Raymond B. West — The Personal Side of the Pictures (1914) 🇺🇸

Call him the “nut director”, and his answer has the effect of a Maxim silencer. Tell him that he works too long, too hard, that his activities will build the road to a nervous collapse — he smiles. He is Raymond B. West, director of Inceville, the headquarters of the New York Motion Picture Corporation at Santa Monica, California. His story is worth any young man’s while, and here it is:

He was added to America’s population in February, 1886. As a wee boy he showed a talent for constructing novelties that, while they went unpatented, gave evidence of the child’s possession of a talent that later would prove valuable in motion pictures. It was at first thought he would take to law, for he was fond of books, and advanced rapidly from class to class in the De La Salle Institute in Chicago. When his family moved to Grand Rapids he distinguished himself outside the classroom, as an athlete, winning the all-around championship in the annual civic competitions held in the Michigan furniture town.

In 1901 the young man came with his mother to Los Angeles, Cal. There he designed, sketched, thought. For these activities he went unpaid. They were designed for his own amusement only, and two years later, finding himself jobless in Detroit, young West took to the prosaic stenographer’s pad, and worked hard and to such good effect that he found himself presently secretary and treasurer of four large gas corporations.

In 1909 the Golden West recalled him. The lure of sunny skies and snowless winters proved too much for him. He returned to Los Angeles and once more realized he was jobless. It was in those early days when the motion picture industry was hurrying toward prosperity in leaps and bounds, and an exhaustless supply of sunlight was making Southern California the mecca of the producing companies. West, who was living surrounded by it all, determined to break in. The plant of the New York Motion Picture Corporation was then at Edendale, California. He went there and asked for a job. “Anything at all,” he said. They made him property man, and when he wasn’t hammering nails or sawing planks, he was putting together a contrivance that he thought “might be of some value in this or that scene”. Soon he was transferred to the scenic department, and there, too, the genius for construction that had first displayed itself in his childhood found ready appreciation.

In the course of a year West succeeded in acquainting himself with the rudiments of motography. His employers at once made him abandon the scenic department for the camera. He became assistant cameraman, then cameraman; finally he was made an assistant director. Thomas H. Ince had been watching him, and recognizing his unusual attainments, his ready inventiveness, and a resourcefulness in him that met with success in the most trying difficulties, made him a director. He is now at once the youngest and the oldest director in Mr. Ince’s plant in the canyons of the Pacific. He is youngest in years, but longest of all with the company. He knew the organization when it was young. Among his friends he numbers characters in the neighborhood who knew him when he applied for a job. His rapid rise as a director, is accounted for by the fact that when he was first raised to that dignified position Mr. Ince had just written a play requiring a director with imaginative power to produce it. It was given to West on a chance. The result was surprising to everyone.

Another was given him. The result was the same. He became known as the “director with the imagination”. Every story that necessitated the constant thinking of the man in charge of it was handed to West. Everything he touched, was bettered by the contact. He seemed to have a gift for direction. Some of his most successful productions are The Banshee, The Heart of Kathleen, The Wearing of the Green, all Irish pictures; The Ghost, A Man’s Right to Die, The Substitute, double-exposures; The Circle of Fate and Mario, Italian pictures; The Romance of the Sawdust Ring and The Defaulter. At present, West is working on the production of Rumpelstiltskin, Thomas H. Ince’s and W. H. Clifford’s [William H. Clifford] new fairy tale film, a production of the most elaborate nature.

At Hollywood the young director has a beautiful home, a wife and son, Vincent. Mrs. West was Miss Gertrude Darby of Los Angeles.

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Raymond B. West, Inceville’s “Boy Director.”

The “Boy Director” in Action

Collection: Reel Life Magazine, December 1914