Tess of the Storm Country (1914)

On 25th October 1912, Mary Pickford threw a farewell party at her apartment on Riverside Drive in New York. She was bidding farewell to friends and colleagues at Biograph, the studio that had been her home for three years. From January to May 1913, she took a break from movies to star in Austin Strong’s adaptation of Rostand’s A Good Little Devil on stage for David Belasco. The play was a hit, and Pickford, playing the trying part of a blind girl, won universal praise from critics.

Adolph Zukor bought the rights to film the play on the condition that Pickford reprised her stage role. Zukor, a Hungarian immigrant and former furrier, had co-founded the Famous Players Film Company with theatrical producers (and brothers), Charles and Daniel Frohman in 1912. Pickford considered A Good Little Devil to be one of her worst films. Zukor also appreciated it was a poor movie and withheld its release for a year. He felt such an expensive star needed a better feature-length vehicle for her introduction as a Famous Player. While A Good Little Devil gathered dust in a vault, Zukor offered Pickford a contract. In return for making three movies back-to-back in fourteen weeks, he would pay the twenty-two-year-old actress $500 a week.

Pickford only made two of those pictures – In the Bishop’s Carriage and Caprice – before falling ill. Undeterred, she and Zukor negotiated another one-year contract. Pickford travelled to California with Edwin S. Porter to make Hearts Adrift. She then negotiated a wage increase to $1,000 a week, and made a screen adaptation of Grace Miller White’s 1909 novel, Tess of the Storm Country. The role of Tessibel, an impoverished squatter, was one Pickford hadn’t wanted to accept. “I flatly refused,” she recalled. “Why they put up with me in my youth I don’t know. [Porter] pleaded with me and almost wept, but I had played a barefoot girl in Hearts Adrift and I didn’t want to play another ragged urchin. I was tired of that kind of role. Porter asked me to take it home and read it. I went home and I couldn’t put the book down. When I was halfway through it, I called him at the hotel and told him he was so right.”

Zukor needed Tess to succeed. His practice of showing “famous players in famous plays” was floundering. He had found that many actors who looked good on the stage weren’t so attractive in front of the camera. When he hired Lily Langtry, Porter told him she would photograph as an overweight old woman. He starred the 60-year-old actress in the short film His Neighbor’s Wife (1913) anyway, then packed her off back to New York. Zukor had failed to appreciate that what appealed to theatre audiences didn’t always appeal to moviegoers. Things had become so dire that Zukor borrowed on his life insurance and pawned his wife’s diamond necklace to secure the $10,000 needed to finance the movie.

Porter shot the film in California, far from the unforgiving East Coast winter. Exposed film had to be sent to New York for processing, meaning nobody involved in the shoot got to see the result of their efforts while they were making the film. As well as directing, Porter acted as cameraman (and cameraman’s assistant!), producer and electrician. The shoot was not a happy one. After working with Griffith, a visionary of the cinema, Pickford found the more workmanlike Porter an unsatisfactory director. She claimed he showed not “the slightest interest in acting or the dramatic aspects of motion pictures.” Porter, an engineer by trade, made no secret of the fact that he was more interested in the technical side of filmmaking. “He knew nothing about directing. Nothing,” Pickford later recalled. “[Porter] had none of the ideas, like close-ups, that Griffith had developed.”