In the fall of 1912 the funny little hop-skip girl had arrived on the
scene in New York. When he got back to the City, Mr. Griffith had found
need for her, and he fussed; and finally Mr. Hammer told him to send
for her. Two tickets were accordingly rushed west to Los Angeles, one
for Mae and one for Mae’s mama. In due time two members of the Marsh
family arrived. The day they reached the East the company was working
outside at some place with a meaningful name like “Millville,” where
we took small country-town stuff. The two Marshes were so excited when
they got off the train in New York and dashed to the studio at 11 East
Fourteenth Street and found the company working outdoors that they
departed immediately for “Millville.” They must get right on location.
So to “location” they hied. And when they had fluttered on to the
scene, and Mr. Griffith looked up and saw his Mae, and not his Mae’s
mama, but the fair Margaret, Mae’s sister, he was pretty mad about it.
Margaret Loveridge, as soon as sister Mae’s star began to rise in the
movie heavens, changed her name to “Marguerite Marsh”; but to her
intimates she became “Lovey Marsh.”
Little Mae Marsh back on the job, did a lot of extra work before she
got a part. Mr. Griffith worked hard with her, especially when a scene
called for a sudden transition from tranquillity to terrible alarm. But
a bright idea came to him. He had noticed in battle scenes that young
Mae became terribly frightened; so when he didn’t have war’s aid to get
the needed expression of fright, without her knowledge he would have a
double-barreled shotgun popped off a few feet from her head, and the
resultant exhibition of fear would quite satisfy the exacting director.
Mae Marsh’s first hit was in “Sands O’ Dee,” a part that Mary Pickford
had been scheduled to play, and there was quite a to-do over the change
in cast. But it was the epochal “Man’s Genesis” that brought her well
to the front, as it did also Bobby Harron. In the parts of _Lilly
White_ and _Weakhands_ their great possibilities were discerned, with
no shadow of doubt.
“Man’s Genesis” was produced under the title “Primitive Man,” and
Mr. Griffith and Mr. Dougherty had an awful time because Doc said he
couldn’t see the title and he couldn’t see the story as a serious
one--as a comedy, yes! But Mr. Griffith was determined it should be a
serious story; and he did it as such, although he changed the animal
skin clothing of the actors to clothes made of grasses. For if the
picture were to show the accidental discovery of man’s first weapon,
then the animal skins would have had to be torn off the animal’s body
by hand, and that was a bit impossible. So Mae and Bobby dressed in
grasses knotted into a sort of fabric.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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