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Florence Lawrence, the first Biograph girl, was rescued from anonymity by Carl Laemmle and, in 1910, became the first modern style movie star. Her star career was brief and she ended up, in the thirties, playing bits.
This development caused great alarm to the men in control of the studios, particularly those who had joined with Thomas Edison in the so-called trust, a generally unsuccessful attempt to limit the production of films. If the actors learned that the public had singled out certain members of the fraternity for special favor, they would undoubtedly begin to demand more money for their services, thereby upsetting the delicate economic balance of the industry.
As if this were not bad enough, the industry was harboring in its midst a saboteur of the conventional wisdom. D. W. Griffith, a reformed actor with literary aspirations, began to direct films for Biograph in 1908. The Biograph years were, for Griffith, ones of experiment, learning how to break all the old, static rules of movie making, teaching the camera to move, learning how to edit his film in order to create the illusion of life's rhythm rather than that of the stage. In the course of creating for the film a new basic grammar, Griffith kept moving his camera closer, ever closer to the faces of his actors. He quickly discovered its cruelty, particularly in those days of flat, harsh lighting and bad film. He needed unlined, youthful faces for his closeups, just as he needed unwrinkled minds which he could command absolutely. He had no need of older actors, set in their ways and impervious to his imperious ego. He therefore built a stock company of malleable, youthful players, among them Blanohe Sweet, Mae Marsh, Mabel Normand, Linda Arvidson (Griffith's wife), Lillian and Dorothy Gish, and Florence Lawrence, perhaps the least important talent of the group, but a girl who was shortly to play a revolutionary role in movie history.
Thus the stage was set for the emergence of the beautiful people, the stars. The public had begun to find them out, despite the best efforts of the industry to conceal their identities. And within the industry a new way of making films was creating a genuine artistic demand for youth and beauty.
It remained only for Carl Laemmle to put the two demands together and create that strange being we know today as the Movie Star. The instrument of his will was Miss Florence Lawrence, already a minor celebrity as the original Biograph girl. In 1910 Laemmle offered Miss Lawrence a thousand dollars a week for her exclusive services to IMP (Independent Motion Picture Company ) . He launched her into starry orbit with characteristic dash. Shortly after signing her, he planted a fake story in the press stating that Miss Lawrence had been killed beneath the wheels of a trolley car in St. Louis. Then he rushed into print crying not merely that
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