Dividing Labor for Production Control: Thomas Ince and the Rise of the Studio System

TLDR: Thomas Ince as discussed by the authors was a classic case of a stage actor who, during a brief period of unemployment in 1910, turned to the fledgling movies as a source of income, and his long-term impact on filmmaking would be very great indeed.

Abstract: Thomas Ince was a classic case of a stage actor who, during a brief period of unemployment in 1910, turned to the fledgling movies as a source of income. Yet his long-term impact on filmmaking would be very great indeed. Working first for IMP and then Biograph, he returned to IMP when promised a chance to direct. He completed his first film in December 1910. Ince soon tired of the one-reel format, however, and accepted a position in the fall of 1911 to direct for Kessel and Bauman's New York Motion Picture Company. He headed to Edendale, California, where a small group of people were already making films. The studio at that time was a converted grocery store: one stage (without even a muslin overhang), a scene dock, a small lab and office, and a bungalow which served as a dressing room. Ince wrote, directed, and cut his first film within one week.2 From these beginnings, by 1913 he had a fully developed continuity script procedure; by 1916 a one-half million dollar studio on 43 acres of land with concrete buildings. There were a 165-foot electrically lit building (which was unique), eight stages 60 by 150 feet, an administration building for the executive and scenario departments, property, carpenter, plumbing, and costume rooms, a restaurant and commissary, 300 dressing rooms, a hothouse, and a natatorium-and 1,000 employees and a studio structure which was essentially that associated with the big studio period of later years.3 Why? Previous historians have provided only partial answers. Lewis Jacobs attributes Ince's innovations to the need to standardize large-scale productions through "formula" pictures and publicity: "Essentially a businessman, he [Ince] conducted himself and his film making in businesslike fashion .... Planning in advance meant better unity of structure, less chance of uneven quality, and economy of expression." Kalton Lahue, in Dreams for Sale, writes, "Ince kept [his studio] functioning at peak efficiency by holding a tight rein on everything that was done." Eric Rhode notes that Ince "was among the first film-makers to adapt his craft to the latest ideas in industrial management and to set up the assembly-line type of production."4