Ladies and gentlemen, the following motion picture is about filmmaking, one of the most exciting chapters of the very earliest years, before Hollywood became the motion picture film capital of the United States.
This is the story of a beautiful woman, Miss Beverly Bane, one of the very first of all the film stars and the young actors and actresses who worked at the same film studio with her, Charles Chaplin, Rod LaRocque, Francis X.
Bushman, Wallace Beery, and many others.
This film is about filmmaking before the 20s, long before talking pictures.
By 1915, Beverly Bane had appeared in 400 films for the S &A film manufacturing company.
She was a star when Gloria Swanson was a film extra at the same studio.
Her films were seen in the United States, in fact they were seen all over the world, in France, Germany, Spain, and in Italy.
In the early teens of this century, she and Francis X.
Bushman were voted the most popular screen couple by the people who really count and are always counted, the fans.
Beverly Bane, the beautiful lady.
Annabelleamous and I'd love to be flattered.
The applause, you know very well it's music to an actress' ears.
But you know, in the beginning, I didn't hear the applause.
I was in silent films.
We'd never know what people thought about us until after the film was released.
There were no stars when I started.
The star system, the big buildup hadn't been invented.
Why, our names wouldn't even be on the film.
There was really no credit list.
That didn't come about until people asked, why, why who is that little lady with the dark brown eyes? The one who appears in photo plays with that man with the handsome profile.
The fans would write to the studios, refer to a photo play, a favorite one, a reporter would snoop about, and finally our names were revealed by a reluctant studio.
My name, Beverly Bane, and I appeared in 400 films, long, long before there was a Hollywood.
In the early teens of this century, Frances X.
Bushman and I were voted the most popular romantic team in pictures.
I was just 16 years old when I started, and I worked in one of the first film centers of the world, Chicago, Illinois.
At the S &A studio.
It was one of the most exciting periods in films.
The beginning, really.
I was a little boy.
I was a little boy.
I was a little boy.
I was a little boy.
I was a little boy.
I was a little boy.
I was a little boy.
I was a little boy.
I was a little boy.
I was a little boy.
I was a little boy.
I was a little boy.
I was a little boy.
assumed I've been out of the limelight, darlings, a few years and and I always really avoided it.
IIt flourished.
I never felt that I needed to build up publicity.
I was a star because it just happened not because someone told me how to act told me how to wear a certain kind of hairdo a certain kind of dress and walk with my toes at a certain angle or have a certain kind of mannerism Francis X Bushman and I were stars simply because the people who saw us liked us.
I guess you could say we were really among the very first luminaries in the motion picture heaven I was a film star just a few years after motion pictures began to be popular began to compete with the legitimate theater.
Oh we could do everything the theater could do and and do it we just couldn't be heard and we had to communicate in different ways different techniques gestures our eyes were important it wasn't until the last few years of the 19th century that films escaped the Edison peep show the kinetoscope and were projected on a screen and even then they were considered as some sort of a magic show never to compete with the stage around the turn of the century they were used as chasers in the series of vaudeville acts and to get the audience out of the theater what was a woman like then what was expected of her then well she had to behave be discreet there were fine ladies of high society the Belmonts, Astors all very elegant and charming and dignified our American royalty they set a certain standard of deportment we all tried to emulate a man wanted the ladies to be little whimpering charming birds the males wanted to be strong and dominant and of course it was the lady's job to see to it that the man was king all that has changed our roles today are different a woman really wasn't supposed to go into the professions theater or anything or to compete with the males dear you'll have to understand that when i was a star women didn't even have the vote and for a woman to go into acting in the theater well she was of course suspected of all kinds of sins and to go into the films how daring how bold how wicked and yet oh so many of us were innocents i remember as a young girl i went to the studios on Argyle Street the S &A film studios among the very greatest in the world at the time on Argyle Street in Chicago can you imagine Chicago as one of the film capitals and as i look back at that street today all those buildings why there was prairie nearby where we did some of the first western films but the old studios are still standing if you take the wilding film studio sign down you can see underneath the Indian head of the S &A film manufacturing studio yes that's what it was called the S &A film manufacturing company and films really were manufactured there so it's quite a remarkable bit of history everybody was fumbling a little bit in the dark but endeavoring to do an excellent job i can remember that oh we had tremendous cleaved lights overhead great big things and what they called an arc light and if you worked anywhere near those arc lights for a half a day say you would go home at night and your eyes were sunburned everything had to be pure bright white light and we had from the tripod of the camera two white ribbons that went back to about 18 feet in distance back there and you had to do all the work within the confines of those lines S &A meant Spur and Anderson you remember Bronco Billy Anderson of course you wouldn't you're too do every day looking so dignified and elegant and a beautiful Havana cigar and we were very respectful of the big boss but he was very kind and dignified and charming we punched a time clock from nine until five and we put the card in its little bracket and then sometimes 10 films a week were made some were one reelers no more than a thousand feet then some were two reelers and three were reelers some were what you would call feature length today gross dark that we did was one of the first films there were a lot of interesting people they'd be beginners in the movies of pioneer days you know the well of parsons by the way but took care of all the scripts and there was richard travers and oh ben terpins started as a property man well walle berry was quite a character he was big and bumptious and well jolly and he played in a comedy series called swede s w w e d i he dressed as a woman played this part of a maid and he wore great floppy shoes like they did in carnivals as a clown after all that's where walle came from carnivals and circuses and one thing another way He used to have a yellow Mercer car.
He would, oh, tear up and down Sheridan Road in Chicago, oh, with a cut out, and all the people in the neighborhood would say, there goes that film actor.
And Gloria Swanson, which usually be with him, she took a great liking to him.
And they were very friendly.
And that was Wally, in his jolly way.
He made friends with everyone.
16 years after the first public showings of motion pictures, when films were just beginning to compete with a legitimate theater, Beverly Bane was the star of a thriving entertainment film industry.
Her studio, the SNA Film Master, was the first to have a film theater.
And there was another internationally famous studio in Chicago, the Selig Polyscope Company, producer of such early films as The Landing of Columbus, Made Right on the Banks of Lake Michigan, and The Spoilers, starring William Farnham and Tom Sanchi, and one of the longest fight scenes ever recorded on film.
Selig Polyscope was also the home of the cliffhanging serials, The Adventures of Kathleen, starring Kathleen Williams.
Both of these studios had western companies.
Selig was one of the first in the Hollywood area, and SNA had Niles Canyon in California.
In Chicago, the new film industry excited the imagination of many young hopefuls.
Beverly Bane tells how she first got into motion pictures.
Originally, I came from Minneapolis, Minnesota, was born there.
And my mother and stepfather moved to Chicago, and I went to a little grammar school.
I was only three weeks in my freshman term when I went up to the SNA to see how movies were taken.
And I went with this neighbor, and she was a chum of mine.
Her family knew the head director, Harry McRae Webster.
And so we went up on a Wednesday, the following Tuesday afternoon, after having gone all through the studio and everything.
The phone rang about four o 'clock in the afternoon, and Mr.
McRae Webster's secretary was there.
And she said, Mr.
Webster wants you to report tomorrow morning at ten o 'clock.
And we went up, and Mr.
Webster came in about, as we were sitting in the green room, and he threw a script down in my lap, and he said, here, read this.
He said, go and have your lunch, and come back, and I'll take you through a scene.
So that's just what we did, and I did the scene.
And he sat out front, you know, and they could talk in those days, because he could say, now turn your head a little more to the right.
Now look up.
Now go and wave out the door.
And you do it, you see.
And you coordinated your action as he talked to you.
And we said our own words.
We knew the sense of the script.
And then we would try to follow the same words throughout the whole scene.
And he looked at me, and I was all through, and he said, now little lady, what would you consider your service's worth? You know, you have to be here from nine until five every day on Saturday, from nine until one.
Well, I didn't know what to do.
I stumbled and stuttered.
Now he says, I'm not going to give it to you.
You just say anything.
Well, I had an allowance of 25 cents a week, and I knew actors got an awful lot of money.
So I said, 30, 35, or 25 dollars a week.
I started to hide, came down.
I didn't want to miss my first opportunity.
We even had animators at our studio, and the animation was little dolls.
One of the animators, a Mr.
Moss, did a number of films at S &A, and I remember one in particular.
It was called Cracked Ice, and it featured a little country bumpkin.
Moss made hundreds of dolls, each with a different face, for a different expression.
Then the dolls were shot a frame at a time.
And those wonderful old George A.
Fables.
Oh, they were written in Chicago slang, and the subtitles were as marvelous as the morals the pictures depicted.
There was always some sort of a hilarious lesson to be learned.
How to avoid the grasp of a two -timing lady, the evil of a city slicker, who sold gold bricks to unsuspecting country bumpkins.
In a way, these George A.
Fables were a comment, a social comment on the times.
All our projectors today run the silence at 24 frames each second, a much too rapid rate.
If you were to see a movie, if you were to play the films at about 16 frames per second, you'd see smoother action.
You see that we were not all little wound -up dolls huffing and puffing around.
Of course, when films became popular in the early part of this century, there were some of those filmmakers who tried to be risque, to flaunt sex a bit, even though it was just a murmur compared with today's outburst.
The producers learned that the wholesome films for the whole family gave them their largest audience, and they were very concerned not to offend anyone.
In fact, our films were advertised as family fare.
Today, with the new classifications for the family fair, that big X on a film can really draw.
You'll pardon the expression.
It can really draw pay dirt.
For instance, right here in Arizona, Russ Meyer's Vixen is playing.
I've been told that it prattles endlessly on about the dubious aspects of sex.
Russ Meyer is a millionaire because of such films for boy years.
Those kinds of films feed our editorial mills, and everyone has an opinion.
More recently, Arthur Godfrey, whom I admired very much in his work, so my friends report that he said that nakedness on the screen was nothing new, that Beverly Bane, she was the first to appear in a nude scene.
I began to get telephone calls from my friends, why, Beverly, Arthur Godfrey has just claimed that you were one of the early nudes.
So I shot off a letter, and very shortly, he gave a very fine apology.
He's a fine person, and publicly stated he was at fault.
Oh, my character remains unsullied.
I'm glad to report to you.
That's the extent of it, darlings.
See all the things I miss.
Oh dear.
When I think back, in those early days, we had the minimum of means to get a maximum effect in our movies, and many times achieve greatness.
But there are very few left.
All I have left are memories, and they're lovely memories.
Time.
Time always requires a summing up.
We sum up our lives when we're teenagers, all the hurts, the agony of life, all our little happinesses.
We, at that age, are entitled to dream, to large hopes, to idealism, to condemn or condone on very short notice.
At that age, we're brought down to, so often, to disappointments.
We need the comfort of others to tell us that life need never be cruel.
That's a summing up that helps us reach our first plateau.
Our little survey of the world is insufficient, but it is all we have at the time.
In my teens, I was a star of moving pictures.
People wrote me the most complimentary letters, told me things about myself, and if I'd ever believed them, I would have been confused forevermore.
Beverly, I admire you so.
Beverly, your life is so glamorous.
Beverly, you're the queen of my dreams.
Oh dear.
Beverly, please send me your picture and your autograph.
We all love you.
The words of love arrived in a torrent.
As a teenager, I was swept up by them.
Sometimes I believed that I was truly glamorous.
The only thing that kept my life in perspective was the fact of work.
I had to punch that time clock at the studio every morning at nine.
A moat under the hot lights looked glamorous when I didn't feel like it, and run about when I was really too tired to run about.
Making believe, my dears, is hard work, how it isolates you from others your own age.
And yet, all the loneliness vanished when the lights went on, and then I was someone else.
Not long after Beverly Bane arrived at the S &A Film Studios, she was teamed with Francis X.
Bushman.
He was enormously popular.
He was married and had five children.
The studio concealed this fact from ardent fans who used to gather at the end of the day to catch a glimpse of his famous profile.
Beverly Bane was a very famous actress.
Beverly Bane made many films with Bushman, and they were voted the most popular screen couple year after year.
Although most of their films no longer exist, we do have excerpts from a 1914 release, Under Royal Patronage.
What did people need at that time? Kings and queens, royalty, elegance, and an escape from the hard world of work, from epidemics.
There was no remedy really for whooping cough, diphtheria, scarlet fever, influenza.
Our film showed men as too often cruel and brutal, but courage triumphed.
Good went out.
In the end, happiness prevailed.
And in our world of shadows, the flickering shadows of the screen, we were creating fairies, fairies of the world, fairytales for an age.
Well, Mr.
Bushman was very exact in calculating all about his work.
And when he would play with me, he always saw to it that some way I was maneuvered with the side of my head or the back of my head so that he could be in full view.
And particularly, he always wanted the profile, and he sort of upstaged me on everything.
And I guess he did on the other actors too, because they used to talk about it.
But he was very precise, very meticulous, and well, oh, spoke very elegantly and precisely.
Bushy started out in the East as an artist model.
He was a beautiful man, beautiful in appearance, and he played in stock companies.
That's really where he got his training.
And when his director went to work for S &A in Chicago, a Mr.
Baker, he wrote to Bushy to come and join this new industry which was flourishing.
Life with Bushy was terribly hectic.
He was often jealous and unpleasantly temperamental and demanding.
And he was always concerned about his career, a career he calculated all the way.
He wanted and sought publicity to enhance his worth, his longevity in films.
And that kind of life wasn't really by cup of tea.
He was a true, may I say it, heavy, wishing to dominate in all matters, including money.
And although we made a bit in films, it seemed to evaporate in his hands.
He would rent lavish apartments and homes, even when he didn't know where his next paycheck was coming from.
I, um, I was his second wife.
We married after our Romeo and Juliet for Metro.
He had five children by his first marriage, and at that time the studios didn't want the world to know that their leading men were married, so this news was kept from the public.
And after I married him, I remember sending money to them, simply because he forgot or did not send it to them.
He was irresponsible, but he was terribly handsome.
To do justice to his memory, he was one of the first, uh, really, the first stars.
Oh, he had a wide following.
Charles Chaplin came to us in, uh, I guess it was 1915.
Uh, he was very meticulous in all his direction.
He demanded a great deal of time for every scene, and of course the rest of us who had, uh, in our early stages had made one movie a day.
We're suddenly confronted with a man who took hours and hours to just rehearse one scene.
Well, we were all appalled.
The, uh, legitimate, dramatic actors that had, had to work so fast, we couldn't believe this was possible.
Another thing that he did, he, um, would, uh, put screens up around.
No one was allowed to see him.
He kept to himself and, uh, was not antisocial, but none of us, uh, really had any conversation with him at all, other than good morning and how do you do.
But, uh, there was a great deal of mystery about it.
The outcome was that the other directors, eventually caught on to the, uh, time element that, uh, Chaplin had established, and they began to, uh, take a little more leisure with their work and found that the results were so good that the front office accepted this change to the great delight of the cast and the directors.
My son and I came to, uh, Arizona about 13 years ago.
We both fell in love with it.
We were going to visit a friend in Beverly Hills in California, and on our way back home to Westchester in New York, we almost bought a house.
But motherly caution, I said, let's go back and sell our home.
We were so happy to have a house.
And then we'll return to Arizona.
And of course, it was, the house was sold in one day.
So, uh, we found a very lovely place, two and a half acres out in Paradise Valley.
The view from my living room window was simply gorgeous.
All the wonderful mountains.
And you had such a sense of spaciousness.
The gorgeous swarrows.
All the cacti.
The little animals, the road runners that are hardly anyplace else in the world, I guess.
And, uh, it is just where I feel that God has directed me to spend my remaining days.
My son loved Arizona.
Everything about the casual life here.
He'd had a great deal of the pressure of New York, and everything about Arizona pleased him.
And he was a delightful, wonderful person.
And I have sadly regretted that two years ago he passed away, which left me with a great void in my life.
He, he was handsome.
Very good looking.
Five feet, 11 tall, muscular, and the most ingratiating smile.
Lovely dark brown eyes.
He was invited to every party practically in the valley.
All hostesses loved to have him come because he could tell stories so delightfully.
And he had many of them.
But they were all the kind that wouldn't offend anyone, but were great fun.
And he always was most amusing.
He could sing beautifully.
And he, he was rather nice, if I do say it.
Now, after he passed away, I had to have certain documents.
And I was going through one, and this is what I found in his Bible.
I shall pass through this world but once.
Any good thing therefore that I can do, or any kindness that I can show any human being, let me do it now.
But let me not defer or neglect it, for I shall not pass this way.
In 1915, Francis X.
Smith, and then Francis X.
Bushman joined Metro.
And it wasn't long after that that the Metro studio executives called on Beverly Bane.
At Metro, Bushman's films with another leading lady were not quite as successful as the S &A Bane -Bushman motion pictures.
Beverly Bane joined Metro, married Bushman a little bit later, and together they made several films on the West Coast.
And then they went to New York to star in Metro's famous production of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet.
People look at a silent movie today, and they see all of these big gestures and everything, they think, oh, what hammy kind of acting that is, you know.
But we only had gestures, you see, to tell a story.
And as a matter of fact, when we did Romeo and Juliet, we said every line of Shakespeare's script, and it was considered a great, great feat to have told the story in gestures of the beautiful language of Shakespeare.
We took three months to do this, and that was quite a good deal in those days.
And we employed all the finest Shakespearean actors.
There was old Bob Cummings, a member of the Lambs Club in New York, and there was Fritz Leiber, who played his own part, and Sir Lawson Butt, who played Tybalt.
And of course everybody else had been connected in some capacity with Shakespearean plays.
And we said every line of Shakespeare's script.
And after the production was presented, all the deaf schools and people who were deaf went to our production and were enchanted because they could read our lips and get the full text of Shakespeare.
Oh, Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo? Oh, deny thy father and refuse thy name, or if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love, and I'll no longer be a Capulet.
There was a wonderful publisher in New York, Daniel Bloom, and he started as a very young boy collecting autographs of the great motion picture actors and also the greats of the legitimate stage.
And finally he met a little woman that made dolls, and she designed them after the exact characters and costumes.
I used to go to parties at his home down on West 9th Street, and his entire living room was filled with glass cases in which as you go in you would see these exquisite dolls.
When I came to Arizona, he said, Beverly, when you come to New York next time we're going to have a bash.
He said, I'm going to give you a beautiful party and you will have your doll.
Well, as a matter of fact, about two weeks later the dear man passed away.
Very shortly I received this large box sent from my friends in Bedford Village of me as Juliet.
Darlings, I'm a square, I guess.
You can't really leap out of the skin of your own generation.
You really can't.
So many of my generation began work at the age of 13 or 14.
We were little adults.
A lot of us contributed to the support of our families.
I'm terribly frightened by habits that postpone responsibility.
The drug culture, the playing at life, the child of 21 or 25 who puts down his father because his job appears to be insignificant, and the child who hides behind the comfortable ivy of a college or a university.
There will be many rude awakenings, won't there? We can't all be heroes or public figures or movie stars.
Thank heaven.
Let's improve this wonderful country of ours by assuming some sort of responsibility for its troubles and working every day of our little lives for some earthly good.
All my friends out here know that I'm a crusader.
I'm a serious -minded person, and I'm very interested in lots of causes.
I have waitful moments at times at night, and along about 2 o 'clock in the morning, I can contrive and write the most magnificent letters, at least in my thought, to my congressman.
I get up in the morning, and my friends tell me, that's pretty good.
I like it.
That gives me the courage to send these things off.
For the most part, I get wonderful replies from all of them.
The first salary I ever made at S &A, I bought 24 pairs of shoes.
Isn't that ridiculous? It was the beginning, really, when Wallis Beery was there playing a Swedish cook, a comic.
You see, our pictures were filmed by men who had hand -cranked their cameras, and the projectionist played them back by hand -cranking.
Everything was very primitive.
It was an untried medium, and directors usually came from the legitimate theater or some sort of training school for actors.
If they had one scene where a shadow showed on an actor's face, the scene had to be redone.
Every day after the shooting, they would go to the projection room downstairs and see whether there were retakes to be taken the next day.
I was always being saved by someone.
I can remember once Mr.
Bushman took me off of a cow catcher on a train in one sequence.
We were fumbling in the dark in one sense.
The camera stayed mostly in one position.
Of course, if he had to have a close -up, he would move the camera in and take that in a certain area.
But always within the confines of these two white lines, it at moments was a little difficult to do.
Making movies then was arduous.
Sometimes a one -reeler a day, a complete movie in one day.
Doing, constantly doing.
When my time was my own, after hours, after five, I had my own world, my own preferences.
Oh dear.
Like a heavenly chocolate ice cream soda.
Darling, what can I leave you with? A beautiful pink rose.
I hear from so many old friends.
Mary Pickford, Buddy Rogers, Ellen Bonfice, and a lot of others.
And from a few old fans.
And I love the letters from young people.
My word.
There's so much interest in the old days.
Those wonderful old films.
If you find a few of my old films, let me know.
Join the world, dears.
Make beautiful movies.
And be as kind as you can be.
People are fragile.
They're fragile.
I'm a little bit of a I'm a little bit of a I'm a little bit of a I'm a little bit of a I'm a little bit of a I'm a little bit of a I'm a little bit of a I'm a little bit of a I'm a little bit of a I'm a little bit of a I'm a little bit of a I'm a little bit of a I'm a little bit of a I'm a little bit of a
