- Born
- Died
- Birth nameThomas Harper Ince
- Thomas H. Ince was born into a family of stage actors. He appeared on
the stage at age six and worked with a number of stock companies,
making his Broadway debut at 15. Vaudeville work was inconsistent, so he was a lifeguard, a promoter
and part-time actor. His stage career was a failure but by 1910 he joined Biograph, and after one film,
Carl Laemmle's Independent Motion Pictures hired Ince as a director. Ince went to Cuba to make films out of
the reach of the Motion Pictures Patent Company -- the trust that
attempted to crush all independent production companies and corner the
market on film production -- but his output was small. In 1911 he joined
the New York Motion Picture Corp. [NYMPC] and headed to California to make
Westerns. Ince insisted that all scripts be thoroughly planned out
before filming began, which would give him the opportunity to film
several scenes at the same time with assistant directors. One of those
directors was Francis Ford, the
brother of John Ford.
In 1912, NYMPC
and other independent studios merged to form Universal Pictures. Ince built a
city of motion picture "sets" on a stretch of land in Santa Monica
Mountains called "Inceville" where he shot many of the outdoor
locales for his films. At the end of 1912, Ince hired
William Desmond Taylor to act in
his film
Counterfeiters (1914).
In 1913 Ince made over 150 films, mostly Westerns
and Civil War dramas. He would also employ directors
Frank Borzage,
Fred Niblo,
Jack Conway, and
Henry King. In 1914 Ince hired
William S. Hart as an actor who could
also direct his own films. Ince made the epic
The Battle of Gettysburg (1913)
and thereafter concentrated on longer films as he moved from director to
producer. He employed thousands of technicians and made movies on
an assembly-line method. In 1915 he joined
D.W. Griffith and
Mack Sennett to form the Triangle Motion
Picture Company built in Culver City on Washington Boulevard (now the site of Sony Pictures). Fortunately, Hart was a profitable star who kept
the company afloat. In 1916 Ince produced and directed the anti-war
film Civilization (1915), which
cost $100,000 and returned $800.000. Always looking for new talent, Ince signed Olive Thomas, the
rising young star of the Ziegfeld Midnight Frolic, to star in his
films.
At the end of World War I, Ince broke with Triangle and joined
his nemesis Adolph Zukor to form
Paramount/Artcraft and built yet another studio in Culver City which had a southern mansion facade of Mount Vernon (and later was bought by David O. Selznick). Ince
developed a series of comedies pairing
Douglas MacLean and
Doris May, and their first picture,
23 1/2 Hours' Leave (1919),
was successful. When William S. Hart's contract ended, however, he left
the company and Zukor forced Ince out of Paramount/Artcraft. In
December 1919 Thomas Ince, Mack Sennett,
Marshall Neilan,
Maurice Tourneur,
Allan Dwan and other directors joined to form
Associated Producers, an independent film alliance. 'Roscoe 'Fatty'
Arbuckle' had been approached, but he had no desire to join the group.
In 1922 Associated Producers merged with First National. On February 1, 1922, Paramount director
William Desmond Taylor was shot
to death in his bungalow and one of the suspects, although never a serious
one, was Mack Sennett, who stated that he
spent the night at the home of Ince.
In 1924 Ince was one of several
Hollywood people aboard the yacht of newspaper magnate
William Randolph Hearst when he
suddenly fell ill. Ince was rushed aboard a train bound for Del Mar where his wife, her son, and a physician met him and accompanied him home where he died. The Los Angeles Times supposedly released the headline "Movie producer Shot on Hearst yacht!" but other papers including the New York Times said that Ince died of heart failure. One of the stories
that sensationalized Ince's sudden death said that Hearst shot Ince and that the bullet wasn't meant for Ince but for
Charles Chaplin, whom Hearst had long
suspected of carrying on a secret affair with his mistress,
actress Marion Davies. Supposedly, Hearst
inadvertently walked into Davies' cabin and caught her and Chaplin in
bed together and fired several shots, missing
Chaplin but hitting Ince. Another rumor circulated that columnist
Louella Parsons was also on board that
day and witnessed the shooting, although other sources say Parsons was in New York at the time. Supposedly, in exchange for keeping quiet, Hearst promised Parsons a lifetime job as the Hollywood reporter for
his newspaper chain (she was already employed by Hearst in 1923 as a reporter). Ince biographers have disputed the Hearst conspiracy and argued that Ince had been ill for some time with ulcers and had suffered from angina with a previous heart attack.- IMDb Mini Biography By: Tony Fontana <tony.fontana@spacebbs.com>
- SpouseElinor Kershaw(October 19, 1907 - November 19, 1924) (his death, 2 children)
- Children
- RelativesJohn Ince(Sibling)Ralph Ince(Sibling)
- Contrary to the portrait of him in The Cat's Meow (2001) as a washed-up producer lucky to make a film a year, in the year before his death in 1924 15 of his movies were released and, at the time of his death, he had nine more before the cameras that were completed posthumously.
- Seeing a short film with Tsuru Aoki, a Japanese actress living in California, Ince realized the potential advantages of casting Asian players in Hollywood films. This was during a time when white actors wearing eye makeup were portraying Asians, due to the strong anti-Asian sentiment among the American public. This would remain the norm in American film for decades to come. When Aoki met Ince, she introduced him to another Japanese stage player, Sessue Hayakawa. Ince hired both Aoki and Hayakawa for a series of films that proved popular and gained even more notoriety when the Japanese couple fell in love and married as Ince stars. Some of the Aoki-Hayakawa films were Far Eastern stories, but others cast them as Native Americans.
- After the death of Wallace Reid from drugs, Ince capitalized on the incident by casting Reid's widow in the anti-drug film Human Wreckage (1923), one of the first films to use psychedelic sets.
- Inceville, located where Sunset Boulevard reaches the Pacific Ocean, is
named for him. It was in Inceville that he established his first
studio, before moving his studio to Culver City. - Made more than 150 films in 1913.
- My first picture contained 53 scenes, and it was freely predicted that I would be fired for wasting so much time and film. Around the studio I was generally designated as "one of those New York guys that know all about the picture business". My salutatory was a comedy. I believe it was three days in the making.
- Primarily the director must know life, but he must know too how to project life, not in narrative form, but by selected dramatic moments, each of which builds toward a definite crisis or climax that will bring a burst of emotional response from the audience . . . He is the personification of every character in his drama as he directs each scene, carrying the story development so closely in his consciousness that he is a dozen persons at once . . . But, above all else, a director must excel in coaxing, cajoling and spurring his actors to heights of artistry.
- When the film was cut and assembled, I would turn my attention to stories and would work until midnight writing scenarios for the following day. With my wife's help, I managed to keep my production up to par . . . Life was fraught with many discouragements and anxieties for those who were engaged in the early motion picture industry. There were many disheartening problems and setbacks. Each step of the way had to be tries, mistakes in judgment and execution, the results of experimentation, had to be corrected, and new ideas tried out.
- Personally, I count the years I spent on stage before I became a director and then a producer as the greatest single factor contributing toward whatever measure of success I have achieved.
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