Watterson R. Rothacker — A Specialist in a Fine Art (1918) 🇺🇸

“Waddy” Rothacker directed and produced the first picture of Mr. and Mrs. Vernon Castle — a single-reeler, sent over the Orpheum Circuit. Below is a night scene of his Chicago factory and studio, through which, among other items, passes every foot of Charlie Chaplin negative and positive.

All our captains of industry that you find in novels, and plays, and motion pictures are grizzled old fellows, or stern, lean, lion-faced men in the prime of life; fellows who possess the piercing eye, beat their desks and walk up and down like tigers in a cage.

But not all our captains of industry, and art, in real life.

For instance, if you should see a certain handsome young chap at a table in the Claridge, New York, chatting with a group of men, don’t think he’s a new Vernon Castle signing a dancing contract, though he may look the part.

Because if it’s the particular chap we mean, a dancing contract would be about the farthest thing from his mind, and the Claridge a place of business that he visits only perforce of business circumstances.

He is Watterson R. Rothacker of Chicago, “Waddy,” his friends call him, the first man in America to use film for industrial purposes — one who went around the country like a new incarnation of John the Baptist, preaching a new faith. His followers include some of the greatest concerns in America. His own business, a huge institution filling a block, is one of the most unique and humming film plants in the world.

Rothacker first became interested in the film business when he was manager of a theatrical trade journal known as The Billboard. In his work he covered and reported such important meetings as the formation, of the Motion Picture Patents Company, the Sale’s Company, and so on.

Then he wrote a series of articles concerning the industrial and educational possibilities of the film, and through comments on these articles he determined to enter the field himself.

During 1910 and 1911 he did considerable picture missionary work, appearing before various advertising and commercial associations through the country, desiring to interest them in motion picture advertising. He also wrote another series of articles on this subject which appeared in the Scientific American, Printer’s Ink, the London Bioscope, and certain European advertising and selling journals. Such an impression did he make that his new evangelism was translated into every language of Western Europe.

And, what were his results at home?

There is the Dupont Powder Company, for which he made a picture showing “Farming with Dynamite,” teaching the farmer how to break up hard-pan soil with high explosive; Armour and Company, for whom he made a picture showing the manufacture of oleomargarine; Wilson and Company, for whom he made a seven-reel picture showing the packing industry; the Winchester Repeating Arms Company, and the C. B. & Q., for whom he made industrial pictures; the American Cyanamid Company, for whom he made a two-reel subject entitled “The Fixation of Atmospheric Nitrogen,” which visualized the transformation of water power into food crops; Sears, Roebuck and Company, for whom he made a fourteen-reeler, the Western Electric Company, and many others.

His argument for the screen as an advertising medium has become a classic. He says:

“The best advertisement in the world will never be written because moving pictures are the superlative advertising medium and exceed the limitations of any pen.”

Watterson Rothacker today prints and develops more film than any other man in America. There’s news, isn’t it — you have thought of California and New York as the only places where the ribbons of silvered celluloid become scrolls of life!

Among the pictures entirely developed and printed in his Chicago establishment are the comedies of Charlie Chaplin. He personally directed and produced the first picture of Mr. and Mrs. Vernon Castle — a single-reeler sent over the Orpheum Circuit.

Rothacker was vice-president of the first Motion Picture Board of Trade, and is now membership chairman of the National Association of the Motion Picture Industry, Chairman of the Studio Committee of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers, member of the National Cinema Commission and member of the War Co-Operation Committee. He was also a member of the Advisory Board, Bureau of Motion Pictures of the American Red Cross, and a member of the National Cinema Commission, which furnished moving picture subjects for the boys overseas.

“I built my laboratory in Chicago,” says Rothacker, ‘“because it is my firm belief that Chicago will eventually be the place where all film manufacturing will be done, situated as it is, so centrally.”

Watterson R. Rothacker, a Chicago man who develops and prints more film than anyone else in America — Matzene, Chicago

Mr. Rothacker knows his business from laboratory to executive office. He is here shown examining one of the great “drums” of drying film.

Carduelis Canaria Co-Stars with Fairbanks

Miss Canaria is the daughter of one of the most famous singers and came to this country from her home in Madeira when very young. She has lived with Francis Marion, the scenario writer, for several years and they are intimate friends.

So it was natural that she should turn her talents to motion pictures, and it was through the assistance of her friend that her chance came in motion pictures.

That’s the way some of our press agents might announce this bird’s advent into pictures, but we must be more truthful. The lady named in the headline (that’s the name scientists give her) is just a little yellow canary. But she has quite a bit to do in Fairbanks’ new picture, “He Comes Up Smiling.”

Miss Marion’s hobby is canaries, and she had trained this one to do a number of cute tricks including playing dead in the palm of her hand, and climbing a miniature ladder.

Above, reading from right to left: Director Allan Dwan, Miss Canaria, Frances Marion, and Douglas Fairbanks.

Collection: Photoplay Magazine, December 1918