Bert Lytell — The Essential Ingredient (1918) 🇺🇸
Bert Lytell, recently of Broadway, New York, but now “a film,” was late to an appointment, and Albert Shelby LeVino, Metro’s scenario editor, took his share of the blame. This was only fair because the two Berts — Albert LeVino is called Bert, too — are almost inseparable. On this occasion they had been very busy collaborating on the scenario for “No-Man’s Land” from the novel by Louis Joseph Vance and, because stories are very scarce and it looked as though they might be late on a release, it was necessary to start shooting scenes before the scenario was finished; so it happened that Lytell was all dolled up like a convict, but he was behaving like a director.
by Elizabeth Peltret
The first thing one is likely to notice about Bert Lytell is his habit of making things around him move quickly. And yet he himself is not ostentatiously quick. On the contrary, he talks rather slowly and walks with something of a stroll. He has a quick temper, but the more angry he is, the more slowly he talks and, instead of flashing, his eyes grow cold.
Melodrama, he says, has an almost irresistible attraction for him. This, according to M. Maeterlinck [Maurice Maeterlinck], who said that nothing befalls us which is not of the nature of ourselves, must be the reason that melodrama is constantly taking place all around him. In fact “they” say that if anything exciting is going to happen anywhere around, it waits until Lytell arrives on the scene before it ever comes to pass. However this may be, he has had plenty of excitement in his life. He even got his start as an actor because the juvenile lead of their stock company ran off with another man’s wife.
Bert Lytell told the story: “I was practically born on the stage,” he said. “My father, W. H. Lytell, was Kiralfy’s principal comedian — the star of Around the World in Eighty Days — and my mother’s father, J. K. Mortimer, was with the Daly stock company, but I did not become an actor until I was sixteen years old.
“I had been going to school in Toronto, Canada, and left there to go to Newark, New Jersey, where I got a job — it was a job, too, not an engagement — as assistant property man at the Columbia theater. My salary was $12.00 a week — ($12.00 looks pretty big to a sixteen-year-old boy) — and my duties consisted of everything from sweeping the stage to prompting the actors and, having a very retentive memory, I soon had the entire ‘rep’ by heart.
“Then came my opportunity. About five o’clock one afternoon, the actor who was to play Ned Seabury in the evening performance of De Mille’s play ‘Men and Women’ left town suddenly, taking with him the wife of a neighboring theatrical manager because the lady’s husband was on their trail with a gun.
“‘Only three hours before the overture and no Ned Seabury,’ raved the manager of the Columbia. ‘What am I going to do?’
“‘I know the lines,’ I said.
“‘All right!’ came the orders, ‘you’re going on!’”
Of course, Bert made a hit. Otherwise, what happened would have been a tragedy instead of a melodrama.
“It was a ‘wonderful’ moment, so to speak. As soon as I could afford it, I bought an extra suit of clothes and a cane and was happy.
“Speaking of melodrama,” reminiscently, “when I was nineteen I became leading man in a stock company at the Bowdoin Square theater in Boston and we put on such things as The Bowery After Dark and The Angel of the Alley. Those old plays certainly did move!”
In regard to the hunger-for-an-audience, he said:
“It is just a case of getting homesick; that is all; but, then, that is enough. I think that an ideal arrangement is one which allows the actor to work in pictures and remain on the stage or, at least, lets him go back to the stage at regular intervals. That is in my contract with Metro so I don’t waste any time getting homesick for the stage, as I would if I felt that I had left it forever.”
Bert Lytell was born in New York City, Feb. 24, 1885. When he was twenty-two he became leading man at the Alcazar theater in San Francisco. Bessie Barriscale was leading woman and Fred Butler, now with Oliver Morosco, was the stage manager.
There was an organization — an Empire Theater of California — from which came Marjorie Rambeau, Laurette Taylor, Bessie Barriscale, Earnest Glendinning, Howard Hickman, Charlie Ruggles, Louis Bennison, and Walter Catlett!
“I was leading man at the Alcazar for three years, and for five summer seasons following was visiting star. It was at that time I met my wife, Evelyn Vaughn.”
He refused to describe the romance.
“But I’ll tell you this much,” he said in conclusion, “I’m married to a mighty nice girl and I hope that I’ll never disappoint her!”
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It took three shots to get this young shark. Bert saw it in the ocean while he was registering melodrama with a pistol.
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The three leading figures in the film production of Louis Joseph Vance’s No Man’s Land.
Left to right: Will S. Davis who directed it; Albert Shelby Le Vino who scenarioized it, and Bert Lytell.
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I’m Tired
Of the story of the prodigal son of the rich railroad president who was disowned because he was expelled from college, and then went out and beat the old man at his own game, and saved his governor from the rival crowd that tried to gobble control while he was vacationing on a yacht — and married the gal.
Of the story of the thoroughbred but wild young club-man who went west because the girl would have naught to do with a “waster,” and fought the villainous Mexicans, and struck oil, and returned to New York in chaps and sombrero and Arizona stride, and licked a lounge-lizard that laughed at him, and arrived at the gal’s house in the nick of time to save her from the ferret-eyed heavy — the lounge-lizard, for it was none other — whom she was to marry to save her father’s honor, and pulled out his check book, and said, “How much?” — and married the gal.
Of the story of the black-silk-clinging-gowned vampire with a record of an even dozen victims, who lured the young millionaire away from his flapper fiancée, and burned incense under his nose, and lolled, decollette, on a regulation vampire couch in the middle of a room big enough for a political convention, and made him gaze into crystal balls, and plied him with champagne and cigarettes, and was foiled by the pure girl, who started to outvamp the vamp, and lost her victim because his better nature returned, and he didn’t think so much of the Cleopatra stuff after all, and stood by the window, and cried bitter tears because she had learned to love him, and watched the poor boob walk off and fade out — and marry the gal.
Collection: Photoplay Magazine, October 1918