This Week:
Spicer Hearing Excerpt: Doc and Wyatt to the cooler.
Let's Go to the Movies: Rush to California and 'The Vamp.'
Writers Notebook: The Making of a Masterpiece

Doc Holliday's Road to Tombstone Excerp
Monday, November 7, 1881
Judge Spicer opened the afternoon session and immediately confirmed the rumor. “A motion filed by the prosecution requests the court to revoke bail previously granted the defendants. My own search of precedent cases suggests that I must go along with the prosecutions point ...That the proof so far is conclusive of murder and under that proof the defendants ought not to be admitted to bail in any sum.”
T.J. Drum offered a jurisdictional argument, but was overruled. Spicer made his position clear by citing case law and precedent. Then he added, “The court is bound where the proof is positive and presumption great to remand the prisoners to the sheriff until the presumption is overcome by the evidence for the defense.” Judge Spicer hesitated for a long moment before saying, “The defendants, J.H. Holliday and Wyatt Earp are ordered to spend their out of court time in the city jail on Sixth Street.”
Tom Fitch immediately stood and said, “Your Honor, counsel for the defense requests that we be provided a private conference room here in the courthouse as there are no facilities for consultation at the jail.”
“That sounds reasonable, Mr. Counselor. I’ll try and arrange something.”
Doc had remained silent during the debate and stayed calm on the surface, but boiled underneath. The judge had essentially validated his argument put to TJ Drum, that the defense had missed a dozen opportunities to show prosecution witnesses up as liars.
(Spicer Hearing Excerpts to be continued.)

Let's Go to the Movies
Hollywood Silents 1914-1929 Part 7

The Hollywood movie industry was attracting artistic and technical talent and a host of want-to-bees at a rate not seen since the Oklahoma land rush of 1889.
With the advent of the feature film and larger motion picture theaters being constructed all over America and Europe the public was hungry for more films. And with the inviting climate and sunshine of Southern California, the industry was poised to fill the public's appetite.
Louis B. Mayer, former film distributor from Boston, joined the rush to the west and landed on Mission Road in east Los Angeles. Mayer rented office space in a loft at the Selig Studios in order to be near the center of production.
Mayer had amassed quite a lot of money from his business dealings back east and could have rented a large office for show, but that wasn't what he needed at the time. All he wanted was a place to work out of and a secretary to handle his correspondence. Mayer wanted to produce quality motion pictures, but first he needed to educate himself about film production from the ground up. He spent very little time in the office as he was out and about in his little Ford visiting lots and movie sets. He asked questions of electricians, carpenters, wardrobe and lighting people making notes during the process. Mayer stayed back and out of everyone's way as he studied and made notes in his little book detailing the director's movements and instructions to actors, stage hands and camera crews. Then when he got back to the office Mayer would dictate letters to business associates asking more questions about the business end of film production.

During that same time period D.W. Griffith produced and released another big picture, Intolerance. It was a 209 minute film photographed by Billy Bitzer and Karl Brown. The cast included Lillian Gish, Mae Marsh, Miriam Cooper and Walter Long.
Variety review excerpt. 'Intolerance reflects much credit to the wizard director, for it required no small amount of genuine art to consistently blend actors, horses, monkeys, geese, dogs, acrobats, and ballets into a composite presentation of a film classic.'
And while Variety's review was positive the o

This Week:
Let's Go to the Movies
My 'Little Boy' Thanksgiving story
Writers Notebook: Thomas Jefferson slogan


Hollywood Silents 1914-1929 Part 6
The Birth of a Nation's distribution problem was resolved through the success of the picture. The Epoch companies road-show presentations earned an enormous amount of money and as a consequence every area film distributor made a bid to show the film in their theaters.
Producers Griffith and Aitkens were awash in money and because of their huge success probably became overly generous in the bid process. Their basic contract demanded an up front fee plus ten percent of the net box office receipts. They had no solid accounting rules and the ten percent net figure was an open door for abuse, which has plagued the industry over the years.
One of the bidders was Louis B. Mayer front man for a film distribution agency in Boston. The contract called for $50.000.00 for exclusive rights to show Birth of a Nation in the New England area. Mayer and his group got the contract and did a good job marketing the film – and made a very nice profit for their efforts.
Louis B. Mayer was a Russian emmigrant who became an American citizen and entrepreneur. With his success in Boston Mayer opened an agency in New York, all the while thinking about motion picture production. Within two years Louis B. Mayer landed on Mission Road in east Los Angeles, California with his mind set on producing films.

While Los Angeles and Hollywood enjoyed the growth of the motion picture industry Santa Monica already had Inceville Studios, a production company that dwarfed, at least in acreage, all the other film companies combined.
Thomas Ince owned the land and the film company. Ince grew up in the theater working in vaudville, and made his Broadway debut at the age of 15.
IHe got his start in pictures with Biograph Films as a director, and after making just one film Carl Laemmle's Independent Motion Picture Company hired him as a director and sent him to Cuba to make films. That move was made by Laemmle in order to be out of the reach of the Picture Patent Company, the same trust company that most other film companies were fleeing New York to avoid.
Ince made a few films in Cuba, but soon returned to New York and joined the New York Motion Picture Company and headed off to California to make Westerns. By the end of 1912 Ince purchased several thousand acres of land in the Santa Monica mountains overlooking the Pacific and formed his own independant company.
During the year of 1913 Inceville Studios would make more than 150 films, mostly Westerns and Civil War dramas.
Thomas Ince hired the best directors he could find and through the years his selection process worked out well. Among those directors hired by Ince were Francis Ford, brother of John Ford, Frank Borzage, Fred Niblo, Jack Conway, Henry King and William S. Hart the actor who directed his own films.
Hundreds of actors worked at Inceville Studios but none of them became a household name faster than John Gilbert. Gilbert came from a dysfunctional family that worked in the theater, and owned a stock company in Spokane, Washington. John grew up in the theater and got his training as an actor there, but he wanted out.
Gilbert dreamed of becoming a movie star, but didn't know how to make it happen. At the time he wanted to get away from his immediate family he also needed a job. John talked the situation over with his Uncle George, a theater director, and while his uncle couldn't hire him at that time he did had an idea that might help. The uncle knew Thomas Ince and wrote a letter to his studio in Santa Monica and gave his nephew a reccomendation and introduction. Ince replied almost immediately and said to send the boy down and he'd pay him $15.00 a week. The young Gilbert jumped at the chance, took the offer and traveled to Santa Monica.
And it was at Inceville where Gilbert got his early training in the movie business working as an

This Week:
Let's Go to the Movies
Doc Holliday's Road to Tombstone – Excerpt Doc confronts his lawyer.
Writers Notebook: John Steinbeck – Anxious moments.
Let's Go to the Movies
Hollywood Silents 1914-1929 Part 5
D.W. Griffith's broad story concept for Birth of a Nation was not the only new innovation he had planned for the film. Working with his long time cameraman Billy Bitzer they started from day one of the production to implement film making concepts never used before. Camera angles, jump cuts, closeups, fades, lighting effects, and many other technical effects that were unheard of then, but common place today.
Griffith had hired a large cast that was about as talented and versatile as any cast you'll ever find in motion picture history.
The names given star billing in Variety's review were Henry B. Walthall, Miriam Cooper, Mae Marsh, Lillian Gish, Donald Crisp and Raoul Walsh. The cast list is long and here are a few more names that would become familiar to the public in the next few years, some in front of the camera, others back of the camera. Wallace Reid, Monte Blue, Josephine Crowell, John Ford, William Freeman, Howard Gaye, Joseph Henaberry, Jennifer Lee, Elmo Lincoln, Walter Long, Bessie Love and Erich Von Stroheim among them.
The shooting schedule took up the last half of 1914 and the costs mounted to more than $112,000.00 – Variety reported it to be $300,000.00.
Any producer today will tell you that the pockets never run deep enough to satisfy everyone and so it was with Birth of a Nation.
The original financing was put up by the Mutual Company, but as weeks ran into months without an end in sight and costs continuing to rise the Mutual directors instructed their president Harry Aitken to cancel the companies participation or assume the investment himself. Aitken did the latter, and he along with Griffith and the Reverend Dixon, the writer of the book, formed the Epoch Producing Company to handle this one exceptional film. It was no easy task and the group had to scramble to round up money in order to make payroll.
But they did complete the picture and once the editing was finished and titles set in place they had a print made and began showing the film to selected audiences in order to get feedback. There was some grumbling about the length, and others had political questions about some of the scenes depicting the post Civil War Reconstruction period. However, that being said, there was an overwhelming majority of positive feedback and enthusiasm for the film.
Griffith had an unprecedented film in size and scope and that alone set up a problem. The picture took up twelve reels and that begged the question for distribution, who could they get to distribute the film? The picture wouldn't fit into any of the regular channels of distribution. How could anyone put up front money at risk to pay the kind of rent they would have to charge?
To solve the short term problem their company Epoch would have to take charge. They rented Clune's Auditorium a 2,600 seat house in Los Angeles. And on the night of February 3, 1915 D.W. Griffith's film Birth of a Nation had its World Premiere.
The audience went crazy over the film and from that opening night Birth of A Nation took on a life of its own.
The show business magazine Variety reviewed the film after its New York opening at the Liberty Theater on March 3, 1915 and their reviewer pronounced Birth of a Nation as the last word in picture making.
'...The story involves: The Camerons of the south and the Stonemans of the north and Silas Lynch, the mulatto Lieutenant-Governor; the opening and finish of the Civil War; the scenes attendant upon the assassination of Abraham Lincoln; the period of carpet-bagging days and Union reconstruction following Lee's surrender; and the terrorizing of the Southern whites by the newly freed blacks and the rise of the Ku Klux Klan . All these including some wonderfully well staged battle scenes taken at nigh