11/22/22
Newletter166
The Crack of Dawn
During the first two decades of movies, 1890-1910, there were no movie stars. In fact, actors were not even given credit. The producers believed that if the public knew the actor’s names, they might grow fond of one of them, then the actor would have a stronger bargaining position. Most movie actors were making about $20 a week. Well, the public made this decision in spite of the producers. There was an actress who appeared in many films for the Biograph Company, particularly those of director, D.W. Griffith, that the audience liked so much that they named her “The Biograph Girl,” a flocked to see her films. She was a Canadian actress named Florence Lawrence. Since Biograph wouldn't pay her decently or give her credit, in 1909 she moved to Independent Motion Pictures (IMP), which would soon become Universal, where she got both credit and more money, and thus the star system had begun.
When Florence Lawrence left Biograph, she recommended her young Canadian friend to replace her. The fourteen-year-old actress who stepped in was Mary Pickford.
The next really well-known movie star was Charlie Chaplin, who basically exploded on the scene in 1915. By 1916 Chaplin was not only the most famous person in the world, but the highest-paid person in the U.S. In the course of one year, Chaplin went from $50 a week to a $1 million, one-year contract. By 1918 Chaplin owned his own studio, which still stands. For many years it was A&M Records and is now Jim Henson Productions.
Between 1915-1921 many movie stars came into being: Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, Gloria Swanson, Buster Keaton, Lillian and Dorothy Gish, and the now-forgotten, Wallace Reid, the original “bad boy” of Hollywood. Wallace Reid was a phenomenon. Not only was he handsome, charming and athletic, he wrote, produced and directed many of his films. In 1919 Reid began making a series of exciting, daredevil auto racing movies that were huge: The Roaring Road (1919), Double Speed (1920), Excuse My Dust (1920), and Too Much Speed (1921). Also in 1919, Reid was injured in a train wreck and began taking morphine for the pain, and he seems to have really liked it. And I think he was the guy who brought the morphine/heroin culture into Hollywood. But as heroin and morphine will often do, Wallace Reid was dead by 1923 at the age of 31. His wild antics led directly to the creation of the first censorship board, run by the former postmaster, Will Hayes. And thus, the Hayes Code came into being, and all of that silly shit of kisses couldn’t be longer than two seconds, and married adults slept in separate beds began.
Interestingly, I think, in this post-WWI period, as 1920s and the Jazz Age was just beginning, a foreign, darker, more menacing, and sexier, leading man became popular, in the form of Sessue Hayakawa from Japan, and Rudolph Valentino from Italy. Hayakawa’s star burned very bright for a very short time, until he reemerged 35 years later in one of my favorite films, The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957).
However, the first real movie star was Rudolph Valentino (real name, Rodolfo Pietro Filiberto Raffaello Guglielmi di Valentina d'Antonguolla). When Valentino appeared in The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921) as a swarthy gaucho, which has a big Tango dance number, the women of the world went insane. Valentino immediately followed with the ridiculous, extremely low-budget film, The Sheik (1921), where he plays an oversexed Arab, and he was a phenomenon. For the next five years, he had a completely unspectacular career in a line of second-rate movies, culminating with the slightly improved, higher-budget, Son of the Sheik (1926). It was a gigantic success. Rudolph Valentino could not be hotter.
On August 18, 1926, as Valentino crossed the lobby of the Ambassador Hotel in NY, he collapsed with a gastric ulcer, which led to peritonitis. He died on August 23, 1926, and the world went into mourning. Hundreds of thousands of people flooded the streets of Manhattan for the funeral. The whole world stopped when Rudolph Valentino was laid to rest. He wasn’t really much of an actor, he was a pretty good dancer, he was ridiculously handsome, and he was the personification of a Move Star. He was 31 years old.
And on that happy note, have a fine day.