Motion Picture Production Photography 101
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STILL STILLAmerican Silent Motion Picture Photography DAVID S. Shiel ds The University of Chicago Press : : Chicago and London DAVID S. Shiel ds is the McClintock Professor of Southern Letters at the University of South Carolina and chairman of the Carolina Gold Rice Foundation. His books include Civil Tongues and Polite Letters in British America and Oracles of Empire: Poetry, Politics, and Commerce in British America, 1690–1750, the latter also published by the University of Chicago Press. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2013 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2013. Printed in Canada 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 1 2 3 4 5 ISBN-13: 978-0-226-01326-8 (cloth) ISBN-13: 978-0-226-01343-5 (e-book) Title page illustration: “The Garden of Sleep and Death” (detail). From John Van den Broek’s The Blue Bird (1918). Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Shields, David S. Still : American silent motion picture photography / David S. Shields. pages. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-226-01326-8 (hardcover: alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-226-01343-5 (e-book) 1. Stills (Motion pictures)—United States. 2. Motion picture actors and actresses—United States. 3. Photographers—United States. 4. Cinematography—United States. I. Title. PN1995.9.S696S55 2013 791.430973—dc23 2012026790 ∞ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48—1992 (Permanence of Paper). for Marcus Shields CONTENTS Acknowledgments ix Overture 1 I INVENTIng Glamour, COMPOSIng WORLDS 1 Photography and the Birth of Professional Beauty 31 2 Glamour Comes to California 53 3 Worlds Distilled: Motion Picture Production Photography 101 II The VISUal ARTISTS 4 Manly Faces: Jack Freulich, Bert Longworth, Ray Jones, and the Universal Studio Aesthetic 163 5 The Dying Photographer and the New Woman 187 6 Opium Dreams: Ferdinand P. Earle and Visual Fantasy 213 7 Royal Photographer to the Stars: M. I. Boris and Visual Artistry 239 vii III ARTISTRy andR EGIMEN 8 The Eyes of Lillian Gish 265 9 The Wide-Open Spaces 299 10 Studio Men 331 Notes 369 Index 391 viii Contents ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I began writing this book in 2003, shortly after coming to the University of South Carolina. Conversations with Scott Jacob, the collector and dev- otee of Melbourne Spurr’s photography, convinced me that the time had come to organize information on the early Broadway and motion picture still photographers. In 2004, I uploaded on the World Wide Web an in- troduction to the genres, formats, and practitioners of early Hollywood glamour imagery. Though modest, the site was the most accurate and compendious source available on the subject at the time. It attracted the attention of Ralph DeLuca, the well-known dealer in posters and enter- tainment memorabilia. DeLuca proposed that I come to New York City to examine the Culver Service Collection, one of the twentieth century’s major image brokerage archives in the United States. Harriet Culver was selling the vast assemblage of vintage photographs and ephemera. De- Luca wanted me to vet the collection to assay its extent, its depth, and its aesthetic importance. The immensity of its riches and the breadth of its coverage of the work of theatrical and motion picture photogra- phers astonished me and convinced me of the importance of developing a summary understanding of this culturally influential and artistically expressive body of work. The Culver Service Collection was eventually purchased by collectibles dealer Jay Parrino, proprietor of The Mint. Both ix Ralph DeLuca and Jay Parrino at various times gave me electronic access to the scans they made of the collection; this proved invaluable in the early stages of preparing this book. A number of images appearing here were reproduced courtesy of Jay Parrino; acknowledgments appear in the captions to the fig- ures in question. When Parrino began dispersing the collection via eBay, I be- came a regular purchaser because of the solid provenance of the material and the wealth of information written on the back of the photographs by publicists and magazine editors making use of the images. Several institutions aided my researchers substantially. As a visiting fel- low at the Princeton Humanities Institute, I explored the stills collection in the Firestone Library. An award from the University of South Carolina Eng- lish Department’s research professorship enabled a semester of study, dur- ing which time I explored the holdings of the Herrick Library at the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences; the Seaver Center for Western Histo- ry Research at the Los Angeles County Natural History Museum; the Louis B. Mayer Film and Television Study Center of the Cinematic Arts Library at the University of Southern California; the Charles E. Young Research Library, Department of Special Collections, and the Performing Arts Special Collec- tions at the University of California, Los Angeles; and the Western Costume Company. During fall semester of 2010, when coleading a weekly seminar at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC, I spent Friday mornings working in the Library of Congress’s Prints and Photographs Reading Room, or across the hall at the Motion Picture and Television Reading Room. On sev- eral occasions in the past seven years, I have visited the Billy Rose Performing Arts Collection at the New York Public Library and profited from the wisdom of Jeremy Megraw there. I regret that the Museum of Modern Art’s film stills collection was unavailable, having been closed a decade ago, during a crucial period of this study’s composition. In addition to making use of the holdings of these institutions, I benefited from the expertise of a number of people, some of whom have become good friends. Amy Rule, head of research at the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona shared my enthusiasm for William Mortensen and Francis Bruguiere. Amy Henderson, historian, and Ann Shumard, cu- rator of photography, at the National Portrait Gallery could not have been more enthusiastic in their support of an aesthetic revaluation of performing arts portraiture. The late Robert Cushman, curator of still photography at the Margaret Herrick Library, read an early version of this manuscript with great sympathy and offered several concrete suggestions for its improvement. Kris- tine Krueger of the National Film Information Service at the Herrick Library handled the great number of my queries and requests with dispatch and good humor. Mary Mallory, an avid champion of Hollywood heritage and member of the Herrick’s photographic archive, has become the greatest sort of elec- x Acknowledgments tronic pen pal. At the George Eastman House, Ulrich Ruedel was a model of efficiency hunting down several quite obscure titles for me. Robert Montoya of Special Collections in the Charles E. Young Research Library at UCLA made my two sojourns there rich experiences. Ned Comstock unearthed Ferdinand P. Earle’s correspondence regarding his special effects work onBen-Hur in the MGM administrative archives in the Film Collection at the University of Southern California. Barbara Nathanson of the Prints and Photographs Divi- sion of the Library of Congress helped me navigate the vast resources stored in that repository. Rob Brooks, organizer of the Mary Pickford Collection in Toronto, discussed Karl Struss and Charles Rosher, Pickford’s photographers, at length with me. Don Spiro, a current still photographer and member of IATSE Local 600, manifested great interest in the technical aspects of early still processing. Bruce Robertson provided repeated aid. Silent film and performing arts photography historians possess a strong sense of common cause, perhaps because of the amount of work that requires doing before sense is rendered from the visual archive of early motion pic- tures. I engaged in correspondences with several important scholars of the era: Marc Wanamaker, Richard Koszarski, Mark Viera, and David W. Menefee proved particularly helpful. Conversations with my colleague in the English Department, Mark Cooper, have provoked quite a few new lines of inquiry. Marcella Sirhandi of Oklahoma State University revealed to me the surprising late career of Richard Gordon Matzene as portraitist of Nepalese royalty. Lloyd Bishop of Ponca, Oklahoma, also aided greatly in my research into the mys- terious R. G. Matzene. General ruminations about visual culture and fashion with my friend Catherine E. Kelly of the History Department of the University of Oklahoma assisted me in understanding how fashion photography diverged from performing arts photography in the 1930s. I have corresponded with numbers of curators and librarians over the past decade about individual photographers or productions for which I sought im- ages. In most cases, my requests, no matter how recondite, were met with po- lite interest and often resulted in the discovery of useful prints or information. I wish to thank the staff of the Motion Picture Stills Archive at the Eastman House, the Lothar and Eva Just Films Stills Collection at the Harvard Film Ar- chive, Special Collections at the University of Vermont Libraries, the Cecil B. DeMille Collection at Brigham Young University, the Performing Arts Divi- sion of the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, Special Collec- tions at the University of Louisville Library, and the staff of the Thomas Coo- per Library at the University of South Carolina. I have supplied credit information on the sources of the photographs in the captions to the individual figures. If no provenance information appears in a caption, then the image derives from the collection of vintage prints I myself amassed to enable the writing of this book. This collection is currently housed xi Acknowledgments at the Department of English at the University of South Carolina.