Lon Chaney, Sr. - The Man of a Thousand Faces

Lon Chaney was born April 1, 1883 in Colorado Springs, Colorado. He was the son of deaf mute parents, Frank and Emma Chaney, and he learned from childhood to communicate through pantomime, sign language and facial expression.

In 1901, he went on the road as an actor in a play that he co-wrote with his brother titled “The Little Tycoon.” After limited success, the company was sold and Lon continued on with the new owner.

Later, while on tour in Oklahoma City, he met Francis Cleveland Creighton, (Cleva) who was auditioning for a part in the show as a singer. When the show ended its run, she was asked to join the traveling entourage. Threatening to run away and against her mother’s wishes, Cleva joined the cast.

During their travels, Lon and Cleva became “sweethearts.” While touring, Cleva became pregnant and they returned to Oklahoma. In February of 1906, she gave birth to Creighton Tull Chaney. Lon went back to working various trades learned in his younger days, but show business was ingrained in him and he longed to return to the stage. Before long, both Lon and Cleva began touring and took Creighton with them.

They arrived in California in 1910 and found consistent employment with Lon as a stage manager, choreographer and actor, while Cleva became a popular singer in Cabaret shows. Their marriage became strained due to working conditions, money and jealousy.

In April of 1913 after continued disputes, Cleva entered the Majestic Theater where Lon was working and in a suicidal attempt swallowed a vial of poison. The poison damaged her vocal chords putting an end to her career and marriage to Lon.

The public scandal also damaged Lon’s stage career and he was forced to seek new employment. He turned to the booming industry of silent films. This move began one of the most legendary acting careers in film history. Between 1913 and 1930 he played more the 150 widely diverse roles, frequently villainous and sometimes bizarre and macabre, almost always pathetic and moving.

By 1918 with over a hundred film credits for Universal, he asked for a raise and was refused. Shortly thereafter, he left the studio to become a freelance actor.

William S. Hart, a popular Western movie star of the time, contacted Lon requesting him to play a villain opposite Hart in “Riddle Gawne.” Lon received high praise for his performance in the role and considered it as his first big break.

In 1919, Lon received critical acclaim for his role in George Loane Tuckers “The Miracle Man” portraying “The Frog,” a con man who pretends to be cripple and is miraculously healed.

Lon often suffered to achieve the character he was portraying. In 1920, for “The Penalty,” he had his legs bound tightly behind him in a harness, inserting his knees into leather stumps devised as artificial legs with his feet bound at the thighs. This was a very painful ordeal that would cut circulation to his legs resulting in broken blood vessels.

For “The Hunchback of Notre Dame” in 1923 he devised a hump and harness reportedly weighing in excess of 50 pounds, twisting his torso to feel the pain of Quasimodo. He delivered an outstanding performance earning him worldwide fame.

In 1924, Lon starred in Metro-Goldwyn’s “He Who Gets Slapped” a circus melodrama voted one of the best films of the year. The success of this movie led to a series of contracts with MGM Studios for the next five years.

In 1925, Lon created the makeup that secured him into film immortality with his portrayal as “Erik,” the tortured opera ghost in “The Phantom of the Opera.”

Due to his ability to portray an endless variety of characters, Lon became known as “The Man of a Thousand Faces.”

He, like Charlie Chaplin, shunned the transition to talking films and was one of the last silent screen stars to holdout against speaking roles. His stock and trade as he professed “was in makeup and the art of pantomime.”

In 1930 he made his one and only talking film, a remake of 1925 “The Unholy Three.” He played Echo, a crook ventriloquist and used five different voices in the movie, thus proving he could make the transition from silent films to the talkies. Unfortunately, less than two months after the film’s release on August 26, 1930, he died from a throat hemorrhage.

MGM Studios was ordered to stop production and observe a period of silence while Lon’s remains were lowered to their final resting place. The world mourned his passing and lost one of film’s most unique and greatest actors.

This year marks the 80th year of his passing and his legacy continues to grow. He was a one of a kind actor that left a mark on an industry that will never be replaced. The characters and makeup he created continue to inspire new artists of today.

http://lonchaney.com/

"By the Sun's Rays", Lon Chaney (1914)

Um dos primeiros filmes do mestre do disfarce do Cinema Mudo: Loan Chaney - "Man of a Thousand Faces". Chaney foi um dos mais proeminentes pioneiros do Cinema de Terror no Mudo, com filmes como "The Hunchback of Notre Dame" e "The Phantom of the Opera" e por ter trilhado com Tod Browning (em dez filmes que fizeram em comum) personagens tortuosas que marcaram a história do Cinema.

"Uncle Tom's Cabin", William Robert Daly (1914)

O primeiro filme com um actor negro, Sam Lucas, no clássico papel de Pai Tomás. Sam Lucas estava bastante rodado nessa interpretação, uma vez que desde 1880 que já o tinha feito por centenas de vezes em palco. Contudo, apesar de ser a personagem principal do filme, do livro de Stowe e de estar quase sempre no centro da acção, em todo o filme apenas "fala" num único entretítulo, antes mesmo de morrer.

O filme de Daly tem vários pontos de interesse, com destaque para a forma como a câmara põe o público na posição dos escravos - numa clara mensagem progressista.

Charlie Chaplin - Parte 4: O EXÍLIO

With "A King in New York" Charles Chaplin was the first film-maker to dare to expose, through satire and ridicule, the paranoia and political intolerance which overtook the United States in the Cold War years of the 1940s and 50s. Chaplin himself had bitter personal experience of the American malaise of that time. To take up film making again, as an exile, was a challenging undertaking. He was now nearing 70. For almost forty years he had enjoyed the luxury of his own studio and a staff of regular employees, who understood his way of work. Now though he had to work with strangers, in costly and unfriendly rented studios. The film shows the strain.

In 1966 he produced his last picture, “A Countess from Hong Kong” for Universal Pictures, his only film in colour, starring Sophia Loren and Marlon Brando. The film started as a project called Stowaway in the 1930s, planned for Paulette Goddard. Chaplin appears briefly as a ship steward, Sydney once again has an important role, and three of his daughters have small parts in the film. The film was unsuccessful at the box office, but Petula Clark had one or two hit records with songs from the soundtrack music and the music continues to be very popular.

Chaplin’s versatility extended to writing, music and sports. He was the author of at least four books, “My Trip Abroad”, “A Comedian Sees the World”, “My Autobiography”, “My Life in Pictures” as well as all of his scripts. An accomplished musician, though self-taught, he played a variety of instruments with equal skill and facility (playing violin and cello left-handed).

He was also a composer, having written and published many songs, among them: “Sing a Song”; “With You Dear in Bombay”; and “There’s Always One You Can’t Forget”,

“Smile”, “Eternally”, “You are My Song”, as well as the soundtracks for all his filmsCharles Chaplin was one of the rare comedians who not only financed and produced all his films (with the exception of “A Countess from Hong Kong”), but was the author, actor, director and soundtrack composer of them as well.

He died on Christmas day 1977, survived by eight children from his last marriage with Oona O’Neill, and one son from his short marriage to Lita Grey.

Charlie Chaplin - Parte 3: AS 8 OBRAS-PRIMAS NA UNITED ARTISTS

Under his arrangement with U.A., Chaplin made eight pictures, each of feature length, in the following order:

1) A Woman of Paris (1923) was a courageous step in the career of Charles Chaplin. After seventy films in which he himself had appeared in every scene, he now directed a picture in which he merely walked on for a few seconds as an unbilled and unrecognisable extra – a porter at a railroad station. Until this time, every film had been a comedy. A Woman of Paris was a romantic drama. This was not a sudden impulse. For a long time Chaplin had wanted to try his hand at directing a serious film. In the end, the inspiration for A Woman of Paris came from three women. First was Edna Purviance, who had been his ideal partner in more than 35 films. Now, though, he felt that Edna was growing too mature for comedy, and decided to make a film that would launch her on a new career as a dramatic actress.

2) The Gold Rush (1925). Chaplin generally strove to separate his work from his private life; but in this case the two became inextricably and painfully mixed. Searching for a new leading lady, he rediscovered Lillita MacMurray, whom he had employed, as a pretty 12-year-old, in The Kid Still not yet sixteen, Lillita was put under contract and re-named Lita Grey. Chaplin quickly embarked on a clandestine affair with her; and when the film was six months into shooting, Lita discovered she was pregnant. Chaplin found himself forced into a marriage which brought misery to both partners, though it produced two sons, Charles Jr and Sydney Chaplin.

3) The Circus (1928). “The Circus” won Charles Chaplin his first Academy Award – it was still not yet called the ‘Oscar’ – he was given it at the first presentations ceremony, in 1929. But as late as 1964, it seemed, this was a film he preferred to forget. The reason was not the film itself, but the deeply fraught circumstances surrounding its making. Chaplin was in the throes of the break-up of his marriage with Lita Grey; and production of The Circus coincided with one of the most unseemly and sensational divorces of twenties Hollywood, as Lita’s lawyers sought every means to ruin Chaplin’s career by smearing his reputation. As if his domestic troubles were not enough, the film seemed fated to catastrophe of every kind. In the late 1960s, after the years spent trying to forget it, Chaplin returned to “The Circus” to re-release it with a new musical score of his own composition. It seemed to symbolize his reconciliation to the film which cost him so much stress.

4) City Lights (1931). “City Lights” proved to be the hardest and longest undertaking of Chaplin’s career. By the time it was completed he had spent two years and eight months on the work, with almost 190 days of actual shooting. The marvel is that the finished film betrays nothing of this effort and anxiety. Even before he began City Lights the sound film was firmly established. This new revolution was a bigger challenge to Chaplin than to other silent stars. His Tramp character was universal. His mime was understood in every part of the world. But if the Tramp now began to speak in English, that world-wide audience would instantly shrink. Chaplin boldly solved the problem by ignoring speech, and making City Lights in the way he had always worked before, as a silent film. [However] he astounded the press and the public by composing the entire score for “City Lights”. The premieres were among the most brilliant the cinema had ever seen. In Los Angeles, Chaplin’s guest was Albert Einstein; while in London Bernard Shaw sat beside him. “City Lights” was a critical triumph. All Chaplin’s struggles and anxieties, it seemed, were compensated by the film which still appears as the zenith of his achievement and reputation.

5) Modern Times (1936). Chaplin was acutely preoccupied with the social and economic problems of this new age. In 1931 and 1932 he had left Hollywood behind, to embark on an 18-month world tour. In Europe, he had been disturbed to see the rise of nationalism and the social effects of the Depression, of unemployment and of automation. He read books on economic theory; and devised his own Economic Solution, an intelligent exercise in utopian idealism, based on a more equitable distribution not just of wealth but of work. In 1931 he told a newspaper interviewer, “Unemployment is the vital question … Machinery should benefit mankind. It should not spell tragedy and throw it out of work”.

6) The Great Dictator (1940). When writing “The Great Dictator” in 1939, Chaplin was as famous worldwide as Hitler, and his Tramp character wore the same moustache. He decided to pit his celebrity and humour against the dictator’s own celebrity and evil. He benefited – if that is the right word for it, given the times – from his “reputation” as a Jew, which he was not – (he said “I do not have that pleasure”). In the film Chaplin plays a dual role –a Jewish barber who lost his memory in a plane accident in the first war, and spent years in hospital before being discharged into an antisemite country that he does not understand, and Hynkel, the dictator leader of Ptomania, whose armies are the forces of the Double Cross, and who will do anything along those lines to increase his possibilities for becoming emperor of the world. Chaplin’s aim is obvious, and the film ends with a now famous and humanitarian speech made by the barber.

7) Monsieur Verdoux (1947). The idea was originally suggested by Orson Welles, as a project for a dramatised documentary on the career of the legendary French murder Henri Désiré Landru – who was executed in 1922, having murdered at least ten women, two dogs and one boy. Chaplin was so intrigued by the idea that he paid Welles $5000 for it. The agreement was signed in 1941, but Chaplin took four more years to complete the script. In the meantime the irritating distractions of a much-publicised and ugly paternity suit had been compensated by his brilliantly successful marriage to Oona O’Neill. In the late 1940s, America¹s Cold War paranoia reached its peak, and Chaplin, as a foreigner with liberal and humanist sympathies, was a prime target for political witch-hunters. This was the start of Chaplin’s last and unhappiest period in the United States, which he was definitively to leave in 1952.

8) Limelight (1952). Not surprisingly, then, in choosing his next subject he deliberately sought escape from disagreeable contemporary reality. He found it in bitter-sweet nostalgia for the world of his youth – the world of the London music halls at the opening of the 20th century, where he had first discovered his genius as an entertainer. With this strong underlay of nostalgia, Chaplin was at pains to evoke as accurately as possible the London he remembered from half a century before and it is clear from the preparatory notes for the film that the character of Calvero had a very similar childhood to Chaplin’s own. Limelight s story of a once famous music hall artist whom nobody finds amusing any longer may well have been similarly autobiographical as a sort of nightmare scenario. Chaplin’s son Sydney plays the young, talented pianist who vies with Calvero for the young ballerina’s heart, and several other Chaplin family members participated in the film. It was when on the boat travelling with his family to the London premiere of Limelight that Chaplin learned that his re-entry pass to the United States had been rescinded based on allegations regarding his morals and politics. Chaplin therefore remained in Europe, and settled with his family at the Manoir de Ban in Corsier sur Vevey, Switzerland, with view of lake and mountains. What a difference from California. He and Oona went on to have four more children, making a total of eight.

Charlie Chaplin - Parte 2: CHARLOT

When his contract with Mutual expired in 1917, Chaplin decided to become an independent producer in a desire for more freedom and greater leisure in making his movies. To that end, he busied himself with the construction of his own studios. This plant was situated in the heart of the residential section of Hollywood at La Brea Avenue.

Early in 1918, Chaplin entered into an agreement with First National Exhibitors’ Circuit, a new organization specially formed to exploit his pictures. His first film under this new deal was “A Dog’s Life”. After this production, he turned his attention to a national tour on behalf of the war effort, following which he made a film the US government used to popularize the Liberty Loan drive: “The Bond”.

His next commercial venture was the production of a comedy dealing with the war. “Shoulder Arms”, released in 1918 at a most opportune time, proved a veritable mirthquake at the box office and added enormously to Chaplin’s popularity. This he followed with “Sunnyside” and “A Day’s Pleasure”, both released in 1919.

In April of that year, Chaplin joined with Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks and D.W. Griffith to found the United Artists Corporation. B.B. Hampton, in his “History of the Movies” says:

“The corporation was organized as a distributor, each of the artists retaining entire control of his or her respective producing activities, delivering to United Artists the completed pictures for distribution on the same general plan they would have followed with a distributing organization which they did not own. The stock of United Artists was divided equally among the founders. This arrangement introduced a new method into the industry. Heretofore, producers and distributors had been the employers, paying salaries and sometimes a share of the profits to the stars. Under the United Artists system, the stars became their own employers. They had to do their own financing, but they received the producer profits that had formerly gone to their employers and each received his share of the profits of the distributing organization.”

However, before he could assume his responsibilities with United Artists, Chaplin had to complete his contract with First National. So early in 1921, he came out with a six-reel masterpiece : The Kid (1921).

The kid in which he introduced to the screen one of the greatest child actors the world has ever known – Jackie Coogan. The next year, he produced “The Idle Class”, in which he portrayed a dual character. Then, feeling the need of a complete rest from his motion picture activities, Chaplin sailed for Europe in September 1921. London, Paris, Berlin and other capitals on the continent gave him tumultuous receptions. After an extended vacation, Chaplin returned to Hollywood to resume his picture work and start his active association with United Artists.

Charlie Chaplin - Parte 1: O REI DA PANTOMINA

Charles Spencer Chaplin was born in London, England, on April 16th 1889. His father was a versatile vocalist and actor; and his mother, known under the stage name of Lily Harley, was an attractive actress and singer, who gained a reputation for her work in the light opera field. Charlie was thrown on his own resources before he reached the age of ten as the early death of his father and the subsequent illness of his mother made it necessary for Charlie and his brother, Sydney, to fend for themselves.

Having inherited natural talents from their parents, the youngsters took to the stage as the best opportunity for a career. Charlie made his professional debut as a member of a juvenile group called “The Eight Lancashire Lads” and rapidly won popular favour as an outstanding tap dancer.

When he was about fourteen, he got his first chance to act in a legitimate stage show, and appeared as “Billy” the page boy, in support of William Gillette in “Sherlock Holmes”. At the close of this engagement, Charlie started a career as a comedian in vaudeville, which eventually took him to the United States in 1910 as a featured player with the Fred Karno Repertoire Company.

He scored an immediate hit with American audiences, particularly with his characterization in a sketch entitled “A Night in an English Music Hall”. When the Fred Karno troupe returned to the United States in the fall of 1912 for a repeat tour, Chaplin was offered a motion picture contract.

He finally agreed to appear before the cameras at the expiration of his vaudeville commitments in November 1913; and his entrance in the cinema world took place that month when he joined Mack Sennett and the Keystone Film Company. His initial salary was $150 a week, but his overnight success on the screen spurred other producers to start negotiations for his services.

At the completion of his Sennett contract, Chaplin moved on to the Essanay Company (1915) at a large increase. Sydney Chaplin had then arrived from England, and took his brother’s place with Keystone as their leading comedian.

The following year Charlie was even more in demand and signed with the Mutual Film Corporation for a much larger sum to make 12 two-reel comedies. These include “The Floorwalker”, “The Fireman”, “The Vagabond”, “One A.M.” (a production in which he was the only character for the entire two reels with the exception of the entrance of a cab driver in the opening scene), “The Count”, “The Pawnshop”, “Behind the Screen”, “The Rink”, “Easy Street” (heralded as his greatest production up to that time), “The Cure”, “The Immigrant” and “The Adventurer”.

"Making a Living", Henry Lehrman (1914)

O primeiro filme de Charlie Chaplin.

"Cabiria", Giovanni Pastrone (1914)

O primeiro "blockbuster". A imaginação de Emilio Salgari à solta na Cinecitta.

"Cabiria" é o cinema peplum no seu auge, a meio caminho entre o filme de aventuras e o melodrama, ambientado durante as Guerras Púnicas do Séc. III a.C. e baseado numa novela de Gabriele D'Annunzio.

Cecil B. DeMille - Parte 2: SOB O SIGNO DOS DEZ MANDAMENTOS

In 1923, Cecil B. DeMille was allowed to try his hand at another large-scale spectacle. "THE TEN COMMANDMENTS" delivered on the spectacular in a big way--but it also went tremendously over budget and caused a strain in relations between DeMille and Famous Players-Lasky. Although "THE TEN COMMANDMENTS" proved to be one of the most successful films of the silent era, the studio did not renew DeMille's contract.

In 1925, with independent financing, he set up his own studio, Cecil B. DeMille Pictures, Inc. The new company was located at the former Thomas H. Ince studio in Culver City. During its three year existence, DeMille supervised dozens of moderately budgeted program pictures and made annual specials. Although his personal productions "THE VOLGA BOATMAN" and
"THE KING OF KINGS" were major box-office hits, the studio's overall program did not perform well enough to sustain the company. It was absorbed by the Pathe Exchange, Inc. and DeMille signed a three picture deal with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

DeMille came to M-G-M just as silents were giving way to sound pictures. His first talking picture, "DYNAMITE" (1929), showed great skill in using the new medium and proved to be a modest hit. His next two pictures, "MADAM SATAN" (1930) and a remake of "THE SQUAW MAN," were also well made films, but in the severe economic downturn that led to the Great Depression they proved to be box-office failures. His M-G-M contract was not renewed. After years of success in Hollywood, DeMille, who also took a beating in the stock market collapse in 1929, faced the prospect of being unemployed and nearly broke.

In 1931, Cecil and his wife went on an extended European vacation, hoping to stir up film production deals in Great Britain and the Soviet Union, but nothing came of these negotiations. Upon returning to Hollywood, Cecil managed to obtain a one-picture deal to produce and direct "THE SIGN OF THE CROSS." His old studio, Paramount, put up half the budget and DeMille financed the balance on his own. "THE SIGN OF THE CROSS" proved to be a tremendous hit, and DeMille remained with Paramount for the rest of his career.

In 1936 he signed on as host of the Lux Radio Theater a dramatic anthology series that aired over the CBS radio network, and these radio appearances made Cecil B. DeMille a household name. He remained with the show for nearly nine years, but a dispute with his union over a one dollar assessment for political activity brought his radio career to an end. DeMille disagreed with the Union's stance, and refused to be levied a fee for a cause he did not support. Suspended by the union, DeMille was forced to give up his $100,000 a year position on the Lux Radio Theater when he lost a court challenge over the $1 fee.

The incident with AFRA (American Federation of Radio Artists) was not the only union drama in which DeMille’s views became controversial. In 1950, dissention was fomenting within the Screen Director’s Guild over President Truman’s loyalty oath, which DeMille supported. Affidavits had been required of labor organization’s officers stating they had no Communist affiliations. John Ford, who was a Director’s Guild board member, signed such an affidavit, as did the Guild’s president, Joseph L. Mankiewicz. DeMille wanted to extend the oath to the full membership; Mankiewicz did not. On October 22nd, the SDG held a large, contentious meeting where DeMille confronted fellow Republican Mankiewicz. Members were divided on the issue. Later that week, Mankiewicz sent letters to the SDG members asking them to voluntarily sign the oath.

Those days are still today clouded in myth. But facts can’t be ignored. Cecil B. deMille never “testified” against colleagues or “named names” before the House Committee on Un-American Activities or any other Congressional panel, as is often asserted. (In 1948, he did testify before the House Subcommittee on Labor Relations where he championed more freedom in unions.) Nor did he collude with Senator Joseph McCarthy to create the black list.

In 1954, recognizing the unfairness of the broad McCarthy blacklist, he hired several blacklisted people for "THE TEN COMMANDMENTS" (1956) – among them composer Elmer Bernstein and actor Edward G. Robinson. In his autobiography, "All My Yesterdays", Robinson credited DeMille with saving his career

Years after DeMille died Mankiewicz reported that DeMille had read a list of names mispronouncing them. The minutes of the Screen Directors Guild do not support this claim.

To the end of his career, DeMille maintained his ability to produce box-office blockbusters. Whether making stories with American historical themes like "THE PLAINSMAN" (1936) or "REAP THE WILD WIND" (1942); or Biblical spectacles like "SAMSON AND DELILAH" (1949) and his remake of "THE TEN COMMANDMENTS" (1956), Cecil B. DeMille created some of the most successful and widely seen films of all time.

Cecil suffered a heart attack on location in Egypt during the making of the
"THE TEN COMMANDMENTS," but managed to recover sufficiently to finish the picture. He served as uncredited executive producer on "THE BUCCANEER" (1958), leaving the direction to his son-in-law Anthony Quinn (married to Katherine DeMille).

Cecil B. DeMille was planning a film on space exploration at the time of his death on January 21, 1959.

Cecil B. DeMille - Parte 1: OS PRIMEIROS PASSOS

Cecil B. DeMille was one of the most successful filmmakers in Hollywood history. Out of the seventy films he claimed as his personal productions, all but six turned a profit, and he remained a leading director of "A" list features from his first film in 1914 to his last in 1956.

He was born in Ashfield, Massachusetts on August 12. 1881, the second son of Henry Churchill de Mille and Matilda Beatrice Samuel de Mille. His brother, William C. de Mille, was born July 25, 1878 in Washington, North Carolina. Throughout his life, Cecil used the family spelling "de Mille" in his personal life and used the variation "DeMille" as his professional name.

Cecil's father taught at Columbia University and was a lay minister in the Episcopal Church. In 1882, Henry de Mille, who had unfulfilled dreams of becoming an actor, was hired as a play reader with Madison Square Theater in New York He started writing plays and entered into a very successful collaboration with the silver haired "wizard of Broadway," David Belasco.

Henry de Mille died in February, 1893, and his widow turned the family home into a girl's school. Later she established the DeMille Play Company as an agency for plays and playwrights. Cecil attended Pennsylvania Military College and later attended the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. He made his stage debut as an actor on February 21, 1900 in "HEARTS ARE TRUMPS." During his time as a touring actor, Cecil met actress Constance Adams. They were married on August 16, 1902, and would eventually have four children. Cecilia DeMille was their biological child. Katherine, Richard and John DeMille were adopted.

In addition to his work as an actor, Cecil also helped his mother manage the DeMille Play Company, and he directed or stage managed a number of shows. He also wrote or co-wrote plays, including a one act vaudeville drama called "THE ROYAL MOUNTED," which would later serve as the basis for his 1940 film "NORTH WEST MOUNTED POLICE." Following in his father's footsteps, he collaborated with David Belasco on "THE RETURN OF PETER GRIMM," and he also wrote several one-act operettas with vaudeville producer Jesse L. Lasky. This association with Lasky led to a lasting friendship.

By 1913, with theatrical prospects bleak, Lasky, DeMille and Lasky's brother-in-law Samuel Goldfish formed the Jesse L. Lasky Feature Play Company to produce feature length motion picture versions of popular plays. Their first film was "THE SQUAW MAN", released in early 1914 to great success. Cecil B. DeMille was named director General of the new company, supervising all production as well as writing and directing his own pictures. Cecil developed a reputation as one of the finest directors in the business with films like "CARMEN" (1915), "THE CHEAT" (1915) and "THE GOLDEN CHANCE" (1916).

Although the Lasky feature Play company had a shaky start, the company's success became assured when it joined with Adolph Zukor's Famous Players Films Company and Frank Garbutt's Bosworth, Inc. to distribute films through the newly formed Paramount Pictures Corporation headed by W. W. Hodkinson. In 1916 the three production companies merged to form the Famous Players-Lasky Corporation, and then assumed control of Paramount.

Cecil B. DeMille retained his position as Director General with Famous Players, but he gradually gave up his supervisory duties to concentrate on making his own pictures. His first large scale spectacle, "JOAN THE WOMAN" (1916), received critical acclaim, but met with only modest box-office success, and for the next several years Cecil was forced to give up his dream of "painting on a big canvas."

During the late 1910's and early 1920's, Cecil turned out a successful and influential series of domestic social comedies. Films like "OLD WIVES FOR NEW" (1918), "DON'T CHANGE YOUR HUSBAND" (1919) and "WHY CHANGE YOUR WIFE?" (1920) gained great attention by focusing on married life rather than on the usual boy-meets-girl formula, and DeMille was able to satisfy his desire to make spectacles by inserting elaborate historical flashback sequences into several of these films.

In this period, DeMille also began to expand his business interests. In 1919 he established Mercury Aviation, the first commercial airline service to carry passengers on a regular schedule. He also sat on the board of the Bank of Italy (later Bank of America) and helped establish the bank's relationship with the motion picture industry.

"The Squaw Man", Cecil B. DeMille e Oscar Apfel

A primeira versão de DeMille de "The Squaw Man" e oficialmente considerado o primeiro filme de DeMille.

"The Wrath of the Gods", Reginald Barker (1914)

O primeiro filme catástrofe da história do Cinema, produzido pelo pioneiro Thomas Ince e com Frank Borzage como galã.

"The Avenging Conscience", D.W. Griffith (1914)

Edgar Allan Poe por David Wark Griffith.

Realizado antes do mítico "Birth of a Nation", "The Avenging Conscience" oferece mais algumas inovações técnicas (sobretudo efeitos especiais) e narrativas do mestre que transformou o Cinema em Arte.

"Le Avventure Straordinarissime di Saturnino Farandola" (The Extraordinary Adventures of Saturnino Farandola), Marcel Fabre (1914)

O espírito de Méliès em Itália.

Mary Pickford - Parte 6: OS TALKIES E O FIM DA MULHER QUE FEZ HOLLYWOOD

In early 1929 Mary appeared in her first talkie, Coquette. A popular play the previous season on Broadway, Coquette was the tale of the downfall of a rich family, done in by jealousy, class snobbery, sex and murder. It was an intentional departure from the typical Pickford heroine. Mary’s version was significantly sanitized to suit the tastes of the newly minted “Production Code,” administered by the Hays office, which sought to control the content of American movies. Nonetheless, her performance was honored with the Academy Award in the first year that the award was given to an actress for a talking picture.

Mary’s second “talkie” was also released in 1929. The Taming of the Shrew is a wonderful, eminently watchable film. The New York Times put the film on its ten best list for the year. William Cameron Menzies, Fairbanks’ art director, lent his hand to the sets and for the first and last time Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks appeared in starring roles in the same film, which was a co-production of both Pickford’s and Fairbanks’ companies. Like Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, they were made for the roles. Although their marriage was falling apart as shooting progressed, there is enough in Shrew to permit the viewer to understand something of both the attraction and the problems these two vibrant souls found in each other. The expensive production made money, but not the kind of money that was expected from the meeting of two of the biggest stars of the last two decades.

Mary Pickford completed two more films after Shrew, and neither was a success. After that, her heart fell out of it. She told her close friend Lillian Gish in 1931 that she would like to burn her old films, but she never did. Her last film, Secrets (1933), with Leslie Howard, is a fascinating and frequently compelling tale. It suffers principally from a difficult speech made late in the film by Mary’s character, forgiving her husband for an unforgivable string of infidelities. It is impossible not to see this for what it is: a desperate and public attempt to call back Douglas Fairbanks and tell him that all is forgiven. It was too late; Mary and Doug had split forever.

Mary Pickford was forty-one years old when she stopped acting in film. She was rich and famous, an owner of a major movie studio. But she was practically alone. Her marriage was headed for divorce, her mother had died, her younger brother Jack had died. She had her sister, who would die unexpectedly from a heart attack in 1936, and her niece, Gwynne, to whom Mary tried, with little success, to be a second mother.

But this was not the end. Though she would never again achieve the stunning success of the first decades of her career, Mary continued to reign as the godmother of Hollywood. She stayed active on the board of United Artists, and produced films, such as One Rainy Afternoon (1936) and Sleep, My Love (1948). She appeared on radio and wrote her autobiography, Sunshine and Shadow (1954). At Pickfair she remained, as she had been with Douglas Fairbanks, the most renowned hostess of Hollywood.

On June 24, 1937, Mary Pickford and Charles “Buddy” Rogers married at the home of Hope Loring, the writer who had introduced them ten years earlier. Mary’s new husband was twelve years her junior, but he had pursued her relentlessly for some time. Their partnership proved an enduring one, lasting more than 40 years until her death.

“Buddy,” as everyone called him, was a gentle and stunningly handsome leading man, who began his film career in 1926, and shot to fame the following year with leads in Wings and My Best Girl. He was a musician who had his own band, The California Cavaliers, and by 1937 he had settled into playing leads in modestly budgeted comedies and musicals. Buddy was easy-going and cheerful to all who knew him.

In 1943 Mary and Buddy adopted two children, Ronald and Roxanne. In time, Mary spent more and more time at home. For some while there still was talk of a return to the screen. She tested for the role of “Vinnie” in Life With Father (1947), and a few years later Billy Wilder approached her for the role of “Norma Desmond” in Sunset Boulevard (1950). Though she was fascinated by the script, Wilder and Pickford did not see eye-to-eye on the story. Rare among Hollywood stars, Pickford retained the copyright of many of her early features, and virtually all of her films beginning with the formation of United Artists. In 1945 she began to donate copies of her many productions to the Library of Congress, and later to the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York. After her death, many of her papers and still photographs were given to the Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. While the preservation of her film legacy still requires major effort, much work has been done to preserve and restore her films. Significantly, due to her personal ownership and foresight, a larger percentage of Mary Pickford’s films have been saved than those of most other silent film stars.

In 1956 Mary ended her work as producer when she sold her shares in United Artists. She and Chaplin were then fifty-fifty owners of the Corporation, and they were the last of the original founders to leave the company. Instead of film work, Mary now turned her attention to charity.

In Paris in 1965, the Cinémathèque Française produced a lengthy retrospective, which included screenings of more than fifty Mary Pickford films. Mary traveled to France for the event, which pleased her tremendously. In spite of this, however, she gradually began to lock herself away like a recluse, spending days at a time in her bedroom at Pickfair. Ill health, and a weakness for alcohol contributed to this seclusion. It had been the bane of practically all of the Smith/Pickford family.

Fewer and few people were admitted into her world. Close friends and family who continued to visit included Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. (who looked upon Mary as a second mother), Lillian Gish, Frances Marion, as well as Colleen Moore, Adela Rogers St. Johns, Lottie’s daughter Gwynne and her family as well as adopted daughter Roxann

At the suggestion of her lawyer and accountant, the Mary Pickford Foundation (originally the Mary Pickford Charitable Trust) was established in 1956, in order to create an enduring charitable organization that could address Mary’s concerns on a continuing basis. Finally, in 1976, Mary was given an Honorary second “Oscar” by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The presentation was filmed in advance at Pickfair, and inserted into the live broadcast. It would be Mary’s last public appearance. She died on May 29, 1979 aged 87.

Mary Pickford was an actress and a producer of talent and vision. If, at her death, she was primarily remembered as a woman who played sweet little girls like Pollyanna, then even a casual investigation of her legacy proves this to be a woefully inadequate assessment. As an actress, her work defined film acting. As a producer, she set standards for quality that placed her films among the best of the era. As a woman of the film industry she helped shape that industry through precedent-setting contracts and by founding the Academy as well as through the formation of charitable institutions such as the Motion Picture and Television Fund. In many ways she truly was, as author Eileen Whitfield called her in her 1997 biography: “The Woman Who Made Hollywood.”

Mary Pickford - Parte 5: O FIM DO MUDO

After Fauntleroy Mary did a stunning remake of her 1914 hit Tess of the Storm Country (1922). The year after that she imported German director Ernst Lubitch, and gave him his first chance to direct an American film, Rosita (1923). Working her way through adult roles, she tried her hand at the Elizabethan epic Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall (1924). But fan mail revealed that her public preferred the girl-child roles, and she returned to that mold with Little Annie Rooney in 1925.

Little Annie Rooney is classic Pickford in the best sense of the word. Mary plays a scruffy teenager whose eventual maturation is hastened by the loss of her beloved father. Most of the first part of the story is a long series of tenement gags, and the film’s one fault is that the ethnic stereotypes presented, while good-humored, don’t hold up very well in an era of politically correct sociology.

Sparrows (1926) is a unique film in Pickford’s catalog; an unusual and beguiling film by any measure. In theme it mixes elements of Charles Dickens and Edgar Allan Poe. The plot revolves around Mary as “Molly,” a teenager who lives on a “baby farm,” where impoverished parents send their children to work for food and board. The dramatic center of the film is an extended escape sequence, in which the children are threatened by a cadaverous Mr. Grimes and his vicious over- sized dog on the one hand, and swamp-dwelling alligators on the other. Biographer Eileen Whitfield says Sparrows is “horrifically good - a bad dream that wakens to a happy ending; a fairy tale told with brilliant style; a comedy; a Grand Guignol; (and) an expressionist thriller (all rolled into one).”

In early 1927 Mary joined other film professionals as one of the founding members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Later in October of that year, she released what would prove her last silent film. My Best Girl is a delightful romantic comedy. Mary sought to break with the image that The Poor Little Rich Girl had set, and here she succeeds magnificently. She plays “Maggie Johnson,” a modern woman, her long curls tightly rolled up and hidden from view. Another successful woman writer, Hope Loring, provided the simple shop- girl-meets-boss’-son-in-disguise romance. Loring had recently scripted William Wellman’s Wings, and she thought the young male lead of that movie might be just the thing opposite Mary in My Best Girl. Hope engineered a “cute meet” for the pair, leading Charles “Buddy” Rogers to the front door of Mary’s studio bungalow, without telling him whose door it was. Rogers was smitten at first sight. So was Mary. There is no question that Douglas Fairbanks was the love of her life. Doug and Mary knew how to have fun together and they genuinely loved their better selves. For a long time the marriage worked well. But there were lingering problems. Doug’s genial good cheer could be obscured by long black moods, severe depression. There were rumors of brief affairs. Meanwhile, Mary was weakened slowly over the years by the same affliction that haunted all the members of the Pickford clan: alcohol.

In March, 1928 Charlotte Hennessey Smith Pickford died. Mary was inconsolable. She screamed, she cried, she hit people. Three months later Pickford walked into a hair salon and cut off her curls. Before the end of the year, another death was widely predicted, the art of pantomime. Silent film, an art form forty-five years in development, was doomed. No film starring Mary Pickford was released in 1928, the first such gap since Mary had entered the movies.

Mary Pickford - Parte 4: A UNITED ARTISTS COM CHAPLIN E FAIRBANKS

Mary, Douglas and Charlie Chaplin (Doug’s best friend) participated in a series of personal appearances to sell Liberty Bonds to support American forces in World War I. At a New York appearance on Wall Street, 50,000 people reportedly turned out to see the movie stars. In an era before public address systems, before radio was widely available, it was impossible for the actors to be heard by everyone present. No matter. The crowd thronged to see the stars.

In January 1919 Pickford was the powerhouse who, together with Doug, Charlie and D. W. Griffith, created an organization that was designed to serve the filmmakers rather than the studio heads. They formed their own distribution company, United Artists. “The lunatics have taken charge of the asylum,” quipped one worried mogul.

In fan magazines and newspaper ads, and in the movies themselves, these United Artists humbly submitted their work to the judgment of that audience. During their first years of UA, Mary’s films were successful. Her first for UA was Pollyanna (1920), a delightful, if self-consciously commercial film that drew its appeal in buckets directly from The Poor Little Rich Girl well.

On March 28, 1920, Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford were wed. The marriage would last fifteen years, but only the first eight years would be truly happy.

Moviemaking was changing. Productions were getting bigger and more expensive. They took longer to make, also. Five Pickford features were released in 1918, four in 1919, only two in 1920. Little Lord Fauntleroy was the third and last Pickford to be released in 1921, and after that Mary settled into making only one film a year. Her control over the finished product was now virtually complete. Little Lord Fauntleroy was ostensibly co-directed by Al Green and Mary’s talented, but alcoholic brother Jack. But cinematographer Charles Rosher recalled it differently to Kevin Brownlow: “She did a lot of her own directing,” he said. “The director would often just direct the crowd. At the end of the scene, whoever was directing, she would always ask me for my opinion.”

Rosher’s assistance was especially important on Fauntleroy, because Mary played two parts, the little boy and his mother. This was the second time Mary had played a “dual role” on screen. The first back in 1918 had been Stella Maris, and many considered that film to contain some of the best dramatic work she ever did. Fauntleroy was especially designed to be a crowd pleaser. The original novel, written in 1886, described an American boy who inherits an English title and vast estate. Tricks of perspective, as well as oversized props and sets were again used, with the added difficulty of having to create the illusion of both Mary as child and a considerably taller adult Mary as mother. The image of the boy Fauntleroy, with long thick Mary Pickford-style curls, comes from the original illustrations for the book. It was a perfect role for Pickford, and Mary who had begun to tire of playing children, took delight in the intentional tweaks to her persona represented by the Little Lord’s desire to have his hair cut, and his mother’s insistence “Cedric, I cannot bear to have you grow up.”

Fauntleroy became Mary’s second highest grossing feature to that time.

Mary Pickford - Parte 3: O AUGE DA "LITTLE MARY"

There was something about this beautiful, spunky girl that people loved. There was an honesty to her performances that was striking. She sensed from the beginning that, compared to the stage, acting for the camera required smaller, more subtle reaction and gesture, and she rarely forced a performance or chewed the scenery. Then there was the fact that she was quite simply drop- dead gorgeous. Fans published poems that went into raptures over her hair: those long tube-like locks that dangled around her incredibly beautiful face. “Little Mary,” who hardly seemed to have aged from 1909 to 1916, usually played poor girls, upstarts who expected and demanded fair treatment, girls of common birth who might marry wealth or family, but who would always be true to their roots. In her features, she rarely played a woman of royalty or an upper crust snoot. She was friendly and open and straightforward. People thought of her as their friend.

Zukor observed Mary on the set. He saw her confer with the scenarist, look over the shoulder of the cameraman, plan a scene with the director, give advice to other actors and fuss with her wardrobe. She seemed to have absorbed every aspect of the craft of making movies. He privately concluded that, had she gone into manufacturing, she might have become president of United States Steel.

Midway through 1916 Mary signed a new contract with Zukor that made her, in effect, his partner. Mary and her mother Charlotte conducted tough negotiations. Together, they functioned as a sort of “good cop/bad cop” team. Henceforth her pictures would be produced by the Pickford Film Corporation and released under a new company: Artcraft Pictures (under the Paramount corporate umbrella). Over the two-year span of the contract Mary stood to make, at minimum, one million dollars.

Mary was searching for a consistent production team: talented people whom she liked, who liked working with her. One of the first persons to fill the bill was a woman, Frances Marion, who wrote the scenarios for The Poor Little Rich Girl and Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (both 1917). Frances would then go on to write seventeen films for Mary, one of which she directed. The two became the closest of friends.

For The Poor Little Rich Girl Pickford and Marion contrived a gimmick that would define Mary’s future. She had played adults, and she had portrayed playful young girls who blossomed into young women ready for love in the final reel. But in The Poor Little Rich Girl, twenty-four year-old Mary Pickford played a twelve year-old child for the duration of the film. Adult actors who appeared with her were cast for their height, and camera angles and a few tricks of perspective were used to maintain the illusion that Mary was child-sized. Enlivened by a variety of humorous bits improvised by Mary and Frances on the set, The Poor Little Rich Girl became a huge hit.

It was so successful, in fact, that before the year was out, Mary had repeated the stunt in not one, but two more hit films: Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, and A Little Princess. Though she spends most of the film as a child, Rebecca finishes her story as a grown woman. But in A Little Princess Mary once again played a child from first to last frame. The illusion was refined through extensive use of oversized sets and props. These successes cemented the public image of “Little Mary,” the perpetual child. It was an image she would briefly revel in, producing some of her best work, and yet ultimately it was an image that would constrain her.

Rebecca marks the debut of another of Pickford’s hand picked team. Not infrequently, Mary had battled with her directors. Now she wanted a friend. She picked frequent co-star, Marshall “Mickey” Neilan. In addition his acting, Neilan was an experienced director who had just directed two films featuring Mary’s brother, Jack. The Pickford/Neilan partnership would prove to contain just the right amount of spice.

“Mickey would dream up running gags long in advance,” Mary said, “and then at the psychological moment blast them at me.” Lucita Squire, a script girl, recalled “the banter, the mimicry, and the happy fellowship that went on behind the scenes.” She noticed that Mary always learned lines and spoke them, even though they wouldn’t be heard.

On screen the collaboration between Frances Marion, Mickey Neilan and Mary Pickford is a delight that effectively mirrors the good spirits that pervaded the set. Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm became a classic.

The following year Pickford found the third collaborator who would contribute to much of her screen heritage, cinematographer Charles Rosher. She had built a professional family that would work together, not always without conflict, but always with spirit and good humor.

Big changes were coming to her private life, as well! Her marriage to actor Owen Moore had been a disaster from its secret start. In a sense it was still a secret. Interviews and articles about Mary never mentioned Owen. Most of her public had no idea that Mary Pickford was also Mrs. Owen Moore. Now to this secret there was added a much more sensational one. Mary had fallen in love. Mrs. Moore, a Catholic, was madly in love with another married man: Douglas Fairbanks.

Fairbanks had begun as a stage actor who specialized in stunts, macho heroics, and self-deprecating humor. Douglas had a wife, Beth, and a young son, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. Charlotte and Mary feared that if the romance became public, Mary would be crucified in the press as a home-wrecker. Despite these concerns, plans for their respective divorces slowly went forward.

Mary Pickford - Parte 2: A FASE GRIFFITH E ZUKOR

Mary worked for Griffith for a year and a half. During this time she fell in love with Owen Moore, another Biograph actor. They were married, secretly, in January of 1911. Pickford was eighteen; Moore twenty-three. The secret was kept even from Mary’s mother, who was shocked and dismayed when she found out, months later.

After she had appeared in eighty Biograph shorts, Pickford left the company for Carl Laemmle’s IMP company. Laemmle had previously snatched another anonymous Biograph actress from Griffith, Florence Lawrence, and publicized her name to great effect. Now they offered the same inducement to Pickford: more money and name recognition. Creatively, however, the collaboration was an unhappy one. Thirty-four (now I suppose that should be “thirty-five”) films later, Pickford broke her contract. After an abortive attempt to make one-reelers with her husband as director at the Majestic Company, she ended up back on Griffith’s doorstep.

In rejoining Griffith, Pickford accepted the fact that talented collaborators and a happy work environment were more important than being on your own. Griffith, on the other hand, accepted the fact that Mary was no longer anonymous. The public now knew her name, and her films were very popular. The next year produced some of the greatest results of the Biograph days.

Mary excelled at parts that moved from adolescence to dawning romance. She was every man’s perfect first love. Marriage or sex might be a part of the story, though often this was implied as coming only after the denouement.

In December 1912 David Belasco offered Mary a chance to return to the theatre to play the part of the little blind girl in A Good Little Devil. Mary jumped at the role, but decided it should be accompanied by an increase in salary. Belasco agreed.

Toward the end of the successful run a man by the name of Adolph Zukor offered to make a film of A Good Little Devil using the original cast. It would be a feature film, a classy project with a famous director, Edwin S. Porter. Far from fearing actor recognition, as had Biograph, Zukor welcomed it. The slogan of his newly formed company was “Famous Players in Famous Plays.”

Over the next four years, from 1913 to 1916, Mary Pickford made twenty-one feature films for Zukor and his Famous Players Film Company. Zukor’s company, in turn, became part of Paramount Pictures. By early 1916 she was making $2000 a week plus a $10,000 bonus each time she finished a picture. At a time when the average annual family income was under $2000, Mary Pickford was making $150,000 a year.

Mary Pickford had become a phenomenon the like of which the world had never seen. She would not be the last. Charlie Chaplin, a comparatively new kid on the block, would eclipse her, just slightly. But by 1916, twenty-four year old Mary Pickford was generally acknowledged to be the most famous and popular woman, not just in America, but in the world. How did this happen?

American movies had become an international business. Domestically, hundred- seat nickelodeons were being replaced by legitimate theaters of up to one and two thousand seats, now referred to as “movie palaces.” Internationally, it was easy to export films. Change the language of a few dozen intertitles, and Pickford pictures could be sent to France, Sweden, the Austro-Hungarian empire and even farther afield to Russia or South America. Distributors made still more money with block booking schemes. “You want the new Mary Pickford film? I’m sorry, her films are not available individually, you must buy the entire Paramount slate for the month of March. Thank you for your business.”

Mary Pickford - Parte 1: A ACTRIZ CINDERELA

Mary Pickford was born Gladys Smith on April 8, 1892 in Toronto, Canada. Her mother Charlotte was Irish Catholic. Her father John Charles Smith was, by reputation, a staunch Methodist with a weakness for alcohol. Within five years of Gladys’ birth the Smith family counted three children: Gladys, her little sister Lottie, and baby brother Jack. In 1898 when Gladys was nearly six, her father died from an accidental blow to the head, leaving his family without savings or income.

Mother Charlotte took in boarders and sewing work. It was a boarder who suggested Charlotte might earn a little money by putting her children on stage. Despite her misgivings about the moral character of “theater people,” within weeks Gladys, Lottie and even their mother were involved in a production at the Princess Theater, just a few blocks from their Toronto flat, that paid the family, by one account, $8 a week.

Little Gladys loved it! From early on it was clear that she would be the star of the family. The playbill for one show promised: “Baby Gladys is a Wonder.” Over the next nine years Gladys appeared in vaudeville sketches, melodramas, and road show productions that traveled through the northeastern United States.

The developing woman was frugal, hardworking, and kind to all who met her. Other adjectives that applied were bright, willful, and ambitious.

Elsie Janis, another child star three years older, recalled meeting “Baby Gladys,” at Shea’s Theatre in Toronto. “She was a very grown-up baby,” Janis later wrote. “She would gaze wide-eyed at my array of dresses, hanging on the dressing room wall, a different one for each performance, and two performances a day. ‘Mother,’ she would say plaintively, ‘do you suppose I will ever have pretty dresses like those?’”

By the age of 15, she was mature enough to travel on her own, and she was setting her own goals. Gladys decided that she should work for one of New York’s most famous producers, David Belasco. It seemed like a thousand to one shot for a teenage road show performer to break into Broadway, but she did it. It was Belasco who insisted she find a new name. In the summer of 1907 she cabled her mother in Canada "GLADYS SMITH NOW MARY PICKFORD - ENGAGED BY DAVID BELASCO TO APPEAR ON BROADWAY THIS FALL."

Mary Pickford appeared in the long run of only one Belasco play, The Warrens of Virginia, before she discovered the movies. “Flickers,” they were called in those days. The typical film was a single reel, eight to twelve minutes long. Often the script, called a “scenario,” was a simply idea in someone’s head, or an outline of shots on paper. Scenes were improvised with minimal dialogue (which of course the audience would never hear). “Intertitles,” just long enough to explain what could not be revealed by mime, were written after the film was edited. These films were shown in storefront “Nickelodeon” theatres, which would run a program of five or more “flickers” in rotation for an admission charge, as the name implied, of a nickel. It was rudimentary fun, but in 1909 this infant medium of “flickers” was changing in leaps and bounds. Some directors, a man named D.W. Griffith at the forefront, were attempting to adapt classic literature to this twelve-minute pantomime; in his first year as director Griffith produced a one-reel version of The Taming of the Shrew.

In April, 1909 Mary Pickford walked up to the Brooklyn brownstone in which the American Biograph Company had set up their studio and asked for a job.

D. W. Griffith arranged an immediate screen test for her, applied her makeup personally, and gave her a small part in a scene for a film that was shot the same afternoon. At the end of the day he invited her to dinner, and when she declined he asked, “Will you come back tomorrow? Our pay for everybody is five dollars a day. We pay only by the day.”

“Mr. Griffith, I’m a Belasco actress and an artist. I must have ten,” said Mary. According to her account of this meeting, Griffith laughed and agreed.

What happened next was a whirlwind tutelage that quickly developed into a genuine, if often volatile, collaboration. Griffith worked quickly. A film shot in June was released in July, and before the year was out, forty-two films were released in which Mary had a role: more than one a week. Within months Mary had convinced Griffith to use her younger siblings as well. But it was Mary who got all the attention, all the raises, all the important roles, and none of the fame. Biograph actors were never identified by name. Director D.W. Griffith was the star.

In January, 1910 Griffith moved most of his troupe to California to avoid the New York winter. Mary went with them, playing everything from Gibson goddesses to Indian maidens. She also wrote a few scenarios, since Griffith occasionally purchased them for twenty-five dollars apiece.

"Cinderella", James Kirkwood (1914)

Mary Pickford em todo o seu fulgor, uma verdadeira Cinderela do Cinema.

"Det Hemmelighedsfulde X", Benjamin Christensen (1914)

A estreia na realização do "satânico" dinamarquês Benjamin Christensen, apaixonado pelas ciências ocultas, bruxaria, rituais macabros e outras celebrações obscuras ("Häxan" de 1922 será a sua obra-prima).

Christensen revela neste seu debute o tom que marcará toda a sua carreira - tanto na Dinamarca, Alemanha e Estados Unidos -, onde o interesse pelo Mal reflecte um estranho sentido da futilidada da vida, a obscuridade das mentes humanas. Com Christensen não há lugar para finais felizes.

"Det Hemmelighedsfulde X" conta a história do tenente Van Hauen (interpretado pelo próprio Christensen), um homem muito preocupado por cumprir com o seu dever, enquanto a sua mulher se enamora do Conde Spinelli, um sinistro conde com demasiadas intenções obscuras.

"Det Hemmelighedsfulde X" é um excelente debute, apesar das características atrás enunciadas não apareçam neste filme; em seu lugar surgem debilidades humanas mais convencionais, como o adultério e a traição.

"Life of the Jews of Palestine", Noah Sokolovsky (1913)

História viva neste documentário seminal, feito por um activista sionista numa bem aventurança promotora da Terra Prometida. O filme mostra a actividade dos judeus europeus acabados de chegar a Israel e na sua interacção com os seus correlegionários do Médio Oriente.

"Like finding documentation of Moses" was how one Israeli film historian described the rediscovery, in 1997, of The Life of the Jews in Palestine, a 1913 film shot by a Russian crew in the Holy Land and presumed lost for 80 years. Few among the 33 selections in the New York Jewish Film Festival hold out the promise of such divine revelations. But rare archival films and documentaries about music are among the highlights.

A smash hit throughout the Pale of Settlement, The Life of the Jews in Palestine offered shtetl dwellers a vision of terrestrial paradise. Noah Sokolovky's 79-minute silent is a cinematic experience of aliyah, or homecoming: opening on board a ship in Odessa, where passengers bid adieu to the diaspora, and gliding past the ancient Oriental mysteries of Constantinople, before surveying the broad, perpendicular avenues of brand-new Tel Aviv, whose allure is distinctly modern. All across this land of plenty, where Jews appear virtually the sole inhabitants, girls and boys (liberated from kitchen and yeshiva) learn agricultural techniques and compete at gymnastics. Sokolovky's crew captured the farms of the Galilee, but not the malarial swamps that surrounded them; the piety of Hasidim at Hebron, but not their tensions with Arab neighbors. Only the stiff backs and rigid physiognomies of middle-aged pioneers celebrating 30 years of Zionist enterprise suggest the price that dream exacted from its earliest participants.

- in Storied Lives and Strange Bedfellows - Tenth Annual New York Jewish Film Festival

"Gli ultimi giorni di Pompeii" (The Last Days of Pompeii), Mario Caserini e Eleuterio Rodolfi (1913)

Este influente épico italiano é um dos principais representantes do estilo luxuoso e operático, com que ficou conhecido o Cinema Italiano nos primeiros anos. "Gli ultimi giorni di Pompeii" também se destaca por ter preparado o caminho para o magistral "Cabiria", realizado um ano depois.

Este é também considerado um dos últimos importantes "filmes tableaux", onde as cenas são filmadas num estilo teatral, com planos abertos, como se o público estivesse a assistir a uma peça no palco.

De uma forma romanticamente trágica, o filme retrata as últimas horas das malfadadas almas que viviam na sombra do monte Vesúvio, tendo por base o romance homónimo de Edward Bulwer.

"Der Student von Prag" (The Student of Prague), Stellan Rye (1913)

O expressionismo alemão começa a nascer para o Cinema, nesta fábula transmutada sobre o mito de Fausto.

The student Balduin is at his wits' end. He has no money, but dreams of being a wealthy, society man. As Balduin mumbles this wish to himself one day, suddenly the adventurer Scalpinelli appears and dumps a load of money in front of him. All this money can be his to fulfill his dream of wealth and luxury. Scalpinelli doesn't ask for much in return, just something from Balduin's modest home. He agrees right away, what could Scalpinelli possibly find? However, much to Balduin's dismay, Scalpinelli decides to take the poor student's mirror image, which literally steps out of the mirror to follow its new master. From that moment on, Balduin lives a life of luxury among Prague's high society.

One day he meets the daughter of Count Schwarzenberg, who is engaged to her cousin, the Baron Waldis Schwarzenberg. Balduin falls in love with her, and she too returns his feelings. The situation intensifies to the point that the two rivals, Balduin and Waldis, challenge each other to a duel. The old Count Schwarzenberg hears about the duel and asks Balduin, known as Prague's best fencer, to spare his nephew. Balduin agrees, but when he appears at the duel as a mere formality, he is met by his double, carrying a bloody sword in his hand. The duel had already taken place! From this point on, Balduin is stalked by his double. No matter where he flees, his "alter ego" accompanies him as a constant reminder of his past.
- in Filmportal.de

"Fantômas", Louis Feuillade (1913)

A série "Fantômas" é constituída por cinco filmes, todos realizados pelo "poeta do real" Louis Feuillade, um dos mais importantes cineastas do Mudo.

"It has been said that in cinema there is both a Méliès and a Lumière tradition. I also think that there is a Feuillade school, which makes marvelous use of Méliès' fantastic and of Lumière's realism." - Alain Resnais.

Conferir apontamentos sobre a cinematografia de Louis Feuillade no site abaixo:

http://www.lips.org/bio_Feuillade_gb.asp

"Atlantis", August Blom (1913)

O cinema nórdico (neste caso dinamarquês) consolida-se como um dos mais importantes do Cinema Mudo.

One of the most famous early European feature films, the Danish production of Atlantis is an impressive achievement for the cinema of 1913. It is hard to believe that such a sophisticated achievement was released the same year as the relatively primitive work being produced in America. It may not seem high praise to say that Atlantis looks like a film from five years later, but this is a sophisticated production for any year, and amazing for 1913.

Atlantis demonstrates that you could take the technical elements of early filmmaking- fixed camera positions, no closeups, minimal sets, outdoor photography- and create effective cinema through restrained, naturalistic acting, a linear plot and basic film grammar. While it includes a few double exposures and beautiful shots at sunset, the filmmaking is not flashy or calling attention to itself.

A adaptation of a then-famous novel (by a Danish Nobel-prize winning author), the storytelling style of Atlantis differs from the classic American cinema. American filmmaking largely followed the narrative conventions of the stage. Like popular plays, American movies would carefully plant clues for later action, and trim any superfluous action or characters. Even a surprise ending would be completely logical. The protagonist in Atlantis is a doctor whose wife has been institutionalized, and decides to travel. You have no idea where the plot is going to go, so the story follows the doctor through a series of cities and contacts with people. The film is about his emotional growth, not what specifically happens to him. In the process, there are remarkable shots of Berlin as he takes a taxi ride around the city and later of New York City. If silent films are a lost art, so is the pre-World War I world of Europe and America captured by Atlantis.

The film is not emotionally involving, but it is very pleasant to watch. The involved (though not complicated) plot is like watching a meticulous adaptation of a novel you haven't read. The roots show in the textured characterizations, and the habit of introducing even peripheral characters by name. The quote on the front laserdisc jacket compares the film's brillance to The Birth of a Nation, but Griffith was expert at introducing characters and establishing them in the first few moments. The style of director August Blom builds the characters as the film progresses.

From the title of the film, there is some hope that we will see the legendary underwater city. The doctor is crossing the Atlantic to America on an ocean liner when the ship hits an obstruction and begins to sink. The title reads: "In his dreams Dr. von Kammacher walks with his friend, Dr. Schmidt, through the sunken town, Atlantis." The scenes are brief, and are accomplished by a few double exposures of ghostly images walking through a village.

The sinking of the ship, obviously influenced by the Titanic disaster of 1912, is extremely well staged, and the action highlight of the film. The staging is completely believable. In the early morning light, people in their nightclothes are on deck scrambling for the lifeboats. It looks for all the world like the filmmakers sank a real ship. There is a long shot of the ship half-underwater, with people jumping for safety from the stern into the water. There are some great scenes in the lifeboat after hours on the open sea, and rescued by a passing freighter.

The 1993 restoration by the Danish Filmmuseum, includes intertitles in Danish and English. The back jacket indicates that the video transfer was made from a 35mm fine grain print at 20 1/2 frames per second. Robert Israel provides a sensitive piano score largely working from Scandanavian classical music of the time. Knowing relatively little about silent Danish cinema or this film, the disc release could have used a second audio track. Since it does not, you may want to track down the book "Danish Cinema Before Dreyer," by Ron Mottram, published in 1988 by Scarecrow Press.
- in Cinemaweb

"Mest Kinematograficheskogo Operatora" (Cameraman's Revenge), Ladislaw Starewicz (1912)

Início da espantosa obra do realizador de animação lituano Ladislaw Starewicz, primeiro a adoptar a técnica "stop-motion". Quando este filme estreou em Londres, os jornais no dia seguinte informavam que os insectos tinham vida humana amestrados por um desconhecido cientista russo!

A seguir indico um site onde se pode conhecer mais sobre a vida e obra de Ladislaw Starewicz:

http://www.awn.com/heaven_and_hell/STARE/stare1.htm

"The Invaders", Thomas H. Ince e Francis Ford (1912)

A história dos Estados Unidos escrita em directo para o Cinema através do western.