The Man Who Made the Movies

by Vanda Krefft

  Eventually, inevitably, Fox’s curiosity turned to worry. Would A Daughter of the Gods be ready for a Christmas 1915 release as originally planned? Go over and take a look, Fox instructed J. Gordon Edwards, who was also in Jamaica, directing A Wife’s Sacrifice. The quiet, gentlemanly, forty-eight-year-old Edwards kept such a low profile that some years later Brenon couldn’t remember his visit. Brenon did, however, heatedly recall the appearance slightly later of Fox Film general representative Abraham Carlos, who would soon become head of Fox’s West Coast studio. Showy, self-important, sporting a straw hat and a jaunty smile in his publicity photo, Carlos had little common sense and a tendency to throw his weight around. Brenon, who was constitutionally short on patience—stupidity enraged him “just as a red rag does a bull,” commented a journalist—argued violently with Carlos and ordered him off the set.

  Christmas 1915 came and went. Grievously behind schedule as 1916 began, Brenon sent word to New York that he wouldn’t be finishing anytime soon.

  “All of a sudden they [Brenon and Fox] were fighting like cat and dog,” Annette Kellermann remembered. Kellermann believed the precipitating factor was Brenon’s mother, whom the director had, as usual, brought along on location while leaving his wife, Helen, at home. According to Kellermann, “Herbert Brenon’s worst enemy was his mother. She was one of those mothers. She went everywhere with him and everything that Herbert did was just right.”

  Brenon did have legitimate grievances. It wasn’t easy making the world’s biggest movie on a backward tropical island, especially when almost all of the supposed advantages had turned sour. Balmy weather? Heavy rains plagued the first few days of production in early September 1915. Then, on September 25 and 26, a hurricane hit Jamaica, causing substantial property damage. Abundant natural wonders? On the first day, crew members noticed shark fins racing across the inlet to St. Ann’s Bay. It turned out that the waters were infested with blue-nose, white, gray, tiger, and hammerhead sharks—hundreds of them—some as long as fifteen feet and most weighing between 230 and 350 pounds. To protect the mermaids, who could hardly swim away quickly with their legs bound by their fishtail costumes, Brenon had to hire both a motorboat patrol to explode dynamite at the entrance to the bay and a crew of local men to harpoon any of the more venturesome beasts. As for the relaxed, languid local culture, it was too much so. Stores were open only from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., with a half-day on Wednesday, limiting the availability of supplies to a movie crew that worked every day, usually from 7 a.m. until 11 p.m.

  Most exasperatingly, the cheap native labor force turned out to be no real bargain at all. Many of the factors that made workers cheap also made them unreliable, inefficient, and discontented. Every day, Brenon had to supervise an average of 7,600 employees, most of them drawn from the diverse local population of whites, Hindus, Jamaican natives, and “maroons,” the latter being runaway slaves who inhabited the nearly inaccessible island interior and who had survived largely through a staunch distrust of whites. None of the locals had any film experience, of course. Yet as extras, they were armed with battle-axes, spears, swords, and other weapons. During the first day of filming, forty people were injured and the following day twenty-seven. After that, injuries tapered off to an average of twenty per day. The locals were also less than charmed by this latest foreign invasion—possibly they’d had enough of imperialism of any sort—and began pilfering items, often pieces of their military costumes, from the sets. The losses became so frequent that an incensed Brenon arranged to have Kingston’s chief magistrate hold court every day at 5:30 p.m. on the steps of the Moorish mosque set, with Brenon acting as the prosecutor. Following the end of each day’s session, several culprits usually got tossed into jail, some for offenses as mild as swearing.

  Fox tried hard to heal the breach with Brenon. With so much of his money and reputation staked on A Daughter of the Gods, he really had no choice, and in general he didn’t like to argue because “where there is dissension, there cannot be great success.” So he continued to send money, sometimes as much as $34,000 a week, and every week, a United Fruit Company steamer brought more provisions down to Jamaica. Altogether, Fox Film would ship more than a thousand tons of supplies to A Daughter of the Gods. Fox also continued to indulge Brenon’s flights of fancy. In January 1916, even after the arguments started, he paid $7,000 to have ten camels shipped down to Jamaica on a chartered steamer from their winter quarters in Bridgeport, Connecticut. The camels did five minutes’ worth of work. For another scene, Brenon got one hundred boats with custom-made Oriental sails dyed dark red to harmonize with the landscape. The boats appeared on-screen for eight seconds.

  Alas, Brenon wasn’t willing to be cajoled back into friendship. Signaling his rage, in the spring of 1916 he burned to cinders the $250,000 Moorish “white city” set at Fort Augusta. Fox Film later claimed it had meant to do so all along, but that wasn’t true. “I have never seen much value in a fire of destruction. I always thought that it was a waste of money,” Fox had written to Brenon in November 1915, adding that he hoped to use the scenery for other movies. “It is therefore my positive idea that this city should not be destroyed, and if you have any burning to do, do it somewhere else in some other way to get burning effects.”

  Rather than quelling his anger, the flames seemed to consume Brenon’s last measure of restraint. Literally, he began to advertise his rebellion. While still in Jamaica, in late March and early April 1916, he took out full-page ads in all the major trade papers announcing, “I draw the attention of the exhibitor and the public to my forthcoming production of A Daughter of the Gods.” My forthcoming production? Yes. “The scenes and situations in A Daughter of the Gods, written and produced by me are fully copyrighted . . . Any person infringing upon my rights will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.” Signed, in large type, Herbert Brenon. Beneath his name, in much smaller letters, appeared, “Management William Fox.”

  Management William Fox. For $1 million . . . or at least $800,000.

  Nonetheless, when A Daughter of the Gods finally wrapped up in April 1916, after nearly eight months of filming—the average feature at this time took only four or five weeks to make—Fox still hoped for a reconciliation. Upon Brenon’s return to New York, he went down to the wharf to meet the ship and, after embracing the sunburned director with open arms, told the press that the two of them would spend the next four weeks editing the movie together. In early May, Fox put out word that he was delighted with Brenon’s work. Allegedly, during one private screening, Fox “grasped the director’s hand and then caught him up in an embrace.”

  Under better circumstances, the relationship might have healed. According to mutual friend Randolph Bartlett, “so deeply embedded were the roots of this friendship that the slightest touch of mutual understanding” would have dissolved the differences. But Brenon was exhausted, his nerves worn so raw that on the trip back he had snapped at Kellermann, savagely telling her she was through in movies. Kellermann, “really heartbroken” because she had considered Brenon a friend, would never see him again.

  Beneath his cheery public exterior, Fox was simmering with anger over Brenon’s repeated insubordination and his failure to live up to expectations. Instead of a coherent masterpiece, Brenon had toted back some 223 reels of film. That was more than any filmmaker had ever shot before. It was 223,000 feet, more than forty-two miles, nearly fifty-six hours of film. Even the great The Birth of a Nation hadn’t dared exceed a completed length of fifteen reels. Two hundred twenty-three reels—how in the world was Fox going to find a story in there? Was there even a story in there?

  Fox and Brenon managed to work together editing the footage for about a month. Then, in June 1916, their fragile detente collapsed. Leading a New York Times reporter around the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Brenon discussed paintings and sculpture that had inspired A Daughter of the Gods but gave no thanks at all to Fox. Fox responded by ordering head publicist Fred Warren to cut back significantly on credit for Breno
n. If he meant that as a warning, it was too late. Brenon was already putting together his own $1 million production company, the Herbert Brenon Film Corporation, and in early July he sent Fox a letter giving two weeks’ notice.

  As Brenon explained to the press, he had decided that he could “do better justice to myself by being my own employer.” Surely it was easy to be a movie producer. All one had to do was find a first-class director, but he already was a first-class director, so he was bound to succeed.

  That did it. As Randolph Bartlett would recall, Fox’s ego had now suffered too many “tortures of humiliation,” and so he “retaliated in an entirely human but intensely cruel way.” In a letter that arrived on Brenon’s intended last day, Fox fired him and refused to pay him for the last two weeks. Then he ordered publicist Warren to rewrite all the promotional material for A Daughter of the Gods—about one hundred pieces—eliminating all references to Brenon and wherever possible substituting his own name. Now the movie became William Fox’s “great imaginative dream,” a story he had envisioned in every detail and then had directed via daily telegrams from New York. Herbert Brenon, according to the new version of events, had been a mere errand boy following orders and not a particularly good one at that. Press releases dropped hints about the director’s “spasmodic” and temperamental work habits and suggested that the movie had cost so much because Brenon wasted money extravagantly, often postponing production because he lacked “inspiration.”

  Outraged, publicly suggesting that his former boss was envious of his talent, Brenon sued Fox for $500,000 in damages as well as the missing $1,500 pay. He also asked the court to forbid Fox Film to release A Daughter of the Gods unless his name appeared as writer and director. This was war. Brenon began to plunder Fox Film’s workforce, hiring away all the department heads who had worked on A Daughter of the Gods.

  Poor Herbert Brenon. If he’d thought to check his contract, he would have remembered that he didn’t have a contract, only that handshake deal whereby Fox had agreed to pay him $750 a week to direct the movie. Fox stood by quietly for eleven days until a New York Supreme Court judge issued his ruling, which said what Fox knew it was going to say: in the absence of a written contract to prove otherwise, Fox had no obligation to provide publicity for Brenon. Fox’s letters to Brenon promising publicity were just that, letters, with no legal force. Now the hapless Brenon had to stand by and watch as Fox began a $300,000 advertising campaign that mentioned his name nowhere.

  The invitation-only premiere of A Daughter of the Gods took place on October 17, 1916, at the 1,370-seat Lyric Theatre on Forty-Second Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, a Shubert Brothers venue that usually presented plays. The event might have reminded Fox and Brenon of how much they’d foolishly thrown away. They might have stood together on the sidewalk, under the huge electric sign depicting Kellermann’s diving figure, greeting guests such as Theda Bara, Norma Talmadge, Thomas Dixon, William Randolph Hearst, Adolph Zukor, Jesse Lasky, Diamond Jim Brady, and Ethel Barrymore. They might have nodded knowingly—told you so—as they listened to the throng of hopefuls pleading unsuccessfully at the box office to buy standing room tickets. And surely both would have gloried in the $10,000 in refurbishments that Fox had paid for at the Lyric: the curved colonnade of Greek pillars, topped by Corinthian capitals, that flanked both sides of the stage; the new curtain showing a classical landscape, the orchestra pit lowered and doubled in size, the new screen and new projectors, and the lobby walls decorated with oil paintings of scenes from the movie.

  Instead, hostility scarred the evening. Reportedly wearing a false beard, the uninvited Brenon sneaked into a second-row seat. Although Fox had cooled down enough to give him screen credit as director, he hadn’t been able to resist taking a few more stabs by failing to acknowledge Brenon as the author and by listing J. Gordon Edwards as the movie’s “supervising director.”

  Still, edited down to ten reels that ran for two and a half hours with an intermission, A Daughter of the Gods transcended all the rancor of its making. “Let us return to our mother’s knee tonight,” the introductory title card read, “and be as little children to enter a heaven of rich enjoyment.” Out of Brenon’s 223 reels, Fox and his film editors had fashioned a story about the beautiful Anitia (Kellermann) and the handsome, noble prince Omar (William Shay), who, having been separated by premature death in their former life as a canary and a sparrow, try to redeem their lost promise of love.

  Naturally, for a Fox movie, the chief villain is the young man’s father, the “Mad Sultan,” who buys the horrified Anitia for his harem and tries to harass her into submission. Realizing he has no chance with Anitia as long as his son is alive, the Sultan chains Omar to a rock in the sea and leaves him to die. Anitia manages to escape captivity by diving off a 103-foot tower and then raises an army to liberate the oppressed kingdom. In the meantime, Omar has been freed and mistakes Anitia’s soldiers for an invading enemy. With their visors down, Anitia and Omar battle one another and, echoing their tragic past-life destiny, Omar kills Anitia. At least that was the official plot summary. It’s impossible to tell exactly what showed up on the screen because no known copy of A Daughter of the Gods remains, and reviewers at the time, baffled by what one described as an “almost kaleidoscopic swiftness” of the scenes, gave widely divergent accounts. Adding to the confusion, Fox Film released several versions of the movie.

  In any case, plot was hardly the point. Far more important was the movie’s stunning cascade of images: Anitia, reincarnated in human form by a fairy queen of the sea and carried to shore on a giant shell by mermaids; Anitia and the gnomes playing in a pool of water on a swing hung from the sky; a graceful “Nocturne Dance” of sea nymphs, their figures silhouetted against a blazing sunset and reflected in the shimmering water; Anitia narrowly escaping the jaws of a huge shark—apparently a real shark, its fin cutting the water just behind her; long shots of Anitia’s twelve hundred warriors riding on horseback toward the city, and then that final giant inferno, majestic in its horrific beauty, that destroys the White City, with buildings collapsing amid a swirl of smoke and flames.

  Arrogant, obstreperous, and profligate, Brenon had done what Fox had asked. He had made a groundbreaking masterpiece. In an era when many directors relied heavily on indoor scenes, Brenon had filmed A Daughter of the Gods almost entirely outdoors, planting his six cameras right in the middle of nature’s wild, insistent, overmastering beauty. Brenon boasted, “What is going to smash you in the face when you see my picture is my beautiful natural setting.” Waves repeatedly splashed up over the camera lens. Shots lingered on trees swaying in the wind, hair tossed around a woman’s face, the surf breaking on the shore, painterly sunsets and billowing clouds. Some scenes had even been tinted to create the impression of natural color. Yet Brenon had also used motion picture technology to reveal the truths hidden behind appearances—to show that however things seemed, they might yet be otherwise through imagination. In “perfectly done” dissolves and double exposures, crocodiles transmuted into swans, and Anitia’s troops, who had started out their march to the Sultan’s city as a crowd of gnomes, changed along the way into strong young men on sleek, handsome horses. The camera saw more clearly than the unaided eye, saw and told of beauty evident but overlooked, beauty latent and trembling for discovery.

  At the Lyric, the first-night audience responded with frequent gasps of awe and outbreaks of applause. Critics likewise were overwhelmed by the movie’s “stupendous . . . pageantry” and “shower of magic.” Moving Picture World wrote, “We are beguiled, we are bewitched, we lose the perception of time.” The New York Journal added, “Its stupendousness is almost appalling.”

  Such acclaim did nothing to soften relations between Fox and Brenon. For his part, Fox didn’t need Brenon anymore now that the movie was finished and needed only to be sold. He knew he could do that better than anyone else. For the first six weeks or so, he played A Daughter of the Gods only at the Lyric and at one theater apiec
e in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. This strategy was common in early motion picture history. By compressing and focusing demand for a film, producers aimed to generate success stories that would motivate exhibitors nationwide to book it. In December 1916, two months after the premiere—with the Lyric still taking in an average of $15,000 per week—Fox began to roll out the movie to the rest of the country in a style reminiscent of The Birth of a Nation. Except that Fox did it more grandly: while The Birth of a Nation had had only twenty-five touring companies, Daughter had forty, each one consisting of a manager, two publicists, a conductor and musicians, and a stage crew. Many theaters treated the movie’s arrival as a special event, accepting advance seat reservations and charging up to two dollars per seat—even though the average movie ticket nationwide cost about ten-and-a-half cents, with the usual highest price being twenty-five cents.

  Fox’s promotional campaign was equally aggressive. Motion Picture News called A Daughter of the Gods “probably one of the best advertised pictures in America.” Many ads featured Kellermann’s nude figure, artfully draped by her long dark hair, and touted her figure as the perfect female body. Lobby displays flaunted images of her in her then-revolutionary one-piece bathing suit. Aiming also for the family trade, Fox insisted that A Daughter of the Gods was a “clean and refined spectacle.” He said, “I believe every mother in the world will wish her sons and daughters to see the picture . . . It will make boys develop manliness and teach girls to acquire and hold their beauty.”