The Silent Era and the First Movie Stars

In the spring of 1910, a crowd in St. Louis mobbed a young actress, tearing at her hat and clothes for souvenirs. Her name was Florence Lawrence, and until weeks earlier the public had known her only as "the Biograph Girl" — because the studios, afraid that named performers would demand real money, refused to print anyone's name at all. A producer named Carl Laemmle changed that. He lured Lawrence away from Biograph, planted a false rumor that she had been killed by a streetcar, then bought newspaper ads denouncing the "lie" and announcing that she was alive, well, and appearing in his next picture. The St. Louis stampede was the result. Laemmle had proven that a face could sell tickets — and with that grubby little stunt, the movie star was born.

The previous era had left the movies as a working-class amusement: flickering one-reelers, ten or twelve minutes long, watched for a nickel in converted storefronts. Anonymous, disreputable, and astonishingly profitable. What happened over the next decade and a half is one of the great transformations in the history of popular art. Between 1913 and 1927, that novelty hardened into an industry, moved three thousand miles west, invented the celebrity as we still understand it, and — most remarkably — taught itself to tell sweeping human stories without ever recording a word of speech.

The Feature Film Arrives, and So Does Hollywood

The first thing to change was length. Audiences, it turned out, would sit still for more than a reel. Adolph Zukor imported the French film Queen Elizabeth (1912), starring the great stage actress Sarah Bernhardt, and marketed it to respectable audiences under the banner "Famous Players in Famous Plays." The gamble worked. In 1913, a partnership of Jesse Lasky, Samuel Goldfish (later Goldwyn), and a stage director named Cecil B. DeMille set out to shoot a full-length Western. They landed in a sleepy Los Angeles suburb, rented a barn, and made The Squaw Man (1914) — often called the first feature film produced in Hollywood.

Why Hollywood? Partly the sunshine, which meant year-round shooting on open-air stages. But partly it was flight. Thomas Edison's Motion Picture Patents Company — the "Edison Trust" — held a chokehold of patents on cameras and film stock and enforced it aggressively back east. California was far away, near the Mexican border for a quick escape, and blessed with landscapes that could double for anywhere on Earth. The independents ran there, and the industry grew up around them: Universal in 1912, the Lasky company that would become Paramount, and the machinery of what would soon be called the studio system. In 1923 a real-estate developer erected an enormous sign in the hills spelling out HOLLYWOODLAND. The last four letters eventually fell away. The rest became the most famous word in the world.

The Star System and the Faces That Built It

Once the studios accepted that names sold seats, the stars they created dwarfed anything the theater or the concert hall had produced. None burned brighter than Charlie Chaplin. In early 1914, at Mack Sennett's Keystone studio, Chaplin threw together a costume — baggy trousers, tight coat, oversized shoes, bowler hat, and a small toothbrush mustache — and the Little Tramp shuffled onto the screen. Within three years he was among the most recognized human beings on the planet. The numbers tell the story: in June 1917 he signed with First National for a contract worth a million dollars, an almost incomprehensible sum for a performer who a few years earlier had been a poor London music-hall comic.

Beside him stood Mary Pickford, "America's Sweetheart," whose girlish curls disguised one of the shrewdest business minds in the industry — she negotiated contracts that made her among the highest-paid people in America and controlled her own films at a time when few actors controlled anything. There was Douglas Fairbanks, the grinning athlete who vaulted through The Mark of Zorro (1920), Robin Hood (1922), and The Thief of Bagdad (1924), never using a stuntman if he could help it. When Pickford and Fairbanks married in 1920 and settled into their estate, "Pickfair," they became the first celebrity royalty, drawing crowds and dignitaries from around the globe.

And there was Rudolph Valentino, the Italian immigrant whose smoldering turns in The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921) and The Sheik (1921) made him the decade's great romantic idol. His death in 1926 from peritonitis following a perforated ulcer, at just thirty-one, triggered scenes of mass hysteria: an estimated hundred thousand people mobbed the streets outside his New York funeral. The public grief was proof of how deeply these silent faces had lodged themselves in the interior lives of ordinary people.

Griffith and the Grammar of a New Language

If the stars gave the movies a face, D.W. Griffith gave them a syntax. Working through the 1910s, Griffith and his gifted cameraman Billy Bitzer did not single-handedly invent the close-up, the cross-cut, the tracking shot, or the fade — but Griffith organized these devices into a fluent visual grammar, a way of guiding an audience's eye and emotion that filmmakers still use every day. His The Birth of a Nation (1915) was, as pure technique, a landmark: three hours long, epic in scale, staggeringly ambitious, and so commercially successful that it charged an unheard-of two dollars a ticket and played to packed houses for years.

It is also one of the most poisonous films ever made. Adapted from Thomas Dixon's novel The Clansman, it depicts Reconstruction as a catastrophe and the Ku Klux Klan as heroic saviors of the white South. Its grotesque racism helped inspire the Klan's twentieth-century revival, and it drew organized protests from the newly formed NAACP in cities across the country. The film is the era's central paradox and cannot be waved away: the same movie that expanded what cinema could do also demonstrated, in the ugliest terms, what cinema could be used to justify. Griffith, stung by the backlash, poured his fortune into the vast, humane, financially ruinous Intolerance (1916) — a folly so enormous it helped bankrupt him. But the language he codified survived him completely.

The Inmates Take the Asylum

By the end of the decade the biggest names had learned the lesson Florence Lawrence first taught: value flowed to the talent, so the talent should own the studio. In 1919, Chaplin, Pickford, Fairbanks, and Griffith joined forces to found United Artists, a distribution company through which they could produce and release their own films free of the moguls. A rival executive is said to have surveyed the arrangement and delivered the perfect epitaph for the star era:

The lunatics have taken charge of the asylum.

They had. And for a few golden years the asylum ran on silence — on orchestras swelling in the dark, on white letters of dialogue flashed between images, on the pure pantomime of a face in close-up understood instantly in Tokyo, Buenos Aires, and Berlin alike. Silent cinema had become a genuine universal language, and its finest practitioners believed it always would be. They were wrong. Even as Valentino's mourners filled the streets in 1926, engineers at Warner Bros. were perfecting a system called Vitaphone. A year later, a performer named Al Jolson would turn to the camera and promise, "You ain't heard nothin' yet" — and the whole silent art would begin, almost overnight, to fall quiet forever.