“Nevertheless, we got our bus and our taxicab, and started. I was on the
bus with the camera-man—George Hill, now a famous director—Dorothy at
the other end, the taxi just below. We had not gone a block when an
enormous policeman started over, to see what it was all about. Then he
took a good look at me and stopped, placed his fingers at the corners of
his mouth and ‘put up’ a smile.
“You remember the scene in ‘Broken Blossoms,’ where the brutal father
commands his terrified daughter to smile. I knew right away the big
policeman had seen it. He really smiled, then, and so did I. ‘Oh, it’s
you, is it?’ he said. ‘Yes, and this is my sister, Dorothy, and we’re
trying to finish a picture before Christmas.’ ‘Go right on,’ he said.
Farther up the Avenue, another policeman called out: ‘What do you think
you’re doing up there?’ I put up the smile myself, that time, hoping he
had seen the picture. Evidently he had, for he laughed and waved us
along. I thought it safer not to break any new ground, so we turned and
made the circuit. We made it several times, and were not troubled again,
but helped.
“That night we knew we were done, and everybody was so happy, and so
sorry, weeping on one another’s shoulders. By the time Mr. Griffith came
home, our picture was nearly all cut, and ready. When he saw and
approved of it, I was very happy, but it had nearly killed me.”
Lillian decided that directing was not for women. “Remodeling a
Husband,” as the picture was finally called, turned out a financial
success. She had spent fifty-eight thousand dollars, and twenty-eight
days, making it, but it netted a profit of a hundred and sixty thousand
dollars, and doubled Dorothy’s picture value. She was proud of all that,
but did not care to try it again. A little while ago David Wark Griffith
said:
“Lillian directed Dorothy in the best picture Dorothy ever made. I knew
she could do it, for whenever we were making a picture I realized that
she knew as much about it as I did—gave me valuable ideas about lights,
angles, color, and a hundred things. She had brains, and used them, and
she did not lose her head. You see what confidence I had in her to go
off to Florida and leave her to direct a picture in a new studio, with
all the problems of lights and sets, and a thousand other things a
director has to contend with. I know how her lights failed on her, and
all the complications that came up, and how she handled them, and how,
out of it, she got that fine picture. One of the best. She didn’t tell
me, but Carr did.”
XVII
“WAY DOWN EAST”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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