Mr. Ingram is one of the very few new directors that the screen has developed in recent years. New in the sense that he has attracted attention not only within the art of picture production but without it as well. He is one of those men who have been recruited from other fields of endeavor and who has fulfilled expectations and gone far beyond them. A man such as Ingram will always have an opportunity. He may have to fight for it but it's bound to come.
Mr. Ingram's remarks about building settings, so that people who frequent such places in real life will instantly recognize them, opens an interesting field of comment. Even if a director labors painstakingly to achieve the proper atmosphere there are always some crabs in the audience who are bound to take exception. If they can't find something to criticise in the setting they criticise the way the extras play their parts.
For a long time doctors have been grossly misrepresented on the screen. Doctors in particular have objected that they never act as if possessed of diplomas. A director recently resolved to put an end to such criticism. It annoyed him particularly inasmuch as he had a friend, an M.D., who was forever poking fun at him whenever he introduced a man of medicine into a picture.
When the director in question completed his latest picture he took his doctor friend to see it and after it was over asked him specially how he liked the performance of the actor who played the doctor.
“Terrible,” replied his friend, “The man never saw a clinic and shows it. No real doctor would act like that.”
“That's funny,” replied the director with a smile, “because, you see he wasn't an actor but—a doctor!”
Chapter VIII
MAINLY ABOUT D. W. GRIFFITH
The producer and director of “The Birth of a Nation,” “Hearts of the World,” “Way Down East,” and “Orphans of the Storm” works with amazing disregard of system.—Others attempt his methods of procedure and come more often to grief than to glory
Chapter VIII
No volume on the subject of directing would be complete without the mention of D. W. Griffith. And yet it is utterly impossible to deal with D. W. Griffith in any comprehensive way. The producer of the first great picture “The Birth of a Nation,” the man who strove for something beyond the times in “Intolerance,” the artist who made “Hearts of the World” and the masterly technician who stands sponsor for “Way Down East,” is singularly hard to approach from any ordinary viewpoint.