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waste his time and the time of his people "listening to all that gab." He wished to remind everybody that he himself was responsible for the costs on his film, and every minute they wasted was adding to costs. But the inescapable suspicion was that he did it deliberately to show his contempt for Mayer, whom he and other lordly directors, such as Ingram, frankly considered a parvenu. Neilan had got his fill of Mayer when he was making the Anita Stewart films.
Such candid disdain of the producer, manifested by Neilan's attitude and by the flat refusal of Ingram to be subordinate to Mayer, reflected a fundamental conflict that openly existed at the time between largely autonomous directors and what they scathingly called "the money-men." Leading directors considered themselves the elite — supreme and secure from restriction in conceiving and creating films. Although they acknowledged dependence for necessary funds on the fellows who put up the money, usually the distributors, they inherently assumed that they would make all artistic decisions. The "money-men" were mere promoters who were capitalizing on art.
This concept of the director as the paramount creative control in the manufacture of motion pictures stemmed from early days when directors, such as Ince and Griffith, were trailblazers for the medium. They and their brash contemporaries — E.S. Porter, Cecil B. De Mille, J. Searle Dawley, George Loane Tucker, Ingram, John S. Robertson — made pretty much what they wanted. They chose their own stories, their casts, approved the designs, picked their locations, and spent as much money as they wished — or, at least, as much as they could wangle from their yammering entrepreneurs. The latter did not intrude as critics, so long as they were eager for the films.
It was only as costs began to rocket in the period after the First World War — that period of splurge and competition that culminated in the crisis of 1923 — that businessmen putting up the money saw that brakes would have to be applied,