The Grove Book of Hollywood

Grove Press

Chapter One

Eluding the Patent Agents

Fred J. Balshofer
from Fred J. Balshofer and Arthur C. Miller, One Reel a Week (1976)

Fred J. Balshofer was a stereoscopic-slide photographer who joined the Lubin ManufacturingCompany in Philadelphia in 1905. He subsequently became a producer and found himself on thereceiving end of a lawsuit from the Edison-led trust, the Motion Picture Patents Company. In1908 he founded the Crescent Film Company and thereafter was joined by Adam Kessel, anex-bookmaker, and Charles O. Bauman, a former streetcar conductor, in the New York PictureCompany, which set up the subsidiary companies Bison and Keystone. He retired from filmproduction soon after sound came in.

After a long weary ride of four nights and five days our small company, consisting ofEvelyn Graham, Charles French and his wife, Charles Inslee, J. Barney Sherry, YoungDeer and his wife Red Wing, Bill Edwards (the prop man), Maxwell Smith, who camein Arthur Miller's place, and I, arrived in Los Angeles the day after Thanksgiving,November, 1909.

    We were among the first of the moving picture companies to begin building a movingpicture center in California. Los Angeles at that time was a sprawling city of approximately250,000 residents, many of whom were Spanish-speaking. Their customs and gentleway of life immediately won my admiration and friendship.

    In 1909, there was darn little paper money to be had. It was so scarce, in fact, thatwhen I went to the Security Bank on Spring Street, in the heart of the city, and depositedtwo thousand dollars in twenty, fifty, and one hundred-dollar bills to the account of theNew York Motion Picture Company, the clerks eyed me as though I had held up atrain. When I asked the teller to change a twenty-dollar bill for ones, he handed me`cartwheels.' `Bills,' I said. He shook his head but managed to find five one-dollar bills,and I was obliged to take the remainder in silver dollars.

    Just about the first to come to California to make movies, I believe, was ColonelWilliam (Bill) Selig, who sent Francis Boggs, his ace director, and a few actors to LosAngeles in the fall of 1907 to establish a studio of sorts in a former Chinese laundry onOlive Street not far from the center of the city. In January, 1910, the Biograph companysent a unit headed by D. W. Griffith with Mary Pickford, Henry B. Walthall, and BillyBitzer, to name a few, out to Los Angeles. They established a studio in a vacant carbarnat Georgia and Pico streets, on the southwest side of the city. Gilbert M. Anderson(real name Aaronson), a six-foot rugged individual of about thirty-five, who made thecharacter of Bronco Billy famous, was George K. Spoor's partner in the Essanay FilmManufacturing Company and was making western pictures starring himself in Niles,California, nearly four hundred and fifty miles north of Los Angeles.

    Like the Biograph, we intended to return to New York in the spring, so we set up atemporary studio in a former grocery and feed store that had a large barn and some oldshacks on a fenced-in plot of ground on Alessandro Street, which was a hilly, sparselysettled section some three miles west of Los Angeles. We converted the store and shacksinto dressing-rooms for our players and put up a small outdoor stage where we couldshoot our interiors. The rented property included a small house across the street that Iused as an office and as a place to lock up the camera equipment. There also was enoughspace for a small laboratory to develop the daily negatives, which I had to do myselfuntil I trained a former cook from the Alexandria Hotel.

    I would cut the negative scene by scene, leaving about six inches extra at each end,and number them, starting with scene one, two, and so on; the main, sub-, and spokentitles I wrote and sent with the developed picture negative to be photographed in ourlaboratory in Brooklyn. In those days, the negative of a complete reel or picture wasnot joined in one roll for printing; certain scenes were selected to be toned or tinteddifferent colors, so these scenes had to be printed in separate rolls and handled onseparate drums. The girls who assembled the positive prints worked at a bench onwhich there was a row of numbered wooden pegs. The joiners, as they were called, cutthe individual scenes from each roll, and the number of a particular scene was placedon the corresponding numbered peg. On the rewinder a piece of the leader was putfirst, then the main and subtitle, followed by scene one, two, and so on, including thedescriptive and spoken titles. The finished reel or picture had a splice at the beginningand end of each scene and title. As there were no machines or even guides to makesplices, the accuracy of the splice depended upon the skill of the joiner. The aboveseems fantastic compared with modern film processing. Today the full reel of a picturehas hardly a splice.

    Col. William Selig had come to Los Angeles to avoid the wintry blasts of Chicagoand had intended to return in the spring. Instead, he decided to stay. Selig was a short,heavyset man about forty who had been a traveling salesman and magician before heorganized his moving picture company in Chicago in 1897. Judging by the looks of hisnew studio in California it was obvious that he was making money hand over fist. Hisstudio in Edendale covered a city block on Alessandro Street and was half a block ormore wide, surrounded by a high, vine-clad wall. Huge wrought-iron gates of Spanishdesign formed the entrance to the studio, and just beyond the gates was a lush tropicalgarden.

    It was here that such coming stars as Tom Santschi, Hobart Bosworth, WilliamFarnum, and Robert Leonard, among others, played in his pictures. Late in the summerof 1910 Francis Boggs, top director for Selig, was shot to death in the studio garden bya Japanese gardener who went berserk. When Selig attempted to take the gun awayfrom the gardener, he was shot in the arm. Selig might have been fatally wounded hadnot others arrived in time to overpower the gun-brandishing Japanese, who, for noapparent reason, was all for killing Selig too.

    As far as I know, there is no actual record of who was the first to photograph amovie scene in Hollywood. Dave Horsley has the distinction of being the first personto establish a studio when he took over a former tavern on the corner of SunsetBoulevard and Gower Street in the fall of 191l. As early as January, 1910, however, wephotographed scenes around Hollywood, riding our horses from the studio in Edendaleto the picturesque hills over the winding roads. There were some adobe buildings on afair-sized ranch just west of LaBrea Avenue and Hollywood Boulevard where wephotographed many horse chases, gun battles, stagecoach holdups and other similarscenes for our Bison pictures before we discovered Griffith Park. Griffith Park was abeautiful place with tree-covered hills, ideal for western pictures. It was only a few milesfrom our studio, and many times we set up an Indian village and left it there for daysat a time in the section now known as Griffith Park golf course.

    We were doing fine in California and hadn't yet seen McCoy or any of his henchmenso we decided to stay. We began to convert our temporary studio into a...