Then said she: “How long is Peake’s Island going to last? What’s sure about summer stock? What does Peake’s Island mean to David Belasco or Charles Frohman? We’ve got this little flat here, with our very own twenty dollars’ worth of second-hand furniture, and the rent’s so low—twenty. You don’t know what’s going to happen down at the Biograph, you might get to direct some day. Let’s stick the summer out anyhow, and when fall comes and productions open up again, we’ll see, huh?”
So we put Peake’s Island behind us.
Now it is as sure as shooting, if “Lawrence” Griffith had accepted the offer to play stock that summer he never would have become the David W. Griffith of the movies. Had he stepped out then, some one else surely would have stepped in and filled his little place; and the chances are he would never have gone back to those queer movies.
Of course, now we know that even in so short a time this movie business had gotten under his skin. David Griffith had tasted blood—cinema blood. And the call to stay, that was heard and obeyed when Peake’s Island threatened to disrupt the scheme of things, was the same sort of call that made those other pioneers trek across the plains with their prairie schooners in the days of forty-nine. With Peake’s Island settled, we hoped there would be no more theatrical temptations, for we wanted to take further chances with the movies.
CHAPTER VII
D. W. GRIFFITH DIRECTS HIS FIRST MOVIE
Considering the chaotic condition of things in the studio as a result of Mr. McCutcheon’s illness, it was a propitious time to take heed and get on to the tricks of this movie business. To David Griffith the direction was insufferably careless, the acting the same, and in the lingering bitterness over his play’s failure he gritted his teeth and decided that if he ever got a chance he certainly could direct these dinky movies.
The studio was so without a head these days that even Henry Norton Marvin, our vice-president and general manager, occasionally helped out in the directing. He had directed a mutoscope called “A Studio Party” in which my husband and I had made a joint appearance.
With the place now “runnin’ wild,” Mr. Marvin wondered whom he’d better take a chance on next.
He put the odds on Mr. Stanner E. V. Taylor.
In the studio, one day shortly after my initiation, Mr. Taylor approached me and asked if I could play a lead in a melodrama he was to direct. A lead in a melodrama—with a brief stage career that had been confined to winsome ingénues! But I bravely said, “Oh, yes, yes, indeed I can.”