Thomas Ince: Hollywood's Independent Pioneer

by Brian Taves

Overview

Thomas H. Ince was a film industry revolutionary. With a career that began in vaudeville and ended with the entire movie studio system credited to his name, the influential producer changed the industry forever. Known for his intense work ethic and vast array of talents that ranged from actor to producer to cinematographer, Ince became known as one of the hardest working businessmen in Tinseltown, churning out more than 100 films during his career. However, today he is perhaps best remembered fo

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780813134222
Publisher:	University Press of Kentucky
Publication date:	01/06/2012
Series:	Screen Classics
Pages:	384
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.20(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Brian Taves is an archivist with the Library of Congress, where this project began with a staff fellowship award. He is the author of over a hundred articles and six books including P. G. Wodehouse and Hollywood: Screenwriting, Satires and Adaptation; Robert Florey: The French Expressionist; and The Romance of Adventure: The Genre of Historical Adventure Movies. He lives in Culpeper, Virginia.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations vii

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction 1

Part 1 Beginnings, 1880-1912

1 Stage Apprenticeship 17

2 Starting in Films 23

Part 2 Making a Reputation, 1912-1915

3 The Job of a Producer 41

4 Establishing a Studio 53

Part 3 Innovations, 1914-1917

5 Generic Experimentation 75

6 The Prescient Failure 89

Part 4 Paramount, 1917-1921

7 A Fresh Start 111

8 The Star Series 119

9 World War I and Specials 143

Part 5 The Perils of an Independent, 1919-1924

10 Associated Producers, 1919-1921 161

11 The Inevitable Merger, 1921-1922 177

12 War with First National, 1922 189

13 The Studio Resumes Production, 1922-1923 199

14 Case Study of a Production and Its Personnel: Her Reputation, 1922-1923 211

15 Initial Distribution beyond First National, 1923 231

Editorial Reviews

Until now, Thomas Ince has not been the subject of a biography. This book offers a glimpse into the world of silent cinema through the story of one of its earliest and most influential moguls.

The Silent Treatment

This fascinating book offers insight into the professional achievements and personal struggles facing Ince during the tumultuous silent movie era.

Film Threat

For more than half a century, film historians all over the world have been awaiting an authoritative and scrupulously researched biography of American film mogul Thomas H. Ince. Brian Taves has achieved this formidable task, patiently researching in the remotest archives in order to give us a vivid and convincing portrayal not only of a neglected filmmaker, but of his flourishing film company and his independent studio. A must for any cinephile's library.

Hervé Dumont

I strongly recommend Brian Taves' vanguard study on Thomas Ince as a definitive source. Accessible and free of jargon, Taves makes exemplary use of newly available archival materials with keen analysis of Ince's surviving films to paint a vivid picture of Ince's career as an independent, challenges he faced and overcame, revealing Ince's contribution as an under-recognized innovator in film history. As Taves demonstrates, Ince developed the division of labor and system of specialized roles that dominate Hollywood to this day.

Sheri Chinen Biesen

Will undoubtedly become a priceless handbook for everyone interested in the history of [the] American film industry.

25fps

Brian Taves has written the first book length study in English of Thomas Ince, the unjustly forgotten producer-director responsible for creating the classical Hollywood studio system of production. Taves' lucid account of a career cut short by a premature death, debunks the many myths surrounding Ince's mysterious last days, while placing Ince in proper perspective as one of Hollywood's greatest early pioneers.

Jan-Christopher Horak

Shows just how important [Ince] was to the film business and how many producers model their careers after him today.

City Book Review

Taves explores Ince's impact on Hollywood's production system, the Western, his creation of the first American movies starring Asian performers, and his cinematic exploration of the status of women in society.... A great bio for you film buffs out there.

Kick Ass Book Reviews

Only one third of Ince's features survive.... Taves is less interested in the nature of his subject's cinematic achievement than in what his career reveals of the early film industry, and in particular of the struggles between the monopolistic tendencies of the major studios and a few individuals trying to maintain their independence.

Sight & Sound

"Scholars and historians welcome an authoritative, detailed, and readable study of this neglected film pioneer."—Richard Koszarski, author of Hollywood on the Hudson: Film and Television in New York from Griffith to Sarnoff

From the Publisher

Filled with unexpected surprises.

King Features Syndicate

[Taves] is painstakingly righting nearly a century of wrongheaded, ignorant or deliberately cruel thinking about Ince's character and career.

Denver Post

Brian Taves's exhaustive and compelling biography of Thomas Ince documents the career of a valiant independent producer in the early days of Hollywood, a period when the movies became big business. Thanks to Taves's exhaustive research, which documents Ince's working methods, financial arrangements, and filmmaking skills, Ince emerges as a true founder of the industry, along with Adolph Zukor, Carl Laemmle, Cecil B. De Mille and D. W. Griffith.

Tino Balio

Ince was busy making films, not scandal, and it is fitting that this biography treats his business and artistic dealings in detail, for those, and not fictions about his death, are important parts of the larger story of movies.

Columbus Dispatch

The illuminating result is a picture of an extraordinary businessman who virtually invented the role of the producer and the institution of the studio.

Virginian Pilot

For more than half a century, film historians all over the world have been awaiting an authoritative and scrupulously researched biography of American film mogul Thomas H. Ince. Brian Taves has achieved this formidable task, patiently researching in the remotest archives in order to give us a vivid and convincing portrayal not only of a neglected filmmaker, but of his flourishing film company and his independent studio. A must for any cinephile's library.

Hervé Dumont

…for the first time…the full range of Ince's contributions to the movies has been persuasively documented…Brian Taves…has given us a portrait of a commercial producer who worked during a time when such a person could still have the inclination of an artist…[Taves] is painstakingly righting nearly a century of wrongheaded, ignorant or deliberately cruel thinking about Ince's character and career.
—The Washington Post

Mindy Aloff