Volume I: Narrative History

Chapter 7 (1914): New Rochelle vs. Broadway

Reel Life, May 23, 1914, carried an account of a visit to the center of Thanhouser activities:

New Rochelle has never forgiven George M. Cohan for the slurs contained in Forty-Five Minutes From Broadway. Either there has been a great change for the better since the song came out nine years ago or George M. had the town all wrong in the first instance. For New Rochelle certainly has no "jay atmosphere," and the "fine bunch of Reubens" Note was decidedly not in evidence during the writer's recent visit to the Thanhouser studios. Instead, we found Main Street quite as desirable as Broadway and the beautiful residential district much more attractive than the cave dwellings of Manhattan. Very much in metropolitan fashion a handsome bluecoat stood at the railroad station, handling the traffic situation like "one of the finest."

A short walk down Main Street took one to a group of concrete buildings, the home of Thanhouser films. At the curb this sunshiny afternoon stood a hay wagon filled with pretty girls and "extra men," all in rustic attire. With much cracking of a long whip on the part of the driver, blowing of horns by the actors, and a startling display of hosiery on the part of the girls as the boys on the curb tried to pull them off the hay rick, the company set off while the visitor enviously looked on."A short walk down Thanhouser Lane took him to the offices of C.J. Hite, president of the Thanhouser Film Corporation. Mr. Hite was busy signing a stack of checks, and outside his door a swarm of players chattered in pleasant anticipation of receiving theirs. Mr. Hite is decidedly a busy man. While he signed the checks, his directors, one after another, came in to report the progress of their work; and once in a while a player edged in to obtain official consideration of his woes or his dreams, as the case happened to be. With hardly a glance upward from his desk Mr. Hite disposed of the plaints and complaints, and it was noticeable from the way the visitors walked on air as they left his magnificently furnished office that Mr. Hite believes in the motto: "Always leave them smiling when you say good-bye."

It was Saturday afternoon and Mr. Hite felt free to escort the party through his plant. A visit first was paid to Thanhouser Lane, Note where some interior sets of The Million Dollar Mystery are in position. With pardonable pride Mr. Hite pointed to rare tapestries, statuary of classic design, a Tudor staircase which was recently taken intact from a country house in England, and a library lined with shelves filled with real books and not the customary array of fake bindings.

Lunch time was about over but Mr. Hite took us to the dining room where Thanhouser employees may obtain well-cooked lunch for half the price they would have to pay elsewhere. The next person we met after we had left the dainty waitresses of the lunch room was Al J. Jennings, ex-bandit, two-handed gunman, survivor of six years in a federal prison for robbing the mail, but finally pardoned and restored to citizenship by President Roosevelt. The life of Al Jennings as written by himself and Will Irwin in The Saturday Evening Post is being put into a six reel picture under the title of Beating Back.

"And now we have come to the technical end of things," smiled Mr. Hite, leading the way across Thanhouser Lane into the new developing and mechanical departments. "The first thing I want to show you is an invention of W.C. Nelson, our chief mechanic, who did all the millwrighting in the plant and in his spare moments in the last six months completed the duplex printer which we have in this corner. This is the Nelson Duplex Printer," explained Mr. Hite. "It is operated by an independent motor, and one man can print two reels of film at the same time. It is compact and accurate and is one of the few printing machines which print the films at right angles with the light. Most machines, as you may be aware, print the film while it presents an arc-shaped surface to the light."

In a room off the machine shop Mr. Hite pointed to two barrels, one of which was filled with what appeared to be coarse rice. "That barrel is filled with tiny cuttings from the thousands of feet of film which go through our battery of Williamson perforators," explained Mr. Hite. "The other barrel is filled with the cuttings of unused bits of film. The film ends and perforation bits are sent to a laboratory where the photographic silver in them is extracted. The celluloid is used over again for various purposes; maybe your sweetheart wears a comb made from them," Mr. Hite remarked to a young man in the party. "The salvage nets us $5,200 a year, or about $100 a week, so you see it is well worth our while to keep the floors clean.

"You will notice," continued Mr. Hite, dipping his hand into a barrel of tiny squares of celluloid, "that each one of these punched out pieces of film is exactly the same size as its neighbor. Under the microscope and the caliper the same thing holds true. That means that our operators are running smoothly and that the film when it runs over the cogs in the projection machine will not wobble. Attention to just these apparently trifling details has made for the success of Thanhouser films.

"Don't go away just yet," suggested Mr. Hite when his guests displayed the inclination to make their exit, believing that they had been shown all that was to be seen. "You haven't visited the House of Mystery yet." Mr. Hite called his chauffeur and then saw that we were safely tucked away in the Thanhouser limousine.

New Rochelle is a beautiful little town where Americans live in American houses, eat American food and, in general, live blameless American lives. Perched on a rolling knoll in the heart of the residential district of this fashionable suburb of New York, the visitors to the Thanhouser studio saw a great mansion which Mr. Hite, with pardonable pride, pointed to as the most expensive "prop" ever acquired by a motion picture company. Note

"That," he explained, "is the House of Mystery!" Priceless Persian rugs carpet the entrance hall. In the dining room heavy carved furniture groans under the weight of the silver services, and in every room on the three floors exceptionally good taste has been used in the selection of the works of art which will be seen in The Million Dollar Mystery.

They do things on a big scale at the Thanhouser plant. If a certain effect is to be achieved, cost is no consideration. Month by month the plant continues to grow. Last week carpenters and masons worked day and night erecting a new stage. Next month the new fireproof "prop" room will be finished. Meanwhile, a baker's dozen of directors keep shoals of people on the run, and the cameras click merrily on.