become the heir to an enormous fortune. Overjoyed, he rushes back to the home of his beloved and announces his good fortune. […] [A]ll goes merrily until the servant enters to say that someone has called to see Mr. Linder. He rises from the table and goes to the next room, where he is horrified to find the burglar who has promised to kill him. Immediately he turns and flies from the place, hotly followed by the thief, who pursues him, wildly brandishing a tremendous knife, previously given to him by Max for the execution of the bloody deed.10

The ‘Max’ of this synopsis was no lax temporary stop gap used in the absence of a name for the character; the contributor, using the performer’s full name, used the conceit that Linder existed within the fictional world. This character/performer conflation was relentless. For Bioscope, in Tout est bien qui finit bien, [a]lways gallant where a lady is concerned, Mr. Max Linder gives a lesson in lovemaking which we are bound to applaud, though convulsed with laughter. For some weeks Max has been trying to make the acquaintance of a demure young lady in the opposite house; but, though he tries his hardest, his persistence has not the slightest effect on her.11

The synopsis continued at length, calling the character Max twice more. Une epreuve difficile was introduced by Bioscope with the explanation that “Max proposes, but as a test of his love, the fair one tells him to bring her a sprig of edelweiss from the mountains”12 and by K&LW with the remark that “Max now falls in love with a widow in the alpine district.”13 This refrain continued,14 and even when the titling of Linder’s films incorporated the series character that he was playing, it was still clear that synopses described not the activities of a fictional person because they used his own full name as the name for that character: in Max Tries Skiing (Max fait du ski), according to Bioscope, “Max Linder determines to master the art of ski-ing, and leaving his hotel, situated in a snowy Alpine district, he endeavors [sic] to get through the doors with his skis on.”15 Here, Linder, rather than his character, was the one trying out skiing. This performer/part conflation was also apparent in comments about Linder that definitely did not originate with Pathé Frères. For example, a commentator in K&LW in early 1910, imagining the fantasy of wafting smells at viewers, asked “[w]hat effect might be imparted to, say, Pathé’s latest great comedy, “On the Spree,” [En bombe,] in which that clever actor, Max Linder, enjoys himself mightily at the Christmas feast at Maxims?” (Surfiss, 597). Here it was not Linder’s character in this film who was enjoying himself at Maxims; it was the transtextual self called ‘Max Linder’. Comœdia likewise described Max fait du ski, in their list of films showing at the Omnia Pathé on 14 July 2010, as if the name of the fictional character was Max Linder: “ceux qui veulent rire verront Max Linder s’essayer au ski [those who want



The Ontology of Film Stardom  335

to laugh see Max Linder try skiing]”.16 All of these remarks indicate the influence of the series character system on the type of ‘real’ film stardom that Pathé and their contemporaries initiated. In this ‘real’ stardom, the character of the performer was being derived from the fictional characters played by that performer. And this was not covert assemblage: as it was blatantly not the case that these films chronicled Linder’s own life, it was an overt tailoring of Linder’s extra-filmic self out of the cloth of his fictional characters.

Kate, Billy, Bunny, Mabel, Charlie & Fatty Another example of the influence of the series character system on ‘real’ stardom can be seen in an October 1912 article in The Pictures by one Russell de Trafford about an anecdote, reportedly currently circulating, concerning a young amateur finding a job with a film company which led to her/him playing leading roles within a month. De Trafford found the story unbelievable: Just suppose that this particular firm had been the B. and C. Company, we are requested to believe that the Dir[e]ctor unceremoniously dispensed with Miss Dorothy Foster or Miss Ivy Martinek, for what? For the sake of putting in a practically unknown lady, a stranger to the public. […] Our fisher maiden of Cornwall and our precious Three-Fingered Kate are replaced by someone who could only have a spectator’s knowledge of these characters. (10)

For de Trafford, ‘Three-Fingered Kate’ served not just as the name of a character but as a name for the publicly known aspects of the identity of the real person Ivy Martinek. Similarly, in May 1914 a contributor to Illustrated Films Monthly remarked that “[i]t was unlikely that “Broncho Billy,” Mr. G. M. Anderson, could keep out of trouble long. He is always taking risks, attempting hazardous feats for the film” (Strong, 167). As with Martinek/Kate, Anderson’s extra-filmic self was easily designated using the name of the series character which he regularly performed. The idea that the film star persona is a series character is also borne out by a common film star phenomenon of the 1910s: the ‘self’-titled series character. Starting, of course, with Linder/‘Max’, these stars feature among the most successful of the decade. For example, starting with Bunny and the Twins, released in the US on 14 February 1912, and continuing with Bunny and the Dogs (released in the US on 12 August 1912), Vitagraph put John Bunny’s name in the titles of 22 of his films before the end of 1914. Shortly after Mabel Normand moved from Biograph to the newly formed Keystone in c.July 1912, Mack Sennett had her initiate a series character called Mabel, and although some of the ‘Mabel’ films did not bear the name ‘Mabel’ in the title, 30 of them did. The term ‘Keystone Mabel’ was used by both her employer and the trade press to refer to a combination of this filmic Mabel and the real Mabel Normand.17 And of course, also at Keystone, in early 1914 Charles Chaplin established the tramp character that he would play nearly invariably up to and including Modern Times (1936), fragments of the role even persisting into

336  The Origins of the Film Star System

his performance of the anonymous ‘Jewish Barber’ character of The Great Dictator (1940). Though Chaplin’s tramp character is not commonly regarded as a series character (Chaplin’s films are commonly known under titles which do not mention the identity of his character, for example, and the character seems to have no name), this is not quite accurate. Chaplin’s films were re-titled in some of their markets to identify them as exploits of a character called ‘Charlie’. For example, all 13 of the films which he made during his Essanay period in 1915–16 were re-titled for release in the UK so as to include the name ‘Charlie’. Figure 7.1 lists these. Re-releases of films from Chaplin’s Keystone period (February to December 1914) also sometimes took ‘Charlie’ titles outside the US. Tango Tangles (released in the US on 9 March 1914), for example, was later re-released in the UK as Charlie’s Recreation, and Caught in a Cabaret (released in the US on 27 April 1914) was later re-released in the UK as Prime Minister Charlie (see Fig. 7.2). Films from Chaplin’s Mutual period (May 1916 to the end of 1917) were also given ‘Charlie’ titles in the UK. The Count (released in the US on 4 September 1916), for example, was released in the UK as Charlie the Count.

Fig. 7.1  Re-titling of Charlie Chaplin’s Essanay-period films for release in the UK and the ordering of these films as ‘episodes’ in Langford Reed’s The Chronicles of Charlie Chaplin (1917).

US title & release date

UK title

The Chronicles of Charlie Chaplin

His New Job (1 February 1915)

Charlie’s New Job

12. Charlie’s New Job

A Night Out (15 February 1915)

Charlie’s Night Out

6. Charlie’s Night Out

The Champion (11 March 1915)

Champion Charlie

5. Champion Charlie

In the Park (18 March 1915)

Charlie in the Park

4. Charlie in the Park

A Jitney Elopement (1 April 1915)

Charlie’s Elopement

14. Charlie’s Elopement

The Tramp (12 April 1915)

Charlie the Tramp

3. Charlie, the Tramp

By the Sea (29 April 1915)

Charlie’s Day Out

1. Charlie by the Sea

Work (21 June 1915)

Charlie at Work

8. Charlie at Work

A Woman (12 July 1915)

Charlie the Perfect Lady

7. Charlie, the Perfect Lady

The Bank (9 August 1915)

Charlie at the Bank

9. Charlie at the Bank

Shanghaied (4 October 1915)

Charlie Shanghaied

2. Charlie Shanghaied

A Night in the Show (20 November 1915)

Charlie at the Show

13. Charlie at the Show

Police (27 May 1916)

Charlie the Burglar

11. Police!!!



18

The Ontology of Film Stardom  337

Fig. 7.2  Poster for the Palladium, Hartlepool, 10 December 1917, RWC. DF.WOD.G2025.

338  The Origins of the Film Star System

Reflecting this partial naming of Chaplin’s series character as ‘Charlie’, in many commentaries the name ‘Charlie’ or ‘Charlie Chaplin’ popularly denotes both a fictional series character and a performer. In 1948, for example, André Bazin wrote that “[f]or the general public, Charlie exists as a person before and after Easy Street [1917] and The Pilgrim [1923]” (144). Chaplin’s ‘real’ identity provided Bazin with the name of his anonymous series character. More recently, Paul Merton’s 2007 account of early film comedy repeatedly calls this character ‘Charlie’ (60–1). Such conflation occurred even during the 1910s. In early 1917 Langford Reed, an industry insider, used the conceit that at least some of Chaplin’s films concerned a character called ‘Charlie Chaplin’ as the basis for an entire book, The Chronicles of Charlie Chaplin. He explained in the foreword, dated January 1917, that “[t]hese chronicles relate to the experiences of the inimitable Charlie in reel and not real life” (v). The conceit of the work, part original work of fiction and part novelisation, was that Chaplin’s Essanay films were all records of episodes in the life of one person (who Reed consistently called ‘Charlie Chaplin’), and that un-documented events in his life connected the events of these films. (The relevant chapters are listed in Fig. 7.1.)19 At the beginning of chapter 13 (corresponding to A Night in the Show/Charlie at the Show), for example, Charlie Chaplin is wealthy because he used his meagre income from becoming a film star following the events of chapter 12 (corresponding to His New Job/Charlie’s New Job) to engage a press agent to write learned articles under his name (97). All of the chapters are linked, in a similarly loose and oddball way, with their neighbouring chapters. All of these additions to the action of films expressed an open conceit that constituted the transtextual persona of Charlie Chaplin out of the traits of his long-term fictional character, such as, conspicuously, the character’s antagonism to the principle of selling one’s labour: at the beginning of chapter 3 (corresponding to The Tramp/Charlie the Tramp), Charlie Chaplin gives up his 232nd job (prune massager) (16–17), and at the beginning of chapter 5 (corresponding to The Champion/Champion Charlie), Charlie Chaplin is sacked from his 347th job (jumping through thin sheets of tin) (29). In gathering evidence in the first six months of 1917, the National Council of Public Morals interviewed schoolchildren in several groups. One was a group of boys, two aged 11 and two aged 13, from Bethnal Green, all of whom attended cinemas weekly: 23. The Chairman. What do you like best at the cinema? – All about thieves. 24. The next best? – Charlie Chaplin. 25. And you? – Mysteries; and then Charlie Chaplin. 26. And you? – Mysteries, and Charlie Chaplin. […] 28. And you? – Cowboys; and then Charlie Chaplin second. (Qtd. National Council of Public Morals, 209)

While genre (here Westerns and detective/crime films) still provided a means of product identification and differentiation (indeed, seemingly the primary means), personhood was now an accompanying means, and a specific type of personhood which was



The Ontology of Film Stardom  339

both that of the performer and that of a fictional series character seems to have been the most successful version of this means. The industry was deliberately generating value in both films and stars by using a series character identity with the same name as the performer, and this star/character real/fictional self would have been one of the more conspicuous characteristics of the film industry at the time, though it has since become nearly invisible in histories of the period, to the extent that popular film histories often call Roscoe Arbuckle ‘Fatty Arbuckle’ as if ‘Fatty’ was either his real name, a nickname or a professional pseudonym (see e.g. Parkinson, 53); ‘Fatty’ was actually the name of a series character performed by Arbuckle in at least 28 films made while at Keystone between late 1913 and early 1916 (there were more that did not bear the name ‘Fatty’ in the title), including six intersections with the ‘Mabel’ series. For Arbuckle and for all of the above performers, their transtextual character was, the industry insisted through a variety of ways, at least substantially similar to their extra-filmic self. These self-titled characters implied that the character existed extra-filmically, and with each character living in a world of comic extremes, this was more likely to insist to viewers that stars’ extra-filmic personae were fictional than it was to insist to viewers that stars’ extra-filmic selves appeared in films.

The star persona as cinematic fiction ‘Real’ film stardom is also designated as at least implicitly fictional because of two aspects of the basic technology of film. The first is that film is temporally indexical: every multi-shot film is a set of records of pieces of time, and every one of these original pieces of time was originally taken from a larger continuum of time. The start point and end point of each shot might follow clearly from events in the story-space, but no intrinsic divisions exist either in the real-world time from which they are taken or in the story-space time which they imply. As Aristotle had observed in c.350 bce, time is infinitely divisible, with no minimum unit (Physics, book 6, part 9, 239b5), and as the gradual adoption of time zones around the world after the 1884 International Meridian Conference acknowledged, seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months and years are all arbitrary divisions of time derived from the rotation and orbit of Earth, one planet amongst many with longer or shorter days and years; time itself is without intrinsic units of any kind. Any shot, therefore, implies to viewers that un-shown time elapsed before the beginning of the shot, and any film implies that un-shown time elapsed before the beginning of the film. That is, film subtly insists to its viewers that the story world and its inhabitants exist before and outlast the total duration of story-space time shown in each film. Every fictional character, therefore, is a self who existed before the beginning of each film’s story time and who (as long as she or he survives the events of the story) continues to exist after the end of each film’s story time. This filmic attribution of real-world attributes to fictional characters results from a characteristic of the filmic process that is identified by the common use of the

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term ‘diegesis’ in film studies to mean ‘story-space’. When, in 1953, Étienne Souriau coined this subject-specific term to mean “all that belongs, ‘by inference’, to the narrated story, to the world supposed or proposed by the film’s fiction” (7), he decided to draw on an extant word that meant the opposite of ‘that which is shown’: the Ancient Greek noun διήγησις (diēgēsis) means ‘narration’ or ‘narrative’ and the verb διηγέομαι (diēgeomai) means ‘to describe’ or ‘to narrate’, as distinct from μίμησις (mīmēsis), meaning ‘imitation’ or ‘showing’.20 Robin Waterfield, for example, translates Plato’s use of διήγησις in The Republic (c.370 bce) into English as ‘pure narrative’, contrasted with ‘representational narrative’ (88). The discipline of prose/theatre studies widely distinguishes between diegesis, defined as ‘telling’, and mimesis, defined as ‘showing’.21 Like Souriau, though, in 1964 Christian Metz explained that in discussing films he used ‘diegesis’ to refer simultaneously to (1) “the narration itself, but also [(2)] the fictional space and time dimensions implied in and by the narrative” (98).22 For both Souriau and Metz, diegesis is both a process and the space-time described by that process. Both used one term to denote both things because the two are near-inseparable for most viewers. The duration of the narrative process, for example, is identical to the duration of all of the events shown by that narrative process. The inconspicuousness of film’s narrative process makes it very easy for viewers to attribute real-world attributes to filmic story-spaces. This was noted during the 1910s. For example, in June 1914 the film star Edith Storey wrote that [y]ou just cant [sic] realize how exhilarating it is to see oneself in the film. It is as if your ghost or entity appeared before you and exactly reproduced your actions, your very thoughts! And at times you are not satisfied with your other self at all, and, as you watch it, you seem to urge it to do better, to do different. But it is implacable – it is yourself as you had willed it to act. (Storey, 117)

Similarly, in March 1915 the film star Tom Mix witnessed film’s implicit insistence on the real-world existence of fictional characters when he wrote that “[w]hen my shadow [i.e. his filmic image] appears on the screen it seems to me there in the audience as if I were viewing the actions of a total stranger instead of the shadow of mine own self” (500). Both performers were prompted by the filmic process to regard these indexes of their own bodies as taking on independent existences. Furthermore, because film performers use their real-world bodies and faces to constitute their characters, film’s temporal indexicality implies that every character from every film existed with that body and face before the arbitrary piece of time when the film’s narrative process joined her/him, and continues to exist after that arbitrary piece of time. When any performer appears prominently in more than one film, film’s temporal indexicality subtly insists that each film is an episode in the life of just one character. This combination of films and reappearing performers automatically implies the continuation of a single larger, though loosely defined, trans-textual self, unifying all of each performer’s characters. Regardless of the image which publicity is purposed to create, this accrued textual self provides the chemical basis of each



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star’s public persona. Although theatre performers also use their bodies to generate a fictional character, film’s endemic temporal indexicality insists much more strongly than the apparatus of the theatre auditorium that its fictional selves pre-exist and outlast a film’s story time. This is one reason why typecasting is generally deemed to be more powerful in film work.23 Film discourse openly played on the idea that each film star’s fictional performances were parts of her/his larger fictional existence, indicating that this idea was clearly manifest at the time. For example, a contributor to P&PG in November 1914 explained that “[w]hile at Thanhouser’s Miss Carey L. Hastings has had not less than eight pairs of twins and about thirty “singles” anywhere from a week old to several years”; such prolificacy was of course filmic, “for she is the “mother” in Thanhouser and Princess stories.”24 Such a strong disparity between the account’s claims and the realm of possibility meant that the account could not be truthful: the writer rehearsed the open fiction of constructing a trans-textual life out of filmic performances. Such commentaries were common. In late 1914 a contributor to MPM produced a poem: Tonight he is a sheriff in some far-off Western town, Tho yesterday he was a lord of passing fair renown; He’s been a daring soldier, bravely facing shot and shell, One week will show him married to a dainty little wife, But lo! the next you meet him as a bachelor for life. He is a man of many parts and many diverse ways, For he’s a leading actor for the Moving Picture plays. I’ve known her as a Southern belle in days of “sixty-one,” And later as a cow-girl, with her broncho and her gun. Not long ago she was a queen amid the social whirl, Tho afterwards I met her as a simple country girl. She’s had a host of lovers who have sought her hand so small, And, what seems very shocking, she has wedded one and all; But this, in truth, is no offense, and need not long amaze, For she’s a leading actress for the Moving Picture plays. (McMaster, 35)

This contributor described each role as an episode in the life of the star, even though he also knew that this was not the case. Like Cretinetti etc. taking on a separate profession or task in each film, the star persona is a known fiction. Second, in film, the raw material out of which trains of story events are constructed is a set of real events. The profilmic event, though not ‘real’ in the sense of ‘genuine’, is real in the sense of ‘occurring’. This means that the performances recorded on film are performances both in the sense of ‘contrivances’ and in the sense of ‘achievements’. This overlap was noted conspicuously in film discourse from the 1910s onwards. For example, one July 1913 article in The Pictures told how Henry Walthall, shortly after joining Biograph, took part in a production when, attired as a sneak-thief, he had to break the window of a jeweller’s and make off with a handful of rings. The picture director

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purposely selected a deserted side-street for the scene, and got together a crowd of spectators from amongst his supers. No sooner was the window smashed, however, than the cry of “Stop, thief!” brought people hurrying from all directions to the scene of the crime, and Henry Walthall flew down the street pursued by a rapidly increasing crowd of fifty strong. […] [A]ll the lookers-on thought a real theft had been committed, and by the time the actor had reached the end of the street, fully a hundred people were eager to arrest him. […] Only the timely arrival of the persuasive director saved the actor from being roughly handled by the mob.25

With a real window, real jewels, real costume, a real act of smashing that window, a real (and, for a silent film, superfluous) cry of “stop, thief!,” and the choice to carry all of this out in a real town near real passers-by, the profilmic event was real in that an event occurred even if it was not real in the sense that the event was a genuine smash-and-grab, and because of this ‘realness’ the profilmic event easily triggered responses in passers-by that led, in turn, to events that were ‘real’ in the sense of being genuine. Further examples include an April 1912 article in The Pictures which told readers that Gene Gauntier “who fortunately is quite athletic, was obliged to literally beat off”26 a male assailant in an incident where, walking to set in costume, she was mistaken by passers-by for a real criminal, and an October 1917 article in P&PG which claimed that a fire rescue scene involving George Larkin and Ollie Kirkby went awry and required that Larkin rescue Kirkby for real.27 Such commentaries acknowledged that one of the potential distinguishing features of the new medium and institution was that each profilmic event was, on average, closer than events on stage to the real event which it was enacted to represent. Because profilmic events were nonetheless clearly staged to produce representations of fictional events, they drew attention to the contrived nature of all built environments and social situations. This ‘profilmic becoming real’ anecdote continues to be very common in film discourse during the twenty-first century. To take one example, New Line’s ‘making of’ documentaries about The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002) claimed that the groups of actors playing the Uruk-Hai and the elves in the quarry outside Wellington, New Zealand, taunted each other for real in the Helm’s Deep scene (‘Warriors’), that the Uruk-Hai ‘draught’ really made Dominic Monaghan retch, that when Viggo Mortensen accidentally broke two toes kicking a helmet, instead of calling ‘cut’ he channelled the pain into his subsequent performance of Aragorn’s frustrated rage at the apparent death of Merry and Pippin (‘Cameras’), that John Rhys-Davies really hit the stunt actors playing orcs with his prop axe (‘The Fellowship’), that when Gimli was supposed to have his breath crushed out of him by the weight of two wargs and an orc, John Rhys-Davies’s breath was really crushed out of him by the weight of the props on top of him, and that Mortensen really head-butted stunt actor Jed Brophy during the warg fight (‘Cameras’) – all asserted a substantial overlap between the profilmic and the real. This overlap is commonly treated as prestigious. For example, actor David Wenham (Faramir) insisted of one set that



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it was Osgilliath, and that was the delightful and incredible thing about working on this film – you would arrive on set and you were in that environment. Throw in all the stunt guys and the extras in full garb and whatever and you’re there, it’s happening. There’s a camera crew around and a few guys with microphones and whatever but that aside, the whole situation was a hundred percent real. (‘Cameras’)

The film’s worth, Wenham implied, relied at least in part on the ability of the crew’s various departments to construct a profilmic environment which was minimally different from a genuine environment. Viewers did not, however, see films as documents of reality; rather, they documented a place where people did things for real even when producing fictions. This idea was expressed in the widespread use of terms like ‘filmland’ and ‘pictureland’ in commentaries on film during the 1910s. For example, in July 1912 a reply to a letter in MPSM described Ralph Ince’s acting experience “before he came into Pictureland”.28 In October 1912 Robert Grau called the formation of the Famous Players company “the advent of Daniel Frohman into Filmdom” (98). William Lord Wright, a contributor to MPSM, repeatedly called the film industry “Filmland” during 1912, 1913 and 1914 (e.g. ‘The Tremolo’ 130, ‘Literature’ 117, ‘The Coming Year’, 104). In June 1913 a contributor to The Pictures remarked that “[i]t is not difficult to sympathise with the girl in a shop or an office, or in a factory, who is tired and disheartened by the monotony of her life, and dreams that everything would be rose-tinged, and that all her cares would vanish if she could only find her way into Picture-Land, and act before the camera” (Ashton, 3). A January 1914 poem by one Theodore Beebe, a cinemagoer from Melrose, Massachusetts, called Mary Fuller “a queen in Filmdom”.29 An August 1914 article in P&PG used “Pictureland” to designate all of those places where filmmaking took place.30 Lottie Pickford was described in 1915 as “the heroine that I had been seeing in Shadowland ’most every night” (Edna Wright, 93). A contributor to the January 1921 first issue of Picturegoer magazine alluded to “that strangely fascinating and somewhat remote planet known as the “movie-world,”” (Nott, 12), expressing a widespread sense that the basic acts of film-making made it ontologically distinct from non-filmic deeds, no matter how real the basic acts of film-making were. The population of ‘filmland’, therefore, was and is distinguished by, among other things, a propensity to carry out genuine acts even when producing fictions. Film stars were paid to participate in a specially constituted set of real events when producing fictions in their working lives, which implied in turn that their public personae in print or in person, no matter how sincere they seemed, were likewise fictions.

“just a mask you’re forced to wear” In addition to resulting from the series character system and the nature of the cinematic image, film stardom’s tacit fictionality also results from the economic positions of both employers and stars. Well into the period of ‘real’ stardom in Europe and North

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America, the most common treatment of film stars by their employers involved the form of stardom which deCordova sees as restricted to the ‘picture personality’ phase. Rather than an embryological stage on the way to stardom, the figure of the picture personality was both the industry’s and its employees’ preferred form for stardom. In several ways, a direct match between performer and parts serves the interests of the economic agents involved. First, it serves the interests of film production companies. This match between performer and part is most commonly manifested in the common perception that film performers play themselves. Regardless of the accuracy of this perception, it is in the interest of these professionals’ employers to propagate it, as it permits them to publicly designate a person as a production value with an identifiably characteristic profile and to promise that this production value will be manifested in each forthcoming film. That is, if a performer’s portrayal of a character in a successful film is deemed by their employer to be an ingredient of that film’s success, it will benefit that employer to use publicity for that performer’s future films to promise that, regardless of how much the future roles differ from the initial role, the audience will get at least a measure of the quality which the performer brought to that successful initial film. Constituting the employee as a production value in this way permits the employer to semi-permanently retain a measure of the value realised by the expense of the successful film. While the employer could of course claim that the performer’s value is acting talent, such a value is not exclusive to that particular person: any performer employee of any production company can be championed as a highly talented actor/actress. The ostensibly unique set of personality traits possessed by one person, by contrast, is the sole ‘property’ of that person and, by extension, that person’s employer. It is in the interests of employers to stress their lead performer employees’ tendency to selfportray in both publicity and in choices about which films to produce and which parts to cast their employees in. For example, out of John Candy’s 26 major roles, at least 21 were warm-hearted and well-meaning but clumsy characters, sometimes shrewd, sometimes gullible, sometimes (oddly) both. The clear departure from this norm that he made towards the end of his career (in JFK (1991) and Cool Runnings (1993)) was a risk that he could not have taken had he not made it onto the A-list. It is no surprise, therefore, that employers have long chosen to try to establish this value long-term by claiming that their performer employees play themselves regardless of the nature of their role. For example, anyone reading the extracts above from various synopses for the earliest films in Linder’s period of ‘nonymity’ might ask whether these numerous uses of the name ‘Max’ to refer to Linder’s character might show not that viewers conflated performers with parts but, instead, that Pathé was using intertitles to call the informal series character that Linder was playing in some of his films ‘Max’. If they were, these synopses suggest that they started to do this at a point somewhere between Petite rosse, released in parts of Europe outside France around 10–13 November 1909 and in France in early December 1909, and Le pacte, released in parts of Europe outside France on 5 March 1910 and in France in late April or early May 1910; it was clearly in place even before the first titular ‘Max’ film, Max fait



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du ski, as implied by K&LW’s synopsis for Le revolver arrange tout, the film immediately preceding Max fait du ski, which called it “[a]nother of the Max Linder series”.31 Such a phenomenon indicates a willing performer/part conflation, but from the opposite direction, as producers at Pathé Frères worked to turn the part into the performer. Their motive in doing this would have been to imply that the films provided insights into the self of their employee, if not by actually providing accounts of his life then by playing out in fiction the possible dramatic consequences of his specific personality traits. This motive is implied by the use of the term ‘personality’ in two synopses in Bioscope: in their synopsis for Le petit jeune homme they remarked that “Mr Linder’s fascinating personality and the perfection of his pantomimic art, combine to make this a very amusing picture”,32 and in their synopsis for Le serment d’un Prince they related that “[h]e has a remarkable personality, and it is the force of this personality which makes his characters so real, so human, and, at the same time, so charming.”33 If Pathé’s London office supplied this text, it indicates an attempt to insist that some element of their asset always made its way into the films, even when, as with Le serment d’un Prince, a drama, the film performance took Linder outside of his habitual territory. The second reason why a direct match between performer and parts serves the interests of the economic agents involved is that in any competitive labour market, performers are motivated to claim that they possess, alongside a capacity to take on any role required, a unique quality, specific to them and beyond the ability of other potential employee to duplicate, that they would bring to all of their roles regardless of their variety, and regardless of how close popular perceptions of the work of film acting come to a model which sees complete self-effacement as both feasible and desirable. While a similar pressure exists in the labour market of live theatre, in the labour market for film performers it is greater as a consequence of the perceived need to amplify performer-originated meaning-making to compete with the extra channels of meaning-making constituted by cinematography and editing, each of which is capable of making a person’s body signify automatically. This prompts film performers to become what Barry King calls “proprietors of a marketable persona” (‘Articulating’, 176), a personal monopoly over their own selves, which is ostensibly impossible to duplicate. This marketable persona can be observed in action even in the early 1910s. As a November 1913 article remarked, “[t]here are a lot of photoplays and a lot of photoplayers – of sorts. But there is only one Miss Ruth Stonehouse.”34 It remains a factor in the contemporary film industry; Geoff King exemplifies one of the primary observations of contemporary scholarship on film stars when he points out that film [s]tars, almost by definition, exceed the boundaries of the fictional characters they play. To be a star is to be recognized within and beyond any specific role. George Clooney remains George Clooney, whether he is also Seth Gecko [From Dusk Till Dawn, 1996], Jack Foley (Out of Sight, 1998), Archie Gates (Three Kings, 1999) or even Batman (Batman and Robin, 1997). (150)

Similarly, John Belton remarked in 2009 that “Spencer Tracy was more Spencer Tracy than Thomas Edison in Edison, the Man (1940), and James Stewart was more James

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Stewart than Glenn Miller in The Glenn Miller Story (1954) or Charles Lindbergh in The Spirit of St. Louis (1957)”, even though his claim that “[i]t is unlikely that John Wayne could have played anyone other than John Wayne” is somewhat reductive (American Cinema, 3rd ed., 99). Paul McDonald argued in 2012 that, when performing, “at all moments the star is the star” no matter how much they are “also a particular character” (‘Story and Show’, 173). As these scholars observed, a dominant model of film stardom among film performers avoids the prospect of stars’ interchangeability by forbidding them from becoming invisible within any role. This stage/film distinction has led, in turn, to a popular model of film acting that Barry King calls ‘personification’, defined as displaying a self that “transcends placement or containment in a particular narrative”, even in the context of extreme variation between roles (‘Articulating’, 175). The idea that film performers ‘merely’ play themselves when they act is, in this respect, a close cousin of the idea that the output of every film director is characterised by a unique signature: getting people to hold the idea has economic advantages that motivate workers to propagate it regardless of whether it is accurate. The pressure on performers, and indeed on all other creative personnel in the film industry, to mark themselves as unique assets in a labour market is great in both those film industries which use long-term contracts and those which do not; the former type of film industry simply concentrates this labour competition at those pressure points when posts become vacant, contracts expire or new posts are established. Thus although the idea that film stars play themselves might, in the case of at least some stars, seem like a ‘mere’ audience misconception, it is a misconception that employers and employees have been widely, persistently and systemically motivated to foster. In 2006 I demonstrated the high currency of the idea that film stars play themselves in popular UK film culture during the 1910s and the early/mid-1920s (see ‘She looks’, 45–76), including an April 1915 article in P&PG which ‘explained’ that Mary Pickford “is the same Mary off as on, and as pretty as she is sweet”;35 I will provide further examples from both sides of the Atlantic here. The first issue of MPSM in early 1911 provided brief information about Essanay’s “picturesque leading woman”: “Miss Clara Williams is a perfect Western type, and, while she has had fine success in various other roles, she excels in the plays of the West. Having spent several years on a cattle ranch, she is familiar with the real cowboy, she is an expert horsewoman, and a lover of the out-door life.”36 In May 1913 The Pictures described Pauline Bush like so: [g]aze at a film in which Miss Pauline Bush appears, and the Picture Theatre seems to vanish, and you imagine that you have been transported as by necromancy, beyond the Rockies, and that you have been brought face to face, not with an actress in a mere play, but with a veritable girl of Arizona or California as it used to be. And this effect is produced because Miss Pauline Bush is – herself.37

A mid-1914 profile explained that “[r]omance and a life of freedom, danger, and adventure have been the lot of Vivian Rich, leading woman of the ‘Flying A’ Company, from babyhood. She was born at sea, and something of the restlessness and mystery



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of the ocean, with the changing moods of the wind and sky, seems to have entranced her nature and moulded her temperament.”38 Here Rich, like Williams, in performing for the outdoor films that were her employer’s staple, was just playing herself. Because this model of film performance stressed honesty, it implicitly asserted that the aims of film performance labour did not include pretence. These aims were implicitly stated by Kalem’s Ruth Roland in a February 1915 article in Motion Picture Magazine: she remarked that “the cinematograph has broadened the field and scope for portrayal of the personality of the individual actor over the opportunity presented on the legitimate stage” (qtd. Roat, 51). Here the work of film performance was very different from impersonation; instead it was Barry King’s ‘personification’, a type of cultural work which involved providing an audience with insights into the selves of performers. This principle was applied even in the case of film performers who had some notable past on the stage: a February 1915 article in MPM claimed that Hobart Bosworth “ran away to sea when a boy, and for eleven adventurous years he saw and did in real life more daring deeds than the average actor feebly imitates on the stage. By turns he was a sailor before the mast; was locked on a whaler in the frozen Arctic; stevedored on the ’Frisco docks; wrestled as a professional, and ranched in Southern California” before becoming a stage performer.39 The article implied that Bosworth then became a film performer because this adventurous nature, which audiences should expect to observe in his films, made him ultimately incompatible with the stage. Even by the middle of the 1910s, therefore, the idea that film stars self-portrayed in films was being circulated by employers’ publicity departments and by journalists writing for popular film magazines. As I pointed out in 2006, it did not abate during the silent period (‘She looks’, 55–8). For instance, in late 1926 the editor of MPM remarked that Pola Negri “belongs to another race of people. It is as natural for her to show her emotion as it is for others to hide theirs. Pola is not a repressed person. She is very much as she appears on the screen, nearer her screen personality than almost anyone we have ever met” (Fletcher, 112). The top tier of film stardom, this article claimed, was made up of people who minimised the distinction between their film roles and their extra-filmic life. A natural corollary of this unique self in a competitive labour market is that, because all people are ostensibly unique, workers will seek out an intrinsic mechanism for limiting the population who can succeed in the profession. One way to do this is to invent a further property that must be possessed if the unique self is to find expression, a further property that is only possessed by a small percentage of the general population. The labour market of the 1910s seems to have done just this in ‘discovering’ a property of transmitting one’s self to an audience via a purely visual and colourless record of their movements, and they called this quality ‘personality’. For example, the film star Tom Santschi wrote in June 1915 that “[t]here are three things that are necessary to good picture-acting […]. The first is two eyes, the second ten fingers, the third is that wonderful, indescribable God-given something known as personality. […] You’ve got to get through the canvas screen, and personality is the only thing that will carry you through.”40 In the December 1918 MPM a contributor

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opened an article on Edna Goodrich with the line “Dear Haze [Hazel Simpson Naylor, one of the magazine’s editors]:–/ The day you went vacationing you said, “Get Edna Goodrich for me […] – her personality – her” – was it her “ego” that you said?” (Hall, 35). In the September 1922 issue another contributor wrote that “personality” is one of the most difficult things in the realm of human psychology to analyze and define. So subtle and elusive is it that it has come to be spoken of as “that indescribable something.” […] This phrase, when applied to screen stars, does not refer merely to their physical appearance, histrionic ability and mental capacity. Very often, in fact, it is not the most talented or the best-looking actor who appears to us the most. What attracts and holds us is some inner psychological magnetism (Van Kranken, September 1922, 46).

In January 1923 the same contributor remarked that Mary Miles Minter was a poor film performer because “she has neither “character” nor personality to any marked degree” (and the same went for Bessie Love and Marie Prevost), while Mary Pickford, by contrast, “has a magnetic personality – that so-called “indescribable something” – which colors and vitalizes everything she does” (Van Kranken, January 1923, 57–8). In 1926 another claimed that Greta Garbo’s significance among the firmament of film stars derived from “the inexplicable charm and power of a rare personality” (Markham, 99). All of these cases modelled ‘star quality’ as the possession of a rare ability to transmit one’s self-portrayal. It may seem that this is where series characters and ‘real’ stardom simply cannot overlap. The ‘self-portrayal’ principle and the mystical quality of personality sound like an industry asserting that film stars’ public personae are genuine, in strict contrast to the avowedly fictional personae of series characters. It seems, instead, to support a long-standing and dominant assumption in film star studies that regards film stars’ public personae as covert fictions, as attempts to deceive rather than overt fictions.41 But there are several reasons to think that film stars’ extra-filmic public personae are both performed and received as overtly fictional. Rather than a misunderstanding of reality fostered among audiences by employers and employees, film stars’ personae are more appropriately understood, I will show, as open lies, fictions into which viewers are invited to enter by willingly suspending their disbelief (in this case the disbelief being a suspicion that little to no aspect of the private self of the star goes to make up the public self that they present extra-filmically). Given that decisions to willingly suspend disbelief are seldom stated, evidence supporting such a claim would inevitably be sparse, but I will show that there are elements of a case for the idea that film star personae are most accurately regarded as fictions knowingly attached, by both stars and cinemagoers, to real people. First, most stars’ extra-filmic public personae are built out of their film roles anyway. When Geoff King remarked (see page 346) that “George Clooney remains George Clooney, whether he is also Seth Gecko, Jack Foley, […] Archie Gates […] or even Batman”, he also implicitly acknowledged that the public persona ‘George Clooney’ derives at least in part from these acts of impersonation (Clooney “is also



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Seth Gecko” etc.). Given that films provide the raw material for the building of a film performer’s public persona, stars erect these personae out of openly fictional components. John Belton also observes that while, “[t]o some extent, the stars make the stories, driving them forward with the force of their personalities”, “[m] ore often than not, […] the stars build their screen personalities on the backs of the characters they play and on the story patterns that writers provide for them” (American Cinema 113). When any film star appears in a new film in a part that is broadly consistent with her/his filmography, while viewers can conceivably imagine that the performer is simply being cast to the characteristics of their private self, the fact that this pre-existing self has been mostly evident to them in film roles is just as likely to indicate that the star’s extra-filmic appearances are just continuations of a career-long practice of public impersonation. All stars, that is, are overtly economically motivated to adopt a rough equivalent of Chaplin’s tramp. Second, in propounding the ideal that film stars should play themselves, the industry was not and is not necessarily insisting that film stars fail to act when being filmed: ‘playing oneself’ can mean ‘performing the self that one uses even when not performing’ – the opposite, that is, of ‘not acting’. ‘Playing oneself’ defined as perpetually performing is certainly a more dignified implicit account of the profession of being filmed. After all, the idea that film performance means merely ‘being yourself’ compares very poorly to existing forms of cultural endeavour. Of course, film discourse has persistently sought to find hard work in this activity in spite of this poor comparison. For example, because film has greater access than the stage to real environments, it tends to be ascribed a corresponding greater responsibility to put real actions into those environments, meaning that film work, even if it is not performance in the sense of acting, is performance in the sense of physical achievement. An April 1915 MPM article, for example, told readers that “[w]hen you see the strenuous comedy or the gripping drama, just remember that some one must take chances, and some one must frequently suffer in order to afford you entertainment. The more skillful an actor is, the greater risk he takes” (Wright, ‘Perils’ 96). Hence the rise of the widespread discourse of risk summarised in the Introduction, as film discourse drew on cinema’s earliest sense-machine profile to badge fiction films as records of the achievements of a corps of remarkable people. Another way of finding hard work in merely ‘being yourself’, however, was to discover that a film performer’s roles were all true to an entirely fictional self, one adopted and played for her/his entire professional career. While one of the advantages of a system of stardom is that it permits an industry to reclassify their product as a record of talent, though identifying performers with characters would seem to prevent this, it can still be possible if stars are designated as performing even when they are not being filmed. This designation can be seen in a list printed in MPM in December 1926 entitled ‘Things We Will Never See’: Lon Chaney as Little Eva Harold Lloyd as Hamlet Charlie Murray as Shylock

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Mary Pickford as The Queen of Sheba Bull Montana as Beau Brummel John Barrymore as Don Quixote. (Tamar Lane, 59)

Instead of deeming these six stars to be unable to play these specific parts, this writer was deeming them all to have adopted long-term trans-textual personae that were incompatible with these specific parts. Their extra-filmic selves were described as forms of professional specialisation. Third, it is much easier for the general public to detect film stars’ adoption of extra-filmic personae than we might expect. As social psychologists have recently established, humans usually develop the ability to identify pretending, joking, lying, figures of speech and irony in others by their early teens, roughly by age 12.42 Even by early adolescence, then, most humans possess sufficient ability to model the consciousness of others to be able to understand and distinguish between several different types of non-literal statement, including, of course, the open lie that is pretending. One of the specific types of pretending that adult humans are also evidently able to identify is the phenomenon known in social psychology as the mere presence effect: that the mere presence of a real or implied audience alters a person’s performance (see Zajonc, Social Psychology, 11). When the first forays into social psychology were carried out during the closing years of the nineteenth century, what was later called social facilitation (when the mere presence of a real or even an implied audience specifically improves performance) was the first phenomenon to be studied,43 which implies that a rough hypothesis of the mere presence effect already circulated in popular consciousness in the late nineteenth century.44 Another reason to think that humans are generally aware of the mere presence effect is that educating children in ways of behaving when in the presence of others is near-universal: on top of the specific dictates of etiquette, humans are commonly educated to sort their own behaviours into public and private registers. That is, humans widely appear to be capable of at least theorising that others’ entire behaviour when in public is performed. While the mere presence effect might be deemed by the general public to operate unconsciously rather than consciously, meaning that specific instances would not necessarily rank as overt fictions, with respect to film stars there is reason to think that the general public do nonetheless incline to identify their extra-filmic selves as overtly performed. One relevant cognitive mechanism is Implicit Personality Theory, a term denoting person A’s storehouse of accrued data about person B. Every person holds a number of Implicit Personality Theories, and each, in interaction with person A’s stock of beliefs and biases, is used to generate their impression of the person whom it concerns at any given time (see e.g. Powell and Juhnke, 919). The data by which we assemble each Implicit Personality Theory comes, of course, through multiple channels, including direct interaction, observation and gossip. In the case of any film star, the primary channel via which each member of the public obtains their data for their Implicit Personality Theory concerning that star is her/his work in films, a channel which consistently provides abundant evidence that these specific



The Ontology of Film Stardom  351

individuals are skilled at overtly pretending. Thus while most Implicit Personality Theories are shaped by the bias identified in 1958 and known since 1977 as the Fundamental Attribution Error (“the tendency for attributers to underestimate the impact of situational factors and to overestimate the role of dispositional factors in controlling behaviour” [Ross, 183]), which means that the general public are broadly predisposed to err towards regarding the behaviour of others as a result of their personality rather than their circumstances (see e.g. Chiu, Hong & Dweck, 19–30), film stars are one of the classifications of profession where the primary evidence directed at the public implicitly insists both that (a) their actions are situationally determined (that is, by their roles), and that (b) their disposition is to be situationally determined (that is, to put themselves in situations where they are required by external forces to act in certain ways). While Dyer’s claim that film stars’ extra-filmic public appearances appear genuine by dint of the implicit comparison they make with their professional activities, which are overt performances (see page 6), has become a cornerstone of star studies,45 the relevance of these people’s professional activities being overt performances seems more likely to work in the opposite direction, generating Implicit Personality Theories among the public which model film stars as expert contrivers of public selves. Evidence of this survives in the strand of Anglophone film discourse of the 1910s and 1920s which asserted that film stars were servants of the people. This strand was particularly strong during the First World War, when the industry responded to threats of both punitive taxation and the stigma of frivolity with the claim that film-making was necessary war work: in The Chronicles of Charlie Chaplin, for example, Langford Reed claimed that “Charlie is a prime favourite with our gallant soldiers and sailors, who feel that the brightness and joy he has brought into their lives outweighs, a million times, any service he might have been able to render as an asthenic little castigator of Huns” (vi). This continued after the war. Sydney Chaplin’s account of the formation of United Artists in early 1919, for example, described it as an attempt on the parts of Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, Charles Chaplin, D. W. Griffith and William S. Hart to save “the public” from the threats posed by a distributors’ combine, and the five’s official statement about the formation of the company overtly referred to themselves as “servants of the people”.46 One 1922 article quoted Dorothy Dalton remarking that “[a]s an actress, as one who is more or less a servant of the public […] it is my duty to do a great many things that I wouldn’t do if I were merely a private-life person” (Bishop, 92). These commentaries all openly acknowledged that film stars had a career responsibility to perform for the public even when they were not being filmed. A propensity during the 1910s for commentators to cite Robert Burns’s 1786 poem ‘To a Louse’ likewise indicates contemporaries’ sense that film stars perform their extra-filmic personae. In the relevant verse from the original, Burns’s speaker asks, O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us To see oursels as ithers see us! It wad frae mony a blunder free us,

352  The Origins of the Film Star System

An’ foolish notion: What airs in dress an’ gait wad lea’e us, An’ ev’n devotion! (132)

Claims that film cameras and projectors fulfilled Burns’s speaker’s dream were not unprecedented in the 1910s, but they were plentiful. This is one example from 1912: If that great singer who could take a flower And from it weave a silver thread of song, Could sojourn here among us for an hour, And mingle with the gay and joyous throng That seek the pleasure of the Photoshow [i.e. cinema], He’d find the thing he wrote of long ago, Had come to pass – the pictures guarantee us A chance to see ourselves as others see us. (Staff, 48)

This is another from 1914: Two lines of Burns have lost their force Thru modern science’s striding course: “O wad some power the giftie gie us To see oursels as ithers see us.” No more can bards like he lament, For now the power has been sent; Our modern Thespians on the screen Can see themselves as they are seen. (Curtiss, 30)

Designating the film performer as a classification of actor with a technologically enhanced ability to scrutinise their own performances specified them as among the most self-policing of people, which in turn insisted that film stars’ trans-textual personae were overt performances. In addition, the history of film stardom also incorporates some overt traditions of contrivance beyond principal photography. One of the most blatant of these is the tradition of film stars transforming their bodies for their parts, either between films or during shooting, often necessitating brief career breaks or significant pauses in shooting. For example, between March 1999 and April 2000 production of Cast Away paused while Tom Hanks lost 40–50 pounds to reflect the weight loss that his character Chuck Noland experienced during four years as the story’s titular castaway. (During this period director Robert Zemeckis retained the Cast Away crew and used this ‘idle’ workforce to make What Lies Beneath.) Some significant recent examples of these transformations are listed in Fig. 7.3. In all cases the performer was already part of a star system when she or he changed her/his body, and in all cases these transformations were reported in the press in tones that reflect enhanced public prestige. For all of these professionals, the fact that their bodies must constitute the raw material for the work of producing fiction meant that they must extend the fictions beyond principal photography and into their private lives; a part of their private lives becomes a contrivance.



The Ontology of Film Stardom  353

Fig. 7.3  Some recent film stars’ body transformations. Performer

Film

Type of bodily change

Robert De Niro

Raging Bull (1980)

fat gain

Tom Hanks

Philadelphia (1993)

fat loss

Matt Damon

Courage Under Fire (1996)

fat loss

Sylvester Stallone

Cop Land (1997)

fat gain

Edward Norton

American History X (1998)

muscle gain

Eric Bana

Chopper (2000)

fat gain

Tom Hanks

Cast Away (2000)

fat/muscle loss

Renée Zellweger

Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001)

fat gain

Will Smith

Ali (2001)

muscle gain

Adrien Brody

The Pianist (2002)

fat loss

Charlize Theron

Monster (2003)

fat gain

Hilary Swank

Million Dollar Baby (2004)

muscle gain

Christian Bale

The Machinist (2004)

fat/muscle loss

Jessica Biel

Blade: Trinity (2004)

muscle gain

Philip Seymour Hoffman

Capote (2005)

fat loss

George Clooney

Syriana (2005)

fat gain

Jared Leto

Chapter 27 (2007)

fat gain

Tom Hardy

Bronson (2008)

muscle gain

Michael Fassbender

Hunger (2008)

fat loss

Colin Farrell

Triage (2009)

fat loss

Denzel Washington

The Book of Eli (2010)

fat loss

Christian Bale

The Fighter (2010)

fat loss

Natalie Portman & Mila Kunis

Black Swan (2010)

fat loss

Matthew McConaughey

Dallas Buyers Club (2013)

fat/muscle loss

Christian Bale

American Hustle (2013)

fat gain

Jake Gyllenhaal

Southpaw (2015)

muscle gain

Chris Hemsworth

In the Heart of the Sea (2015)

fat/muscle loss

354  The Origins of the Film Star System

Of course, this is not to propose that cinemagoers regard film stars’ public personae as utter fabrications that do not relate in the slightest to the actual characteristics of the people whom we call stars. But to be overtly fictional, they do not have to be utter fabrications: they just have to be contrivances. To rank as contrivances, they merely need to be designated in some way as versions of the self-fictionalisation involved in everyday social interaction. Although the various acknowledgements of stars’ fictionalisation of their extra-filmic selves described in this chapter are somewhat encoded, stars occasionally overtly describe this self-fictionalisation. For example, in 1996, John Cleese, already by this date a widely recognisable film performer, gave a guest lecture at the American School in London. Afterwards, he answered a student’s question about whether there were negative aspects of fame by listing several. This was the last: there’s bits of us inside that are much more authentic, that are really about who we are, and then there are all the bits that we show to the rest of the world because that’s the way to impress the rest of the world. […] Now the hard thing when you’re famous and people are coming at you with cameras all the time is that the bits of your personality that you use to impress the rest of the world kind of take over, and they become stronger, and the bits of you inside that are really you kind of get weaker like a muscle that isn’t getting exercised. And if I go out and spend six or eight weeks on the trot doing publicity – I mean on [A Fish Called] Wanda [(1988)] I did 64 days of interviews […] at the end of that six-week period what you find is that you have become a more superficial person, and it takes a little time on your own to get back to who you are, because you have been using those parts of your personality all the time that project yourself to the world and that’s not really who you are.

Here, Cleese was open that publicity obligations had overtly required him to participate in an extreme version of the open self-fictionalisation involved in everyday social interaction. Fourth, extra-filmic appearances by film stars tap into a long tradition of extratextual yet nonetheless fictional interactions. The fact that stars’ public and press appearances take place outside the blatant or subtle frames used to denote that a phenomenon is fiction might be taken to show that their implied audiences do not regard them as fictional. However, this is to overlook the fact that there is a strong public tradition of knowingly pretending that overtly fictional events, places and people are real. Examples include those elements of Bloomsday (the earliest mention of which dates from 1924)47 which involve indulging the overt fiction that the fictional events in Dublin on 16–17 June 1904 described in James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) actually happened, having one’s photograph taken with a performer in costume at a Disney theme park, visiting the area in London’s King’s Cross station where, since late 2013, half a luggage trolley attached to a brick wall permits member of the public to pose for photographs in which they appear to be passing through the wall to platform 9¾ (employees of the nearby Harry Potter Shop are on hand during busy periods to lend participants their preferred Hogwarts house scarf), using NORAD’s



The Ontology of Film Stardom  355

online Santa tracker at santatracker.org, or allying oneself on Facebook with one of the Noble Houses of George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series. Like these activities, treating film stars’ public selves as real can be regarded as an extratextual yet nonetheless overtly fictional activity in which the public are overtly invited to indulge. Rhona Trauvitch, who has amassed many examples of activities in which viewers/ readers/auditors knowingly interact with overtly fictional characters and situations in the real world, classifies these activities as ‘synontological’, a term denoting “a convergence of ontological states” (para 2). Synontology, she explains, “is characterized by the confluence of two ontological states: that which features the fictional entity, and that which features the fictional entity’s non-fictional manifestation” (para 2). Her examples include playing on one’s school Quidditch team, learning and conversing in Sindarin (one of the languages of Tolkien’s Middle-Earth), Sherlock Holmes fans visiting the Reichenbach Falls in Switzerland (the location of the climactic confrontation between Sherlock Holmes and Moriarty from Doyle’s December 1893 short story ‘The Final Problem’) and Star Trek fans visiting Riverside, Iowa, the future birthplace of Captain James T. Kirk. None of these activities, some of which are highly ritualised by tourist industries, seem to be the product of category errors on the part of members of the public. Behaving towards a fictional character as if they are real during a viewing/reading/etc. of a text is easier because the viewer/reader/ etc. is immersed in the text, because conventionalised methods of rendering the text’s frames (price, packaging, means of distribution/transmission, etc.) relatively inconspicuous minimise the effort needed to suspend disbelief; by contrast, these extra-textual fictional interactions are versions of suspended disbelief that occur in spite of the viewer/reader/etc. not being immersed in the text, in spite of not being placed in such a way that these textual frames are inconspicuous. The former category of activity is near-automatic; the latter requires a significantly greater effort. Trauvitch shows that such activities involve cognitive flexibility: participants in such activities seem to be able to interact, either simultaneously or in rapid succession, with realworld elements on a genuine level and with the fictional elements to which they refer on a playful level. Participants seem generally to be able to understand both the realworld purpose and the fictional referents of, for example, the ‘commemorative’ tourist plaque at the Reichenbach Falls. Likewise, it seems most likely that the population of Walthamstow would have been able to work out that the “[d]uplicates of Lieut. Daring, Jumbo, and two seamen” who were driven in a motor car around the town in June 1912 at the instruction of the manager of the Higham’s Park Electric Theatre (see page 310) both corresponded to fictional equivalents and had a real-world purpose. For a member of the public to seem to treat a film star’s public persona as if it is genuine does not, therefore, mean either (a) that a member of the public does regard that persona as genuine, or (b) that a member of the public is unable to apprehend the real-world purpose of that persona. Rather, it is likely that, in contrast to conventional scholarly models of popular regard for film stars’ public personae, interacting with film stars’ public selves as if they are genuine occurs in spite of common knowledge that

356  The Origins of the Film Star System

they have several reasons not to be, and therefore results from a conscious decision on the part of members of the public. Both sides of such star-audience interactions have strong motives to engage in this practice: fictional social interactions function as sandpits, spaces where interpersonal behaviour can be rehearsed safely in complete isolation from consequences. Fiction is one way of constituting this sandpit, but it is not the only way. It is also significant for my account of the origins and ontology of film stardom that Trauvitch’s synontological interactions, both those which are organised by agents with authority over the texts and those which are organised by the public, are predominantly associated with story-spaces that persist across series; the Star Trek, Harry Potter, Batman, Tarzan, Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Who story-spaces provide the overwhelming majority of Trauvitch’s examples. Another instance of a series-derived synontological interaction was the weigh-in and press conference that New Line staged at Bally’s, a hotel in Las Vegas, on 15 July 2003 in advance of the release of Freddy vs Jason, at which two performers, in costume and in character as Freddy Krueger and Jason Vorhees, were weighed-in as if they were boxers, answered questions from the press and traded insults, and which concluded with the hotel stating their betting odds on the outcome of the forthcoming ‘match’ while security guards struggled to stop a premature ‘fight’ between the two characters.48 This marketing method could work only because both characters were familiar to the general public via publicity for their, thus far, 17 filmic appearances (seven by Freddie and 10 by Jason). Similarly, extra-filmic appearances in front of cameras and the press permit a film star to continue a long-term act of impersonation made up of, at least, those aspects of their self which were evident in their earliest successful films.

Modelling film stardom Star scholarship, including deCordova’s, normally overlooks the possibility that a star’s fictionalising of their self might be over rather than covert. The private lives of stars for deCordova were all covertly fictional (i.e. deceptions); at one point, for example, he referred to “the “exposés” of the “real lives” of the stars that we see daily in magazines and on television” (PP, 1), using inverted commas to show that for him such press releases are attempts to deceive a credulous public. Elsewhere he referred to writing that reveals what she or he [i.e. the star] is “really like” behind the screen. The actor is assigned a personality, a love life, and perhaps even a political persuasion. As one moves back from the text [i.e. the film] to its ostensible source, one confronts a figure that is given a rather detailed, and typically “realistic,” human identity (PP, 21).

As mentioned in the Introduction, the scholarship on film stardom produced during the second half of the 1980s, when deCordova was writing his publications on



The Ontology of Film Stardom  357

film stars, made much of the supposedly covert fictionality of stars’ personae (see page 6). For example, in 1985 Robert Allen and Douglas Gomery wrote that “the public does not “know” a star’s off-screen personality directly, but only certain representations of that star mediated through a variety of sources”, including films’ “attendant publicity materials, gossip columns, interviews, newspapers articles” and so on (172). In 1986 Dyer wrote that “[m]uch of the construction of the star” refers the viewer to “a privileged reality […], the reality of the star’s private self” (Heavenly, 11), his vocabulary implying the deceptiveness of that image of the star’s extra-filmic self. DeCordova echoed these writers when he wrote that “[t]he star who shuns stardom is as much a type today as the blond bombshell, and one that meets with much less resistance from the public, since such a star gives the illusion of being a real individual outside of the system” (PP, 10). For this generation of scholars, stars were typical of our tendency to confuse discourses with realities; indeed stars were even more pernicious instances of our systemic self-deception, either because some could appear more genuine than their colleagues (deCordova) or because all of them could appear more genuine than their parts (Dyer).49 This common schema, still a prominent part of star studies in the 2010s,50 is summarised in Fig. 7.4. Scholarship in the Humanities at the time that Dyer and deCordova were writing these works was characterised by the popularity of Michel Foucault, whose arguments about human subjectivity arising from institutional apparatuses were echoed in deCordova’s description of how “cinema as an institution and as an enunciative form produces this position from which the star can speak and be spoken” (PP, 11).51 This basic reversal – though human subjects may seem like producers of utterances they are actually themselves metaphorical utterances produced by systems – is still a cornerstone of cultural studies, and certainly enables us to identify power structures, but deCordova applied it to the film star system as if the star system was not part of

Overt Fictions Any fiction film role

Covert Fictions A film star’s extra-filmic public self

The Genuine A film star’s private self

Fig. 7.4  A common scholarly model of film stardom.

358  The Origins of the Film Star System

a specifically fiction-producing industry. For example, at one point he remarked that “[j]ournalism provided the institutional setting for much, if not most, of the discourse on stars. The trade press, fan magazines, the popular press, and newspapers all constituted specific positions from which to speak the stars” (PP, 12). Here he took the overt mediatisation of the star system and designated it as participating in the same covert deception as the mediatisation through language in which humans participate in their everyday lives. DeCordova remarked that “the actor – like the author – cannot be viewed simply as a real individual. It is a category produced by a particular institution and given a particular function within that institution” (PP, 19). Undoubtedly. The particular institution is, however, a fiction-producing institution, meaning that the ‘realness’ of the categories that it also produces is not necessarily presented ‘straight’. This was the category error made by deCordova and his contemporaries and successors: they treated mediatised descriptions of professionals at work as if they functioned identically to those assertions that regimes of power disguise as self-evident truths. Just as “[p]eople walking in the streets at 8 a.m. are not just seen walking – they are seen going to their jobs. And the same people seen walking at 5 p.m. are seen going home” (Zajonc, ‘Cognition’, 201), so film stars are ‘people with the skills and motives to perform even extra-filmically’. Therefore, while film stars report being approached in non-work public situations by fans who expect them to be the same in these non-work situations as they are on chat shows,52 this may not reflect a misunderstanding about the authenticity of the self which each film star performs on these chat shows: instead it may reflect a perception that film stars have an unusual tendency to perform a fictional self in any public situation. The idea that film stars’ public personae are overt, if tacit, fictions was implicit in many commentaries from the 1910s. For example, as I pointed out in 2006, when Kalem first used the name of a performer in an advertisement for a film in The Pictures (in the 15 June 1912 issue), they conflated the performer with the role, advertising Missionaries in Darkest Africa with the headline “Gene Gauntier captured by African Savages”.53 Indeed, even in describing the fictional situation to which this conceit referred, they continued to conflate part with character: “[i]n the play,” the advertisement explained, “Miss Gauntier, rather than succumb to a savage chief, renders her life to her Maker.”54 Such an open conflation between performer and part was a staple of film publicity during the 1910s. A West Virginian cinemagoer wrote a poem for MPSM in January 1914: See those cowboys riding swiftlyMiss Ruth Roland, on her steed, Rides like boats on water gliding, While her pony runs full speed. Broncho Billy, always handy, With his strength and manly grace; You will say he’s a “Jim dandy”No one else could take his place. (Rachels, 106)55



The Ontology of Film Stardom  359

For this cinemagoer, the abilities of the fictional Broncho Billy and the real Ruth Roland had a similar status. A Chicago cinemagoer wrote a poem about Julia Swayne Gordon later that year: I’ve seen you oft upon the screen In roles that people criticize, But long ago I knew the truthThat all those parts were just a guise. Your greedy, scheming, vampire ways Are just a mask you’re forced to wear, But I have looked beneath – and found A hidden store of sweetness there. Your lovely eyes, your graceful ways Have won my heart, I must confess; So with this rhyme I send three cheers To you – my charming “Villainess!” (Steiner, 109)

It was clear to this cinemagoer that Gordon’s villainess persona was a career-long impersonation, “just a mask you’re forced to wear,” rather than an expression of some aspect of her genuine self. Such insights were frequent, if quiet, features of popular film culture during the 1910s. In April 1914, for example, just after MPSM became simply MPM, it included an article on Mutual’s Henry Walthall which seemed to assert that his film self was exactly the same as his most private self: in the morning, he “hastily demolishes a perfectly good egg, and, grabbing another mouthful of coffee, leaps from the house, vaults his backyard fence and streaks it for the station just in time to catch the end of the rear coach. His day’s work has begun!” (Russell Smith, 114). After costume and make-up, [d]ownstairs to the big studio he goes and slips into what appears to be a very tough crowd of young men. Actors can be very tough on five dollars a day and plenty to eat, and the way they shove Walthall around is a caution. It is the real thing, and only the soft, muffled click of the camera recalls it is but a play for millions to glimpse on the screen of a thousand theaters. […] But our hero fights back fiercely […] “Phew!” he mutters, as he sinks down on an upended beerbarrel. “’Tis hard work for a mere lad like me so early in the morning!” (114–15)

After showing at length that film performance was extremely hard work, the article concluded that Walthall nonetheless has his reward, for millions of people, young and old, know his face and love his performances, all over this broad land and Europe; so he does not labor in vain, even tho his laboring extends sixteen hours at a stretch, as it often does. The movies keep one moving, and Walthall is pretty swift on his feet – he has to be to hold down his job! But as he himself says, “It’s all in a day’s work,” and a long day’s work it is, too. (115)

At the end of the article, that is, the writer admitted that the energy shown by Walthall across the non-working and working parts of his day was a product not of any innate

360  The Origins of the Film Star System

disposition but of the requirements of the profession: “[t]he movies keep one moving”. Instead of a private self that was deemed to remain genuine while at work, this was the reverse, a professional self deemed to act extra-filmically, even over breakfast. When he asserted that “[i]n finding out about the players’ personalities, spectators supposed they were learning something about the real conditions of the film’s enunciation” (PP, 88), deCordova made one of his very few unevidenced claims. The above sources indicate that he assumed too great a degree of deceptiveness in the institution and too low a degree of understanding in the general public. The evidence presented in this chapter suggests that, in place of the scholarly model of film stardom summarised in Fig. 7.4, the model summarised in Fig. 7.5 is the more accurate. In this model, while film stars and fictional characters do not have exactly the same degree of fictionality, they are nonetheless both overt fictions. In this model, general perceptions of film stars are subject to what social psychologists call a ‘target effect’,56 a bias in interpersonal perception in which an individual or a group is regarded by others as unusually high or unusually low, relative to the average in the general population, on a given personality scale (extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, etc.). Relevant research among social psychologists, however, has not included the propensity to openly perform as one of the personality scales whose ‘native’ biases it investigates.57 In April–May 2016, therefore, I sought to test this model of film stardom by carrying out a survey designed to identify the extent to which the general public expects to find that film stars’ extra-filmic selves are overtly performed. It used a questionnaire that asked respondents to select stars of their choosing, to specify (question 2) “[w]hat means were involved in your learning about the lives of your two stars outside the things for which they are famous”, and to then imagine being presented with various situations in which they would meet their chosen stars face-to-face. The questionnaire asked respondents to imagine several

Degree of fictionalisation

Overt Fictions 100%

Minimum social level 0%

Any fiction film role A film star’s extra-filmic public self

A film star’s private self

Fig. 7.5  Diagram of the model of stardom proposed in this chapter.



The Ontology of Film Stardom  361

different types of opportunity to meet their chosen stars, ranging from those taking place in a relatively public environment, where the star might be reasonably expected to use any public persona, to those taking place in a very private environment, where the star would have no overt motive to use any public persona. Respondents were then asked “If you were to approach her/him, do you think you would find that her/his personality is significantly different from the personality you know from the various sources you ticked in answer to question 2?” This question explicitly asked respondents to state whether they expected (i.e. rather than suspected) their stars to be performing a role in their non-work public appearances. Devising this study involved trying to filter out a degree of noise. Given the propensity to suspect social contrivance discussed above (see page 351), it was not enough to look at whether respondents regard film stars’ extra-filmic public selves as implicitly performed; it was necessary to look at whether respondents had a greater implicit sense of the fictionality of the public selves of film stars than they have of the public selves of their fellow humans in general. The study therefore also asked respondents to apply this series of imaginary scenarios separately to two stars, the first a film star and the second “a star from a profession that doesn’t involve acting: for example, a sportsperson, a TV celebrity who doesn’t act such as a presenter or a talk show host, a politician, writer, internet celebrity, businessperson, public intellectual, socialite, artist, film director, member of a royal family, etc.” This lengthy specification for the second star was purposed to get the best chance of finding out about a field of stardom which was not influenced by ideas about acting. As a result my findings about perceptions of film stars were not specific to just film stars, as they could have been representative of perceptions of all stars whose job involves acting. Respondents were asked to give the names of their two stars before going on to apply each of the scenarios to them in turn, so that the scenarios impacted as little as possible on their choice of star (though respondents could go back and change their star if they wanted). Admittedly, this method also did not permit me to compare popular regard for the two different types of star in public situations with popular regard for humans in public situations generally, so any difference that I found between popular regard for film stars and popular regard for non-acting stars might be either (1) the difference between popular regard for the two different types of stars or (2) the difference between popular regard for film stars and popular regard for humans generally. I predicted that if the general population do regard the public selves of film performers as tacit fictions, then respondents would consistently be more likely to expect to find a difference between the film star’s private and public selves than they would be with their other star, and that this discrepancy would be greater the more private the situation. 145 over-18-year-olds, not sorted demographically, participated anonymously, and of these only 131 identified stars who fell within the requested categories, which meant disregarding 14 responses. In some instances respondents did not provide an answer for every star and for every scenario, so the number of respondents represented in the responses to each question varies between 130 and 131. The results of this survey are presented graphically in Fig. 7.6 and numerically in Fig. 7.7.

362  The Origins of the Film Star System

Fig. 7.6  Responses to an online survey about expectations concerning stars conducted in April–May 2016.

Fig. 7.7  Raw figures and percentages for the data presented in Fig. 7.6.

Scenario

Type of star

Can’t Can’t Yes decide No Total Yes (%) decide (%) No (%) 30

20

81

131

22.9

15.3

61.8

Non-film star

24

12

95

131

18.3

9.2

72.5

Film star

38

20

73

131

29.0

15.3

55.7

Non-film star

25

13

92

130

19.2

10.0

70.8

48

12

71

131

36.6

9.2

54.2

Non-film star

34

10

86

130

26.2

7.7

66.2

Film star

62

21

48

131

47.3

16.0

36.6

Non-film star

38

15

77

130

29.2

11.5

59.2

Eating at a Fast Food Place

Film star

63

19

48

130

48.5

14.6

36.9

Non-film star

42

14

75

131

32.1

10.7

57.3

Ocean Voyage

Film star

65

23

43

131

49.6

17.6

32.8

Non-film star

39

24

67

130

30.0

18.5

51.5

Social Event Film star

Day’s Work

In the Street Film star

Neighbours



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These results demonstrate two significant distinctions. First, as predicted, in every scenario, the number who expected that their selected film star’s real self would be substantially different from her/his public self was higher than the number who expected the same about their non-film star. Even the smallest discrepancy (in the scenario about the relatively public social event where the star is not working) was 4.6%. Second, as the imaginary scenarios became more private, while the number of respondents saying that they expected the star’s personality to differ from their public self generally grew for both categories, this increase was sharper for film stars. As Fig. 7.6 shows, while the amount of respondents replying ‘yes’ increases for both categories of star from left to right, the discrepancy in each pairing between the number who expected their film star to be different in real life and the number who expected their non-film star to be different in real life also generally increased. Reading through the six scenarios from left to right, the differences are 6 (4.6%), 13 (9.8%), 14 (10.4%), 24 (18.1%), 21 (16.4%) and 26 (19.6%). In the most private of these settings, the socially isolated ocean voyage, 65 respondents expected to find that the film star’s personality differed from their extra-filmic public self, while only 39 expected to find the same about their non-film star. Looking at just those who answered ‘yes’ or ‘no’, in every scenario, only a minority of respondents ever stated that they expected their non-film star to be different in real life from their public self, while in the three most private of the scenarios (neighbours, eating and ocean voyage), the majority of respondents stated that they expected their film star to be different in real life from their public self. While these results do not show an absolute dissimilarity between popular regard for film stars and popular regard for non-film stars, they do indicate a distinct propensity to expect film stars to overtly perform their extra-filmic public selves. Indeed, those respondents who answered that even in the more private scenarios, they did not expect their film star’s personality to differ from their public self may have been stating not that they regarded their film star as being genuine when in public but that even these more private scenarios were not sufficiently private to make the film star set that public persona aside.

Conclusion The full version of the Evening Standard & St James’s Gazette report on Moran/ Daring’s narrow brush with death when pushed off a cliff during the filming of Lieutenant Daring Avenges an Insult to the Union Jack in the winter of 1911–12 (see Chapter 6) ran like so: The popular film actor, “Lieutenant Daring,” who recently had a remarkable escape from death whilst taking part in a picture-play, informs me that he has now quite recovered from the shock of his 80ft. fall from a cliff at Brighton, and has only sustained a sprained wrist. The film, being rehearsed, showed an attack by Spanish brigands, the leader of the gang striking Lieutenant Daring, and in the struggle which followed the officer was thrown from the cliff. For this purpose a

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plank was placed just below the edge of the cliff for the Lieutenant to stand upon in order to be out of range of the camera. Whilst disappearing however, he slipped on the grass and fell 80ft. into the sea. Other actors in the company climbed down the slope, and with the assistance of the coastguards, who procured a boat, the actor was rescued. This incident forms only one of many which occur in the cinematograph business whilst in search of realism for the films.58

The same piece of publicity appeared in several other local and national newspapers.59 In the Devon & Exeter Gazette it ran as follows: The realism of the drama shown in pictures is indicated in the following facts:– While rehearsing the drama at Brighton for the pictures, Lieut. Daring (the B. and C. Company’s naval actor) fell over a cliff ninety feet high, and miraculously escaped death. In company with ten other actors and actresses, he was representing an English naval officer who was being attacked by Spanish brigands. The leader of the brigands strikes him and throws him over the cliff. For the purpose of the picture, a plank was placed just below the edge of the cliff for Lieut. Daring to stand upon in order to get beyond the scope of the camera. He slipped on the grass when disappearing, and, instead of stopping on the plank, he, to the consternation of his friends, fell below into the water. Colleagues at once went down the slope, and, with the assistance of the Coastguard, who procured a boat, the actor was rescued. […] Miss Dorothy Foster, one of the actresses, fainted. All these dangers are braved by English actors to give the public good, home-made English films.60

The name ‘Percy Moran’ is absent from every version of this story that I have seen. Instead, ‘Daring’ refers to both the fictional character and to the performer. Moreover, in both of the above versions the writers seem to prefer to use ‘Lieutenant Daring’ as the name of the performer: he is “[t]he popular film actor, “Lieutenant Daring,”” in the first and “Lieut. Daring the B. and C. Company’s naval actor” in the second. Alongside these commentators’ determination to discover the real personhood behind the filmic, they both felt an urge to discover fictionality in the extra-textual self behind the film. Star fandom can, as this chapter has shown, be regarded as the same urge. Lobby cards issued by studios to accompany films during the early 1920s demonstrate that film performers had become not just a but the primary category of production value by this point: Paramount’s lobby card for At the End of the World (1921) just showed Betty Compson’s face,61 while Universal’s lobby card for Desperate Trails (1921) just showed Harry Carey’s face.62 Indeed, the film star firmament was so extensive by the beginning of the 1920s that one of United Artists’ posters for The Mark of Zorro (1920) called Douglas Fairbanks “The Star of Stars”,63 inventing an A+ category to show just how hierarchically they deemed it appropriate to regard performers. This was a mature star system, but the evidence surveyed in this chapter indicates that these images of Compson and Carey’s faces and the name ‘Douglas Fairbanks’ denoted not real people but trans-textual personae with



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a fictional status that was nearly as overtly fictional as the identities of avowedly fictional characters. Just as Chapter 6 showed series characters ‘trespassing’ on the territory of stars, this chapter has shown stars ‘trespassing’ on the territory of series characters, to the extent that there seem to be no significant differences between the two territories.

Notes 1. Comœdia’s reports on the rich young Hungarian woman’s proposal of marriage to Max Linder in early June 1908 (see page 110n144) did not indicate either whether she knew his name or whether she asked for it (Anon., ‘Échos’, Comœdia 252 (8 June 1908), 1; Anon., ‘Échos’, Comœdia 253 (9 June 1908), 1). 2. Qtd. Dureau, ‘Amoreuse’, 3–4. Dureau reported that the translation from Finnish to French had been provided by a Danish acquaintance living in Paris, so its fidelity to the original is of course not guaranteed. Thanks to Guy Austin for help with the English translation. An English translation that does not quite match this was printed in Anon., ‘The Latest from Paris’, K&LW 6.141 (20 January 1910), 571. 3. Anon., ‘New Films and Their Makers’, K&LW 5.124 (23 September 1909), 989–97, 993. 4. Anon., ‘The Very Latest’, Bioscope 154 (23 September 1909), 29–33, 33. 5. Anon., ‘The Very Latest’, Bioscope 156 (7 October 1909), 92–7, 97. 6. Anon., ‘The Very Latest’, Bioscope 160 (4 November 1909), 37–45, 41. 7. Anon., ‘The Very Latest’, Bioscope 161 (11 November 1909), 37–45, 45. 8. Anon., ‘The Very Latest’, Bioscope 163 (25 November 1909), 41–9, 47. 9. Anon., ‘New Films and Their Makers’, K&LW 6.144 (10 February 1910), 781–93, 783. 10. Anon., ‘Latest Films’, Bioscope 176 (24 February 1910), 47–56, 47. 11. Anon., ‘Films of the Week’, Bioscope 184 (21 April 1910), 25–39, 27. 12. Anon., ‘Films of the Week’, Bioscope 188 (19 May 1910), 21–33, 21. 13. Anon., ‘New Films and Their Makers’, K&LW 7.158 (19 May 1910), 109–19, 119. 14. For yet more examples see Anon., ‘Films of the Week’, Bioscope 189 (26 May 1910), 29–41, 29, Anon., ‘Films of the Week’, Bioscope 190 (2 June 1910), 25–41, 27, and Anon., ‘New Films and Their Makers’, K&LW 7.160 (2 June 1910), 239–51, 241. 15. Anon., ‘Films of the Week’, Bioscope 191 (9 June 1910), 33–47, 37. 16. Anon., ‘Music-Halls/Cafés-Concerts/Cabarets Artistiques et Cirques’, Comœdia 1020 (16 July 1910), 3. 17. See for example Advertisement for Keystone, MPW 19.10 (7 March 1914), 1283, and Anon., ‘Mabel Normand, Key to Many Laughs in Keystone Comedies’, MPW 21.2 (11 July 1914), 239. 18. Anon., ‘Champion Charlie’, P&PG 8.76 (31 July 1915), 336. 19. Chapter 10, not listed in Fig. 7.1, was called “Carmen up to Date”, and ‘storyized’ A Burlesque on Carmen (released in the US on 18 December 1915), a parody of the Famous Players-Lasky adaptation of Carmen released in the US in late October/early November 1915, the one film which Chaplin made while at Essanay into whose title the company was, understandably, unable to get the word ‘Charlie’ for its UK release.

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20. ‘diegesis, n.’, ‘mimesis, n.’, Oxford English Dictionary. Thanks to Thanasis Vergados for help with the phonetics. 21. Kier Elam, for example, employs “Aristotle’s differentiation of representational modes, namely diegesis (narrative description) versus mimesis (direct imitation)” (100, emphasis in original). Suzanne Keen points out that “mimesis can be used to mean ‘showing’ over the diegesis of ‘telling’” (137). 22. In part because of Gérard Genette’s importing of this definition of ‘diegesis’ from film studies in his 1972 work ‘Discours du récit’, translated into English as Narrative Discourse in 1980 (in a footnote he openly admitted his debt to “the theoreticians of cinematographic narrative” for his use of the term (27n)), both the Ancient Greek meaning of ‘diegesis’ and the film-specific meaning of ‘diegesis’ are used in narratology, somewhat confusingly. See for example Abbott, 231; and Keen, 179. 23. Philip Drake observes, for example, that “[i]t is often assumed that stardom itself prevents the closing of the gap between character and performer” that is necessary to properly embody any character, meaning that the only way to use stars properly is to cast them as characters whom they already strongly resemble (85). 24. Anon., ‘Picture Personalities’, P&PG 7.38 (7 November 1914), 196. 25. Anon., ‘Motion Picture News’, The Pictures 4.94 (26 July 1913), 21. 26. Anon., ‘Picture Notes’, The Pictures 1.25 (6 April 1912), 23. 27. Anon., ‘Dare-Devil Larkin: The Hero of a Thousand Screen Hair-Breadth Escapes’, Pictures & Picturegoer 13.193 (20–27 October 1917), 437–8. For more examples see my The Cinema, 66–71. 28. Anon., ‘Answers to Inquiries’, MPSM 3.6 (July 1912), 146–60, 160. 29. Qtd. ‘Appreciation and Criticisms of Popular Plays and Players by Our Readers’, MPSM 6.12 (January 1914), 105–9, 105. 30. Anon., ‘Picture Personalities: Pithy Paragraphs About People in Pictureland’, P&PG 7.27 (22 August 1914), 15. 31. Anon., ‘New Films and Their Makers’, K&LW 7.160 (2 June 1910), 239–51, 241. 32. Anon., ‘The Very Latest’, Bioscope 151 (2 September 1909), 19–25, 19. 33. Anon., ‘Latest Films’, Bioscope 179 (17 March 1910), 47–58, 56. 34. Anon., ‘Our Screen’, The Pictures 5.108 (1 November 1913), 22. 35. Anon., ‘Picture News and Notes’, P&PG 8.61 (17 April 1915), 38. 36. Anon., ‘Miss Clara Williams’, Moving [later Motion] Picture Story Magazine 1.1 (February 1911), 13. 37. Anon., ‘Two fair stars of the Flying ‘A’’, The Pictures 4.86 (24 May 1913), 12. 38. Anon., ‘Miss Vivian Rich’, P&PG 6.22 (w/e 18 July 1914), 482. 39. Anon., ‘Brief Biographies of Popular Players’, MPM 9.1 (February 1915), 107–9, 107–8. 40. Qtd. in Anon., ‘The Technique of Film-Acting’, P&PG 8.69 (12 June 1915), 199. 41. For example, in her analysis of Nicole Kidman’s extra-filmic public persona (assembled across talk show appearances, fashion shoots, styling of her body, appearance in commercials and charity work), Pam Cook consistently regards this “performance that extends beyond acting in film” as an attempt to deceive, only apparent to audiences as fiction when cracks show or when it produces multiple discrepant Kidmans (41).



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Although Barry King describes a variety of post-c.1990 instances when stars’ personaeformation became apparent to the public, he designates these as evidence of a recent configuration of stardom brought about by many fissures in the star system, rather than as functions of the system (‘Embodying’, 46–52). Similarly, though she hints at the idea that stardom may be an open fiction when she calls it a ‘masquerade’, Sabrina Qiong Yu nonetheless sees masquerade as synonymous with “put[ting] on a deceptive appearance” – that is, with covert fiction (3). 42. A 2012 meta-analysis of 20 studies carried out between 2001 and 2011 which employed the ‘Strange Stories’ method (designed to test subjects’ ability to identify pretending, joking, lying, figures of speech and irony in others), mostly to study atypical children such as those with autism, showed that by age 12 the control groups of non-atypical subjects were near-perfect in correctly identifying these phenomena (Miller, 69–71, 80–1). 43. In 1897–8 Norman Triplett found that cyclists performed better when they were racing each other than when they were racing clocks, and that children’s performance when winding fishing line onto reels was better when they were in the presence of other children doing the same than when they were alone (507–33). 44. Since the 1960s social cognitive psychology has shown that individuals in both social species and supposedly ‘non-social’ species, even cockroaches, behave differently when they think that they are being observed from how they behave when they think that they are unobserved, the presence of real or implied audiences generally causing positive effects on well-practised tasks (social facilitation) and negative effects on unfamiliar tasks (social inhibition). See Zajonc et al, 83–92. 45. For example, in the introduction to her 2013 book on Lady Gaga, Amber Davisson quotes Dyer’s “more real than characters in stories” remark as an accurate description of the fundamental ideological function of all stars (11). 46. Qtd. in Anon., ‘The Big Five’, P&PG 15.264 (1–8 March 1919), 223. 47. On 27 June 1924, while living in Paris, Joyce wrote to a letter Harriet Shaw Weaver which included the remark that “[t]here is a group of people who observe what they call Bloom’s day – 16 June” (216). 48. At the ‘weigh-in’, both characters were played by the performers who would play them in Freddie vs Jason, Freddie Krueger by his long-term performer Robert Englund, and Jason Vorhees by Ken Kirzinger, new to the part. Thanks to Michael Appleby for bringing this event to my attention. 49. While Dyer did briefly discuss the idea of everyday life being a dramatic contrivance in Stars, he denoted this not as a possible basis for the model of film stardom but as a threat which film stardom is fashioned to contain or defeat, writing of “the anxieties surrounding the validity of […] a belief in a separate [private] identity” (Stars, 24). He also briefly discussed the idea that stars “bear many of the hallmarks of novelistic character” (109), but did not apply any of the implications of this to his general model of stardom. 50. For example, Barry King wrote in 2015 that “[t]he persona, as a durable image manifested repeatedly in the media, seems to be the property of the actor’s person outside of character; whereas it is actually an adjustment of the self to the contingencies of media exposure” (Taking Fame, 11).

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51. DeCordova also overtly cited Foucault on several occasions (PP, 18–19, 82, 140–3). 52. For example, in 2013 Ian McKellen told Maxim magazine that fans who stop him in the street ‘sometimes ask for Gandalf’s autograph or ask for me to say a line and I say, “I’m sorry, I’m not Gandalf. In fact, I’m not quite sure where he is at the moment.”’ (Qtd. Leftley, para 6). Clearly these fans do not mistake McKellen for a wizard, but merely assume that he is willing to perform for them when off-camera; McKellen’s described response, though not the requested performance, is nonetheless a performance. 53. Advertisement for Kalem, The Pictures 2.35 (15 June 1912), 23. Shail, ‘She looks’, 57 (though in this article I misquoted this advertisement as ending “African Slaves”). 54. Ibid. 55. A ‘Jim-dandy’ is an admirable and skilled person. 56. The term was coined by David A. Kenny, Interpersonal Perception 17. 57. See for example Kenny, ‘PERSON’, 265–80 and Srivastava et al, 520–34. 58. L.D., ‘Cinematography: A Weekly Review of the Latest Films’, Evening Standard & St James’s Gazette (16 March 1912), 19. 59. See for example Anon., ‘Picture Realism’, London Daily News 20,586 (2 March 1912), 5, and Anon., ‘Actor Falls off Cliff’, Alnwick Mercury 2,389 (9 March 1912), 3. 60. Anon., ‘Exeter Theatres’, Devon and Exeter Daily Gazette 20368 (Saturday 9 March 1912), 3. 61. Lobby Card Collection, HRC, At the End of the World folder. 62. Lobby Card Collection, HRC, Desperate Trails folder. 63. Photograph of the Queen Theatre, Houston, Texas Cinema Theatre Collection, Interstate Theatre Collection, Adjunct IIB, HRC, TT2-1j.



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Conclusion Recent scholarship on early cinema has stressed the prominence of contingency in historical causality. In 2009 Joe Kember showed that it was, in part, because European production companies were seeking some form of legal protection for their works and because they saw one possible source in the copyright afforded to conventional works of fiction that they shifted from factual film-making to fictional film-making in the late 1900s (205–6). In 2010 I argued that “while technologies come to attain identities as media […] through their association with existing media, they also come to attain mediativity through accident” (‘The Great’, 78). As this book was written during events marking the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War, it is perhaps unsurprising that I have sought to stress the role of accident to an even greater degree than deCordova;1 during the centenary commemorations, popular historiography questioned an earlier orthodoxy that the War was an inevitable clash of powers that was just waiting for provocation, rendering instead a picture of powers who were adept at ensuring the status quo in spite of frequently occurring casus belli being prevented, by a set of coincidences, from ensuring it again in late June and July 1914 (this account was featured, for example, in 37 Days). However, a counterfactual historian would have much work ahead of them to justify the claim that if Franz Ferdinand had survived 28 June 1914, no Europe-wide conflict would have occurred during the first quarter of the twentieth century. So with the events described in this book: had the circumstances in the industry and in the lives of the people involved varied only slightly (e.g. if Max Dearly had been less healthy during the first half of 1909 (see page 93), or if the Nick Carter films had not been financially successful for Éclair and so forestalled the industry-wide adoption of the character-based series phenomenon), the film star system would not have first emerged in Europe and North America in the closing months of 1909. But it is difficult to tell whether, had these circumstances varied slightly, the emergence of a film star system would have been any more than briefly postponed. The answer to this book’s research question may be ‘because once any medium in which the faces of participants are visible is institutionalised, it will adopt a star system concerning these participants sooner or later’. There are several reasons to think that a star system in film is highly likely, if not inevitable.2 The first concerns media maturity. The progression of brands in the first 20 years of film-making takes a clear direction on each of two levels. The first generation of brands were attached to technologies. A September 1897 article in the Amateur

Photographer, for example, listed 27 film cameras currently on sale in Europe and the US, with brand names including the motorgraph, pictorialograph, rollograph and cieroscope alongside the more familiar bioscope, vitagraph, animatograph and cinematograph.3 These brands distinguished between supplies of hardware and were highly impersonal. The second generation of brands started to emerge shortly after the first and were attached to companies, usually taking the names of their executives: R.  W. Paul, Edison, Gaumont, Hepworth, Pathé Frères. These brands also distinguished between supplies of hardware, as most of these companies produced film cameras and projectors, but they also distinguished between supplies of software, and included a small degree of personality in that they described the figureheads of business entities. If continued, both brand progressions – from hardware to software and from impersonal to slightly personal – later reach a stage where sub-categories of software are being branded according to a highly personal brand. A system of branding in which individuals’ identities are used as production values in publicity seems therefore to be at least a likely later stage in the emergence of a new cultural technology. Of course, one condition for this progression of brands to bring about a star system was that power in the industry had to become centralised with production companies. A small variation in the feasibility of mass production or mass transportation of films, preventing film production companies from reaching internationally or even nationally with their products, would have prevented this. Ideas about what happens when technologies achieve the status of a medium have recently been shaped by André Gaudreault and Philippe Marion’s ‘double birth’ model.4 For them, the first birth of any medium occurs when its technological basis is first, and often haphazardly, constituted, usually out of bits of existing technologies. While such a new technology might “introduce a truly new representational paradigm” (‘The cinema’, 13), it is usually initially employed without regard to its distinctive properties, put to work as a labour-saving technology by existing media institutions, thus constituting only a crypto-medium (‘The cinema’, 15). In the case of cinema, despite the ‘attraction’ of the new apparatus, despite its status as a technological novelty, the medium […] was used as a new way of continuing to do what had ‘always’ been done, to perpetuate stage shows and itinerant entertainments, or as a new way of presenting already well-established entertainment ‘genres’: magic and fairy shows, farce, plays, and other kinds of public performances. (‘The cinema’, 13–14)



In this crypto-medium phase, “[t]he need to render this technology autonomous, to take advantage of its possible media specificity, is not yet felt, or not yet felt to be relevant” (‘The Neo-Institutionalisation’, 93). Serving a lengthy apprenticeship, the new technology might “facilitate access to these [existing] genres by improving their performance and by affording them wider dissemination” (‘The cinema’, 16), but this only elevates it to the level of proto-medium. For Gaudreault, in the cryptomedium phase and the proto-medium phase projected moving photographs were not cinema: “in the case of kine-attractography, which dominated the world

Conclusion  371

of animated pictures until about 1908-10, we have not yet entered the history of cinema” (Film and Attraction, 4). In this model, the new technology is only constituted as a medium when it becomes institutionalised, which involves establishing practices that are unique to it, working to manifest the technology’s distinctive properties in output, establishing distinctive forms of labour, regulating and regularising a labour environment and generating some recognition of the medium’s identity in popular consciousness (Gaudreault, Film and Attraction, 83). The second birth of any medium, for Gaudreault and Marion, occurs when the technology completes a shift from subordination to insubordination, from practices that treat it as continuous with other cultural forms to practices that see it as sharply distinguished from them, and from financial dependence on older industries to its own self-sufficient industry.5 The institutionalisation of a new medium, then, seems likely to lead the general public, including the industry and the audience, to introduce into their media behaviour an awareness of the distinct professions involved in the various arms of the industry. As Gaudreault and Marion point out, the second birth shifted attention away from inventors and company managers as the relevant personnel of the industry. A star system can therefore be regarded as a sign of the maturity of a medium; it is what emerges in the gap produced when a medium is sufficiently separated from its subject matter. As I wrote in 2012, “while known celebrities appeared in films in the United Kingdom even before the turn of the century, film’s own celebrity was, from one point of view, a symptom of the industry’s capacity to generate celebrities purely out of its own products” (‘The Invention’, 461–2). However, it is notable that in Gaudreault and Marion’s model, while the second birth of cinema in c.19106 shifted popular attention away from inventors and company managers, it shifted attention not towards performers but towards directors (Gaudreault & Marion, ‘The Cinema’, 15–16). A system of stardom based on directors (badged initially as ‘producers’) was indeed initiated on both sides of the Atlantic in c.1912, with D. W. Griffith first discussed in The Pictures in August 19127 and first profiled as a creative figure in The Pictures in June 1913.8 MPM called Griffith “that poetic dean of the director’s profession” in its May 1914 issue (La Roche, 87), and P&PG devoted an October 1915 front cover to an image of Griffith, who they called “[t]he world’s greatest motion picture producer” for his work on The Birth of a Nation, echoing a convention used in its accounts of performers by adding that his yearly salary was US$20,000,9 equivalent (as an income) to about US$2,160,000 in 2017 (Williamson, ‘Seven’). In addition, several recent works have suggested modifications to the ‘second birth’ model. Denis Condon, for example, argues that “[i]f the birth metaphor must be used, the second birth of cinema should be considered in the plural – like the multiple first births in France, the United States, Germany and Britain: the second births really constituted a baby boom” (127). Though the evidence presented in Chapters 5 and 6 might dispute Condon’s ‘baby boom’ metaphor by showing that a single international phenomenon – the character-based series – can be regarded as causing the star system to emerge, I have also provided evidence that a baby boom might be an apt

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metaphor nonetheless: the emergence of film stardom constituted one of multiple successive births that together constituted the second birth of cinema. Others included the move to fixed-site film-only exhibition discussed on page 59, and the development of narrative editing structures across European and North American cinema in the period 1908–13.10 Given these other constituent births, the second birth baby boom did not need a system of performer stardom, or any system of stardom, to come about. The second concerns prestige. Recent scholarship also argues that during the late 1900s and 1910s the film industry saw a widespread class-based refashioning, remastering, reframing and repurposing of cinema into new, bourgeoisie-friendly, conditions for production and viewing (see e.g. Gunning, ‘Weaving’, 339). This is certainly a feasible master narrative for the appearance of film’s star system (see my ‘A distinct advance in society’, 225n5). As soon as enough elements of the film industry sought to shift cinema into bourgeois markets, and so into the register of the bourgeoisie, the dominance of bourgeois cultural categories would have led to attempts to duplicate existing models of prestige, and as a primary bourgeois category is a form of privacy that the bourgeoisie deem to be politically neutral (see Habermas, 55), the prospect of refashioning cinema as an experience of learning about the lives of performers – a form of profession widely deemed to be apolitical – would have been attractive as a way of increasing cinema’s appeal to bourgeois customers. In early 1914 the film star J. Warren Kerrigan wrote that those who predicted during the preceding 18 years that film would turn out to be a passing craze had a point: “the wiseacres predicted that the mere curiosity of seeing moving-pictures on the screen would soon pall. Truly, if the manufacturers had not awakened and substituted actors for figures, the novelty would have died” (150). Among production companies, the urge, identified by Kember, “to retain aspects of communication, performance, and personality that would be both affectively engaging and comfortably familiar for […] audiences” (8) can be seen as a major force in the turn to financially exploiting the ‘personalities’ of their employees. Even if Kerrigan was wrong, the mere existence of the perception that he echoed – that experiences are more attractive to consumers when they offer aspects of personhood – makes it likely that employers in any new cultural industry will eventually try to operate a version of a star system if they deem it feasible. One contemporary expression of this perception can be observed in the Evening Times in October 1910, in which a columnist remarked that “John Bunny, the fat comedian of Vitagraph Co[mpany], is the delight of picture theatre audiences”.11 A star system, by implying intimacy with enduring private subjects, promised to cultivate a bourgeois model of patronage. Both of these general trends – the drift towards personhood in a mature medium and the influence of bourgeois categories – indicate that significant value tends to be attached to personhood by those working in cultural industries. In addition, of all current categories of industry – mining, energy, manufacturing, retail, travel, tourism, etc. – cultural industries in particular tend towards finer and finer means of product differentiation: while a food manufacturer, for example, can feasibly issue a

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product cast from one mould indefinitely, the products of any cultural industry must be constantly updated, meaning that they are naturally prompted towards issuing products that by their very nature cannot be the same as any other products. This means in turn, at least in a context where every person is deemed to be unique, that a cultural industry is systemically pushed towards adopting as its core product the act of obtaining insight into the personhood of ostensibly unique people. However, as Chapter 6 demonstrated, the conditions described above do not necessarily lead cultural industries to market a form of personhood with any realworld existence. A star system is just one of multiple systems of personhood that can be operated to differentiate an industry’s products. The European and North American film industries have consistently used series characters as an alternative form of product-differentiating personhood during the last century. A letter sent to The Pictures in late 1911 was answered thus: “Not the same person. “Foolshead” acts with the Itala Co; “Calino” with the Gaumont Co; and “Tontollini” [sic] with the Cines Co.”12 Here a journalist used the names of the characters as anonyms for the performers, and did so even though the name of at least one of these people had already been used in publicity directed at the general public (see page 285). In addition, it was also not inevitable that any live form of stardom that did emerge would take the shape that it did. As Chapter 7 showed, film stardom assumed openly fictional settings that distinguish it from other forms of celebrity, and as Fig. 8.1 indicates, in the version of film stardom that did emerge there was no appreciable difference between the identities of ‘real’ people working under nonself-evident pseudonyms (Linder and Deed), the identities constituted by self-evident pseudonyms such as Prince and Mistinguett (Mistinguett was the stage pseudonym of Jeanne Bourgeois),13 and the identity of the fictional series character Nick Winter. Two of the reasons why film stardom assumed openly fictional settings (characterbased franchising and late capitalism, the first and third, respectively, of the reasons discussed in Chapter 7) were themselves contingent circumstances. One dominant strand of scholarship on the earliest years of cinema during the past thirty years has sought to demonstrate that many of the uses to which the new technology was put were later abandoned as cinema became a full institution.14 It may seem that in providing an alternative permutation of the star system, the series character constituted another of these abandoned paths. However, this pathway is, as I have shown, still frequently trodden, constituting not an abandoned direction but both a parallel to the younger pathway that is the star system based on ‘real’ people and a model for that more recent pathway. In both using series characters and in their particular use of stars, the film industries of Europe and North America are still participating in a method of film production and film marketing that predates the period in which the names of performers are routinely used in publicity. After more than three decades during which early film scholarship, deCordova’s work included, has stressed the distinctiveness of film’s ‘kine-attractography’ period from the films and practices of its later institutionalised form, a handful of recent works have begun to outline aspects of the later institution cinema that

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Conclusion  375

Fig. 8.1  Les célébrités du cinéma. FJS-P, AFF-P-1876.

were already manifest in some of the films and practices of the pre-second birth earliest period. Kember introduced Marketing Modernity (2009) with the remark that much work has “emphasised the differences to be found between the majority of mainstream film texts either side of (approximately) 1908, but has paid less attention to similarities between the institutional and social practices of the industry across the same period” (2), before going on to explore these continuities extensively. Vanessa Toulmin showed in 2006 that the genre of docudrama originated in the ‘kine-attractography’ period (38–45).15 Kember points out that such continuities were likely: the continuities which can be traced from nineteenth-century entertainment industries through early cinema and into later cinema have […] been underestimated, sometimes leaving us in the counterintuitive position of claiming for such sophisticated and highly financed modern institutions that their interests were best served by a sudden transformation of existing – profitable and easily regulated – practices (2).

Film’s star system emerged in a situation where multiple means of product differentiation already served film production companies and hiring companies well, and so it is unsurprising that film stars found themselves being advertised as a repurposed version of one of these existing forms of product differentiation – the series character. On a larger scale, the character-based series film emerged in a situation where several older cultural industries had been profitably using forms of trans-textual personhood to sell periodicals, books and tickets and to engage audiences for decades (see Chapter 5). This is not to claim that cinema did not undergo either a second birth or a second baby boom; rather, the evidence collected in this book shows that the second birth was not a reboot, a new ‘year one’. In the film industry, which, this book has amply demonstrated, was international from its earliest moments, the second birth was a process by which a few options from a much larger menu of options already in use became norms. As Chapter 7 demonstrated, these surviving norms are not quite as familiar as we film historians are inclined to conclude.

Notes 1. Beyond a tipping point, deCordova’s case implies, nothing could restrain the appearance of film-intrinsic celebrities. 2. I inclined towards claims of inevitability when I remarked in 2012 that “[t]he context for the emergence of a system of intra-filmic celebrity based on filmed bodies is best expounded by a survey of the reasons for its non-appearance during the first fourteen years of the cinematograph’s presence in the United Kingdom” (‘The Invention’, 462). 3. Anon., ‘The Cinematograph’, Amateur Photographer 26.677 (24 September 1897), 262–8. That the contributor called 16 of the 27 technologies simply ‘cinematographs’ indicates that the name chosen by the Lumière brothers in 1895 for their device had,

376  The Origins of the Film Star System

partly by virtue of first successfully combining a film camera with projection, become the generic name for the technology. 4. Recent echoes of this model in my work include my The Cinema, 18–33 and my May 2013 special issue of Early Popular Visual Culture on ‘Cinema’s Second Birth’ (volume 11.2). 5. With any medium, they write, “[i]ts second birth, or constitution, will appear when its quest for identity and autonomy coincides with institutional recognition and a decisive improvement in the economic resources devoted to its production” (‘The Cinema’, 16). Discussing cinema in particular, they repeatedly use the phrasing ‘an institutional legitimacy that acknowledges specificity’: in 2002 they wrote that “[t]he second birth is when it sets out on a path that enables the resources it has developed to acquire an institutional legitimacy that acknowledges their specificity” (‘The Cinema’, 14); in 2005 they wrote that the new technology “was then born a second time when it set out on a path that enabled the resources it had developed to acquire an institutional legitimacy that acknowledged their specificity” (‘A Medium’, 4); also in 2005 they wrote that “[t]he second birth is when it sets out on a path that enables the resources it has developed to acquire an institutional legitimacy that acknowledges their specificity” (‘The NeoInstitutionalisation’, 92, emphasis in original). 6. Gaudreault typically gives “the years surrounding 1910” (Film and Attraction, xi) as the rough date range for cinema’s second birth. 7. Anon., ‘Motion Picture News’, The Pictures 2.43 (10 August 1912), 31. 8. Anon., ‘Motion Picture News’, The Pictures 4.88 (14 June 1913), 24. 9. P&PG 9.85 (2 October 1915), front cover. 10. The US developments are explored at length in Keil, Early American, 85–124. For a discussion of the specific route that these developments took in the output of a single company, see Salt, ‘Vitagraph’ 55–72. 11. Anon., ‘The Motion-Picture and Photo-Play’, Evening Times (9 October 1911), 3. 12. Anon., ‘Answers to Correspondents’, The Pictures 1.7 (2 December 1911), 22. 13. Bourgeois had been working in music hall in France since 1885. As J. Dudley Andrew shows, she “was the mainstay of the Folies-Bergère during its heyday […]. From 1910 to 1940 she was unquestionably France’s dominant performing artist” (18). She performed for several films for Pathé during 1910–13. 14. Gunning, for example, argues that “excavating the first years of cinema history uncovers not only a neglected past, but a forgotten future” of paths untaken (‘Animated pictures’, 317). 15. Christie argued something similar in 2006 when he remarked that R. W. Paul’s film The Launch of H.M.S. Albion (made 21 June 1898), which shows elements of the aftermath of a jetty collapse caused by the battleship’s launch, “amounts to Britain’s first disaster film” (Commentary to The Launch of H.M.S. Albion); that is, Christie deemed it appropriate to apply a genre designation to a film made in a period conventionally deemed to



employ a quite alien set of genres.

Conclusion  377

378

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392  Works Cited

Index acting. See performance Algy (Savoia series character)  203 Alkali Ike (Essanay series character)  202 Ambrosio company  66. See also Friscot; Robinet; Tiny Tom American Film Manufacturing Company  313 American Mutoscope and Biograph Company. See Biograph Anderson, Gilbert M.  164, 263, 271, 336 anonymity in publicity  129 in publishing  289–93 systemic in the film industry  25–7, 90, 108 n.125 anonyms (alternatives to pseudonyms)  284–93 Appleton, Victor  228 Aquila  66. See also Longlegs; Pik Nik Aquilanti, Pacifico  270 Arabella (Lux series character)  202 Arbuckle, Roscoe  4 accused of sexual violence  4 plays ‘Fatty’ character  340 Aristotle  340 Armat company  115 ‘art’ filmmaking  22–3, 56–7, 63–4, 98, 229 Arvidson, Linda  122 Association of Edison Licensees/Film Service Association (AEL/FSA)  115, 124, 148. See also Motion Picture Patents Company (MPPC) used to limit Pathé Frères’s market share  168 attribution. See anonyms; pseudonyms; series characters Austen, Henry  284 Austen, Jane attribution of novels of  284–5

Babylas (Le Film des Auteurs/Pathé Frères series character)  200 Baggot, King called a star  43 n.11 personal appearances in St Louis, Missouri (see Lawrence, Florence) Bainbridge, Rolinda  146–7 Bale, Christian  354 Bana, Eric (Eric Banadinović)  333, 354 Barnacle, Captain (Vitagraph series character)  201, 251 Barnes, Justus  120 Barnett, John  228 Barrymore, John  351 Batman  357 Bax, Hannibal. See Barnett, John Bébé/Bobby (Gaumont series character)  201, 207, 211, 245, 265, 272, 287, 307. See also Dary, René Belasco, David  178 Berlin Commission  59 Berne Convention  59 Bernhardt, Sarah  229 Bertho, Paul  271 Bertie (Lux series character)  202 Betty (Vitagraph series character)  213, 294 Bidoni (Cines series character)  203 Biel, Jessica  354 Bill Cody’s Wild West Show  12, 18 Biograph company (previously American Mutoscope and Biograph company)  35, 67, 115, 117, 129, 223, 274, 342. See also Joneses, The; Lawrence, Florence; Pickford, Mary; Wrights, The employment practices of  121, 122, 123, 176 produces character-based series films  182–4, 213, 287

Bison. See New York Motion Picture Company Blackton, J. Stuart  164. See also Vitagraph company Blake, Sexton (in prose fiction)  228 Blake, Sexton (UK Gaumont series character)  199 Bloomsday  355 Boireau/Jim (Pathé Frères series character)  192, 203, 227, 297, 317. See also Deed, André Bond, James  310 Boniface (Milano series character)  203, 289, 317 Bostwick, Herbert  28 Bosworth, Hobart  348 bourgeoisie cinema’s aspiration to status of  373 Bourne, Jason, series  189 Boy Detective, The (Monofilm series character)  202 branding  35–41, 59, 103, 221, 222–3, 293 progression between different classifications of  370–1 brand loyalty  40 Bressol, Pierre  103, 260, 313, 331–2, 333 Briscoe, Lottie  164 referred to as ‘The Lubin Girl’  291 British & Colonial Kinematograph company (B&C)  8. See also Daring, Lieutenant; Drowsy Dick; ThreeFingered Kate; Turpin, Dick; Weary Willie & Tired Tim produces character-based series films  227 publicises Lieutenant Daring character  296, 300–6 British Mutoscope and Biograph company  23 Brody, Adrien  354 Bromhead, Alfred  22 Broncho Billy (Essanay series character)  200, 263, 271, 312, 336, 359–60. See also Anderson, Gilbert M. Brophy, Jed  343 Browning, Ethel  146–7 Bumptious, Mr (Edison series character)  200, 213, 251, 287. See also Cumpson, John Bunny, John  336, 373 Burns, Robert

394 Index

‘To a Louse’  352–3 Bush, Pauline  347 Buss, Harry  270 Caines, Eleanor  146–7 Calino (Gaumont series character)  199, 207, 211, 213, 236, 242, 250, 260–1, 262, 263, 270, 273, 278, 279, 295, 307, 311, 314, 374. See also Mégé, Clément camera distance. See size of human body in the frame Campbell, Herbert  236 Candy, John  345 Carey, Harry  365 Carter, Nick (Éclair series character)  192–5, 196, 198, 217, 223, 225, 226, 227, 237, 238, 247, 248, 260, 267, 313, 331–2, 333, 370. See also Bressol, Pierre Carter, Nick (in prose fiction)  194–5, 227, 228, 229. See also Coryell, John; Dey, Frederick van Rensselaer; Eichler, Alwin; Street & Smith causality  1–2, 5, 23–4, 41–2, 60–1, 93, 113, 139–41, 142, 147, 165, 167, 170–1, 176–9, 184, 293, 370–6 celebrity, definition of  7 Centaur company  117, 119 Champion, Harry  234 Champion company  313 Chaney, Lon  350 Chaplin, Charles  20, 350, 352 tramp character referred to as ‘Charlie’  336–40 Chaplin, Sydney  352 Charles Urban Trading Company  9, 303. See also Puddenhead, Professor Checco/Mr Stout (Cines series character)  203 Chirgwin, G.H.  233–4 Chronophone  47 n.53 cinemas changes of programmes in  59–60 emergence of  59–60, 217–18, 225–6 Cines  56, 66, 67, 115. See also Bidoni; Checco; Coco; Jenkins; Kri Kri; Lea; Tontolini

produces character-based series films  197, 211, 213 Cisco Kid, The. See Henry, O. Clarendon company  303. See also Daddy’s Little Did’ums; Frightened Freddy; Pellie, Dr Brian; Rose, Lieutenant Cleese, John  355 Clooney, George  346, 349–50, 354 Coborn, Charles  236 Cocciutelli (Milano series character)  222 Cochrane, Robert  125–6, 139, 143, 147 Coco (Cines series character)  197, 199, 270. See also Aquilanti, Pacifico comedy  197, 207, 230, 267, 276–80 Comerio  66 comics  229. See also Mutt & Jeff; Weary Willie & Tired Tim Compson, Betty  365 copyright  59, 310, 370 Coryell, John  194 Costello, Maurice  33 publicity for  158–9, 164 crediting distinguished from publicity  27–34 (see also publicity) on-screen  22–3, 33, 79, 90 Cretinetti/Foolshead (Itala series character)  195, 198, 207, 211, 213, 222, 223, 226, 229, 236, 238, 246, 248, 250, 251–2, 261, 262, 266–7, 268–9, 270, 274–6, 277, 278, 279, 280, 281, 285, 287, 288, 295, 297, 299, 312, 317, 374. See also Deed, André Cricks & Martin  115, 303. See also Muggins; Scroggins; Sharp, P.C.; Smiler, Charley; Smith, Constable produces character-based series films  262 Cri-Cri (Urban-Éclipse series character)  201 Cumpson, John  182, 287 Cutcliffe Hyne, C.J.  228 Daddy’s Little Did’ums (Clarendon series character)  197, 201, 223, 244, 271



Dalton, Dorothy  352 Damon, Matt  354 Daring, Lieutenant (British & Colonial series character)  202, 223, 227, 261, 262–3, 264, 269. See also Moran, Percy publicised as if a real person  296, 300–6, 310, 356, 364–5 Dark Universe megafranchise  189 Darnley, Herbert  22 Dary, René  265, 272, 287 DC Extended Universe megafranchise  189 Dearly, Max  93–4, 179, 370 deCordova, Richard account of emergence of star system in North America  1, 2–5, 10, 96, 130, 141, 332, 345, 370 criticism of the ‘standard account’  113–14, 277 Deed, André (Henri André Augustin Chapais)  68, 288, 317, 374, 375. See also Boireau; Cretinetti moves from Pathé Frères to Itala  102, 280 named in publicity by Itala  285, 286 plays Boireau series character  192, 276, 280, 317, 320 plays Cretinetti series character  261–2, 270, 277, 280, 281, 285 recognition by audiences  266–7, 274–6 returns from Itala to Pathé Frères  288, 317, 322 Delvair, Jeanne  282 DeMille, William C. The Warrens of Virginia  178 De Niro, Robert  354 detective fiction  195, 229 Deutsche Vitascope company. See Lupin, Arsene Dey, Frederick Rensselaer  194 diegesis  341 directors  372 discourse on film  3–5 distinguished from economic forces  2 ‘mistaken for reality’ scenario in  10–15, 18 ‘profilmic becoming real’ scenario in  342–4 Disney. See Walt Disney Company

Index 395

display boards  32–3 Doctor Who  357 ‘double birth’ model  371–3 proposed modifications to  374–5 Doyle, Arthur Conan  194, 227, 228. See also Holmes, Sherlock drama  197, 207 Drowsy Dick (British & Colonial series character)  197, 199, 227 Duhamel, Sarah  317, 322 Dupin, Arthene (Urban-Éclipse series character)  201, 207, 250 Dureau, Georges  60 Eastman Kodak  115 Ecko company. See Pimple Éclair  56, 67, 103, 313. See also Carter, Nick; Gavroche; Gontran; Huguenots, The; Little Willie; Meskal le contrebandier; Morgan the Pirate; Rifle Bill; Tommy; ‘Vautour’ de la Siria, le; Zigomar founded  66 produces character-based series films  192–7, 226–7, 293, 370 Edison, Thomas  9, 23, 115, 147, 346. See also Association of Edison Licensees; Motion Picture Patents Company Edison Film Manufacturing Company  27, 28, 33, 67, 113, 115, 145–7, 158, 168, 291, 313. See also Bumptious, Mr; Pilar Morin; Townsend, Edward; Wells, Carolyn brand  371 crediting performers  29–32 employment practices of  119, 120 produces character-based series films  213 produces What Happened to Mary serial  214 stock company of  28, 121 Eichler, Alwin (publisher)  194–5, 196 Ellis, Maisie  22 emblematic shots  262–7 Eon Productions  310 Essanay company  20, 27, 29, 33, 67, 115, 158, 313, 337, 347. See also Alkali Ike; Broncho Billy; Mulcahy employment practices of  121

396 Index

produces character-based series films  213 Europe film industry in  55–61 Pathé Frères’s dominance of film industry in  64–6 European Convention of Kinematograph Film Makers and Publishers  57 Evans, Fred  272 Fairbanks, Douglas  352, 365 Famous Players company  344 Farrar, Geraldine  20 Farrell, Colin  354 Farrell, O’Neill  303 Fassbender, Michael  354 Fawn, James  236 Feige, Kevin  189 fiction implied extra-textual existence of characters in  340–1 turn from non-fiction to  217–18 as type of non-literal statement  351 film actor. See performers, film film exhibition live performance at (see under performance, live) static (see cinemas) travelling  217–18 film industry competition in  55, 66–7, 226 expansion of product range in  59–60 hiring  38–41, 58, 218–21 horizontal diversification in  58 immune to a star system  25–7, 35–8, 94, 124, 281 industrial authorship  35–8, 281, 310 open market  38–41, 218–21 ‘filmland’  344 film magazines, circulation of  27–8 popular  41 film performance. See performance, film films. See also film industry fiction  1, 17 indexical properties of  340–4 pricing  56–8, 158 selling rather than hiring  55, 218 shelf life of  59–60 temporal properties of  340–2

film stars. See stars, film First World War  352, 370 Fitzgerald, Percy  230–6 Fitzhamon, Lewin  236 Fitznoodle (Hepworth series character)  201, 223 Foolshead. See Cretinetti Foster, Dorothy  301, 336 Foucault, Michel  358 franchising  215–21 Frightened Freddy (Clarendon series character)  197, 200, 223 Friscot (Ambrosio series character)  200 Frohman, Charles  178 Frohman, Daniel  344 Fuller, Mary  214, 344 referred to as ‘The Edison Girl’  291 Fundamental Attribution Error  352 Garbo, Greta  349 Gasnier, Louis  68 Gaudreault, André. See ‘double birth’ model Gaumont (French company)  66, 67, 117, 226, 307, 371. See also Bébé; Calino; Main de fer; Onésime; Zigoto produces character-based series films  213, 287 Gaumont (UK company)  17, 47 n.53, 117. See also Blake, Sexton ‘art’ films of  22–3, 56–7 produces character-based series films  192 Gauntier, Gene (Genevieve Liggett)  37–8, 343, 359 Kalem’s publicity campaign for  158, 170, 294 referred to as ‘The Kalem Girl’  290 stage career of  178 work for Kalem  119–20, 122, 177, 214 Gavroche/Funnicuss (Éclair series character)  203, 223, 313 genre  215–16, 221, 253 Gerard, Etienne. See Doyle, Arthur Conan Gilbert, Fred  230 Girl Detective, The (Yankee series character)  213 Gish, Lillian  122 Gontran (Éclair series character)  201, 207, 223, 236



Goodrich, Edna  349 Gordon, Julia Swayne  360 Graphic company  115 Green, Tom  47 n.53 Griffith, David Wark  119, 122, 123, 213, 352, 372 Guillaume, Ferdinando  269, 270, 287, 289 Gyllenhaal, Jake  354 Haggar, William makes ‘Weary Willie’ films  190–1 Hanks, Tom  353, 354 Hardy, Tom  354 Harry Potter Wizarding World  189, 355, 356, 357 Hart, William S.  352 Hastings, Carey L.  342 Hawkeye, P.C. (Hepworth series character)  197, 201 Hemsworth, Chris  354 Hendrie, Anita  122 Henry, O. (William Porter)  228 Hepworth, Cecil  15, 25–6, 236, 289 Hepworth Manufacturing Company  16–17, 23, 34–5, 115, 303, 371. See also Fitznoodle; Hawkeye, P.C.; Mugwump; Poorluck; Rover; Tilly ‘the Tomboy’ and Sally produces character-based series  191, 223, 236, 282–4 produces non-fiction series  217 hiring. See film industry Hocking, Silas  305 Hoffman, Philip Seymour  354 Holmes, Sherlock (in prose fiction)  194, 227, 228, 299, 356, 357. See also Doyle, Arthur Conan Holmes, Sherlock (Nordisk series character)  195, 198, 227, 251, 264, 266, 285. See also Larsen, Viggo Hornung, E.W.  228 Huguenots, The (Éclair series characters)  198 Humphreys, William  110 n.146 Iliad, The  228 Implicit Personality Theory  351–2 implied author  225

Index 397

Ince, Ralph  344 Independent Film Protective Association (later Independent Film Renter’s Protective Association)  116–17 Independent Motion Pictures (IMP) American subjects in films of  169 attitude towards generating stars  159, 313 as brand name  222 challenges facing  125–6 establishment of  118 exceptional circumstances of  176 Hiawatha  125–6, 164, 169 publicity campaign for Florence Lawrence (see Lawrence, Florence) ‘Independents’ in the time of the MPPC  113–14, 117–18. See also Motion Picture Patents Company (MPPC) attitude towards generating stars  27, 158–9 common ground with the MPPC  169 emergence  116–17 organisations formed by  116–18 output of  118, 124 willingness to take risks  126 intermedial alliances  227–9 intermedial influences  230–6 International Projecting and Producing Company (IPPC)  117 Itala  56, 66, 223, 276, 313, 317. See also Cretinetti; Toto produces character–based series films  195–6, 211, 213, 222 Jean (Vitagraph series character)  201 Jenkins (Cines series character)  203 Jewett, Ethel  146 John Bull company. See Peggy Johnson, Arthur  22 Joly, Henri  66 Joneses, The (Biograph series characters)  198, 207, 213, 216, 221, 223, 287, 295. See also Cumpson, John; Lawrence, Florence Joyce, Alice  164 referred to as ‘The Kalem Girl’  291 Joyce, James  355 Jurassic Park franchise  218

398 Index

Kalem company  20, 27, 28, 32, 67, 115, 313, 348, 359. See also Gauntier, Gene; Joyce, Alice employment practices of  120–1, 122 ‘Girl Spy’ series  213, 214, 294 Katzenjammer Kids, The (Selig series characters)  203 Kellerman, Annette  19 Kelly (Milano series character)  201, 207, 247 Kendall, Ezra  128 Kent, Charles  164 Kerin, Norah  22 Kerrigan, J. Warren  373 Essanay’s publicity for  158 Kettle, Captain. See Cutcliffe Hyne, C.J. Keystone company  337 produces ‘Fatty’ series  340 produces ‘Mabel’ series  336 Kidman, Nicole  367 n.41 Kinetoscope  43 n.12 Kirkby, Ollie  343 Kleine, George  115, 117 Kleine Optical Company  115 Kri Kri (Cines series character)  203, 274–5, 297 Krueger, Freddie (Nightmare on Elm Street franchise)  294, 357 Kung Fu Panda series  189 Kunis, Mila  354 labour noise in film production  38–9, 97 Laemmle, Carl  114, 125–7. See also Cochrane, Robert; Independent Motion Pictures; ‘Independents’ in the time of the MPPC; Lawrence, Florence; Ranous, William motives for producing star publicity  139, 177, 179 travels to Europe  126–8, 139 Laemmle Film Service (LFS)  116, 125–6 Lang, Matheson  22 Langtry, Lillie  20 Larkin, George  343 Larsen, Viggo  264, 266, 285 Lasky Feature Play Company  20 Lauder, Harry  47 n.53, 234 Lawrence, Florence (Florence Bridgwood/ Solter) The Broken Oath  129, 132, 136 called a ‘star’  9, 43 n.11

circumstances of leaving Biograph company  114, 127, 142, 213 considered by IMP to be a production value  140 Coquette’s Suitors  129, 130, 133 crosses industry divide  142 A Doctor’s Perfidy  130 employed by IMP  128 The Forest Ranger’s Daughter  141 Her Own Way  141 IMP’s publicity campaign for in North America  61, 113, 125–39, 143–47, 159, 171, 176, 251, 259, 276, 293 in the UK  164 joins Biograph company  121 Lest We Forget  128, 129, 136, 141 Love’s Stratagem  128, 140, 141, 164, 182 The Miser’s Daughter  130 Mother Love  129, 131 Never Again  134 personal appearance in St Louis, Missouri, with King Baggot  129–30, 138, 143–4 (see also Stars, film, personal appearances of) physical appearance of  177 playing the character of Mrs (Emma) Jones  182–3, 280, 310 (see also Joneses, The) public regard for  311 referred to as ‘The Biograph Girl’  139–40, 181–2, 289, 290 stage career of  178 story about mistaken obituaries concerning  144–5, 285 trade press mentions of  128–30 work for the Biograph company  122–3, 176, 182 Lea (Cines series character)  200, 207, 250, 274–5 Leblanc, Maurice  228 Leist, Bernadine  146–7 Le Lion  66 Leno, Dan  47 n.53, 231 Leonard, Marion  122 Léontine/Betty (Pathé Frères series character)  199, 207, 213, 227, 262, 271, 274, 287 treated as real person  306–9



Lepanto, Victoria  141 Leto, Jared  354 Leybourne, George (Champagne Charlie)  233 life-modelling  19 Lindbergh, Charles  347 Linder, Max (Gabriel-Maximilien Leuvielle) Aimé par sa bonne  94–6, 102, 159, 160, 180 Amour et fromage  77, 92, 163 Amoureux de la femme à barbe  95, 160, 181 À qui mon cœur?  71, 73, 161, 334 Avant et ... après  73, 79, 82, 97, 159, 161 and comedy  277, 278, 287 considered by Pathé Frères to be a production value  95–6, 103, 167, 171, 297, 375 Consultation improvise  94 En bombe  73, 98, 161, 170 fencing skills of  98 first works for Pathé Frères  93 international stardom of  68–9 Jeune fille romanesque  75, 87, 162, 167, 334 Je voudrais un enfant  75, 88–9, 162 Kyrelor, bandit par amour  77, 92, 163 La barbe de Théodore  95, 160, 181 La timidité guérie par le serum  74, 84, 90, 161 La vengeance du bottier  71, 74, 79, 81, 97, 98, 103, 161, 167, 278 Le duel de Monsieur Myope  78, 163 Le pacte  75, 162, 334, 345 Le petit jeune home  69–72, 79, 95–6, 97, 159, 160, 164, 170, 181, 312, 346 Le revolver arrange tout  78, 93, 163, 346 Les débuts d’un patineur  95, 180 Le serment d’un Prince  76, 162, 346 Les exploits du jeune Tartarin  74, 83, 161, 334 Les surprises de l’amour  72, 160, 170 Le voleur mondain  73, 98, 161, 166, 170 L’ingénieux attentat  77, 90, 91, 163, 167 Mauvaise vue  76, 162

Index 399

Max fait du ski  78, 163, 166, 179, 180, 335–6, 345 Max Linder contre Nick Winter  311 ‘Max’ persona/character  179–80, 207, 280, 310, 322, 333–6, 345 Pathé Frères’s casual openness about  111 n.151 Pathé Frères’s publicity campaign for, in Europe  61, 67–103, 127, 171, 176, 293, 333 escalation of  71 motives behind  93–7, 259, 322 probable influence on Carl Laemmle  139, 147 Pathé Frères’s publicity campaign for, in North America  140, 159, 166–7, 170–1 Petite rosse  73, 80, 140, 161, 333, 345 physical appearance of  177 playing series character Théodore  181, 280 pseudonym  93, 374 public regard for  311, 312 Roméo se fait bandit  73, 161, 334 scenario-writing work  96–7 Soldat par amour  76, 162 stage career of  93–4, 97–8, 178 survives appendicitis  167 Tout est bien qui finit bien  77, 163, 335 Une bonne pour monsieur, un domestique pour madame  75, 85–6, 99, 100, 162 Une conquête  72, 79, 97, 98, 160, 170, 180, 333 Une epreuve difficile  78, 163, 167, 335 Une représentation au cinema  77, 90, 163 Une ruse de mari  76, 89, 99, 101, 162 Un mariage Américain  71, 72, 97, 98, 160, 333 unofficial publicity for  98–101, 111 n.151 Little Tich (Harry Relph)  230, 232 Little Willie (Éclair series character)  202, 207, 246 Lloyd, Harold  350 Lloyd, Marie  234 London King’s Cross Station  355 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth The Song of Hiawatha  125–6, 169 Longfellow, Stephanie  122

400 Index

Longlegs (Aquila series character)  200, 223 love  211, 292, 331–2 Love, Bessie  349 Lubin company  35, 67, 115, 145–7, 313 Lumière Cinématographe  9 Lupin, Arsene (Deutsche Vitascope series character)  200, 252 Lupin, Arsène (in prose fiction)  228 Lux  66, 67. See also Arabella; Bertie; Patouillard produces character-based series films  211, 223 McConaughey, Matthew  354 McDonald, Ronald (restaurant mascot)  269 McDowell, Claire  122 McDowell, John Benjamin  8 Maguire & Baucus  9 Main de fer/Iron Hand (Gaumont series character)  203 Malone, Mary  22 Marion, Frank  120 Marion, Philippe. See ‘double birth’ model Markt/MPSA  301 Marsh, Mae  122 Martin, George R. R. A Song of Ice and Fire series  356 Martinek, Ivy  336 Marvel Cinematic Universe megafranchise  189 Maskeleyne, John Nevil  47 n.53 megafranchising  189 Mégé, Clément  261, 270 Méliès company  67 Menzel, Idina  37 Meredeth, Hal  228 Merriwell, Frank. See Patten, Gilbert Mersereau, Violet  122 Meskal le contrebandier (Éclair series character)  198, 204 Messter company. See Smith Milano company  66. See also Boniface; Cocciutelli; Kelly produces series characters  201, 222, 289 Milky Bar Kid, The  269 Miller, Glenn  347 mimesis  341 Minter, Mary Miles  349 misrecognition of film performers  154 n.98

Mistinguett (Jeanne Bourgeois)  374, 375 Mitchell, Howard  22 Mix, Tom  341 Monca, George  282 Monofilm company. See Boy Detective, The Monoghan, Dominic  343 Montana, Bill  351 Moore, Unity  272 Moran, Percy  261, 269, 300–6, 365 Morgan the Pirate (Éclair series character)  198, 239, 248 Morris, Flora, publicised by Hepworth  23 Mortense, Viggo  343 Motion Picture Patents Company (MPPC)  113–14, 126, 127, 148, 276. See also ‘Independents’ in the time of the MPPC attitude towards generating stars  27, 158–9 common ground with ‘Independents’  169 formation and methods of  115–16, 124, 179 leading indirectly to the emergence of the film star system  158 norm of anonymity amongst  125, 148, 164 output of  118 records of  61 used to limit Pathé Frères’s market share  168 Motion Picture Story Magazine (MPSM)  164–5, 177 Muggins (Cricks & Martin series character)  199, 248, 249, 250, 303 Mugwump (Hepworth series character)  197, 199, 223 Mulcahy (Essanay series character)  200 Murdock, J.J.  117 Murray, Charlie  350 music hall. See variety Mutt & Jeff (comic in San Franciso Chronicle)  228–9 Mutt & Jeff (Nestor series characters)  202, 228, 229 Mutual company  337, 360 Myers, Michael (Halloween franchise)  294 National Board of Censorship  168



National Independent Moving Picture Alliance (NIMPA)  118 Natural Colour Kinematograph Company  9 Neason, Hazel  178 Negri, Pola  348 Nestor company  118. See also Mutt & Jeff; Young Wild West New Line The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers  343–4 New York Motion Picture Company (NYMPCo)  33, 117, 119, 276 Nielsen, Asta  277 Nordisk company  26, 66, 67, 313. See also Holmes, Sherlock; Pinkerton, Nat produces character-based series films  192, 195–6, 227 represented in North America by Great Northern  115, 117 Normand, Mabel  294, 336 North America, film industry in  55–61. See also ‘Independents’ in the time of the MPPC; Motion Picture Patents Company (MPPC) establishment of stock companies in  120–3 hiring companies  115–17, 179 production of character-based series in  213 resistance to Pathé Frères  167–71 schism in  115–25, 142–3, 147, 158 Norton, Edward  354 Odyssey, The  228 Onésime/Simple Simon (Gaumont series character)  203, 223, 316 Orczy, Emma  228 Otis, Elita Proctor  56 Page, Arthur  22 Paramount  189 Pasquali company. See also Polidor; Raffles produces character-based series films  211, 288 Pathé, Charles  66 Pathé, Théophile  66 Pathé Frères  55–7, 63, 216–17, 226, 291, 371. See also Babylas; Boireau;

Index 401

Léontine; Rigadin; Rosalie; Théodore; Winter, Nick activities in North America  115, 117, 164 backlog of imports into North America  140 chanticleer brand identity of  103, 168 exceptional circumstances of  176 and the Film d’Art company  22–3, 229 industry dominance of, in Europe  64–6 industry dominance of, in North America  167–8 Le concert de Théodore  181 preference for series characters over stars  217, 322 produces character-based series  192, 277, 287 publicity for Max Linder (see Linder, Max) records of  61 vertical integration  65–7, 70, 176 Patouillard/Bill (Lux series character)  200, 207, 223, 224, 236, 244, 245, 271. See also Bertho, Paul Patten, Gilbert  228 Paul, Robert William  9, 16–17, 23, 47 n.53, 115, 371 Peggy (John Bull series character)  197, 203 Pellie, Dr Brian (Clarendon series character)  200 Perez, Marcel  281, 317 performance, film  10–24, 264 audiences’ awareness of work constituting  267–8, 293 competitive labour market in  346 models of  347–9, 350 performance, live accompanying films  35, 225–6 stage  46 n.43, 120, 123, 128, 264, 267, 342, 346 performance, norms of quality in  277–8 performers, film coming about of long-term employment as  34, 67, 119–24, 123, 176 non-human  282–4 recognition of (see recognition of film performers) personae and series characters  266, 293 in variety  231–4

402 Index

personal contact, perceived value of  225, 230 personality (as method of transmitting one’s self)  348–9 Phantom, Dr (Warwick Trading Company series character)  199 Phillips, Edward  158 Phoenix company  118 Pickford, Jack  123 Pickford, Lottie  123, 344 Pickford, Mary (Gladys Smith)  122, 123, 213, 347, 349, 351, 352 Biograph’s publicity campaign outside North America for  158 referred to as ‘The Biograph Girl’  290, 291, 311 stage career of  178 Pictures, The (magazine)  177, 226, 301–5, 359, 372 Pik Nik (Aquila series character)  202, 223 Pilar Morin  33, 110 n.146, 146 Pimple (Ecko series character)  203, 272. See also Evans, Fred Pinkerton, Allan  196 Pinkerton, Nat (in prose fiction)  196, 228 Pinkerton, Nat (Nordisk series character)  196, 198, 251, 264, 285. See also Larsen, Viggo Pinkerton, Nat (Urban-Éclipse series character)  201, 246, 250, 303, 313 Polidor (Pasquali series character)  202, 207, 211, 236, 269, 288, 289, 298. See also Guillaume, Ferdinando Poorluck (Hepworth series character)  197, 199, 223, 226, 248, 252, 259, 261, 270. See also Buss, Harry Portman, Natalie  354 posing  18–20 posters  7, 24, 25, 37, 41, 56, 63–4, 69–70, 96, 99, 103, 119, 134–7, 143, 294, 313 Powers company  33, 118 Poynter, Beulah plan to perform in film version of Lena Rivers  20 premium product  57–8. See also Veblen effect prestige  228–9

Prevost, Marie  349 ‘Prince’ (Charles Petitdemange)  166, 271, 277, 282, 298, 312–13, 317, 322, 375. See also Rigadin product differentiation  63, 158, 215–16, 253, 269, 310, 322 production value definition of  7 performers considered to be  95–6, 103, 127, 140, 167, 170–1, 345 series characters used as (see series characters) pseudonyms  93, 178, 184, 374. See also anonyms assigned by employers  289 Psilander, Valdemar  26 psychology, social  351–2, 359 publicity. See also names of particular individuals directed at the general public  2, 40, 121 Puddenhead, Professor (Urban series character)  197, 198, 223, 240 Pyke, Montagu  301

Rigadin/Wiffles (Pathé Frères/SCAGL series character)  200, 207, 208–10, 211, 223, 236, 251, 252, 262, 271, 282, 297, 298, 312–13, 317, 318, 322. See also ‘Prince’ Riley, James Whitcomb  ‘Jap Miller’ 128 risk (physical)  21–2, 306, 350 Robinet/Tweedledum (Ambrosio series character)  200, 207, 211, 236, 248, 250, 262, 269, 281, 297, 313, 317. See also Perez, Marcel Roland, Ruth  22, 348, 359–60 Rosalie/Jane (Pathé Frères series character)  202, 262, 317, 322. See also Duhamel, Sarah Rose, Lieutenant (Clarendon series character)  199, 219–20, 223, 241, 243, 248, 250, 252, 260, 269, 299, 303, 313, 317 Rossi company  67 Rover (Hepworth series character, played by Blair)  191–2, 282–4

Quidditch  356 Quirk, William  213

Sally (Hepworth series character). See Tilly ‘the Tomboy’ and Sally (Hepworth series characters) Santa Claus  355–6 Santschi, Tom  348 Savoia company. See Algy Sawyer, Laura  147 Scarlet Pimpernel, The. See Orczy, Emma Scroggins (Cricks & Martin series character)  197, 199 Selig, ‘Colonel’ William N.  11–14, 20 Selig Polyscope company  11, 67, 115, 291. See also Katzenjammer Kids Sennett, Mack  336 serial fiction definition of  189–90 in film  214 series distinguished from serials  189–90, 214, 216 non-fiction  216–17 series characters  183–4, 189–376. See also names of particular characters audiences’ familiarity with  251–3

Radios company  67 Raffles (Pasquali series character)  202 Raffles, A.J. (in prose fiction). See Hornung, E.W. Raleigh & Robert  117 Ranous, William  126, 176 recognition of film performers  60, 94–6, 114, 123, 124, 129, 139, 143, 159, 177. See also misrecognition of film performers; size of human body in the frame while playing series characters  183, 259, 260–3, 266–7, 274, 276, 285, 293 recognition of series characters  227 Reed, Langford The Chronicles of Charlie Chaplin  337, 339, 352 release dates  218 Rhys-Davies, John  343 Rich, Vivian  347–8 Rifle Bill (Éclair series character)  195, 198, 251



Index 403

bearing names of their performers  333–40 costumes and physical traits of  270–2 in film programmes  236–53 in films on UK film market  196–7, 311 in late-twentieth-/early-twenty-firstcentury slasher films  294–5 as means of product differentiation  253, 269, 310 names of, used as if the names or pseudonyms of their performers  268–9, 279–80, 285–9, 300–7, 332, 374 personal appearances of  296, 300–1, 310, 356, 357 as production values  184, 269, 287, 307 in prose fiction  227–9 provide functional equivalents for film stars  294–310 as surrogates for production company brands  221–5, 260, 281, 310 treated as if real people (see Daring, Lieutenant; Léontine) series fiction. See also series characters comedy in  276–80, 293 definition of  189–90, 229 distinction between character-based and story-space-based  218 in print  228–9 rise of in European and North American film production  190–214 Shakespeare, William Macbeth  20 Romeo and Juliet  22 Sharkey, Captain. See Doyle, Arthur Conan Sharp, P.C. (Cricks & Martin series character)  201 Sheen, Charlie (Carlos Estévez)  333 Sims, George  22 Sinbad  228 singing  230–1, 292 size of human body in the frame  34, 79, 260–3 Smiler, Charley (Cricks & Martin series character)  197, 201, 269 Smith (Messter series character)  200 Smith, Constable (Cricks & Martin series character)  197, 202, 206, 246, 262, 272. See also Storrie, Kelly

404 Index

Smith, George Albert  9, 47 n.53 Smith, Will  354 Société Cinematographique des Auteurs et Gens de Lettres (SCAGL) founded by Pathé Frères  56 produces character-based series films  282 Société des Gens de Lettres  56 Sorel, Cécile  229 Sorelle, William J.  28 Spooner, Mrs Cecil  33 Stallone, Sylvester  354 star definition of  5–9 stars, cross-over  98, 110 n.146 stars, film. See also names of particular individuals ‘American’ characteristics of  170 body transformations of  353–4 deadlock preventing the emergence of  24–5, 94, 95, 142, 259, 291, 293 definition of  332 designated as servants of the people  353 directors as  372 ‘French’ characteristics of  170 history of scholarship on  6, 17–18, 63, 102–3, 332, 346–7, 352, 357–8 models of  349–64, 357–64 personae of  333–66 personal appearances of  129–30, 133, 158 private lives of  3, 6, 310, 332 putatively unique personalities of  345–7 rendered extraneous by series characters  294–5, 311–22 salaries of  48 n.64, 119–20, 282 star system alternative types of  9–10 industrial version of  5–9, 34, 123 theatrical version of  122, 123, 141, 176 Star Trek franchise  189, 218, 356, 357 Star Wars franchise  189 statuettes  317, 318–19 Stewart, James  346–7 Stingaree. See Hornung, E.W.

stock characters  236, 264 Stonehouse, Ruth  346 Storey, Edith  341 Storrie, Kelly  272 Streep, Meryl (Mary Streep)  333 Street & Smith (publisher)  194 Sullivan, Francis  120 superhero films  189, 229 Swank, Hilary  354 Sweet, Blanche  122 referred to as ‘The Biograph Blonde’  291 Swift, Tom. See Appleton, Victor Swinton, Tilda (Katherine Matilda Swinton)  333 Tarzan  357 Taylor, Alma  261, 272, 281 Tearle, Godfrey  22 Terminator franchise  218 Thanhouser company  33, 118, 342 Théodore (Pathé Frères series character)  199, 207 Theron, Charlize  354 Three-Fingered Kate (British & Colonial series character)  199, 223, 227, 262, 336. See also Martinek, Ivy Tilley, Vesta  47 n.53 Tilly ‘the Tomboy’ and Sally (Hepworth series characters)  197, 200, 236, 250, 252–3, 261, 264, 272, 281, 303. See also Moore, Unity; Taylor, Alma; White, Chrissie time in film. See film time zones  340 Tiny Tom (Ambrosio series character)  202 Tolkien, Jonathan Ronald Reuel. See also New Line Middle Earth fiction  356 Tommy (Éclair series character)  201, 207 Tontolini (Cines series character)  197, 199, 207, 211, 213, 223, 236, 248, 250, 252, 261, 267–8, 269, 270, 288, 289, 299, 374. See also Guillaume, Ferdinando Toto (Itala series character)  201, 289, 317. See also Vardannes, Emilio Townsend, Edward work for the Edison company  27–31 Tracy, Spencer  346



Travolta, John  37 Trewey, Félicien  9, 44 n.15 Triangle Pictures sells off its assets  25 Trunelle, Mabel Edison company’s publicity for  158 Turner, Florence  33, 164 joins Vitagraph  120 personal appearances  133, 158 referred to as ‘The Vitagraph Girl’  290, 292–3 Vitagraph’s publicity campaign for  133, 158–9 Turpin, Ben  27, 29 Turpin, Dick (British & Colonial series character)  203 Twentieth Century Fox  189 Tyler, Walter  266, 274 United Artists  352 United Kingdom character-based series films made in  197–8 character-based series films on the market in  211–13 United States attitudes towards French culture in  168 film industry in (see North America, film industry in) Universal  189 Urban, Charles  9 Urban-Éclipse  67, 117. See also Cri-Cri; Dupin, Arthene; Pinkerton, Nat formed  66 produces character-based series films  313 Vardannes, Emilio  289, 317 variety  230–6 prestige in  230 variety performers in films  22, 23 ‘Vautour’ de la Siria, Le (Éclair series character)  199, 205 Veblen effect  58 Victoria, Vesta  234 Vitagraph company  19, 32, 33, 56, 67, 115, 126, 158, 168, 291, 313. See also Barnacle, Captain; Bunny, John; Costello,

Index 405

Maurice; Jean; Phillips, Edward; Turner, Florence produces ‘Bunny’ series  336 produces character-based series films  213 publicises Mabel Normand  294 Vorhees, Jason (Friday the Thirteenth franchise)  294, 357 Walt Disney Company  37, 189, 355 Walthall, Henry  342–3, 360–1 ‘wandering’ value  25–6, 142, 289, 310, 313. See also anonymity; anonyms; pseudonyms Warner Bros  189 Warwick Trading Company  9, 17, 47 n.53. See also Phantom, Dr Washington, Denzel  354 Wayne, John  347 Weary Willie & Tired Tim (British & Colonial series characters)  197, 201, 227 Weary Willie & Tired Tim (comic in Chips)  190, 228 Wells, Carolyn work for the Edison company  27–31 Wenham, David  343 White, Chrissie  261, 272 Wicks, Monty  16

406 Index

Williams, Brown & Earle (company)  115 Williams, Clara  164, 347 Winslow, Herbert Hall The Vinegar Buyer  128 Winter, Nick (Pathé Frères series character)  199, 251, 311, 315, 319, 374, 375 Wolff, Philip  15 Woods, Frank  148 n.1, 182, 183, 291, 294, 312 World Film Manufacturing Company  118, 119 Wrights, The (Biograph series characters)  213 X-Men megafranchise  189 Yankee company. See Girl Detective, The Yankee Films Company. See Independent Motion Pictures Young Wild West (Nestor series character)  203 Zellweger, Renée  354 Zemeckis, Robert  353 Zigomar (Éclair series character)  202, 247, 313 Zigoto (Gaumont series character)  203, 223

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410

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