Thomas H. Ince

Born in Newport, Rhode Island into a family of struggling stage actors, Thomas Harper Ince grew up in the theater and drifted into the infant movie business as a jobbing actor and then director around 1910. What set him apart was not his eye but his mind for organization. Hired to run production in the hills above Santa Monica, he built a sprawling facility that the press dubbed "Inceville" — the first purpose-built studio town, with standing sets, labs, prop houses, and a commissary, and a workforce that could turn out pictures on a schedule.

Ince's true innovation was administrative. He pioneered the detailed, fully budgeted shooting script — the "continuity" — that broke a film down scene by scene before a foot of film was exposed, and he separated the roles of director and producer, supervising many units at once while others handled the megaphone. It was, in effect, the assembly-line system that Hollywood would run on for the next half century. He specialized in tautly constructed Westerns, made a star of the stone-faced William S. Hart, and mounted the pacifist spectacle Civilization (1916). With Griffith and Sennett he formed the Triangle Film Corporation.

Then, in November 1924, came the ending that overshadows the achievement. Ince fell ill aboard William Randolph Hearst's yacht during a birthday cruise and died days later, officially of heart failure. Rumors — of a gunshot meant for Charlie Chaplin, of a Hearst cover-up — have never been proven and never quite died. He was forty-four. Because he produced far more than he personally directed, and because so much of his work has been lost, the man who arguably did more than anyone to industrialize the movies is far less remembered than the artists whose careers his system made possible.