Ramona (1910)

D. W. Griffith’s film career was still three years ahead of him when he journeyed from San Francisco to Los Angeles in January 1905 to appear in a stage adaptation of Helen Hunt Jackson’s romantic novel Ramona. Like all but the most desperate of theatrical actors, he looked down on the ‘flickers’ or ‘galloping tintypes,’ as moving pictures were then known. Griffith, still working under the stage name of Lawrence Griffith, was to play the lead role of Alessandro, a Native American who falls in love with a Spanish mission girl.

The play was written by Johnstone Jones and Virginia Calhoun, an actress who also played the title character. The play opened at the Mason Opera House in Los Angeles on 27th February 1905. The Los Angeles Herald, reporting on the opening night, noted the leading lady’s nervousness and struggled to find anything positive to say about the play, commenting that, “the drama must suffer considerable remodelling after its first night test. Vigorous and unsparing use of the blue pencil will assist materially in making this version of “Ramona” acceptable and worthy.”

The play toured through Oakland, Fresno and Woodland before ending at San Francisco, where the critic for the San Francisco Argonaut was far less diplomatic than their Los Angeles counterpart: “No one in the company knows how to act,” they wrote, “and Miss Calhoun does not know how to write a play.”

While such a negative reception might have caused many to expel the episode from their memory, Griffith returned to Ramona after taking a Biograph company to California for winter shooting. Perhaps the play revived memories of being reunited with his future wife, Linda Arvidson, with whom he had previously worked while performing with the MacDowell theatrical company. Perhaps, also, he remembered the glowing review he received from the Los Angeles Times, which said: “…anyone who sees him [Griffith] in the death scene of this play will acknowledge with tears and delight his right to this heroic Indian character. He looks the part to perfection. He is tall, straight as an arrow, spare, swarthy and handsome with the classic mould of feature necessary to this role.”

Griffith’s 1910 screen version of Ramona was the second-to-last to be filmed on his first expedition to California. The journey had taken four days on the Black Diamond Express, in a carriage marked “The Biograph Special.” It was on this trip that he also made In Old California (1910), the first film to be shot in Hollywood.

To these city dwellers, Hollywood must have seemed an alien environment. Agnes DeMille, the niece of Cecil, who arrived in 1914, recalled how the streets wound to “the wild, wild hills. [There were] sage brush and rattlesnakes, and coyotes and the little wild deer that came down every night.” Mary Pickford, who played Ramona, recalled, “There was hardly a store…There were gardens everywhere, and they ran down to the very curbs, and flowers spilled into the roadway.”

Pickford was unhappy for much of the company’s stay in California. She missed her mother and sister, and, most of all, her secret love, Owen Moore. She also had to care for her little brother, Jack, a late addition to the group. Linda Arvidson recalled overhearing her say when passing an eastbound train, “God bless all trains going east and speed the one we go on.” Pickford later recalled: “There wasn’t much social life in those days because there was no place to go. Perhaps once a week we’d go to the old Alexandria Hotel Grill for dinner. In the lobby was the million-dollar rug, named because so many deals had been made there. Paul Whiteman played there too, long before he became famous.”

The proximity of the locations in which Helen Hunt Jackson’s drama unfolds may have been the clincher that made up Griffith’s mind to adapt it for the screen. Piru and Camulos, in Ventura County, were seventy miles from Los Angeles. Even before the troupe left for California, the possibility had been discussed in New York. Griffith had insisted that Biograph purchase the motion picture rights from the publisher, Little, Brown and Company—something unheard of in 1910, despite the ongoing legal battle over Kalem’s unauthorised version of Lew Wallace’s Ben Hur (1907). Biograph resisted, arguing it was cheaper to ‘borrow’ the plot and release the film under a different title, but Griffith insisted on using the original title, and the front office relented. Little, Brown and Company received $100, marking the first time a movie studio had paid for the screen rights to a novel. The opening title of the film proclaims, “Adapted from the novel of Helen Jackson by arrangement with Little, Brown & Company. This production was taken at Camulos, Ventura County, California, the actual scenes where Mrs. Jackson placed her characters in the story.”