by Ellen Dawson
into a respectable “ethical role model” (Smith 58, 134, 149). That transformation could involve an unexpected love interest, as in Broncho Billy and the Girl (April 1912) and Broncho Billy’s Escapade (August 1912); a heroic sacrifice in which he is fatally wounded, as in Broncho Billy’s Last Hold-Up (August 1912); or a confession of guilt, before dying, to a woman whose husband he had long ago killed, as in The Reward for Broncho Billy (December 1912). By incorporating Christian themes of moral uplift, self-sacrifice, and redemption—most explicitly expressed in Broncho Billy’s Bible (June 1912)—the films often evoked the ideals of evangelical Protestantism (Smith 145–46). Yet “Broncho Billy” as a character was never entirely fixed or stable. In Broncho Billy’s Narrow Escape (July 1912), for instance, he is a ranch hand falsely accused of stealing a horse, and it is the ranch owner’s daughter who has to “make a hard ride”—ending with her successful return framed by a silhouetted doorway, not unlike a much later famous shot in John Ford’s The Searchers (1956)—to save him at the last moment from being lynched (“Critical Reviews,” New York Morning Telegraph, 14 July 1912, 4:2, 4). An even more surprising variation on his usual character occurs in A Wife of the Hills (July 1912), where Anderson plays an outlaw whose own wife and pal conspire to get him arrested and jailed. He escapes, intending to take revenge on his unfaithful wife and her lover, and a posse
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pursues him to the illicit couple’s isolated cabin. In the gunfight that ensues outside the cabin, a stray shot from the posse strikes the lover, who dies in the woman’s arms. Once again looking through a window, Anderson now smiles in gratification and gladly gives himself up to the posse.
Although never strictly a parent, “Broncho Billy” sometimes served as a surrogate father figure to one or more children. In Broncho Billy’s Gratitude (June 1912), for instance, he is wounded and tended by a woman whose young daughter he befriends. Later the woman’s estranged husband kidnaps the girl and flees in a stagecoach; when Billy holds up the coach, he discovers the girl and returns her to her mother; his good deed, however, does not keep him from being arrested by a posse. This ingratiating, protective attitude toward children, especially girls, also affected the character’s actions in Broncho Billy’s Heart (November 1912), where a family man steals a horse for his covered wagon and is saved from arrest when Billy exchanges his own horse for the one stolen and manages surreptitiously to return it to the owner, and in Broncho Billy’s Ward (February 1913), where he agrees to serve as the guardian for a dying friend’s young daughter and later consents to her request to marry, although he himself has come to love her. Arguably, this behavior made “Broncho Billy” an appealing figure to audiences that could include mothers as well as children, both boys and girls. Although the films may have had Anderson’s character repeatedly appear at the outset as “a stoic, isolated male,” they consistently embraced
“traditional, middle-class ideals of morality, manhood, and character”
(Smith 134, 149, 151–52). As immigrant boys like Harry Golden would later admit, Broncho Billy taught them “New World” attitudes and instilled in them their “first ideals of American manhood” (Levin 67).
That Essanay, and probably Anderson himself, promoted “Broncho Billy” as a “character-creation” may have had special significance within the U.S. film industry, for Anderson’s recurring character was unique and uniquely popular in 1911–1912. This was the first and most successful American attempt to create in motion pictures what was then assumed as a defining characteristic of print fiction and stage plays: a “character” with at least a relative sense of psychological, emotional, and moral “depth,” and one that was also “original” and did not depend on a prior literary antecedent, adapted or translated onto film. In this case, of course, “originality” came from Anderson himself as a “picture personality”: his embodiment onscreen was necessary for “Broncho Billy” to exist and to circulate as a recurring fictional character to admire and even emulate. At the same time, however, as a serial figure, “Broncho Billy” was not unlike Buffalo Bill, Deadwood Dick, Jesse James, Young Wild West, and others on whom
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earlier dime novel series had been constructed. The name functioned much like a brand that could guarantee repeated spectatorial satisfaction. In
“Broncho Billy,” therefore, Anderson created (he also wrote many of the scripts) a remarkable figure that served to redefine what would keep audiences returning to motion picture theaters, regularly and frequently. The appeal would come not so much from company trademarks, as before, but from a series of film stories that involved a single recurring character (already characteristic of French comic films) within the popular “American subject” of the western or, more specifically, the cowboy picture. And the appeal would come equally from a single popular “picture personality,” G. M.
Anderson, who, along with half a dozen others, played such a crucial role in establishing the nascent movie star system.
✩★
✩★
✩★
✩★
✩ “Star Performers” on Parade
It is notoriously difficult to date the beginnings of public interest in motion picture actors, but traces of it can be found at least by early 1910. In February of that year, in his “On the Screen” column in Moving Picture World, Thomas Bedding (Lux Graphicus) noted what he had once predicted, the arrival of “star performers”: “It is common talk in moving picture circles now that the success of a particular film or of a particular company’s films are traceable to one or two performers. . . . The outcome of all this of course is that the public interest in the picture heightens on account of its personalities” (5 February 1910, 167). Three months later, the writer of another column, “Observations by Our Man About Town,” was stunned to realize that “the interest the public has taken in the personality of many of the picture players is astonishing. . . . Managers all over the country are begging the manufacturers to furnish them with photographs of their players so that they may be displayed in the lobbies of their theaters, and the people who are craving to see and meet the originals may be in a measure consoled” ( Moving Picture World, 21 May 1910, 825).
Although the trade press initially was far from certain that “star performers” would benefit its principal priority—“elevating” motion pictures—
both the World and New York Dramatic Mirror took hesitant steps to satisfy this public craving by running a few photo stories of what it decided were favorite
“picture personalities.” Local newspapers showed far less hesitancy, however, as the early stories that touted Anderson’s popularity suggest. Indeed, daily newspapers arguably took the lead in responding to the public craving for “picture personalities,” ensuring that newspapers would play a crucial role in what was fast becoming a multimedia system of movie stardom.
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As is well known, Florence Lawrence, the former “Biograph Girl” (and teenage vaudeville performer), was the first to receive much attention, largely due to an infamous publicity campaign engineered by Carl Laemmle for the independent film company, IMP (deCordova 56–61; Bowser 112–13). That campaign included several “events,” from a faked news story of Lawrence’s death in an auto accident—quickly picked up and debunked even in small-town newspapers—to her surprise visit to St. Louis in late March (see, for instance, “Rumor Hands a Hot One,” Iowa City Press, 8
March 1910, 8). The latter was especially significant in that Lawrence was explicitly labeled a “film star” in an extensive series of articles, with accompanying photos, in the St. Louis Times. Advance stories prepared the paper’s readers for the special two-day appearance of “the girl with a thousand faces” (IMP’s own hyperbolic phrase); thousands of fans greeted her with an ovation when she arrived by train (the reception allegedly rivaled that for either Commodore Perry or President Taft); and hundreds heard he
r speak at the Gem Theater, where she signed photographs for up to “500
women.” At the same time, the Empress Theater in downtown Washington, D.C., was promoting Lawrence to the level of a stage actor in IMP’s Mother Love (March 1910), naming her “The Maude Adams of Moving Pictures”
(Empress Theater ad, Washington Post, 21 March 1910, 4). In early May, an unusually prominent photo story in the Des Moines News featured Lawrence as the most popular of four female “star performers,” with this ditty as an epigraph: “This is the girl of the wondrous faces, / Whom you meet in a hundred places; / Each time she told a story to you, / Then vanished like magic when it was through” (“On the Moving Picture Stage: Have You Seen These Faces?” 6 May 1910, 16). As a sign of her continuing popularity with audiences over the next few years—from the time she left IMP for Lubin and then, in 1912, founded her own company, Victor Films, which released through Universal—theater managers across the country consistently cited Lawrence in their newspaper ads, often placing her name above the title of any film in which she was starring—and in larger typeface. As late as 1913, she still was such a fan favorite that she placed fifth in Photoplay Magazine’s
“Great Popularity Contest” (July 1913, 61).
Laemmle’s campaign had the effect (probably intended) of boosting the status of his and other “independent” companies, and Vitagraph, another leading MPPC firm, quickly countered by mounting its own promotion of the “Vitagraph Girl,” Florence Turner. That promotion included personal appearances in the New York City area (not far from the company’s studio in Brooklyn), and Vitagraph even commissioned a special “waltz song” for Turner who would perform it herself to “wild applause”—and the sheet
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Florence Lawrence,
Motion Picture Story Magazine,
March 1911.
music cover was printed in Film Index (“Vitagraph Notes,” Moving Picture World, 2 April 1910, 515; “A Vitagraph Night for the Vitagraph Girl,” Film Index, 23 April 1910, 3; “The Vitagraph Girl,” New York Dramatic Mirror, 23
April 1910, 20; and “Vitagraph Girl Feted,” Moving Picture World, 23 April 1910, 644). Both the World and the Mirror featured Turner in their first photo stories that summer, the one as a “picture personality” but the other, perhaps more boldly, as a “motion picture star” (“Picture Personalities. Miss Florence E. Turner: The Vitagraph Girl,” Moving Picture World, 23 July 1910, 187–88; “A Motion Picture Star,” New York Dramatic Mirror, 18 June 1910, 17). Reading either magazine, exhibitors would have learned that Turner was a “blend of nationalities” (Spanish, Italian, Scottish, and American),
“petite, dark, slender, vivacious, full of life and go, just as we see her on the
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Florence Turner,
Motion Picture Story Magazine,
July 1911.
stage [screen],” and that she had come to Vitagraph while rehearsing the role of an Italian street gamine for the European tour of an Italian pantomime company. With fan letters pouring into the company, she agreed to give out photos of herself at public appearances (Bowser 113). Much like Lawrence, and unlike Anderson (by 1911), Turner played a wide range of roles—“pathetic, grotesque, humorous, sentimental”—from The New Stenographer and A Tale of Two Cities (both February 1911) to Auld Lang Syne (July 1911) and Cherry Blossoms (August 1911). Intriguingly, when the Newspaper Enterprise Syndicate began to include “picture personalities” in the
“daily birthday feature” it released to newspapers in early 1911, Turner’s photo story was one of the few actually printed in papers from Fort Wayne, Indiana, to San Antonio, Texas (“Florence Turner in Notable Gallery,” Moving Picture World, 14 January 1911, 73; “Our Daily Birthday Party,” Fort Wayne Daily News, 6 January 1911, 14; San Antonio Light and Gazette, 6 January 1911, 8). Much like Lawrence, she too would later draw on her popularity as a star to found her own company, Turner Films, but in England, where she produced half a dozen films before the outbreak of World War I.
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The tipping point that convinced the film industry to embrace and exploit the emerging star system probably came during the first six or eight months of 1911. The publication of Motion Picture Story Magazine early that year certainly was influential because, from its initial appearance, each month’s issue came with full-page photographs of the “picture players”—
among the first were both Lawrence and Turner (“Personalities of the Picture Players,” March 1911, 1–6, 57). But there were other signs of intense audience demand. Beginning in February, letters to “The Spectator” in the New York Dramatic Mirror increasingly asked to know more about the actors, and one fan listed his favorites, all but two of them women: Florence Lawrence, Mary Fuller, Marion Leonard, Pearl White, Gene Gauntier, and the unnamed Mary Pickford (1 February 1911, 30). In late March, Motography even included a short piece titled “The Value of Stars”: “They constitute one of the most valuable assets in the film maker’s treasury. . . . It is doubt-ful if the film-maker has any other resource so potent to attract the public”
(25 March 1911, 322). From then on, the trade press cooperated with manufacturers to invest in “picture personalities” for promotional purposes.
Motion Picture Story Magazine expanded what was called its “Gallery of Picture Players” photos to a dozen per month. The New York Dramatic Mirror began printing up to half a dozen smaller publicity photos of such picture players, including brief stories on these “subjects of illustration.”3 In April, the second story on G. M. Anderson described him as “known to thousands of picture lovers, with whom he is a favorite, as may be seen by the many inquiries regarding him from MIRROR readers” (“Subjects of Illustration,” 26
April 1911, 28–29). Exhibitors perhaps even more quickly saw the advantage of naming favorite “picture personalities” in their local ads. In early January, in Sandusky, Ohio, for instance, the Theatorium urged its clientele: “Don’t Miss Seeing MISS MARY PICKFORD, formerly the Biograph Girl but now an IMP” ( Sandusky Star-Journal, 10 January 1911, 6). About the same time, in Bismarck, North Dakota, the Gem featured The Gray of the Dawn, “in which Marion Leonard, the star performer of all companies, plays probably her heaviest role” ( Bismarck Daily Tribune, 3 January 1911, 4). A month later, in Hawarden, Iowa, the Electric Theatre placed a puzzling bit of newspaper copy for Rachel, a Kalem “melodrama with a strong appeal to the Jews of America, with Miss Alice Joyce in the title role” ( Hawarden Independent, 23 February 1911, 4).
The second of the three women who became so well known as the Biograph Girl, Marion Leonard (much like Lawrence) successfully advanced her career in late 1910 by moving to an independent company, Reliance, and then a year later founded her own production company, Gem Motion
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Pictures. Throughout much of 1911, exhibitors consistently used Reliance’s publicity material to alert their audiences to Leonard’s appearances and the range of characters she played. In New Castle, Pennsylvania, Herbold’s Acme noted that The Little Avenger “afforded Miss Marion Leonard, in the character of an unfortunate girl whom the policeman’s wife befriended and took her home when arrested, an opportunity to do some clever acting” ( New Castle News, 24 February 1911, 9). In Butte, Montana, the Orion Theater informed
“admirers of Marion Leonard” that they could see her one evening in
“another of those beautiful Reliance productions called Till Death Do Us Part”
( Anaconda Standard, 7 April 1911, 9). In Oshkosh, Wisconsin, “the Colonial’s favorite actress” starred in The Gloved Hand as a woman who “by indomitable will, ris[es] from the sordid dance halls of a western mining town to a state of dramatic bliss as the wife of a wealthy man” ( Daily Northwestern, 8 April 1911, 11). In Benton Harbor, Michigan, the Bell Opera House placed her name above the title of its featured film, The Seal of Time ( News-Palladiu
m, 30
April 1912, 8). The trade press ads for Gem productions, Richard deCordova rightly argues, were “the most clever of the period”: one framed a photo of Leonard’s face in a diamond ring, with the caption that she was engaged; another was a full-page letter from Leonard, announcing that she indeed was engaged—to Gem (deCordova 68–69). Internal conflicts at the Sales Company, the only independent distributor at the time, apparently prevented the Gem productions from being released until they were sold to the Rex company (Mahar 63). By February 1912, in Fort Wayne, the Lyric could announce the “reappearance,” in Under Her Wing, of that “most popular motion picture leading woman . . . Marion Leonard of the Rex-Gem pictures”
( Fort Wayne Sentinel, 1 February 1912, 12). Although Leonard herself would abandon filmmaking for several years, she remained a favorite even after Universal took over distribution of Rex films: in July, in Hamilton, the Grand, promoting A Mother Heart, described her as “the greatest of moving picture actresses” (“Amusements,” Hamilton Evening Journal, 26 July 1912, 5).
Among the “Famous Kalem Beauties,” there were two that the firm particularly promoted (“Ten Famous Kalem Beauties,” New York Dramatic Mirror, 31 January 1912, 53). The writer, director, and actor Gene Gauntier was best known early on as the “Kalem Girl” and for her “girl spy” roles in Kalem’s Civil War films, but she gained even more prominence in 1911–1912 when she took a production unit to Ireland and then Egypt to make heavily publicized “Irish features” from Arrah-Na-Pogue (November 1911) to You Remember Ellen (March 1912) and “exotic” films such as A Tragedy of the Desert (July 1912) (Orpheum ad, Titusville Herald, 6 April 1912, 5; Opera House ad, Mansfield News, 25 May 1912, 16; Jewel ad, Hamilton
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Evening Journal, 5 June 1912, 8).4 Kalem’s most popular “picture personality,” however, was a former “Gibson Girl,” Alice Joyce (“Alice Joyce, Kalem Beauty, Will Appear in Higher Class Photoplays,” Fresno Morning Republican, 27 September 1912, 9). As early as March 1911, “a beautiful photogravure, hand-colored in France,” of Joyce was on offer to exhibitors—and, in turn, fans—and by the summer she was being heralded as a “bright little star”