NONFICTION: BIOGRAPHY
Thomas Ince: Hollywood’s Independent Pioneer by Brian Taves (University Press of Kentucky)
What does a movie producer actually do?
In the case of Thomas Harper Ince (1882-1924), an independent producer from the silent-film era, the answer is: Endure an ulcer’s-worth of stress from lawyers and accountants, then, with a heavy heart, sprint from dawn to midnight across all departments of the movie studio to ensure that a story you once loved is sufficiently gutted and sweetened to earn enough box-office receipts to pay the guys who stress you out.
Ince oversaw — as well as edited, directed and/or wrote — about 800 motion pictures, and he developed important procedures for producing movies efficiently that affect Hollywood today. He and his family, an encouraging wife of 17 years and their three sons, also seemed to be content. Alas, one evening, at age 42, he was felled by a heart attack brought on by overwork and a bout of indigestion after a toast to his birthday on the sumptuously appointed yacht of William Randolph Hearst. Various miscommunications about the circumstances of Ince’s death provided industry gossips with decades of fodder for speculation: Did Hearst, in fact, shoot Ince in a rage, mistaking him for Charlie Chaplin (a head shorter) in a compromising position with Hearst’s mistress, Marion Davies? (That speculative version of Ince’s death was the subject of Steven Peros’ 1997 play, “The Cat’s Meow,” and of Peter Bogdanovich’s 2001 film based on it.) With the publication of “Thomas Ince: Hollywood’s Independent Pioneer,” the answer is a sure and blunt no. And, for the first time — thanks to the author’s access to 13,000 items in Ince’s archive at the Library of Congress — the full range of Ince’s contributions to the movies has been persuasively documented.
Ince’s biographer, Brian Taves, an archivist at the Library of Congress and the author of six books, including several on filmmaking, has given us a portrait of a commercial producer who worked during a time when such a person could still have the inclination of an artist. Taves lays out the costs, fiscal and spiritual, attendant on Ince’s attempt to make artful pictures that spoke to a mass audience, an attempt that such peers as D.W. Griffith — for whom art alone was the mission of moviemaking — did not essay.
More closely resembling a legal brief than a popular biography, Taves’ book is no beach read. For example, it cites to the dollar Ince’s yearly gross incomes and taxes paid, and the costs, again to the dollar, of making pictures, followed by the gross receipts nationwide.
But, unlike his subject, Taves isn’t addressing the masses. He is painstakingly righting nearly a century of wrongheaded, ignorant or deliberately cruel thinking about Ince’s character and career. The taxes and receipts are crucial to understanding the business side of Ince’s many collaborative ventures. Taves credits Ince with, among other things, developing the genres of the Western and the Civil War picture, exploiting the melodrama as a women’s “weeper,” organizing the movie lot to streamline staff and perfecting pre- production blueprints.
