Fred Kelsey — Real Tales About Reel Folk (1914) 🇺🇸

Fred Kelsey, director for the Reliance, has earned the name of “hoodoo” director, at the Reliance and Majestic studios. While working on The Revenue Officer’s Deputy, a two-reel Reliance feature, Kelsey rented a costly, silver-mounted Mexican saddle in Los Angeles. He took it to Newhall, a small desert town near Angel City. He left the saddle in a barn over night, intending to return and finish the scene next day. The following morning he found that the barn had been burned.

In another picture, Kelsey pulled off a dynamite explosion, and incidentally demolished a quantity of county pipe line. In still another production, he used his automobile to rush an injured newsboy to a hospital. While racing to the hospital, the trunk on the car, containing all the cameraman’s supplies, was lost: Two days after this, traveling in Topanga Canyon, near Santa Monica, a suit-case holding Irene Hunt’s stage clothes disappeared.

But in spite of barrels of ill luck, Kelsey is doing great things these days, and everybody at the studio is enthusiastic to work under him.

—

A thrilling fight on top of a freight train between two men, in which one of them is hurled from a swaying box car while the train is travelling at a speed of forty miles an hour, is the feature of Environment, the one reel Majestic drama directed by W. Christie Cabanne [Christy Cabanne] at the Majestic–Mutual studios.

The fight comes as a climax to the career of a weak youth, who through the influence of his sweetheart, suddenly recovers his manhood and saves his sweetheart’s father from being robbed by the very thugs who had been his companions.

Signe Auen is featured, with Chas. Gorman [Charles Gorman], playing the title rôle. F. A. Turner and Leslie Warner take prominent parts.

—

Collection: Reel Life Magazine, October 1914

—

see all entries of the Real Tales About Reel Folk series