“Where did you get all that?”
“Moving Pictures!”
“Moving Pictures? For heaven’s sake, tell us about it.”
“How did you do it?” queried George Terwilliger. “Forty-five dollars for three stories, good Lord, and they gave you the money right off, like that.”
So Mr. Woods told his little story, and as the conversation ended, George Terwilliger reached for paper and pencil, for five-dollar bills were beckoning from every direction. Maybe he could put it over, too. He did—he sold lots and lots of “suggestions.” Frank Woods wrote thirty movies for Biograph.
Frank Woods now set about to criticise the pictures with the same seriousness with which he would have criticised the theatre. He bought books about Indians and let the producers know there was a difference between the Hopi and the Apache and the Navajo. With a critical eye, he picked out errors and wrote of them frankly, and his influence in the betterment of the movies has been a bigger one than is generally known outside the movie world. Mr. Woods is really responsible for research. And Mr. Dougherty gives him credit for turning in the first “continuity.” The picture that has that honor is a version of Tennyson’s “Enoch Arden,” called “After Many Years.”
Scenarios that reached the Biograph offices, due to lack of organization, were sometimes weeks in reaching the proper department, but Mr. Griffith got first chance at “After Many Years.” Both he and Mr. Dougherty thought it pretty good stuff, but the obvious emotional acting that had prevailed somewhere in every picture so far, was here entirely lacking. Quiet suppressed emotion only, this one had. But Doc said he’d eat the positive if it wouldn’t make a good picture. So it was purchased.
But “After Many Years,” although it had no “action,” and some of us sat in the projection room at its first showing with heavy hearts, proved to write more history than any picture ever filmed and it brought an entirely new technique to the making of films.
It was the first movie without a chase. That was something, for those days, a movie without a chase was not a movie. How could a movie be made without a chase? How could there be suspense? How action? “After Many Years” was also the first picture to have a dramatic close-up—the first picture to have a cut-back. When Mr. Griffith suggested a scene showing Annie Lee waiting for her husband’s return to be followed by a scene of Enoch cast away on a desert island, it was altogether too distracting. “How can you tell a story jumping about like that? The people won’t know what it’s about.”
“Well,” said Mr. Griffith, “doesn’t Dickens write that way?”