When the movies were young (1925)

The First Tworeeler 195 this year we would go to it right, with a massive production of Tennyson's * 'Enoch Arden" — a second production of the poem that had written history for us in our screen beginnings. The first time we had taken most of it in the studio, with only one or two simple shots of the sea. Now we would do something g-r-a-n-d. "Enoch Arden" was such good movie stuff, and Mr. Griffith was wondering how he could get it all into one thousand feet of film. An exhibitor in those days would accept eleven hundred feet of film, but that was the limit. The programs were arranged only for the thousand-foot picture; a thousandfoot Biograph being shown Mondays and Thursdays. How could two thousand feet be shown on Monday and none on Thursday? Even could the exhibitor have so arranged it, would the people sit through two thousand feet without a break? Well, now, we could do this : we could take the picture in two reels, each of a thousand feet, show one reel Monday, the second Thursday, and take a chance on the people becoming sufficiently interested in the first reel to come back for the second — the only logical way of working out the problem. Mr. Griffith fully realized his responsibility. Again he would chance it. Santa Monica would be the ideal place for this big production; so every day for a week — for a whole week was given to exteriors alone — we motored out to Santa Monica in the cold early morning. The place had changed little in the year that had passed. The row of tiny shacks was now occupied by Japs and Norwegians who caught and dried fish and fought with each other at all other times.