Jack Dillon — How Directors are Made (1925) 🇺🇸

Thousands of ambitious youngsters all over the world are constantly wondering how men get to be motion-picture directors, just as thousands of girls are wondering how the feminine stars attained their pinnacles.

Unlike most highly paid professions, there seems to be no standardized course of preparation for picture directing. No two directors seem to have risen by the same route. Some were college men — some never saw high school. Many were actors — others never played a part. The only point of similarity in their background seems to have been that practically all were adventurers.

Take, as a characteristic example, Jack Dillon [John Francis Dillon], one of the most successful directors to-day. He began as a telegraph messenger boy, lured to the job by the desire to wear a uniform. He discarded that to don another, the uniform of a theater usher. That gave him the ambition to be an actor. His first job on the stage was to make the waves for a nautical scene in a melodrama, by crawling under a big strip of loose canvas with other boys, and making the canvas go up and down.

Then he became the acrobatic foil for the great Kyrle Bellew. Killed nightly in a duel, he had to fall backward down a flight of steps, risking his neck. Once out of a job he became a skating instructor, and worked in several cities, until the call of the theater led him to get a job as dramatic editor on a newspaper.

Finally he returned to the stage, this time to become a real actor, but when the movies began he saw an opportunity in them, and joined the Kalem Company, as director and writer of screen stories.

He rose as a director to the point of directing Mary Pickford. Recently he has done Flaming Youth, “Lilies of the Field,” “Flirting with Love,” “If I Marry Again,” The Perfect Flapper, and “The One-Way Street.”

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Photo by: Roman Freulich (1898–1974)

Collection: Picture Play Magazine, April 1925