Leaders All — James Ross Grainger, Story of a Smile Backed by Hard Work (1923) 🇺🇸

Leader All — James Ross Grainger

Because from the beginning he has been a believer in hard work; because he has been through the school of experience; because he is a believer in knowing his customers intimately and maintaining contact with them throughout the year; because his subordinates know he is well acquainted with their problems and have confidence in his ability to help them to solve them.

Story of a Smile Backed by Hard Work

Career of James Ross Grainger, ranging from bill posting for circus as a boy to sales chief of Goldwyn

If you want verification of the old saw that “The man with the smile wins” we will give you as a shining example James Ross Grainger, vice president and general sales manager of Goldwyn-Cosmopolitan.

Mr. Grainger’s success is due only primarily to the smile that so frequently is seen upon his face.

It is the bubbling good nature of the man that is responsible for friendships so quickly formed, friendships that stick.

Back of the smile, too, is a personality of unusual force — that of a man possessed of remarkable physique and vitality, of one who drives hard from 9 in the morning to 6 o’clock at night; of one who then is ready to play with the gang.

So the success of “Jimmie” Grainger has been due to his upstanding cordiality plus his capacity for hard work and the will to achieve.

That success is attributable to another factor, and a major factor, too: A wide acquaintance among the men who exhibit pictures in the United States.

For fourteen years Mr. Grainger has been crossing and recrossing the several states that go to make up the Union and calling upon theatre owners. He knows these men, literally thousands of them, by their first name.

Not only does the Goldwyn vice president converse with exhibitors in the familiar way customary among old friends, but he converses with them in their own language.

And if the dialogue on occasion may wax a bit warm, as these business discussions among the aforesaid old friends sometimes do, it is likely the Goldwyn man will be found the possessor of a rather wide range of invective, the kind that delights the heart of a male bystander and keeps guessing the not too fortunate individual on the receiving end.

Just that’s where the smile again comes in. It provides a perfectly good background for a difference of opinion seemingly fierce but actually just a bit animated and entirely friendly in feeling.

Like Governor Al Smith “Jimmie” hails from the east side of New York. It is true that during his childhood there was a brief residence in Boston, but the Grainger family returned to New York.

The first business experience of the lad was as an apprentice in the realm of the showman, the great field of the circus, the ambition of the boy from the city as well as the one from the country.

With Foley & Burke’s “colossal shows” the first duty was the posting of bills and the tacking up of cards. From this work automatically he reached out into the advertising department.

Before he was of voting years he traveled in the ornate advance car as the big boss.

Then for four years Mr. Grainger devoted his energies to stage companies, working ahead of them and with them.

On one occasion up in Idaho, when a company was in straits, Mr. Grainger had gone on to another town in the effort to obtain a date. By telegraph came the word that the leading man had quit the outfit, accompanied by an appeal that “Jimmie” come back and fill the breach.

The response was immediate, and the show went on as scheduled, with a leading man not on the bills. There was money in the box office, the company was paid off and the situation was saved.

When the moving picture began to loom on the horizon Mr. Grainger was filled with the idea it was going to be the big thing in an amusement way.

He got right into the state right field and for some years remained there. Among the early big ones with which “Jimmie” was connected was Cabiria. Then for a period he was associated with the Edison talking pictures as western representative.

Among the experiences in the state right field was the ownership of the rights on Tillie’s Punctured Romance for Iowa and Nebraska, which incidentally proved profitable.

Then there was an association with Thomas Ince in selling rights on Civilization.

For a time Mr. Grainger served as representative for General Manager Sheehan of Fox. Later on he was temporarily assigned as district manager of that company, with offices in the middle west.

He induced Marshall Neilan to organize his own unit and then secured a contract with First National, for which organization the producer made nine pictures.

He represented Mr. Neilan four years, and for a time was in partnership with him.

He represented Charles Chaplin for two years.

He represented William Randolph Hearst for a year and a half supervising contracts for Cosmopolitan in the offices of Paramount.

It was twenty months ago that F. J. Godsol became president of Goldwyn and called to his aid Mr. Grainger. From the day of the latter’s entrance into the company’s offices there has been the closest co-operation between the two men and the highest respect of one for the other.

The co-operation has extended not only to those matters in which they are mutually interested but also to the affairs that fall especially within the domain of each.

We have remarked that Mr. Grainger has a wide acquaintance among exhibitors. Perhaps the statement will be better understood when it is added that in the first fifty-two weeks of the vice-president’s affiliation with the company he spent thirty-three of these on the road maintaining personal contact.

As a result when a situation arises in any part of the country and it is brought before Mr. Grainger at his corner office up there on the eighth floor of the Woolworth Building in Fifth avenue the Goldwyn official has a pretty definite knowledge of the surrounding circumstances.

Another result is that Goldwyn men in the field know that in the home office there is a man who understands exchange problems and that with him they may frankly discuss them.

Furthermore it is said of Mr. Grainger that he is blessed with a remarkable memory for names and faces and situations and incidentally prices.

The Goldwyn vice president is a believer in the maxim that the early bird catches the worm.

That was demonstrated when he first came to the company by the manner in which he started things humming in the earlier forenoon hours.

It was demonstrated again last summer when instead of waiting for the early fall to get in touch with exhibitors he set out on a cross-country journey in the heat of July.

In the twenty-five days of the trip he slept fifteen nights on the rails.

It was during a particularly torrid spell and after several consecutive nights on the move that Eddie Bonns, his traveling companion, demurred.

The retort was quick and as explosive as the remark which preceded it: “What in hell do you think this is — a vacation?”

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Collection: Exhibitors Trade Review, 20 October 1923

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