E. Magnus Ingleton — New World Film Department (1915) 🇺🇸

Mrs. Eugenie Ingleton is librarian of the reference department at Fort Lee studio.

When seen recently at the World Film studio at Fort Lee, Mrs. Eugenie Ingleton had the following to say regarding the workings in her new department: “When I first came to the World Film studios I was intensely interested with everything. The beautiful dressing rooms, the shower-baths, the splendid carpenters’ workshops, the scenic department, at the head of which is a master of art. All these things, even at a hurried glance, showed possibilities of delightful work for anyone who loved things artistic.

“When I was engaged as reader, writer, designer, and anything else I could prove useful in, I went into the business, heart and soul. Each week has, I think, added to my enthusiasm. I have started, what I hope will prove a valuable, though never completed Library of Reference Department. Pictures and sketches of everything under the sun, at all periods, and at all times, I am collecting and classifying, so that directors wanting helpful ideas, for scenes, costumes, locations, historic dates or detail, will find several sketches or pictures of whatever they seek. It is amusing to note the unexpected things that are wanted. The first thing I was asked for was a Burne-Jones stained glass window, a plane tree, an angel and a hotel kitchen followed, etc., etc. Everyone is most kind in helping me to add to the collection, bringing all sorts of unexpected little sketches that are bound to come in useful at some unexpected moment. The most of my time is taken up in reading and writing, however. I have just completed a five-reel scenario of Dion Boucicault’s play, After Dark, which is to be made by the William A. Brady Picture Plays Co., and in which Robert Warwick and Alice Brady are to be starred. I have brought it forward — how many years? Substituted the Spanish-American War for the Crimean, and changed the London of our grandmothers into New York of the present day, and I don’t think the good old play, so full of human interest, has suffered one bit by becoming a naturalized American.

“Some years ago I was connected with Mr. Hepworth’s [Cecil M. Hepworth] fine studios at Walton-on-Thames, England. I wrote scenarios and played the principal parts, but could not decide then to give up theatrical work altogether. Since then I have written the three-act opera, Aphrodine, about which I am in negotiation with Messrs. Shubert. My one act opera, The Willow Pattern Plate (originally produced at Terry’s Theater, London, seven years ago), was reproduced at Proctor’s Fifth Avenue Theater recently, with William Pruette in the leading part. Vernon Dalhart, who sang Ralph in Pinafore at the Hippodrome, was principal tenor. Lately I have written The Little Brown Mouse, for Miss Charlotte Granville. But every day I work at the World Film studio, the more absorbing and interesting I find it, the more I marvel at the genius of masterful picture direction, the more I strive to write something wonderful and beautiful with full scope for directors, actors, scenic artists and operators. I suppose every scenario department is full of these desires and ambitions, but isn’t it very splendid and isn’t the competition full of stimulus?

“I played my first part, ‘Little Eva,’ in Uncle Tom’s Cabin at the age of ten, and at one time played 104 leading parts in two years at a well-known old London stock theater. I acted with the late Charles Arnold, and was nurse, newspaper correspondent, and did Secret Service work through the South African war and came to this country first from the Haymarket Theater, London, where I played in Bunty Pulls the Strings. I took Miss Jean Cadell’s place when she left the Comedy Theater, New York, and also played the part (Aunt Susie) in Chicago. Messrs. Shubert and Brady have been my only managers in America, and during my long engagement with them, I learned to love America. But from Little Eva at ten years old, to an hour spent in New York’s wonderful library last night, there is hardly a moment that passes without gaining some knowledge or experience that is helpful to one’s work in a big moving picture studio.”

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“The Apartment House Mystery”

The society girl detective solves mystery of death on house top (Kalem two-reel).

by Hanford C. Judson.

The second of the Girl Detective Series is in no sense a continued story, for each episode is self-contained and free from dependence on incidents told in preceding instalments. The two leading women, Cleo Ridgeley and Ruth Roland, both at times take the central role. In this picture, The Apartment House Mystery, the villain is played by Thomas Lingham, who pictures very acceptably a shifty individual, while William H. West, who was the chief crook in the first picture, is here the janitor. Ruth Roland is the detective, and Cleo Ridgeley is wife of the “murdered” man — whose death it is proved both by the girl detective and later by the coroner’s office was due to heart failure.

The story begins in the early morning when the janitor goes to the roof to beat his rugs and finds the dead man. A call to the police brings the girl investigator and she finds a clue. The suspense of the story comes from the fact that we ourselves think the man was murdered and work with the investigator trying to fathom it all; trying to fasten the crime on the keeper of the gambling joint in the house. The more we go into it the surer we feel that he is a murderer until under the third degree of the girl detective he breaks down and confesses or rather tells a story which deeply interests us because it is all possible, yet with the prejudice the scenario has carefully nursed in us we believe it a lie. It proves to be the simple truth.

There is good action in this part of the picture, in the last 1,500 feet or thereabouts. The acting of most of the characters is excellent, and the staging and photography are good. It is a very fair offering.

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Scene from The Apartment House Mystery (Kalem)

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Lubin Players to Wed Before Camera

Following a romance of two months’ duration in the big studio of the Lubin Manufacturing Company in Philadelphia, Clarence Jay Elmer, a widely known Lubin photoplayer, will wed Miss Edyth Stroud Anderton, another Lubin photoplayer, on February thirteenth. The wedding will be unique, for the young couple will be married in the daylight studio on the top floor of the Lubin plant, and motion picture cameras will record every detail of the wedding.

Elmer played the title role in The Patsy Bolivar Series of comedies that the Lubin Company is now releasing each week. Miss Anderton is the daughter of Gus Anderton, a well-known automobile man of Philadelphia and a niece of Judge Stroud of the Superior Court of Pennsylvania. For some time she played with Lubin’s Southern Company at Jacksonville, Fla., and later was transferred to the Philadelphia company.

Collection: Moving Picture World, January 1915