We would not have been true to the traditions of the Golden State had we not used a Mission in our first picture. We meant to do our very best right off and send back a knock-out.

So to San Gabriel we went to get the lovely old Mission atmosphere in a picture called “Threads of Destiny.”

We spread ourselves; we took the Mission front, back and sideways, inside and out; we used the worn old stairway, shaded by a fragrant pepper tree, that led to the choir loft: we even planted lilies—or rather, Mary Pickford as Myrtle, the orphan girl of San Gabriel, planted lilies—along the adobe wall of the old cemetery where slept baptized Indians and Mexicans.

It was pleasant sprawling about in the lazy sunshine. We who were “atmosphere” wandered about the cemetery, reading the old tombstones, and had the priest guide us through the Mission showing us its three-hundred-year-old treasures. And across the way we visited the curio shop where we bought pretty post-cards and ate tamales, real Mexican tamales.

We would experiment on this Mission picture. We wanted a dim, religious light, and here it was, and we wanted to get it on the screen as it looked to us, the real thing. One little window let in an afternoon slant of soft sunshine that fell directly upon the pulpit where Christie Miller, playing an old priest, was to stand and bless the congregation. If we could light up Christie, the devout worshipers could be mere shadows and it would look fine—just what we wanted. Billy Bitzer would “get” it if it could be got, that we knew. So while Billy was tuning up his camera, Bobby Harron came and gathered in the congregation from the curio shop and cemetery, and we quietly took our places in the chapel and did our atmospheric bit. We did pray—we prayed that it would be a good effect.

We rather held our breath at the picture’s first showing until his tricky scene was flashed on the screen. Then we relaxed; it was all there!

Spanish California was not to be neglected this trip, and our next picture, a romance of the Spanish dominion, called “In Old California” is historical as the first Biograph to be taken in Hollywood. The Hollywood Inn was at this time the only exclusive winter resort between the city and the ocean. We needed rooms where we could make up and dress, and Mr. Anderson, the genial young proprietor, welcomed us cordially.

Marion Leonard was playing the beautiful Spanish señorita in this movie and Frank Grandin the handsome young lover who afterwards became the governor of California. As we came out of the hotel in our make up and Spanish finery and quietly drove off into the foothills, guests were lolling on the broad front porch. With a start they came to. Whatever in the world was happening! “Did you see those people? What is it? What’s going on? Let’s get our motor and follow them and see,” said they.

We had selected what we thought a remote and secluded spot in the foothills, but soon in ones and twos and threes the guests appeared. For a time they seemed well-behaved spectators; they kept quiet and in the background. But Miss Leonard’s dramatic scenes proved too much for them. They resented the love-making and began making derogatory comments about movie actors, and one “lady” becoming particularly incensed, shouted loudly, “Well, I wouldn’t dress up like a fool like that woman and act like her, no, not for all the money in the world.” That off her chest, she turned on her heel, and left us flat.

Paul de Longpré, the famous flower artist, lived only a few blocks from the Inn on Hollywood Boulevard. Many years ago he had left his native France and built a lovely château in the broad stretches of young Hollywood. In his gardens he had planted every variety of rose. A tangled profusion of them covered even the walls of his house. We offered fifty dollars a day for the use of the gardens. M. de Longpré went us one better. He offered to let us work if we’d buy a corner lot for three hundred dollars. But what could we do with a corner lot? We had no idea we would work six days and pay the three hundred dollars just in rental. But that we did. What we didn’t do, was, take title to the corner lot. Had we done so we would have laid a foundation for fortune.

I recall M. de Longpré as the first person we met on location in California who seemed to appreciate that we were at least striving for something in an art line. To him we were not mere buffoons as we were to the ladies of the Hollywood Inn.

“Love Among the Roses” we aptly called the picture in which Marion Leonard played a great lady residing in the Kingdom of Never-never Land.

Monsieur de Longpré’s lovely house and gardens—a show place for tourists some twelve years ago—has long since been cut up into building lots on which have been erected rows of California bungalows. For when motion picture studios began to spring up like mushrooms in this quiet residential district, actors had to be domiciled and the boulevard was no longer desirable as a restful home locality. Also, the financial return on property thus manipulated was not to be lightly regarded. The town council voted a memorial to the kindly French artist. So Hollywood has a de Longpré Avenue.

The day we lunched at the Hollywood Inn marked an event for Hollywood. Few motion picture actors had desecrated the Inn’s conservative grounds until that day. A few years later only motion picture actors lived there, and they live there now, though the old-maid régime is coming along rapidly. Aside from the movie intrusion, Mr. Anderson foresaw the changes that were to come. In due time he built the now famous Beverly Hills Hotel. But the movie actor, who has now achieved a social and financial standing that equals that of other professions, he still has with him.

Goodness gracious, how could we ever get all the scenic beauty on the screen! It was too distracting, what with Missions, desert, mountains, ocean, beaches, cliffs, and flowers. We wanted to send enough of it back in our pictures to ensure our coming again next winter.

We had a scenario that called for a wealthy gentleman’s winter home. We hied ourselves out to Pasadena, to Orange Grove Avenue, Hillside Avenue, Busch’s sunken gardens, Doheny’s, and other famous show places. We found a place with gardens and pergolas, just the thing. Asked permission to use the house and grounds, from very charming ladies wintering within, possibly a bit bored, for they seemed delighted with the idea.

It was not the custom in those days to explain the nature of the story for which one desired a place; and the ladies being so keen on seeing moving pictures being made, the matter ended right there. The scenario which had been selected for our pioneer work in Pasadena was called “Gold is Not All.”

The day came to start work on the picture. We were all packed up in our motor car outside the Alexandria Hotel getting an early start, for the earlier we got to work, the fewer the days we would need to trespass on the borrowed property.

“Gold is Not All” was a story of contrasts. There were very wealthy people in it and very poor people. And the poor faction was so poor that mother, little mother, had to take in washing to help out, which washing she returned to the rich people’s houses.

Like many other fallacies that have become identified with motion picture characterization, rich people are invariably represented as being unkind, selfish, penurious, and immoral—oh, always immoral. And the poor are loving, kind, true, surfeited with virtue. The poor mother idolized her children, worked and slaved for them; father always loved mother, never strayed from home. But the rich man, drat him, ah, he had sweethearts galore, he was dishonest on the stock market, he put marble dust in the sugar, his wife was something merely to be exploited, and his children were always “poor little rich boys and girls.”

So we were primed for action and quite ready to make our wealthy gentleman sojourning in his winter mansion an utter rake, a miserable specimen of the middle-aged debauchee who treated cruelly a long-suffering wife. But the little poor families were such models of all the virtues, they hadn’t missed one; and their days were full of happiness.

The hostess of this charming home with some friends watched our performances. There was no limit to their hospitality. They brought out tables and a tea-service and they loaned us their “bestest” butler—there was a lawn party in the story. When the picture was finished, Mr. Griffith invited the owner and his family and their friends to the studio to see the picture.

The projection over, we noticed a strange lack of enthusiasm; and then Monsieur took Mr. Griffith aside and asked him if it would be absolutely necessary for him to release the picture.

“Really,” said the gentleman, “we are a very happy family, my wife and I and the children, we like each other a lot. All my friends have been told about the picture and they’ll watch for it—and I just don’t like it, that’s all. You know a person can have money and still be a respectable citizen in the community.”

And that was that. But we learned something.

And here comes little Jack Pickford in his first leading part, a comedy directed by Frank Powell, and called “The Kid.” It was full of impish pranks of the small boy who does not want his lonely daddy to bring him home a new mama, but he comes across in time and soon is all for her.

Two more pictures, “The Converts,” and “The Way of the World,” finished us at San Gabriel. Both were Christian preachments, having repentant Magdalenes as heroines, and were admirably suited for portrayal against the Mission’s mellow walls.

Sleepy old San Gabriel, where dwelt, that first winter, but a handful of Mexicans and where no sound but the mocking bird was heard until the jangling trolley arrived and unloaded its cackling tourists!

Mission atmosphere got under the skin; so we determined on San Fernando for “Over Silent Paths,” an American Desert story of a lone miner and his daughter who had come by prairie-schooner from their far-away Eastern home.

San Fernando Mission was twenty-two miles from Los Angeles, with inadequate train service, and the dirt road, after the first winter rains had swelled the “rivers” and washed away the bridges, was often impassable by motor.

The desertion and the desecration of the picturesque place was complete. For more than two hundred years the hot sun and winter rain had beat upon the Mission’s adobe walls. It boasted no curio shop, no lunch room, not even a priest to guard it. A few Japs were living in the one habitable room—they mended bicycles. We were as free to move in as were the swallows so thickly perched on the chapel rafters. An occasional tourist with his kodak had been the only visitor until we came. Then all was changed.

It was in San Fernando that we first met up with the typical California rancher. This man, whose name I recall as “Boroff” had been one of the first settlers in the valley. On a “location hunt” we had spied Mr. Boroff’s interesting-looking place with its flowers and its cows, and had decided to pay our respects and see if we could get the ranch for a picture, sometime. One of the “hands” brought Mr. Boroff to us. Rangy and rugged, oh, what health-in-the-cheeks he had! He swung us about the place and then suddenly we found ourselves in a huge barn drinking tall glasses of the most wonderful buttermilk.

“Do you know,” said Mr. Boroff, downing his, “I drink a quart of whiskey every day to pass the time away, and a gallon of buttermilk so I’ll live long.”

Squatted one afternoon on the edge of the roadway in front of the Mission, I began idly scratching up the baked dirt with an old Mexican stiletto we were using in a picture. A few inches below the surface I noticed funny little round things that did not seem to be rocks. I picked up a few, broke off pieces of dry dirt, cleaned the small particles on my Mexican shawl, and found them to be old Indian beads, all colors, blue, red, and yellow. Through the leisure hours of that day I dug beads until I had an interesting little string of them. The Indians from whose decorated leather trappings the beads had fallen had been sleeping many years in the old cemetery back of the Mission.

Now there are grass and flower beds growing over my little burial place of the beads, for the Mission has been restored; but even were it not so, the movie actress of to-day would surely rather lounge contentedly in her limousine than squat on old Mother Earth, digging up Indian beads.

The third and last of the Missions we visited was romantic San Juan Capistrano, seventy miles south of Los Angeles, nestling in the foothills some three miles from the Pacific.

Our scenario man, Mr. Taylor, had prepared a Spanish story of the padre days, and this lovely rambling Mission with its adjacent olive ranches, live-oak groves, silvery aliso trees, and cliffs along the seashore, was to afford stacks of local color.

Our one automobile deposited its quota—Mr. Griffith and party—in San Juan Capistrano in the late afternoon. The evening train brought the rest of the actors.

There was one little Inn, the Mendelssohn—now fixed up and boasting all modern conveniences; then merely an airy wooden structure evidently built under the prevailing delusion that southern California has a tropical climate. There was a tiny office; the only parlor, the proprietor’s personal one, which he was kind enough to let us use. He had a stove and it felt mighty good to get warmed up nights before turning in.

The bedrooms were upstairs. To reach them you had to go out in the yard, the back-yard, climb the rickety stairs to the porch, on to which each little bedroom by means of its own little door, opened. The bare-floored bedrooms were just large enough to hold a creaky double bed, wash-bowl and pitcher, and a chair.

We must see the Mission before dinner. The idea of dinner didn’t thrill us much, and the thought of going to bed thrilled us less. But why expect the beauty of old things and modern comfort too? The thought of seeing old San Juan in the dim light of early evening should have sufficed.

Beautiful old ruin! The peace and the silence! We might have been in the Sahara.

Every member of the company was to work in this picture. There were no more than ten little bedrooms in the hotel. Actors slept everywhere, two and three in a bed; even the parlor had to be fixed up with cots. Miss Leonard and others of the women had been domiciled in a neighborly Spanish house—the only other available decent quarters.

Dell Henderson, who had put himself wise to the arrangement of sleeping partners, had copped little Jack Pickford as his bedfellow. Dell was one of our very largest actors and Jack being about as big as a peanut, Dell had figured that with the little fellow by his side he might be able to catch forty winks during the night.

Few of us managed to get unbroken winks. Between the creaking of one’s own bed and the snores from other rooms down the line (the walls were like paper) and the footsteps on the shaking porch, of actors going from room to room looking for something better than what had been allotted them, it was a restful night! All through it, at intervals, Charlie Craig kept calling to his bedfellow, “Don’t squash me—don’t squash me.” But the most disgruntled of all was Sennett. To every room he came calling “Hey, how many in this bed? Who’s in there? Got three in my bed; I can’t sleep three in a bed.” But responses were few and faint, and from Dell Henderson’s room came only silence. So after waiting in vain for help in his difficulty, and thoroughly disgusted, Mack returned to what must have been very chummy quarters.

There had been engaged for this picture a bunch of cowboys, rough-riders, headed by Bill Carroll, for we were to pull some thrillers in the way of horse stuff. The riders with their horses were leaving Los Angeles on the midnight train, due to reach Capistrano at 2 A.M.

It was all so weird and spooky that midnight had arrived before I had summoned sufficient courage to let myself go to sleep. No sooner had I dozed off than out of the black and the silence came a terrific roar, yells, and loud laughter, and pistol shots going zip, zip, zip.

These hot-headed Mexicans! Things happened here, and something dreadful was going to happen right now. I heard horses; and soon horses and riders galloped madly into the back-yard, right to the foot of our stairs, it seemed.

But it was only our cowboys who had arrived, feeling good, and full of the joy of life. Old Colonel Roosevelt knew all about this sort of thing, and would have appreciated the celebration. No thought had been given the boys’ slumber places, and so after a look around they docilely crawled up into the barn and were soon asleep in the sweet-smelling hay.

“The Two Brothers,” the picture we were to do, told the story of the good and bad brother. Good brother marries the pretty señorita in the Mission chapel.

An experienced and cultured gentleman was the French priest in charge of this Mission. He was most obliging and told us we could use whatever we liked of the wedding ceremonial symbols, which we did, but which we shouldn’t have done on this particular day of days—Good Friday.

The wedding was some spread. There were Spanish ladies in gay satins and mantillas, and Spanish gentlemen in velvets and gold lace, and priest and acolytes carrying the sacred emblems. They paraded all over the Mission grounds. Then the camera was set up to get the chapel entrance. While all was going happily, without warning, from out the turquoise blue sky, right at the feet of the blushing bride and the happy groom, fell the stuffed figure of a man! Right in the foreground the figure landed, and, of course, it completely ruined our beautiful scene.

On Good Friday in these Spanish-Mexican towns of California a ceremonial called “burning Judas” used to take place (and may still, for all I know). Old carts and wheels and pieces of junk in the village are gathered in a heap outside the Mission grounds, and old suits of clothes are stuffed with straw, making effigies of Judas. The villagers set fire to this lot of rubbish and to the Judases as well, and the evil they have brought during the year is supposed to disappear in the smoke from their burning bodies. The handsomest Judas, however, is saved from the conflagration for a more ignominous finish. A healthy young bull is secured and to his formidable horns this Judas is strapped. Then the bull is turned loose, so annoyed by this monstrous thing on his horns that he madly cavorts until Judas’s clothes are torn to shreds and his straw insides are spilled all over the place, and he is done for, completely.

Now while we had been rehearsing and taking the wedding scenes, the sacristan, a little old man to whom life meant tending the Mission and ringing the bells at the appointed hour, had been covertly taking us in, and when he saw our gay though holy processional start into the very sanctum of the Mission on Good Friday, his soul revolted. No, that he would not stand for!

Something even worse than riding the bull’s horns could happen to Judas; and that was to be thrown at movie actors. So the sacristan picked the prize Judas, and at the climactic scene he dropped him on us, and then broadcasting a roar of Mexican oaths he went on his way, his soul relieved and his heart rejoicing.

But we felt differently. There was no telling now what these San Juan hot-heads might do to us. But the seeming lack of reverence of our procession was explained to the little sacristan by the understanding priest.

The next day we did the abduction. We took ourselves miles from the Mission. We chose a treacherous-looking road along the ocean cliffs. In a ramshackle buggy the bride and groom were speeding on their honeymoon, but bad brother and his band of outlaws were hot on the trail to steal the bride. Our cowboys bringing up the rear were cavorting on their horses; the horses were rearing on their hind legs; and the director was yelling, “A dollar for a fall, boys, a dollar for a fall!” The boys fell, on all sides they fell; they swung off their horses, and they climbed back on, and they spilled themselves in the dust, their horses riding on without them. Some of the boys made ten and some twenty dollars that day, just for “falls.” And not one was even scratched.

The next day was Easter Sunday, and our work being finished, in the gray dawn we folded our tents and silently slunk away.

But the curse of Judas was upon us. When the picture was projected, all was fine—scenic effects beautiful—and photography superb, until—we came to the wedding procession!

Judas, to our surprise, was nowhere to be seen; he had fallen out of focus evidently, but the effect of his anathema was all there. The scene was so streaked with “lightning” we could not use it. At San Gabriel we retook it later, but it never seemed the same to us.

Sierra Madre was another of our choice locations this first trip. Here were wonderful mountains with fascinating trails and canyons deep and long. From Sierra Madre, Mount Wilson was climbed, by foot or donkey, for no magnificent motor road then led to its five-thousand-and-something-foot summit.

At the quarter-mile house we did “The Gold-seekers,” a story of California in the days of ’49, with Henry Walthall striking pay dirt in the west fork of the San Gabriel canyon.

Mary Pickford did one of her Indians here, “A Romance of the Western Hills.” David thought Mary had a good face for Indians on account of her high cheek bones, and usually cast her for the red-skinned maid or young squaw. A smear of brown grease paint over her fair face and a wig of coarse straight black hair made a picturesque little Indian girl of “our Mary.”

Curls and Mary Pickford were not yet synonymous. She played, besides Indians, many character parts with her hair smacked straight back; and she “did” young wives with her hair in a “bun” on the top of her head to make her look tall and married. When Mary wore curls, it meant an hour of labor at night. The curls necessitated three distinct kinds of “curlers,” the ones for the wave on top, others for the long curls, and little curlers for the shorter hair around the face. I often thought Mary Pickford earned her slim salary those days for the time and effort she spent on her hair alone.

It was an unhappy Mary on that first trip to Los Angeles, Owen Moore having passed up his little sweetheart on account of the weekly ten dollars he thought Mr. Griffith should have added to his salary. The day’s work over, came her lonesome hour. On the long rides home from location, cuddled up in her seat in the car, she dreamed of home and dear ones. And one day passing the eastbound Santa Fé Limited, out of a deep sad sigh the words escaped, “God bless all the trains going East and speed the one we go on”—the Irish in her speaking.

An urge to do “Ramona” in a motion picture possessed Mr. Griffith all the while we were in California, for the picturesque settings of Helen Hunt Jackson’s deep-motived romance were so close at hand. Several conferences had been held on the subject in New York, before we left. But in order to make a screen adaptation of this story of the white man’s injustice to the Indian, arrangements would have to be made with the publishers, Little, Brown & Company. They asked one hundred dollars for the motion picture rights and the Biograph Company came across like good sports and paid it, and “Ramona” went on record. It was conceded to be the most expensive picture put out by any manufacturer up to that time.

To Camulos, Ventura County, seventy miles from Los Angeles, we traveled to do this production of “Ramona.” For Camulos was one of the five homes accredited to the real Ramona that Mrs. Jackson picked for her fictional one. She picked well.

What a wealth of atmosphere of beautiful old Spain, Camulos’s far-famed adobe offered! Scenes of sheep-shearing; scenes in the little flower-covered outdoor chapel where Ramona’s family and their faithful Indian servants worshiped; love scenes at Ramona’s iron-barred window; scenes of heartache on the bleak mountain top but a few miles distant where Alessandro and Ramona bury their little baby, dead from the white man’s persecutions; and finally the wedding scene of Ramona and Felipe amid the oranges and roses and grass pinks of the patio. Even bells that were cast in old Spain rang silently on the screen. The Biograph Company brought out a special folder with cuts and descriptive matter. The picture was Mr. Griffith’s most artistic creation to date.

Nor did we neglect the oil fields, for oil had its romance. So at Olinda, that tremendous field, we “took” plungers innumerable and expensive oil spilling out of huge barrels into little lakes, all black and smooth and shiny. The picture, called “Unexpected Help,” had Arthur Johnson and little Gladys Egan as star actors. One other oil picture we did, “A Rich Revenge,” a comedy of the California oil fields, with Mary Pickford and Billy Quirk.

We had located a picturesque oil field. A crabbed-looking man in dirty blue jeans seemed the only person about. We asked him would there be any objection to our working, and he gruffly answered in the negative.

So we “set up,” and got our scenes; and, work finished, looked about for our man, wishing to thank him. Feeling sorry for him, we went one better and tendered him a twenty-dollar gold piece. When he saw that money, he began to curse us so hard that we were glad when we hit the highway.

At the garage in the village we made inquiries and were enlightened. The man of the dirty blue jeans was none other than the millionaire owner of the oil well, an oil well that was gushing one fair fortune per day. And though he refused our money as though it were poison, three times a week that man walked to Santa Ana, ten miles distant, where he could buy a ten-cent pie for five cents.

Still more atmosphere we recorded in a picture called “As It Is In Life”—the famous old pigeon farm located near the dry bed of the San Gabriel River. Shortly after the time of our picture, the winter storms washed away this landmark and we were glad then that we had so struggled with the thousands of fluttering pigeons that just wouldn’t be still and feed when we wanted them to, and insisted upon being good, quiet little pigeons when we wished them to loop the loop.

It seems we paid little attention to sea stories. Perhaps because we had our own Atlantic waiting for us back home, and we had done sea stories. We produced only one, “The Unchanging Sea,” suggested by Charles Kingsley’s poem, “The Three Fishers.”

Charlie Ogle, who had worked in a few old Biographs but had been signed up with Edison before Mr. Griffith had a chance to get him, said to me one day out at the Lasky lot last winter—1924:

“What was that wonderful sea picture you played in? My, that was a picture, and you did beautiful work. I’ll never forget it.”

“You couldn’t remember a sea picture I played in, Mr. Ogle. Heavens, that was so long ago you must mean some one else.”

“No, I don’t, and I remember it very well. What was the name?”

“Enoch Arden?”

“No.”

“Fisher Folk?”

“No, now what was that picture?”

And at that moment we were interrupted in our game of guess as Leatrice Joy, whom we had been watching, came off the scene to revive from the heavy smoke of a café fire, before doing it over again.

“I’ve got it—‘The Unchanging Sea.’”

“That’s it, that’s the one. I’ll never forget that picture.”

“As I remember, it was considered quite a masterpiece.”

The fishing village of Santa Monica was the locale of this story. At this time there was but a handful of little shacks beyond the pier, places rented for almost nothing by poor, health-seeking Easteners. No pretentious Ince studio as yet meandered along the cliffs some nine miles beyond. The road ran through wild country on to Jack Rabbit Lodge where a squatter had a shack that tourists visited occasionally and for twenty-five cents were shown an old Indian burial ground.

The only fellow movie actors we met this first winter in Los Angeles were two members of the Kalem Company, beautiful Alice Joyce and handsome Carlyle Blackwell, who often on fine mornings trotted their horses over Santa Monica’s wet sands.

Occasionally, we met Nat Goodwin, who had cantered all the way from his home in Venice-by-the-Sea.