Silents are Golden: The Wild Frontier of “Inceville”

The Wild Frontier of “Inceville”

“When the movies were young,” as the saying went, filmmakers’ heads were swimming with possibilities. Motion pictures cameras could take footage anywhere a tripod could rest, so why not take advantage of it? Outside the usual confines of the stage, anything was possible: immense battle scenes, staged floods and fires, sweeping landscape shots, breathtaking horseback riding stunts…at long last, the sky was truly the limit.

One such visionary filmmaker was Thomas H. Ince, a former stock company actor. After breaking into film acting at the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company in NYC, by 1910 he was working as a coordinator at Carl Laemmle’s nearby IMP Company and quickly proved himself capable of directing. Soon Ince was thinking bigger than the ramshackle east coast studios, where the stages tended to be open air and at the mercy of wind, rain and winter cold. Reportedly he was also concerned about the battles between the monopolizing Motion Picture Patents Company trust and independent companies like IMP. Heading to the west coast just might be a prudent move.

In September 1911 Ince met with Adam Kessel and Charles Baumann of the New York Motion Picture Company, who had recently opened a studio called Bison in a hilly neighborhood of Los Angeles (the same location would soon be reused for the famed Keystone studio). Bison specialized in making westerns, and Ince loved westerns. Playing it cool as he talked to the two executives, to his pleasant surprise he managed to cut a deal to make films on the west coast for $150 a week.

Ince arrived in the Edendale district Los Angeles with his wife Elinor, his lead actress Ethel Grandin, a cameraman and a property man. He was dismayed to find the studio consisted of a small house and a barn, with hardly enough space for the western epics he’d been imagining. He soon scouted out a more favorable location: 460 acres of land by Sunset Boulevard and the Pacific Coast highway, where rolling desert hills overlooked the ocean. 

Getting to work on western dramas with titles like The Deserter (1912) and War on the Plains (1912), Ince was soon bringing in enough cash to lease even more open land: a full 18,000 acres owned by the Miller Brothers, who had a 100,000 acre ranch and their own Wild West show. Ince could finally bring his visions to life–and not just epic films, but his vision of having a sprawling, one-stop shop kind of studio with its own dressing rooms, indoor and outdoor sets, prop buildings, corrals, film printing laboratories, cafeterias, carpentry shops, offices, film vaults–everything a studio could need all in one handy location. It was an ambitious idea at the time. The Millers–who were happy to lend their Wild West performers to Ince’s productions–dubbed the complex Inceville.

Life at busy Inceville had adventure, romance, and a bit of surrealism. At the time, the Wild West Ince sought to capture onscreen was still very much alive and well. The Millers’ performers consisted of hundreds of real-life cowboys and cowgirls and a Sioux tribe who set up their own teepee village on the property. Cattle and bison herds and 600 horses grazed the rolling hills. The studio was alway swarming with cowboys, who considered themselves superior to the “lowly” actors, with more heading in from ranches in Wyoming and Montana regularly to earn some quick cash. The streets were lined with an eclectic assortment of buildings representing Puritan settlements, Scottish cottages, European villages, modern mansions, frontier towns–a bit of everything a director could need. Actors who traveled out from Los Angeles–taking a succession of streetcars to Santa Monica and then horse-drawn wagons that carried them past the broad Pacific beaches and up the road to remote Inceville–probably felt they were entering a different world.

A number of stars like John Gilbert got their starts as extras at Inceville, and it also boasted such talents as Louise Glaum, an early “vamp,” William S. Hart, the silent era’s biggest cowboy star. Key directors such as John Ford and his brother Francis, William Desmond Taylor, Frank Borzage and Henry King all worked for Ince. As for Ince himself, he was passionately involved in his many productions, writing and tweaking scenarios, writing dialogue for the actors (not the norm in that era), suggesting locations and camera angles to cameramen, and discussing tints and toning with editors. He would also accept feedback, making improvements such as building cabins for his actors when they complained about snakes and insects getting into tents they used as dressing rooms. 

Thanks to his hands-on approach Ince was happy to claim the lion’s share of credit, famously opening his films with titles proclaiming: “Thomas H. Ince presents a Thomas H. Ince productions, supervised by Thomas H. Ince…” etc. The producer’s mania became a well-known joke to the rest of Hollywood. Buster Keaton’s short The Playhouse (1921), where the straight-faced comedian played all the roles in a stage show, took a jab at Ince in a scene where an audience member marvels: “This fellow Keaton seems to be the whole show.”

The studio had its share of hardships, experiencing wildfires in 1915 and 1923, a cutting room fire in 1916, landslides in 1916 and 1917–the latter claiming the lives of three employees when their scaffolding collapsed. But Inceville’s films managed to be profoundly influential, having a sweeping authenticity thanks to its rough-and-ready actors and natural locations.

As it turned out, Inceville’s heyday was relatively brief. Ince would form the Triangle Motion Picture Company with Mack Sennett and D.W. Griffith in 1916, moving his main base of operations to Culver City. In time he went back to operating his own studio, building a Mount Vernon-like administration building dubbed “The Mansion” which still stands today. William S. Hart continued to film at the old Inceville locations, but by the early 1920s it was largely abandoned, turning into a real-life ghost town. The structures that were left would burn in a 1923 wildfire–only a church set remained.

In 1924 Thomas H. Ince himself also suffered an unfortunate end. A dinner he had aboard William Randolph Hearst’s yacht the Oneida aggravated his peptic ulcers and angina, which had been lingering problems for him since the 1910s. Despite medical care, the resulting heart attack claimed his life. While his time as a filmmaker and producer had been brief–only 14 years–Ince was undeniably a key figure in early cinema. And the romance of long-gone Inceville, with its rolling hills and rough cowboys, lingers on in his early surviving films.

…

–Lea Stans for Classic Movie Hub

You can read all of Lea’s Silents are Golden articles here.

Lea Stans is a born-and-raised Minnesotan with a degree in English and an obsessive interest in the silent film era (which she largely blames on Buster Keaton). In addition to blogging about her passion at her site Silent-ology, she is a columnist for the Silent Film Quarterly and has also written for The Keaton Chronicle.