Enter the Screenwriter

An article printed in The Scientific American in June of 1909 heralded a new change in American popular culture. The screenwriter. This blurb was reprinted in the magazine in June 2009.

Moving pictures are exhibited in about ten thousand theaters and halls in the United States. With the rapid spread of this new amusement has also come a marked change in the public taste. Spectators were once quite content with a view of factory employees going to and from their work, the arrival and departure of railway trains, and similar scenes. Nowadays, a more or less coherent story must be unfolded, for which reason the makers of moving pictures have been compelled to write plays (or at least to conceive them) and to have them acted before the camera.

“More or less coherent” is a quality which seems to have remained with screenplays a century later.

The Grub-Stake (1923)

There is something irresistably modern about her. Watching her lithe, tall body run, and climb, and even fight, we might forget for a moment that she did these things a very long time ago. It is the silent movie, the sepia tint, the title cards, and the accompanying music that underscores the moods that remind us Nell Shipman was strictly Back in the Day. She could fit comfortably in the world today, except perhaps that she was a maverick who did not seem to aspire to fitting in.

Today we have a look at “The Grub-Stake” (1923), a silent film written, produced, and starring Nell Shipman. My copy comes courtesy of your friend and mine, John Hayes from Robert Frost’s Banjo. John and his wife, Eberle Umbach, wrote and performed the score for this 2006 restored version of Miss Shipman’s little known masterpiece.

Nell Shipman, who cut her teeth in vaudeville and traveling acting troupes, was a woman of intelligence, extraordinary creativity, and astonishing grit, who shook off the trappings (and shackles) of Hollywood to form her own production company when indie films, let alone indie films with a woman at the helm, were unusual. And she did her own stunts.

“The Grub-Stake, A Tale of the Klondike”, a long eight-reeler, takes our Nell, a kind-hearted but naïve girl, from a waterfront slum in the Pacific Northwest where she cares for her invalid father, The Skipper, played by Walt Whitman (no relation) as a laundress and bumbling Jill-of-all-Trades.

A sauve entrepreneur from Gold Rush country, played by Alfred Allen, comes down for supplies, and bestows upon her a “grub stake”, that is financial backing, to start herself up a laundry in the Klondike to serve what she hopes will be a busy clientele of gold prospectors in dirty clothes.

But oh, the tangled web of fate! This sauve fellow is a Wicked Man, who compromises her, marries her (though he is already married), and hies her away to the Alaskan mining town where he runs a dance hall.

He immediately puts his “wife” to work dancing with wealthy men. Nell, who has shucked her simple sailor dress for fancy duds, is shocked to learn from the crude saloon madam with the heart of gold, played by Lillian Leighton, that she has been lured here for unsavory activities, which indeed may lead to a Fate Worse than Death.

So to speak.

“Dumb as an oyster” her husband notes when he decides she is the perfect pigeon for his chicanery.

It takes her a little while longer to discover that her husband is also just about to have her poor old father murdered by his stereotyped sinister Chinese toady.

But, Nell, full of righteous indignation and a bucketload of terror, packs up The Skipper, a new friend who is the adle-pated saloon lush dragging an imaginary dog on a piece of rope, and heads for the hills in a dogsled (pulled by real dogs, not imaginary ones). In a snowstorm. Filmed on location in Idaho, we have real snow and ice, and real frostbite, as the “making of” documentary on this DVD can attest.

We are treated to several more reels of winter, in which Nells gets separated and wanders blindly in foul weather until she takes refuge in a bear’s den. The bear takes kindly to her, in fact, kisses her full on the mouth. There will be a love story, but not yet. Not with the bear. They’re just good friends, apperances notwithstanding. Oh sure, they sleep together, but you really should get your mind out of the gutter. It’s not like that.

Several weeks pass as winter turns to spring and some beautiful nature photography guides the story. Nell finds comfort among the critters of the woods, a sense of affection and peace as she had never felt in civilization. Nell Shipman kept her own zoo of critters for these wildlife scenes, and it has also been noted by film historians that she was an early proponent of humane treatment for animal actors.

But, trouble returns in the form of her evil husband, a rowdy gang of claim jumpers, a relentless Mountie, and her sprained ankle that just does not seem to want to heal. Fortunately for Nell, the saloon madam has a handsome artist son, played by Hugh Thompson, who also lives in the woods. Eventually, true loves conquers all (this time with the artist, who is almost as affectionate as the bear), but not before we get a final cliffhanger with Nell actually hanging off a cliff. Did I mention she does her own stunts?

Watching Nell Shipman is a treat, mainly because of that unusual unaffected quality of hers that seems to reasonate beyond the decades since the time this film was made. Where other female stars of her era were waif-like, she is big and athletic. Perhaps because she made the film herself, there is no turning her into a comic buffoon, which could easily happen in the studio system back down in Hollywood where “types” were plugged into the machine.

Miss Shipman defied the types of the day. Her shaggy, unruly bobbed haircut, and her wry, subtle expressions of humor alternating with utter innocence are an intriguing contrast to the typical exaggerated pantomime of the day. She moves with natural, unselfconsicous energy, unlike some of the more tableau-stances typical of actresses in silent films of the time. I would not say she is a better actress than someone like Lillian Gish or Greta Garbo, who were more studied and trained. She was not a better actress, but her very ease and naturalness are refreshing.

The use of a natural setting itself seems like a bold example of Nell Shipman’s escape from the Hollywood studio.

I especially enjoyed John’s and Eberle’s score for this restored film, which follows the moods and conscience of the characters, and especially of the real woman at the helm. It must have been a fascinating process, interpreting not only the dramatic moods of the film as vingettes in music, but to try to relate the emotional and psychological regeneration of the Nell's character when she encounters nature.  In a sense, a musical score written for a silent film is rather like another script for the entire plot.

Can’t get enough plunking on a toy piano, for my money. For more on their participation in this, and in another of Nell Shipman’s films, have a look at John’s description here, and also here. John also gives a good bit of background on Miss Shipman’s career.

“The Grub-Stake” is third in a three-volume DVD series of Shipman’s films available at the Boise State University bookstore. Here’s a link to get your copy. Extras on this particular DVD include an interesting documentary on the making of “The Grub-Stake”, and another brief bio narrated by Nell Shipman’s granddaughter and great-granddaughter.

When “The Grub-Stake” was released, it received initial praise and brief success, until the distributing company suddenly failed and went out of business. This pulled the plug on Nell Shipman’s silent film career. It took many decades and the efforts of determined people like Tom Trusky of the Idaho Film Commission, research and restoration staff, including the likes of John and Eberle, to revive her masterpiece and share it with us.

My thanks to all of them for their efforts, and especially to John for sending me this very special DVD.

Now Playing at Springfield's Broadway Theater, 1916

Above is the program for the lineup at the Broadway Theater in Springfield, Massachusetts, probably about 1916. The theater was located on Bridge Street, and for more details on the theater, please have a look at this page on the Cinema Treasures website.For more on the evolution of Bridge Street, its theaters, businesses and residents, have a look at this essay posted on my New England Travels blog on Bridge Street in Springfield, Mass.

Photos of the old Broadway Theater, built in 1913, torn down in the 1950s are scarce, but we have this program to illustrate the evolution in the presentation of the performing arts. The bill is presented in a manner very similar to a vaudeville program. The Broadway also showed vaudeville acts until its gradual phasing out to all movies.

The first films on the bill are likely one or two-reelers, that is films that lasted ten or 20 minutes. Dorothy Bernard stars in “The Girl and Her Trust” produced at the Biograph studio, and “Breaking the Shackles” was an Edison studio film.

We note the Broadway Concert Orchestra was on hand to accompany these silent films.

“Adventure in the Woods” or “Adventure in the Autumn Woods” with Mae Marsh was from 1913, and the Francis Bushman, billed also as Francis X. Bushman (last seen here in "The Flag" - 1927)in “Blood Will Tell” was from 1914, so this movie house showed films from varying studios and the older films were more or less fillers, like lesser vaudeville acts.

The main features, both new films from 1916, were the two Paramount movies “The Spider” with Pauline Frederick, and “The Ragamuffin” with Blanche Sweet, both billed as “5-Act” films, which would have run about 50 minutes. Films were regarded as photo-plays then and it looks as if we were weaning ourselves off live entertainment by using the familiar vaudeville lineup and the suggestion that the multiple reels of film were “acts” in the drama.

We may sometimes indulge in the mistaken belief that technology changing our popular entertainment almost too fast for us to keep up is a modern phenomenon, but I wonder if anything could have seemed so fantastic and out of this world than the flickers flashed on a screen pulled down to cover the stage, leaving only the orchestra pit exposed (though only for another decade), and the astonished gaze of the downsized vaudevillian wondering how he could get in on the “act.”

3 Bad Men - 1925

“3 Bad Men” (1925) is notable for the lovely union of 1920s filmmaking and present day film scoring. This John Ford directed silent Western was restored, with a new musical soundtrack added in 2007. The modern music composed by Dana Kaproff is extraordinarily evocative of American Western themes, and deeply moving in the way it re-interprets this old silent movie for a new audience.

(We recently discussed modern scoring of silents in the comments section of this post on “The Freshman” - see here.)

There are the traditional feathery piano chord plunking, standard for silent movies, to be sure, but this score soars with the use of guitar and fiddle. One particular musical theme which is repeated throughout the film is used to illustrate the feelings of the main character, Bull Stanley (played with great sensitivity by Tom Santchi.) He is one of the three bad men, and his loneliness, his sadness, and his redemption are all carried to us effortlessly through music.

The film takes us to the 1877 land rush. John Ford sets the scene with proclamations by President Ulysses S. Grant, shots of a three-masted bark carrying immigrants over the ocean to the new country. There are a few ethic slurs throughout this film, which Ford seems to attempt to balance out with a tribute to the diverse ethnic groups that come to settle the Midwest. This is not a pontificating film, however, in the style of perhaps D. W. Griffith. On the contrary, the film is actually very funny, with title cards that convey the same kind of dry wit Ford’s actors will speak in his later films.

We see American Indians also, and though they thankfully are not treated with the same kind of ethnic ribbing the newcomers get, still they are not fleshed out as human beings. They are used here seemingly only as symbols of a presumably dying culture, signposts to show us we are in the West, and the West is still wild but not for long.


Dan O’Malley, played by George O’Brien, is a devil-may-care Irish immigrant who encounters Miss Lee Carleton and her father, former Confederate Major Carleton crossing the prairie in their enormous Conestoga wagon, leading a small heard of thoroughbred racehorses. Miss Lee, played by Olive Borden is a lady by birth, even though the only time we ever see her out of trousers, boots, and cowboy hat is when she takes a bath. She is flashing-eyed beauty, independent, and sassy.


Bull, and his pardners Spade and Mike, played by J. Farrell MacDonald (who, like Santchi, played in over 300 films, last seen here in “My Darling Clementine” - 1946), are desperados, horse thieves, and overall ne’er do wells. But these old no-account saddle tramps have a lovable quality of humor that throws the audience for a loop and makes them reconsider what is “bad”. Bull, it will be slowly revealed throughout the film, has a sorrowful back story, wherein his beloved little sister ran off with a man who “promised” to marry her. Bull is looking for her, and for the man who took her away.


The man is Layne Hunter, a dishonest sheriff in a ramshackle gold mining town. He and his gang attack Lee and her father to steal their horses, just when Bull and his boys wanted to steal them. Bull and his boys counter-attack and chase off the horse thieves, but Lee’s father is killed. When Lee buries her face on Bull’s chest in tears, we see the beginning of a transformation for Bull, who is reminded of his failure to protect his younger sister. He and his boys, become Lee’s guardian angels for the rest of the film.

What is interesting is that Ford never makes these scenes too maudlin. There is a bit of overplaying here and there, as was the acting style in silents, but from the director’s point of view there is occasionally a startling cynicism to the film. The bad sheriff wears a white hat, and one senses this was Ford’s way of twisting our film Western iconic imagery. When Bull first comes up behind Lee, he thinks she is a man and intends to rob her at gunpoint, only lowering his gun in astonishment when she removes her hat and her hair falls to her shoulders. Dan O’Malley, who will eventually be Lee’s romantic interest, at first displays no interest in being her hero. In a muddy gold camp where cutthroats and dandies cross paths with prostitutes, only the new Protestant minister, whom an immigrant clothier with all due respect comically refers to as “Rabbi”, is all good, and the sheriff in the white hat, is all bad. Everybody else is drawn in shades of gray.

There are impressive long shots of a massive expanse of prairie filled with wagon trains and cattle. The scenes of the land rush look so familiar, perhaps because they have been duplicated many times elsewhere. There are shots of charging wagons, toppling over each other, axels breaking, wagon wheels falling off, wagons charging right over the camera, and a shot of a man on a large-wheeled bicycle being towed by a horse. Many of these images you might also recognize in a similar land rush in “Far and Away” (1992) with Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman.


Bull, Mike, and Spade drive Lee’s wagon and horses into the gold camp, and when Lee is approached by the flirtatious Sheriff Hunter, Bull gets protective and stands between them. The smarmy sheriff announces the unsavory reputations of Bull and his boys, unmasking them and hoping to shock Lee, who was ignorant that her protectors are desperadoes. What follows is another unusual scene, when Lee shows her tolerance as well as her moxie by cavalierly shrugging this off, “Come my three bad men, it’s time we were making camp.” She is a trooper, and when they agree to work for her for nothing, she asks with wonder, “Then you’ll be my men?”

They remove their hats with hesitant gallantry and nod, consenting to be owned. Seeing her holding another woman’s baby, Bull gets another pang of protectiveness, his slow guitar waltz plays, and we seem to see into his troubled soul.


Deciding she needs a better family than they, her men decide to go husband hunting for her. Spade and Mike, who are the more comic relief of the trio, tackle this, and their thirst, at the saloon, but Dan O’Malley eventually arrives in the gold camp, and resumes his attentions to Lee. He has Bull’s approval, because Bull has seen him punch his way out of the saloon. Therefore, he is a good man.

Conversely, we see here, and in other Ford Westerns, that women are depicted as the civilizing influence over the men and the bringers of civilization to the West. It is a romantic notion, but Ford, for all his macho movie fist-fighting, was really a romantic.

Bull is eventually reunited with his lost younger sister, Millie, who was shunted away by Sheriff Hunter among his prostitutes. Hunter’s gang tries to put down a revolt led by Bull against his abuse of power, and in the melee, Millie is shot. Their reunion is brief, and tragic. When Bull realizes that Sheriff Hunter was the man who led her astray, he punches through several doors trying to get to him.

When the minister, Bull, Mike, and Spade attend Millie’s grave the next morning, the wind whips their clothing, and it dawns on June 25, 1877, the day the land rush will begin at noon with the booming of Army cannon.

Life does not stand still, even for the grieving. Bull, Mike, and Spade, who have no personal interest in the land rush, continue to assist Lee and Dan to their promised land, and score revenge on Hunter, who is after them.


Each of the men, in separate acts of bravery, gives his life for the future of Lee and Dan, and so the three bad men are redeemed. In the final shot, a lump in your throat moment when we see their ghosts on horseback on the dim horizon are forever watching out for “our gal.”

The stunning action sequences are enhanced by a spirited fiddle reel, but the real soul of this film is so beautifully displayed in Bull’s theme of the slow guitar waltz. The classic Western is ironically made more classic with a modern touch. Despite Ford’s imprint and some laudable camera work, I can’t believe this film could have as much emotional impact without this lovely music.

The Freshman - 1925

“The Freshman” (1925) sends an eager Harold Lloyd to college. Harold’s main goal is to fit in and be popular. His biggest handicap is himself and his sweet, heartbreaking desire to be liked.

We meet Harold first in his room at home, practicing college cheerleading yells and preening in his freshman beanie and sweater before a mirror. There is a movie poster for a film called “The College Hero”, the actor of which Harold idolizes. Apparently there is no freshman orientation at his school, because most of Harold’s knowledge about being a college student comes from his favorite movie and a boy’s book, “Jack Merivale at College.” The college annual has a photo of the football captain, who is the Most Popular Man on campus, and Harold wants to emulate his new hero so that he can be a hero himself.

He learns a snappy little jig from the movie he has seen, which the hero does just before he extends his hand to shake upon meeting new people. It’s hysterical, and Harold’s poor father bemoans to his mother, “They’ll either break his heart or his neck.” There is thinly veiled poignancy in this sarcasm, because both turn out to be true.

Harold is off to Tate University (not the same name used for the college in “Good News” -1947, discussed here, which was Tait.)

Harold’s utterly without guile enthusiasm for all things collegiate lead him into mishaps with the dean, making a fool of himself when he finds himself accidentally on stage for a student assembly, and nearly getting killed being the tackle dummy for football practice. Harold starts off on the wrong foot and stays there, but in his idealism for being a college man, he has no idea that everything has gone wrong. The in-crowd hazes him mercilessly without his knowing it, and makes him jump through hoops just to see if he will. Harold mistakenly believes he is the most popular man on campus.


The only genuine element of Harold’s college success lies in Peggy, played by Jobyna Ralston, a co-ed he met on the train. She is, as the title card tells us, “the kind of girl your mother must have been,” in short, true blue and sweet. Peggy is a poor but honest lass who will work her way through school at the Hotel Tate as a check room girl and maid. The scene on the train is cute, when he helps her do a crossword puzzle, the clue for one word which requires them to think of suitable endearments that will fit the number of blocks, like “sweetheart” and “darling”, and the elderly couple behind them suspect they are lovers.

Harold repeats his how-do-you-do jig every time he meets someone new, and for a repetitious gag, it really gets funnier each time we see it. At a school dance, where Harold thinks he is the admiration of all, Harold defends Peggy’s honor when a masher tries to take liberties. When Harold slugs the brute, the resentful fellow lets the cat out of the bag that nobody really likes Harold, that he has been made a fool, and everyone is laughing at him. Harold discovers this is true, and the agonized facial expression depicting his realization is moving. Lloyd was not just a fantastic physical clown and athlete, he could really act.


His pain and embarrassment are acute, and we see Peggy’s heart breaking to see it. Wordlessly (yeah, I know it’s a silent movie anyway), she holds her arms out to him, and he cries in her lap. So sweet and sad, you want to shove your arms through the TV and hold him yourself. Well, all right. Maybe it’s just me.



She encourages Harold to just be himself, not to try to be kind of the campus hero for friends who are false. How much he takes in we don’t know because he still wants to be football hero.




The climax of the film takes place at the Big Game. There is footage here used from an actual stadium packed to the gills. According to the IMDb site, the football scenes were shot at Memorial Stadium in Berkeley, California between the first and second quarters of the East-West game of 1924-25. Members of the University of Southern California football team played both teams. The entire film, incidentally, was shot in sequence, which of course was unusual.



The football game of course goes wrong for dear old Tate, and when Harold the water boy at last gets to play in the final moments, he messes up in some very funny faux pas, but his pluck and his refusal to quit actually puts him in a spot where he can save the day. He does.



Now everyone on campus, all the in-crowd, all the bullies, even the crusty old football coach are imitating Harold’s how-do-you-do jig. But all Harold can think of as they ride him out of the stadium on their shoulders is his best girl.




There’s not a lot of studying or class time at dear old Tate or Tait, however you spell it. Maybe that’s why everyone from June Allyson, Peter Lawford, and Harold Lloyd went there.



Here is an interesting clip from YouTube analyzing how the famous jig was shot by means of undercranking to make it look a little faster and a lot sillier: