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In the fall of 1912 the funny little hop-skip girl had arrived on the scene in New York. When he got back to the City, Mr. Griffith had found need for her, and he fussed; and finally Mr. Hammer told him to send for her. Two tickets were accordingly rushed west to Los Angeles, one for Mae and one for Mae’s mama. In due time two members of the Marsh family arrived. The day they reached the East the company was working outside at some place with a meaningful name like “Millville,” where we took small country-town stuff. The two Marshes were so excited when they got off the train in New York and dashed to the studio at 11 East Fourteenth Street and found the company working outdoors that they departed immediately for “Millville.” They must get right on location. So to “location” they hied. And when they had fluttered on to the scene, and Mr. Griffith looked up and saw his Mae, and not his Mae’s mama, but the fair Margaret, Mae’s sister, he was pretty mad about it.
Margaret Loveridge, as soon as sister Mae’s star began to rise in the movie heavens, changed her name to “Marguerite Marsh”; but to her intimates she became “Lovey Marsh.”
Little Mae Marsh back on the job, did a lot of extra work before she got a part. Mr. Griffith worked hard with her, especially when a scene called for a sudden transition from tranquillity to terrible alarm. But a bright idea came to him. He had noticed in battle scenes that young Mae became terribly frightened; so when he didn’t have war’s aid to get the needed expression of fright, without her knowledge he would have a double-barreled shotgun popped off a few feet from her head, and the resultant exhibition of fear would quite satisfy the exacting director.
Mae Marsh’s first hit was in “Sands O’ Dee,” a part that Mary Pickford had been scheduled to play, and there was quite a to-do over the change in cast. But it was the epochal “Man’s Genesis” that brought her well to the front, as it did also Bobby Harron. In the parts of Lilly White and Weakhands their great possibilities were discerned, with no shadow of doubt.
“Man’s Genesis” was produced under the title “Primitive Man,” and Mr. Griffith and Mr. Dougherty had an awful time because Doc said he couldn’t see the title and he couldn’t see the story as a serious one—as a comedy, yes! But Mr. Griffith was determined it should be a serious story; and he did it as such, although he changed the animal skin clothing of the actors to clothes made of grasses. For if the picture were to show the accidental discovery of man’s first weapon, then the animal skins would have had to be torn off the animal’s body by hand, and that was a bit impossible. So Mae and Bobby dressed in grasses knotted into a sort of fabric.
“Man’s Genesis” wrote another chapter in picture history. It was taken seriously by the public, as was meant, and every picture company started right off on a movie having some version of the beginning of man. For Mr. Griffith it was the biggest thing he had yet done, and one of the most daring steps so far made in picture production.
Again, against great opposition David had put it over, not only on his studio associates, but on the entire motion picture world. Besides “Man’s Genesis,” our most talked of picture of the winter—our biggest spectacle—was “The Massacre.”
It was taken at San Fernando. There were engaged for it several hundred cavalry men and twice as many Indians. A city of tents, as well as the two large ones, similar to the ones of the year before, was built outside the borders of the town.
There was so much preparation, due to the magnitude of the production, that the secrecy usually attending a Biograph picture did not hold in this case, and the village of San Fernando, two miles away from the place of the picture, declared a holiday.