Bringing Essanay’s “Special Eastern” to Ithaca

This chapter describes Ted Wharton's brief stay in Ithaca, wherein he shot Football Days at Cornell (1912), the picture that would prove to be a turning point in his career. Convinced that the town would be an ideal location for a full season of summer shooting, he pressed George K. Spoor, cofounder of Essanay, to allow him to establish a temporary Ithaca studio facility. Spoor agreed to authorize the venture, and in May of 1913, Ted returned to Ithaca with the “Special Eastern,” a complete company of some twenty crew members and photoplayers, including the studio's biggest star, Francis X. Bushman, and his frequent leading lady Beverly Bayne. The Hermit of Lonely Gulch was the first of the pictures the “Special Eastern” would produce that season, and it proved to be an excellent start. Other pictures produced that season include Sunlight, For Old Time's Sake, A Woman Scorned, Tony the Fiddler, and Dear Old Girl. The chapter then considers assistant director Archer MacMackin, who—working under Ted's close supervision—kept himself and the company busy throughout the summer with rehearsals and production. The Toll of the Marshes would be the last picture filmed by Ted's Essanay “Special Eastern.” After the company decided against opening a permanent eastern studio, Ted terminated his contractual association with Essanay and moved to Ithaca to form his own independent production company.

Taking a Parallel Path

This chapter discusses how Leo Wharton got into the film industry. Leo's earliest documented stage appearance was in 1893, in the play The Fairies' Well. After a few years of itinerant acting, Leo was able to secure steadier employment at the Hopkins Grand Opera in Saint Louis, where his brother Ted was already performing. As part of Colonel Hopkins's theatrical company, Leo assumed various stage roles in the popular daylong “continuous performance” programs that Hopkins pioneered, which combined live drama and between-the-acts vaudeville. Leo's first known (and first credited) film appearance was in the title role of Lincoln in Abraham Lincoln's Clemency (1910), a photoplay produced by Ted Wharton for Pathé. The role not only garnered good reviews for his sympathetic performance and even for his resemblance to the revered figure whom he was portraying; it also led to an offer as a director for Pathé, the studio for which Ted was then working. There, Leo began directing similar shorts, such as the period historical drama The Rival Brothers' Patriotism (1911). Since early movie audiences seemed especially fond of marital comedies, Leo produced several shorts in 1913 that revolved around wedding-day complications. While these and other short pictures that Leo produced for Pathé were often predictable in their plotting and formulaic in their execution, they were nonetheless popular with audiences and profitable for Pathé. Moreover, they established his reputation in the industry.

Introduction

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the serial motion picture. Typically two-reel action-packed films that ran for ten, fifteen, or more installments, serials often ended with a cliffhanger and a promise “to be continued next week.” Episodically structured and suspensefully plotted, they not only served as the precursors of the popular installment dramas and crime procedurals that have become staples of modern network and cable television programming; they also anticipated the extended incremental storytelling methods and “thrilling episodes of inescapable fatality and hair-breath escapes” that later filmmakers would exploit in commercial blockbusters such as the Star Wars series and the Indiana Jones and Marvel movie franchises. Moreover, serials helped to forge a strong link between the print and the film industries. The chapter then traces the evolution of the serial form, looking at an early twelve-part Edison production, What Happened to Mary, whose first installment was released on July 26, 1912. It also describes the serial The Perils of Pauline (released beginning March 23, 1914), which not only heightened interest in the genre; it also immortalized its star, Pearl White, and became the most famous of all the early chapter plays. However, it was the pioneering serials produced by filmmakers Ted and Leo Wharton that would have the most profound and sustained impact on the genre.