In an age when the movies were as young as she, theatre life in New York was much more widespread. In 1901–2, for example, there were no fewer than 314 plays running on or off Broadway, and it was not hard for someone with Gladys’s talent to find work. By the time she was twelve, her earnings were $40 a week. When she was fourteen she went on tour with a comedy, The Warrens of Virginia, and while she was in Chicago she saw her first film. She immediately grasped the possibilities of the new medium, and using her recently created and less harsh stage name Mary Pickford, she applied to several studios. Her first efforts failed, but her mother pushed her into applying for work at the Biograph. At first Griffith thought Mary Pickford was ‘too little and too fat’ for the movies. But he was impressed by her looks and her curls and asked her out for dinner; she refused.72 It was only when he asked her to walk across the studio and chat with actors she hadn’t met that he decided she might have screen appeal. In those days, movies were short and inexpensive to make. There was no such thing as a makeup assistant, and actors wore their own clothes (though by 1909 there had been some experimentation with lighting techniques). A director might make two or three pictures a week, usually on location in New York. In 1909, for example, Griffith made 142 pictures.73
After an initial reluctance, Griffith gave Pickford the lead in The Violin-Maker of Cremona in 1909.74 A buzz went round the studio, and when it was first screened in the Biograph projection room, the entire studio turned up to watch. Pickford went on to play the lead in twenty-six more films before the year was out.
But Mary Pickford’s name was not yet known. Her first review in the New York Dramatic Mirror of 21 August 1909 read, ‘This delicious little comedy introduced again an ingenue whose work in Biograph pictures is attracting attention.’ Mary Pickford was not named because all the actors in Griffith’s movies were, to begin with, anonymous. But Griffith was aware, as this review suggests, that Pickford was attracting a following, and he raised her wages quietly from $40 to $100 a week, an unheard-of figure for a repertory actor at that time.75 She was still only sixteen.
Three of the great innovations in filmmaking occurred in Griffith’s studio. The first change came in the way movies were staged. Griffith began to direct actors to come on camera, not from right or left as they did in the theatre, but from behind the camera and exit toward it. They could therefore be seen in long range, medium range, and even close-up in the same shot. The close-up was vital in shifting the emphasis in movies to the looks of the actor as much as his or her talent. The second revolution occurred when Griffith hired another director. This allowed him to break out of two-day films and plan bigger projects, telling more complex stories. The third revolution built on the first and was arguably the most important.76 Florence Lawrence, who was marketed as the ‘Biograph Girl’ before Mary, left for another company. Her contract with the new studio contained an unprecedented clause: anonymity was out; instead she would be billed under her own name, as the ‘star’ of her pictures. Details about this innovation quickly leaked all over the fledgling movie industry, with the result that it was not Lawrence who took the best advantage of the change she had wrought. Griffith was forced to accept a similar contract with Mary Pickford, and as 1909 gave way to 1910, she prepared to become the world’s first movie star.77
A vast country, teeming with immigrants who did not share a common heritage, America was a natural home for the airplane and the mass-market movie, every bit as much as the skyscraper. The Ashcan school recorded the poverty that most immigrants endured when they arrived in the country, but it also epitomised the optimism with which most of the emigrés regarded their new home. The huge oceans on either side of the Americas helped guarantee that the United States was isolated from many of the irrational and hateful dogmas and idealisms of Europe which these immigrants were escaping. Instead of the grand, all-embracing ideas of Freud, Hofmannsthal, or Brentano, the mystical notions of Kandinsky, or the vague theories of Bergson, Americans preferred more practical, more limited ideas that worked, relishing the difference and isolation from Europe. That pragmatic isolation would never go away entirely. It was, in some ways, America’s most precious asset.
* The elevator also played its part. This was first used commercially in 1889 in the Demarest Building in New York, fitted by Otis Brothers & Co., using the principle of a drum driven by an electric motor through a ‘worm gear reduction.’ The earliest elevators were limited to a height of about 150 feet, ten storeys or so, because more rope could not be wound upon the drum.
6
E = mc2, ⊃ / ≡ / v + C7H38O43
Pragmatism was an American philosophy, but it was grounded in empiricism, a much older notion, spawned in Europe. Although figures such as Nietzsche, Bergson, and Husserl became famous in the early years of the century, with their wide-ranging monistic and dogmatic theories of explanation (as William James would have put it), there were many scientists who simply ignored what they had to say and went their own way. It is a mark of the division of thought throughout the century that even as philosophers tried to adapt to science, science ploughed on, hardly looking over its shoulder, scarcely bothered by what the philosophers had to offer, indifferent alike to criticism and praise. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the last half of the first decade, when the difficult groundwork was completed in several hard sciences. (‘Hard’ here has two senses: first, intellectually difficult; second, concerning hard matters, the material basis of phenomena.) In stark contrast to Nietzsche and the like, these men concentrated their experimentation, and resulting theories, on very restricted aspects of the observable universe. That did not prevent their results having a much wider relevance, once they were accepted, which they soon were.
The best example of this more restricted approach took place in Manchester, England, on the evening of 7 March 1911. We know about the event thanks to James Chadwick, who was a student then but later became a famous physicist. A meeting was held at the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society, where the audience was made up mainly of municipal worthies – intelligent people but scarcely specialists. These evenings usually consisted of two or three talks on diverse subjects, and that of 7 March was no exception. A local fruit importer spoke first, giving an account of how he had been surprised to discover a rare snake mixed in with a load of Jamaican bananas. The next talk was delivered by Ernest Rutherford, professor of physics at Manchester University, who introduced those present to what is certainly one of the most influential ideas of the entire century – the basic structure of the atom. How many of the group understood Rutherford is hard to say. He told his audience that the atom was made up of ‘a central electrical charge concentrated at a point and surrounded by a uniform spherical distribution of opposite electricity equal in amount.’ It sounds dry, but to Rutherford’s colleagues and students present, it was the most exciting news they had ever heard. James Chadwick later said that he remembered the meeting all his life. It was, he wrote, ‘a most shattering performance to us, young boys that we were…. We realised that this was obviously the truth, this was it.1