By James Aitchison

Thomas Ince was the “Father of the Western” and made 800 silent movies.  He pioneered the disciplined, assembly-line system of movie making.  He was the first man who produced more than one film a week.  He built his own complete studio complex and Hollywood’s first backlot.  He supposedly died of “heart failure” on newspaper baron William Randolph Hearst’s yacht.  Witnesses claimed that a jealous Hearst mistook him for Charlie Chaplin, who had been romancing Hearst’s lover, and shot him in the head.  The jury is still out…

Thomas Harper Ince, born 16 November 1880, was a true movie pioneer.  He first appeared as an actor on Broadway at the age of 15.  In 1907, Ince married actress Elinor “Nell” Kershaw who later became his partner in film production.

Ince’s first taste of film making came when he acted for the Biograph Company, also known as the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company, the first film company in the United States and home to famous director D. W. Griffith and actors such as Mary Pickford, Lillian Gish and Lionel Barrymore.  To avoid contravening Thomas Edison’s patent on 35 mm film, Biograph developed its own 68 mm film.  The camera punched sprocket holes on either side of the film as it was exposed at 30 frames per second.

But Ince yearned to direct in his own right.  When he learned that the New York Motion Picture Company had established a West Coast studio, he talked himself into the job of running their new operation.  Ince, his young wife, a cameraman and a leading woman went west — and discovered the new studio was nothing more than a barn! 

As Ince wrote in his memoirs, “The sets consisted of a few pieces of very bad furniture and one backdrop with a flock of birds supposedly in flight … there were no enclosed stages … both interiors and exteriors were filmed out of doors … the set for an interior scene consisted of one or two side walls …”  In such supposedly enclosed rooms, any breeze would blow and make women’s dresses flap violently.  As Ince remarked, such scenes “brought forth deserving ridicule from the audience.”

Undeterred, Ince located his studio on Sunset Boulevard and Pacific Coast Highway in the Santa Monica Mountains.  By 1912 he had purchased that land and acquired additional property in the Palisades Highlands, stretching seven miles (12 kilometres) up Santa Ynez Canyon, between Santa Monica and Malibu where Universal Studios was later established.

Dubbed “Inceville”, Ince’s studio became the Hollywood prototype.  Silent stages, production offices, printing laboratories, a huge commissary to feed staff and actors, dressing rooms, props storage, elaborate sets and the first backlot: a puritan settlement, a Japanese village, a Scottish village, a church, an Army fort with log palisades and a lighthouse.

More significantly, Ince founded the Hollywood assembly-line; he was studio head overseeing multiple production units.  Until then, the director and cameraman controlled all aspects of a film’s production, often improvising on the spot.  Ince changed that forever.  Ince was the first studio head to have separate screenwriters, directors and editors.  He was also first to bring producers, directors, production managers, production staff and writers together under one organisation.

With this studio model, Ince’s silent films were written, produced, cut and assembled, ready for delivery to cinemas, within a week.  Between 1913 and 1918, Ince made more than 150 two-reelers, mainly westerns.  The great director John Ford (Stagecoach, The Grapes of Wrath and How Green Was My Valley) cut his teeth at Inceville. 

One of Ince’s most successful films was Custer’s Last Fight, produced in 1912.  The cast included Native Americans who had actually been at the Battle of Little Bighorn!

Always ahead of his time Ince believed, “the art of the screen, as I see it, and the secret of better pictures, is to hold up the mirror of life and show us to ourselves.”

Enter real estate tycoon Harry Culver. He persuaded Ince to relocate his studio to what would become Culver City. Ince agreed and partnered with the famed director D. W. Griffith and comedian Mack Sennett, who specialised in the Keystone Cops films. Their new company, Triangle Motion Picture Company, was so named because the property resembled a triangle from the air. (Later the site would be the home of MGM and is now Sony Pictures Studios.)

By 1918 Ince had sold his shares in Triangle and formed Paramount Pictures with Adolph Zukor.  It was a short-lived partnership.  Ince then formed Thomas Ince Studios, which would become another Culver City landmark.  The administration building, “The Mansion”, replicated George Washington’s home at Mount Vernon.  Behind its imposing facade were 40 production buildings, bungalows for stars, a backlot, and even a hospital and fire department.

All this, long before the advent of talkies!

In 1924, newspaper baron William Randolph Hearst, keen to lease Ince’s studio, invited the producer for a weekend cruise on his luxury yacht.  Ince and Nell joined the other guests and celebrated Ince’s 44^th birthday.  After dinner, Ince suffered acute indigestion from salted almonds and champagne.  On 19 November, Ince died at his Los Angeles home.  The death certificate gave his cause of death as heart failure.  However, the morning edition of the Los Angeles Times screamed: “Movie Producer Shot on Hearst Yacht!”.  Allegedly Hearst mistook Ince for Charlie Chaplin, whom he suspected of having an affair with Hearst’s lover Marion Davies.  Chaplin’s valet Toraichi Kono even claimed he saw Ince bleeding from a bullet wound to the head.

Ince’s widow Nell heatedly denied the rumour.  Her husband was cremated and his ashes scattered at sea.  She disappeared to Europe amid rumours that Hearst had bought her silence. 

A fire wiped Inceville off the map in 1922.  Most of Ince’s films have not survived.  Sadly, the rumours surrounding his death have trivialised his real contributions.  What Thomas Ince achieved in two decades, his vision for movies and his system of disciplined filmmaking, entitle him to a permanent place in filmmaking history.