Motion Pictures
In 1914, Sills decided to conquer the new medium of motion pictures. He made his film debut the same year in the big-budget drama The Pit for the World Film Company and was signed to a contract with film producer William A. Brady. The film was enormously successful, and Sills made three more films for the company, including another huge box-office draw The Deep Purple opposite silent screen star Clara Kimball Young. By the late 1910s, Sills had reached leading man status and parted ways with World Film, taking the then unusual path of freelancing as an actor.
By the early 1920s, Sills was enjoying a highly successful acting career and working for such prominent film studios as MGM, Paramount Pictures, and Pathé Exchange. He was often paired with the most popular leading ladies of the era, including: Geraldine Farrar, Gloria Swanson and Viola Dana. His greatest public and commercial successes came with the now lost Flaming Youth (1923) opposite Colleen Moore, and the enormous box-office hit The Sea Hawk (1924).
On May 11, 1927, Sills had the distinction of being among the original 36 individuals in the film industry to found the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS), a professional honorary organization dedicated to the advancement of the arts and sciences of motion pictures. Fellow performers included: Mary Pickford, Richard Barthelmess, Jack Holt, Conrad Nagel, Douglas Fairbanks, and Harold Lloyd.
Sills' last work was not The Sea Wolf (1930) but a book published posthumously in 1932: Values: A Philosophy of Human Needs - Six Dialogues on Subjects from Reality to Immortality - co-edited by Ernest Holmes. Milton Sills was an unusual blend of actor and academic.
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Famous quotes containing the words motion pictures, motion and/or pictures:
“Too many Broadway actors in motion pictures lost their grip on success—had a feeling that none of it had ever happened on that sun-drenched coast, that the coast itself did not exist, there was no California. It had dropped away like a hasty dream and nothing could ever have been like the things they thought they remembered.”
—Mae West (1892–1980)
“Motion or change, and identity or rest, are the first and second secrets of nature: Motion and Rest. The whole code of her laws may be written on the thumbnail, or the signet of a ring.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“I hate cheap pictures. I hate pictures that make people look like they’re not worth much, just to prove a photographer’s point. I hate when they take a picture of someone pickin’ their nose or yawning. It’s so cheap. A lot of it is a big ego trip. You use people as props instead of as people.”
—Jill Freedman (b. 1939)