With the one exception already noted we had neglected the sea the year before, and as yet we had attempted nothing important that had to do with “Ol’ davil Sea,” as Eugene O’Neil calls it. The sea was trickier than the mountains, and more expensive if one needed boats and things. But this year we would go to it right, with a massive production of Tennyson’s “Enoch Arden”—a second production of the poem that had written history for us in our screen beginnings.
The first time we had taken most of it in the studio, with only one or two simple shots of the sea. Now we would do something g-r-a-n-d. “Enoch Arden” was such good movie stuff, and Mr. Griffith was wondering how he could get it all into one thousand feet of film.
An exhibitor in those days would accept eleven hundred feet of film, but that was the limit. The programs were arranged only for the thousand-foot picture; a thousand-foot Biograph being shown Mondays and Thursdays. How could two thousand feet be shown on Monday and none on Thursday? Even could the exhibitor have so arranged it, would the people sit through two thousand feet without a break?
Well, now, we could do this: we could take the picture in two reels, each of a thousand feet, show one reel Monday, the second Thursday, and take a chance on the people becoming sufficiently interested in the first reel to come back for the second—the only logical way of working out the problem. Mr. Griffith fully realized his responsibility. Again he would chance it.
Santa Monica would be the ideal place for this big production; so every day for a week—for a whole week was given to exteriors alone—we motored out to Santa Monica in the cold early morning.
The place had changed little in the year that had passed. The row of tiny shacks was now occupied by Japs and Norwegians who caught and dried fish and fought with each other at all other times.
One friendly Norwegian loaned his shack as a dressing-room for the women. We “shot” the same shack for Annie’s bridal home. The men made up in a stranded horse car of bygone vintage that had been anchored in the sand. We sent out an S. O. S. for a sailing vessel of Enoch’s day, and we heard of one, and had it towed up from San Pedro. What would we do next?
We did “Enoch Arden” in two reels. Wilfred Lucas played Enoch; Frank Grandin, Philip; and I played Annie Lee. Well, Jeanie Macpherson said I had “sea eyes,” whatever that meant.
Mrs. Grace Henderson kept the Inn to which Enoch returns; Annie’s and Enoch’s babies grew up to be Florence LaBadie and Bobbie Harron (one of Bobbie’s first parts), and Jeanie Macpherson powdered her hair and played nurse to the little baby that later came to Philip and Annie.
George Nichols departed via the Owl for San Francisco to get the costumes from Goldstein & Company. There was so little to be had in costumes in Los Angeles. Mr. Nichols had also journeyed to San Francisco for costumes for “Ramona” the year before.