The Rise and Fall of the Silent Film Era, Vol I: The Actors

By James R Ashley

The motion picture industry started out ridiculed and despised at the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th Century. The first motion pictures in the 1890s were shown in vaudeville; then in penny arcades; then in nickelodeons, named after the price of admission. In the penny arcade you deposited a penny in a small machine and saw though an eye-piece a number of cards flip by in rapid succession, simulating movement. Later the machines would accommodate a small filmstrip spooling by.

Nickelodeons were a step forward in some cases and a step backwards in others. Patrons could now see a 30-minue moving picture displayed on a sheet or on a white wall for 5 cents. That was the good part. The bad parts were that there were virtually no coherent storylines, and the venues these films played in were in no way inferior to the “black hole of Calcutta.” They were frequently converted buildings with no widows; no ventilation; and frequently smelling of sweat, perspiration, and urine. Pickpockets and prostitutes regularly plied their trade in those sweatboxes to good effect, adding additional unpleasant smells.

With the lengthening of films from 1-reelers to feature films of 3- to 4- reelers, improved storylines were developed, and higher ticket prices allowed theater owners to upgrade their viewing premises. By the end of the silent film era high-end movie theaters were being designed after opulent European opera houses, complete with huge paneled rooms where wealthy women, with the assistance of their maids, could change their attire and jewelry during each of the 3 to 4 intermissions.

In two decades the silent film era actors had developed the art of pantomime to its highest level. But as night follows day the era ended almost quickly as it had begun. In 1927 the Jazz Singer was released and people became hooked on sound. Dialogue made most of the silent area comedians unfunny almost overnight, as their characters had been developed solely on pantomime. The remaining romantic leads now sounded ridiculous when their forlorn looks of love were translated into endless repetitions of “I love you.” Voices too doomed a number of the silent actors to extinction. In many cases the voice did not fit the public perception of the character, and loyal fans deserted them by the thousands. The final nail on the coffin was the Great Depression that dramatically changed public perceptions about what was funny or romantic in an era of steadily increasing misery and uncertainty for most people.

When the end came a few, like Chaplin, Lloyd, and Hart, retired comfortably on what they had saved from their careers; others were not so lucky. Fairbanks died young from a heart attack, having lost the will to live any longer; Keaton and Gilbert died alcoholics; Mix was virtually decapitated in an auto accident; Novorro was brutally murdered by two homosexuals he had hired; Reid died of drug addiction; Valentino died from septic pneumonia; and Arbuckle’s career was ruined by a false rape charge. It was an unhappy end for such exciting and carefree lives that those stars had once lived.

They are all gone now but what a trail they blazed across the night-time sky. They had entered a new and exciting industry and single-handedly elevated it into an art form (at least for a while). The way they dressed, the way they acted, the way they lived became the object of the greatest interest to their millions of fans who sought to emulate them in every way they could. For better or worse they set standards of behavior and expectations of that era. We cannot understand ourselves without knowing how we got here, and this book is written to shed some light on days long gone, when our grandparents had their lives forever altered by the great silent film actors during the golden age of the silent film era.

• Language: English
• Publisher: James R Ashley
• Release date: Jul 22, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301390045

Book preview

The Rise and Fall of the Silent Film Industry

Vol I: The Actors

James R Ashley

Copyright 2015 James R Ashley

Smashwords Edition

Table of Contents

Introduction

Gilbert Maxwell Anderson

Roscoe Fatty Arbuckle

Francis X Bushman

Lon Chaney

Charlie Chaplin

Jackie Coogin

Douglas Fairbanks

John Gilbert

William S Hart

Al Jolson

Buster Keaton

Harry Langdon

Harold Lloyd

Tom Mix

Ramon Novarro

Wallace Reid

Ben Turpin

Rudolph Valentino

Bibliography

Introduction

The motion picture industry started out ridiculed and despised at the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th Century. The first motion pictures in the 1890s were shown in vaudeville; then in penny arcades; then in nickelodeons, named after the price of admission. In the penny arcade one deposited a penny in a small machine and saw though an eye-piece a number of flip cards go by in rapid succession, simulating movement. Later, the machines would accommodate a small filmstrip spooling by. The penny arcades were usually located in poor neighbors and appealed to immigrant men, who had little command of the English language. The suggestive pictures played on the machines gave the penny arcades a bad name and made respectable people reluctant to patronize them.

Nickelodeons were a step forward, in some cases, and a step backwards in others. Patrons could see a 30-minue moving picture displayed on a sheet or on a white wall for 5 cents. That was the good part. The bad parts were that there were virtually no coherent storylines, and venues these films played in were in no way inferior to the black hole of Calcutta. They were frequently converted buildings with no widows; no ventilation; and frequently smelling of sweat, perspiration, and urine. Pickpockets and prostitutes regularly plied their trade in those sweat boxes to good effect, adding additional unpleasant smells.

With the lengthening of films from 1-reelers to feature films of 3- to 4-reelers, improved storylines were developed and increased ticket prices allowed theater owners to upgrade their viewing premises. By the end of the silent film era, high-end movie theaters were being designed after opulent European opera houses, complete with huge paneled rooms, where wealthy women, with the assistance of their maids, could change their attire and jewelry during each of the 3 to 4 intermissions during the movie.

The 1st male comedies were crude and sophisticated. Scripts were virtually non-existent, with the comedians frequently going on location and just making up a skit as they went along. Continuous non-stop action is what counted, and if the scenes were nonsensical and disconnected, that really didn’t matter. Mack Sennett, who ran the most successful comedic studio of his time, said that if the action slowed down and the viewing audience had time to think about it, they would find nothing funny about what they were seeing.

The early comedians were born right out of a Dickens novel. Charlie Chaplin and Roscoe Arbuckle had incredibly horrible childhoods, being unwanted and uncared for. Harry Landon ran away from home and joined the circus as a clown, Buster Keaton took to the stage while he was still crawling, and Ben Turpin lived several years of his youth as a tramp. Harold Lloyd seemed to have the only normal family upbringing. All the comedians, however, had one thing in common, an overwhelming desire to succeed at being funny.

Comedy chaos in the 1-reeler shorts in time led to longer feature films and more careful development of plots and gags. Witt and cleverness now replaced mindless action, and the extra film time allowed for the development of character personas. Ridiculously exaggerated and bizarre characters and non-stop action soon gave way to the believable and sympathetic characters and realistic situations viewers could identify with. Lloyd’s glasses character, for instance, became the epitome of the boy next door and reminded every man of himself in his youth or someone else that he knew.

Romantic male actors were right out of the Victorian Era at the beginning. Francis X Bushman, William S Hart, and Wallace Reid personified the "all American boy, who knew how to treat a lady right, that being to put her up on a pedestal to admire her from afar. High romance usually concluded with a tender embrace and a long kiss, but sometimes not even that much, William S Hart preferring to kiss his horse, rather than a girl. This chase love was soon replaced by the almost brutal and sensual sexual domination, which Rudolph Valentino personified, and it drove the sexually repressed women of the time almost mad. After the bland Victorian Era, here at last was a man who knew how to fulfill a woman’s secret longing to be treated as a sex slave, and they could not get enough of him or his pictures. He pioneered the way for the new Jazz Age man, who simply took what he wanted. John Gilbert would attempt to revive Valentino’s sex template after he had died, but what worked in Valentino’s day now sounded hokey and ridiculous to the now sophisticated audience of the sound era,

and he was literally laughed off the screen. He was replaced by Clark Gable, who knew how to treat a women rough when she needed it and be tender with her when it later suited him.

In 2 decades the silent film era actors had developed the art of pantomime to its highest level. But as night follows day, the era ended almost quickly as it had begun. In 1927, the Jazz Singer was released and people became hooked on sound. Dialogue made most of the silent area comedians unfunny almost overnight, as their characters had been developed solely on pantomime. Chaplin’s Tramp, Landon’s Little Elf, and Lloyd’s Glasses Character quickly lost their old audiences, as they became unrecognizable with dialogue and failed to gain new audiences because they were now considered passé and hokey. The great remaining romantic leads now sounded ridiculous when their forlorn looks of love were translated into endless repetitions of I love you. Voices too doomed a number of the silent actors to extinction - be it the flat dialogue of Tom Mix or the treble octave of John Gilbert. In many cases the voice did not fit the public perception of the character, and loyal fans deserted them by the thousands. The final nail on the coffin was the Great Depression, which dramatically changed public perceptions about what was funny and romantic in an era of steadily increasing misery and uncertainty for most people.

When the end came a few, like Chaplin, Lloyd, and Hart, retired comfortably on what they had saved from their careers; others were not so lucky. Fairbanks died young from a heart attack, having lost the will to live any longer; Keaton and Gilbert died alcoholics; Mix was virtually decapitated in an auto accident; Navarro was brutally murdered by 2 homosexuals that he had hired; Reid died of drug addiction; Valentino died from septic pneumonia; and Arbuckle’s career ruined by a false rape charge. It was an unhappy end for such exciting and carefree lives that those stars had once lived.

They are all gone now, but what a trail they blazed across the night-time sky. They had entered a new and exciting industry and single-handedly elevated it into an art form. The way they dressed, the way they acted, the way they lived became the object of the greatest interest to their millions of fans, who sought to emulate them in every way they could. For better or worse, they set standards of behavior and expectations of that era. We cannot understand ourselves without understanding how we got here, and this book is written to shed some light on days long gone, when our grandparents had their lives forever altered by the great silent film actors and became part of what we have become today.

Gilbert Maxwell Anderson

Maxwell Aronson

Bronco Billy

Gilbert Maxwell Anderson was born Maxwell Aronson in Little Rock, Arkansas, on March 21, 1880. He was an office clerk in his teens and by age 20 was a cotton buyer. Aronson went to acting school in St Louis but soon after arriving there left for New York. On Broadway, however, the only work he could find was as a dummy in a minstrel show. When he attempted to sing, he was so off key that he was fired on the spot.

Aronson got his start in silent films in 1903, by convincing Edwin Porter, an Edison Company director, that he was an expert horseman back in Missouri. Based on the riding skills he claimed, Aronson was hired, However, when it became apparent that he was unable to ride a horse, Aronson was cast in 3 walking roles in The Great Train Robbery: a train robber walking, a man shot in the back during the robbery, and a greenhorn. The 1-reeler was so well received by the public that Aronson made the decision to make his career in the silent film industry and changed his name to G.M. Anderson, in order to disguise his Jewish origins.

Anderson now went to Selig, who owned several nickelodeons and was desperate for films he could show in them. Convincing Selig that he could make western films fast and cheap, Anderson was sent to Colorado to deliver on his promise. And Anderson did just that, directing and starring in Westerns that were coming of his production line at a clip of 12 a month.

In 1907 Anderson convinced George Spoor to invest in a company with him, in order to provide Spoor’s National Film Renting Company with Western films. Spoor’s $2,500 investment resulted in the start-up of the Essenay Film Manufacturing Company, the name being an anagram of the investors last names S for Spoor and A for Anderson; S and A, or Ess-en-ay. Spoor ran the company in Chicago; Anderson did the writing, directing, and acting; Gilbert Hamilton the camera work; and Ben Turpin was the company’s only full-time actor, who in any spare time he had also did the work of a carpenter, scene painter, prop man, shipping clerk, and janitor.

Anderson based his Western stories around a character he named Bronco Billy, which proved to be extremely popular with the public. Although Anderson traveled throughout the West filming, he did much of his shooting in the Niles Valley, in Alameda County, California, just southeast of San Francisco. Anderson filmed 148 Bronco Billy 1-reelers, which not only made him as the silent film’s first Western star but established the Western as a film genre. By 1910 Anderson was making $50,000 a year, which jumped up to $125,000 a year at the conclusion of his Bronco Billy series.

After the Bronco Billy series, Anderson went on to film another 150 1-reelers for Essenay and became a millionaire in the process. Although now wealthy, Anderson apparently pursued a solitary life, devoid of the normal pleasures most ordinary people enjoyed. Although he was married and had a daughter, he rarely saw them. When he was in San Francisco, he stayed in ordinary hotels. When Filming in the Niles Valley, Charlie Chaplin was shocked when he saw his bedroom room. It contained an old iron bed with a light bulb hanging over it, a dilapidated table, and an old chair. The toilet did not flush and its tank had to filled with a jug of water to make it work.

Anderson tried to move into feature films but his popularity was now on the decline, being edged out by William S Hart, then Tom Mix. In 1916 Anderson sold his interest in Essenay and retired from silent films. He then produced a series of comedy shorts starring Stan Laurel but when that failed to pan out, he lived a solitary life, managing an apartment house in San Francisco from 1920 to 1942.

In 1964, nearly deaf and wheelchair-bound, Anderson entered the Motion Picture Country House in Woodland Hills. In 1970 he moved to the Academy’s Briarwood Convalescent Hospital. The next year he died there, at age 90.

Roscoe Arbuckle

Fatty

Roscoe Conkling Arbuckle was born on March 24, 1887, in Smith Center, Kansas. Since both his parents (William and Mary) were thin and Roscoe was unusually large at birth (16 pounds), in contrast to the other 4 children in the family, his father believed him to be illegitimate. This suspicion was probably groundless, as his wife was a devout Christian. In revenge, however, for his wife’s alleged infidelity, William named the baby after a Republican Senator whom he despised, Roscoe Conkling. Being an alcoholic and believing Roscoe not to be his son, William made life miserable for him whenever he could, frequently denying he was his father and never failing to scold and beat Roscoe for the least offense. Being shy and optimistic about the future, however, Roscoe bore the mistreatment without becoming embittered by it.

Disliking the life of a farmer, William moved his family to Utah in 1888, then to Santa Ana in California, in order to pick crops. There, he purchased a small house which he converted into a hotel. William then took Alan, one of his sons, north with him to San Jose, California, in search of more profitable employment, thereby abandoning his wife and Roscoe. He eventually bought a small hotel there.

Although just 5 years old, Arbuckle did odd jobs around the Santa Ana hotel for his mother and delivered groceries for extra money. He attended school for a while, then dropped out in the 2nd grade without his mother being aware of it (there was no requirement at that time that mandated that children attend school). Arbuckle would then spend his days backstage in one of the neighborhood theaters, watching the various vaudeville acts, usually until he was chased away.

Arbuckle’s mother had suffered chronic medical problems from his birth that likely led to her death 12 years later (in 1899), at age 50. At that time, Arbuckle was 12 years old and weighed 185 pounds. After his mother’s funeral Arbuckle stayed with some relatives. After a few weeks, he was given a basket of food, $2.50 in cash, and a ticket (paid for by some of his mother’s church friends), and put on a train going north. Upon arrival, Arbuckle waited at the train station in a futile hope that his father would pick him up, per Arbuckle's request in a letter he had sent his father. Seen there by Sam Booker, who had purchased his father’s hotel, Arbuckle was told that his father and brother had moved on to parts unknown. Feeling sorry for Arbuckle, Booker offered him room and board at the hotel, in return for him working as a busboy and janitor there.

An 18-year-old Pansy Jones, who was the hotel piano player and singer, heard Arbuckle singing while he was doing his chores and was impressed. She let him sing to the guests on her off-nights and keep the tips. She also encouraged him to do comedy routines (juggling, and tumbling) which, despite his weight, he was surprising adept at. She then suggested that he perform in the local amateur talent show at the city’s popular Empire Theater, which he did. The audience applauded his singing, dancing, and comedy routine, but when Arbuckle overstayed his time slot, a hook came out to take him off stage. Panicking, Arbuckle did a flip into the orchestra pit. The crowd went wild at seeing the huge Arbuckle do such a difficult acrobatic feat and their enthusiasm won the competition for him, the prize being a $5 gold piece.

The next day Arbuckle was told by David Grauman, father of Sid Grauman, who had been staying at the hotel that day, that his performance the previous night had been noticed and a career in the theater was in the offing for him down the road. It was