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The Man who Made "The Big Parade"
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phetic trip to Manhattan, which I have chronicled at the beginning of this article. The result of this trip was that he procured some odd jobs around the studios that familiarized him with the technique of him making.
Then he went back to Texas. He married — the beautiful girl whom he took as his wife, now known as Florence Vidor, was singularly photographic as a type, and therefore admirably suited to appear in his pictures. Her parents were opposed, however, to any such a career for her, so Vidor and his wife decided they would come to California. He particularly wanted her to have a chance to work in the studios in Hollywood.
With very little between them and starvation, they made their way Westward. En route, Vidor eked out a living by taking scenics and showing them as he went, for they traveled to the Coast in a Ford.
When they arrived at San Francisco, he had less than a dollar, plus the Ford and a
shotgun. So he pawned the shotgun, so that they could have a room and some supper. Subsequently, he sold the Ford, and they traveled by rail direct to Los Angeles.
He told his father, before coming West, that he was going to become a director, and in less than a year, he fulfilled this intention. The intervening time he had filled out with work as a camera man at the Vitagraph studio, where he had gone because he had known Corinne Griffith in Texas, and she was working there. She aided him in procuring the first job that he got in Hollywood.
It was with "The Turn in the Road" that he first came into prominence, this being one of his very first pictures. Like several others that followed, it was made at a small independent studio, then known as the Brentwood. Florence had gained recognition for herself, too, as one of
He is quite as unaffected as when he came, unknown, to the studios from Texas; success does not seem in any way to have spoiled him.
He knon>s that achievement along creative lines demands time for isolation and reflective thinking.
the principal players in "Old Wives for New," made bv Cecil B. De Mille.
It was at about the time of the making of "The Jackknife Man" that I first met Vidor. He was fulfilling a contract then for First National, and had financed a studio for himself that is used nowadays for comedies. He had just completed the Ellis Parker Butler story, and had done it as a piece of daring. He had striven in the film to avoid anything of the conventional sex appeal that was then, under the De Mille leadership of "Male and Female," so popular.
He had tried to make a production in which there was no love story, but which should at the same time be filled with humanness. There is no doubt that he succeeded, and that the resulting feature should have made his everlasting reputation right then and there, because "The Jackknife Man" was a work of art, as fine in its way and in its day as "The Big Parade" is now.
But the public was unreceptive. The picture died a slow and tragic financial death, and even the people who appeared in it are by now completely forgotten.
Had, however, the present-day methods of introducing the merits of a picture to the public been prevalent then, I really believe that it could have been something of a triumph.
But it was put before the people hesitatingly and tremulously, and as Continued on page 92