The Tornado (1917)

Twenty-year-old Jack Feeney arrived in Hollywood in July 1914, three years after the first movie studio. By then, the once-sleepy town was expanding at an astonishing pace as it challenged New York to become the hub of the American moviemaking industry. Swarms of hopefuls descended on the town, keen to gain a foothold in the booming movie industry. Unlike many, Jack knew someone who could give him the break he needed. His older brother, Francis, had found fame with Universal Studios, where he directed and acted in Western shorts under the name of Francis Ford. He also starred in the popular serial Lucille Love—Girl of Mystery with Grace Cunard. Earlier that year, he had returned to their hometown of Portland, Maine, in a brand-new Stutz Bearcat, and filled his little brother’s head with stories of the riches to be made in Hollywood.

Frank found his brother a job at Universal as a studio ditch-digger, earning $12 a week helping to prepare Universal City for its grand opening the following year. As filming of Lucille Love neared its conclusion, he graduated to “assistant, handyman, everything” for Frank. He received his first screen credit—as Jack Ford—in The Mysterious Rose (1914), a short that once again teamed his older brother with his frequent co-star, Cunard. In 1915, Frank made him assistant director on The Doorway of Destruction. Ford spent the next two years learning the trade while working for his brother and other Universal directors.

Ford told Peter Bogdanovich that Carl Laemmle, the head of Universal, promoted him to director following an incident at the opening of Universal City in March 1915. During the event, various film crews shot fake scenes for the entertainment of guests touring the new complex. One director failed to show up for work that day. Laemmle, escorting a group of beauty pageant contestants, was growing impatient waiting for the absent director’s scene to be shot, so Isidore Bernstein, the studio’s general manager, turned to young Jack Ford for help.

“We had a Western street and a bunch of cowboys,” Ford recalled. “And Mr. Bernstein came riding up and he says ‘Gee, you’re the first assistant. You’ve got to shoot something while [Laemmle’s] here…You have riders, let ‘em ride back and forth.’ So they rode through the streets shooting at everything for no reason at all, and I said to Mr. Bernstein, ‘How was that?’ He said, ‘Fine.”

Laemmle told Bernstein to keep shooting, so he ordered Ford to ‘Have ‘em ride back shooting.’ Then he says, ‘Can’t you have a couple of falls in there?’ I said, ‘Oh, that’ll be easy.’ But these girls are all very pretty and the cowboys are sort of straightening their kerchiefs up, straightening their hats and trying to look as pretty as possible, shining up to these gals. So I says, ‘I’ll fire a pistol and you, you, and you do a horse fall or fall off your horse.’ Well, the cowboys looked at one another, I fired the shot and then every cowboy—I think there were thirty of them—they all fell off their horses.

“And I says to Mr. Bernstein. ‘That’s about it, isn’t it?’ He said, ‘Oh, no, keep on going. What can you do now?’ So I put a lot of kerosene and gasoline in the place and burnt the town down, had the cowboys running up and down…They thought it was great. They had a picture coming up with Harry Carey and they had no director. Mr. Laemmle says, ‘That Jack Ford, he yells real loud. He’d make a good director.’”