Thomas H. Ince - Life and Career

Life and Career

Born in Newport, Rhode Island, November 16, 1882, Ince first appeared on the stage at age six and then worked with a number of stock companies. He made his Broadway debut in 1898 when he was 15 after debuting in Shore Acres. Vaudeville offered work for him, but the work was inconsistent, so he was a lifeguard, a promoter and part-time actor. In 1905 he was hired to work for the Edison Manufacturing Company and formed his own Vaudville company, though with little success. He met his wife, Biograph contract actress Elinor Kershaw, when they appeared together in a Broadway show, For Love's Sweet Sake in 1906. They were married a year later and had three sons during their marriage. With his stage career a failure, however, Ince felt he was headed nowhere as an actor. Before long, through his wife's connections, Ince got a job with Biograph in New York. Although he was working exclusively in films, making $5 per day, he was regularly under employed.

In 1910, a chance encounter in New York with an old employee from his acting troupe led Ince to some work at the Independent Motion Pictures Co. (IMP). That same year he was given an opportunity to direct when a director at IMP was unable to complete work on a small film. In a precocious moment of bravado, he advanced the idea of working full-time in that capacity to IMP's owner Carl Laemmle. Impressed with the younger man's pugnacity, Laemmle hired him on the spot, sending him to Cuba to make films out of the reach of the Motion Pictures Patent Company — the trust that was attempting to crush all independent production companies and corner the market on film production. Ince's output, however, was small. And, although he tackled many different subjects, he was strongly drawn to Westerns and American Civil War dramas. He wanted to achieve the sort of spectacular effects accomplished with minimal facilities that D.W. Griffith had done. This, he believed, could be accomplished only in Hollywood.

In September 1911, in an attempt to convey the appearance of a successful director by wearing a borrowed suit and a diamond ring he had also borrowed from a local jeweler, Ince walked into the offices of Charles O. Baumann at the New York Motion Picture Co. (NYMP), which had recently decided to establish a West Coast studio to make westerns. The ruse worked, and Ince was offered $100 a week to go to California.

"This offer came as a distinct shock, but I kept cool and concealed my excitement. I tried to convey the impression that he would have to raise the ante a trifle if he wanted me. That also worked, and I signed a contract for three months at $150 a week. Very soon after that, with Mrs. Ince, my camera man, property man and Ethel Grandin, my leading woman, I turned my face westward."

In November 1911, they arrived at NYMP's small studios at Edendale (later known as Echo Park). It was during this period that Ince began his first steps to revolutionize the filmmaking process as we know it today. Almost instinctively, he hit upon the formula of carefully pre-planning his films on paper (something even Griffith never did) inventing the use of a detailed "shooting script," which also contained information on who was in the scene, and the "scene plot," which listed all interiors and exteriors, cost control plans and so on, and then meticulously breaking down the shooting schedule so that several scenes could be shot simultaneously by assistant directors.