Tillie's Tomato Surprise (1915)

Despite tearfully informing Mr Justice Page during legal proceedings against Mack Sennett’s Keystone Company that she was “sore on the movies”, Marie Dressler was not slow to sign with ‘Pop’ Lubin to capitalise on her smash hit feature, Tillie’s Punctured Romance (1914). Dressler’s complaint to the judge was part of her effort to secure payment from Keystone for money owed to her from the film’s profits. The case was still ongoing when she signed with Lubin, although the actress would eventually receive a $50,000 payout and the return of the film’s negative after five years. Rumours suggested Lubin was paying Dressler $1,000 per week.

Lubin announced that Dressler would appear in a minimum of three five-reel comedies per year, supported by “the most expensive list of players that has ever been used in a production.” The June 12th, 1915 issue of Motion Picture News announced the actress’s arrival at the Lubin studio in Philadelphia. The report noted that she would begin work immediately on a feature comedy picture written especially for her, but made no mention that it would be a sequel to her first picture. Two weeks later, however, the paper revealed that Acton Davies, the dramatic critic for the New York Sun, had written Tillie’s Tomato Surprise especially for her. John C. Rice, the actor most famous for delivering cinema’s first kiss in Edison’s 1896 short The Kiss, was scheduled to appear alongside her. However, on 5th June 1915, four days after arriving in Philadelphia to begin work on the picture, Rice died of Bright’s disease in the city’s Hotel Majestic.

Interiors for Tillie’s Tomato Surprise were shot at Lubin’s studio in Philadelphia, with the exteriors filmed at his Betzwood ranch. Dressler and the rest of the cast would arrive each morning by train, ready for another punishing day’s filming. Dressler told a reporter “Both Acton Davies, the author of my new play, and myself pride ourselves on the fact that in spite of Tillie’s Tomato Surprise being a five-reel comedy, you will not find in it either a policeman, a siphon, a telephone or a revolver and anyone who has ever seen a comic picture will realize that in avoiding these features, we have attained at least some feat and are going to give the public something new in the line of vegetables, if not of photoplays.”