Thomas Ince: Hollywood's Independent Pioneer

From: "Taves, Brian P" <[email protected]>

A word the recent publication of my new book by University of Kentucky Press, January's TCM book-of-the-month:


Thomas H. Ince (1880-1924) turned moviemaking into a business enterprise. After progressing from actor to director and screenwriter, he revolutionized the motion picture industry by developing the role of the producer. In addition to building Inceville, the first major Hollywood studio, he was responsible for more than eight hundred films.

Thomas Ince: Hollywood's Independent Pioneer chronicles the filmmaker's life from his early career on the stage to his sudden death just before Ince was to join forces with media tycoon William Randolph Hearst. In November 1924, the two longtime friends met to plan a powerful combine; Hearst wished to produce his films at Ince's studio, and Ince would in turn bring Hearst magazine stories to the screen. Days after the meeting, Ince suddenly succumbed to ulcers and heart disease-the toll of writing, directing, producing, and editing hundreds of films since 1910. Rumors began to spread, instigated by some of Hearst's enemies, and Ince's own movie exposé of yellow journalism in the previous year had earned him a measure of press enmity. Brian Taves tells the true story of one of silent cinema's most influential moguls.

Thomas Ince reveals not only the end of Ince's career, but the intense years he spent as a leader of the film industry. Assigned by Carl Laemmle to direct the movies of Mary Pickford and sent to film in Cuba, Ince learned the value of filming on location. When he headed to southern California, he used the surrounding landscape as the setting for his authentic westerns. Realism became the keynote of Ince's films, whether he tackled social issues such as poverty and addiction, re-created Civil War battles, or cast the first Hollywood films with Asian actors in lead roles. Many diverse talents including Sessue Hayakawa, William S. Hart, Charles Ray, and John Gilbert became stars under Ince's tutelage. In later years, melodrama became Ince's focus as he explored the changing position of women in America with films such as the silent version of Anna Christie (1923). Based on the surviving films, corporate papers, and accounts from popular and trade journals of the time, Thomas Ince: Hollywood's Independent Pioneer recounts a remarkable saga, providing a vivid glimpse inside the world of a silent-era filmmaker.

Brian Taves is an archivist with the Library of Congress. He is the author of P. G. Wodehouse and Hollywood: Screenwriting, Satires, and Adaptations; Robert Florey, the French Expressionist; The Romance of Adventure: The Genre of Historical Adventure Movies; and numerous articles.

"Brian Taves's compelling biography of Thomas Ince documents the career of a valiant independent producer in the early days of Hollywood, a period when the movies became big business. Thanks to Taves's exhaustive research, which documents Ince's working methods, financial arrangements, and filmmaking skills, Ince emerges as a true founder of the industry, along with Adolph Zukor, Carl Laemmle, Cecil B. DeMille and D. W. Griffith."

- Tino Balio, author of The Foreign Film Renaissance on American Screens, 1946-1973

"I strongly recommend Brian Taves' vanguard study on Thomas Ince as a definitive source. Accessible and free of jargon, Taves makes exemplary use of newly available archival materials with keen analysis of Ince's surviving films to paint a vivid picture of Ince's career as an independent, challenges he faced and overcame, revealing Ince's contribution as an under-recognized innovator in film history. As Taves demonstrates, Ince developed the division of labor and system of specialized roles that dominate Hollywood to this day."

- Sheri Chinen Biesen, author of Blackout: World War II and the Origins of Film Noir