The Perils of Pauline (1914 Serial) - Behind The Scenes

Behind The Scenes

Pearl White was hesitant to accept the title role, but signed up for $250/week and lots of publicity.

William Randolph Hearst was involved in plot development. He was also present at the premiere at Loew's Broadway Theatre, on 23 March 1914. According to "The Truth About Pearl White" by Wallace E. Davis, the general release was approximately 1 April 1914.

E. A. McManus, head of the Hearst-Vitagraph service organization, was the person who proved how successful a serial could be. He co-operated with the largest film equipment and production company in the world at that time, a France-based company named Pathé, to produce this serial, which was Pathé's first entry into the medium. George B. Seitz tried to follow the cliffhanging pattern of The Adventures of Kathlyn but each chapter was mostly self-contained.

After retiring from law enforcement, former FBI Director William J. Flynn, through his acquaintance with the actor King Baggot (who in 1917 was considered the greatest film star in the country), became a scenario writer for the motion picture industry; producers Theodore and Leopold Wharton commissioned him to write story lines for their films. The Whartons also adapted Flynn's experiences into a 20-part spy thriller titled The Eagle's Eye (1918), starring Baggot.

Surviving chapters of Pauline are noteworthy for their unintentionally funny title cards and dialogue captions, filled with misspellings, poor punctuation, terrible grammar, and odd expressions. This happened when Pathé, the theatrical distributor, exported the film to France. The film was recut and adapted for home-movie use, and all of the printed captions were translated into French. Later, when the American home-movie industry beckoned, the original English titles had been scrapped, so the French technicians tried to translate the titles back into English. These errors have also been blamed on Louis J. Gasnier, director and supervisor of the production. Gasnier, as explained by Crane Wilbur, made linguistic mistakes that confused the French-speaking crew. In either case, current prints of The Perils of Pauline contain these badly re-translated title cards. Thus, in "The Pirate's Treasure", Pauline detects a time-bomb and says, "What is that tic-tac I can hear." In the same episode, she spies one of the quaint locals and observes, "Here is an original old man." The new title cards also renamed the villain's character: "Raymond Owen" was now called "Koerner," in reference to German "villainy" during World War I.

Much of the film was shot in Fort Lee, New Jersey when many early film studios in America's first motion picture industry were based there at the beginning of the 20th century. Scenes were also filmed in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The term "cliffhanger" may have originated with the series, owing to a number of episodes filmed on or around the New Jersey Palisades—though it is also likely to refer to situations in stories of this type where the hero or heroine is hanging from a cliff, seemingly with no way out, until the next episode or last-minute resolution.

Pearl White performed her own stunts for the serial. Considerable risk was involved. In one incident, a balloon carrying White escaped and carried her across the Hudson River into a storm, before landing miles away. In another incident her back was permanently injured in a fall.

One of the more famous scenes in the serial was filmed on the curved Ingham Run trestle in New Hope, Pennsylvania on the Reading Company's New Hope Branch (now the New Hope and Ivyland Railroad line). The trestle still stands, just off Ferry Street, and is now referred to as "Pauline's Trestle". The railroad is a tourist attraction and offers rides from New Hope to Lahaska, Pennsylvania, crossing over the original trestle.

Milton Berle (1908-2002) claimed The Perils of Pauline as his first film appearance, playing the character of a young boy, though this has never been independently verified. The serial did mark one of the early credits for the cinematographer Arthur C. Miller, who was transferred to the project from the Pathé News department.

Pathé established an American factory and studio facility in Jersey City, New Jersey in 1910, and also established the Eclectic Film Company as a subsidiary distribution company for both its American and European products. Although the Jersey City plant produced moderately popular comedies, dramas, and newsreels largely directed at the US market, Pauline was the first American-made Pathé effort to achieve worldwide success under the Eclectic banner.

The final peril has Pauline sitting in a target boat as the Navy opens fire. The idea was also used in To the Shores of Tripoli (1942, Fox).