What Kind of a Fellow Is — Ince? (1918) 🇺🇸

Being a glance at the real human side of the big men of the picture game caught in action

by William A. Johnston

Thomas H. Ince — “Thomas Handsome” we would fittingly call him were he an actor and were we writing for gushy fan circulation — has probably wondered why he hasn’t appeared earlier in this series.

Granting, of course, that Thomas H. knows this series is in existence.

Others, who do know of it, have been wondering. So we suppose explanations are in order.

Thomas H. Ince has been on the schedule for this series for a long, long time, but we have kept postponing the interview in the vain hope that he would come to New York on a visit and enable us to give an up-to-the-minute close-up flash.

But it doesn’t happen.

That man Ince surely does love his work — and California. He just sticks to his studio lot as if success hadn’t long ago made it possible for him to take life much easier.

Perhaps that is why “Supervised by Thomas H. Ince” means so much. Mr. Ince is on the job every sunrise to see that it does mean something.

But to get back to our opening thought.

People have been asking us why we haven’t told them what kind of a fellow Ince is. We haven’t because he wouldn’t leave California and enable us to get a first-hand interview. His case is much the same, though it also reverses, as that of J. Stuart Blackton, who hasn’t appeared yet because he ran away on us — to California.

We’ll get even with both by writing them up in their absence.

We are tempted to write Mr. Ince up through the medium of our “Exhibitors’ Box Office Reports.”

Have you ever noticed the frequent recurrence of a particular phrase in those reports — used by the exhibitor in Maine and the exhibitor in Michigan — “Ince standard.”

A few exhibitors have reached the point where they don’t even bother to tell us that they thought the picture good — they just write “Ince standard.” That’s enough.

It’s something to have created a standard of value in this picture game.

It’s an achievement — and in that achievement is the index to the personality of the man Ince.

Thomas H. Ince takes everything he does seriously — he puts all there is of him into everything he does.

He came into the picture game because it offered a job — and he was an actor out of a job. That was in the early days when motion pictures weren’t a very serious matter.

But did Tom Ince treat them as a passing time-killer? No — he took them seriously. From the start — and from the start he made good. And he kept on taking everything he did seriously — and kept on making good.

When the early years brought dollars in undreamt of abundance, Thomas H. went seriously at the task of enjoying life — and he took his family along with him.

No one ever called you into a corner to whisper a sub-rosa morsel about Director Tom Ince.

He even took serious joy out of the stage folk who a few years previously hadn’t much thought for Actor Tom Ince — and less when he went into the despised “movies.”

The changes of a few years brought them to Director Thomas H. Ince looking for — jobs. And be it said — even while he got serious delight in letting them witness evidences of his changed state — if Tom Ince had the job and if the former scoffer fitted it — he got it.

There’s one other thing that Thomas H. Ince has reduced to a serious standardized science — and that is the discovery and development of screen stars. He’s a regular Christopher Columbus at that.

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Collection: Motion Picture News, May 1918