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The CPR hires the Edison Company to create 'advertorials' for the West
SEE CLIPS OF NEW YORK HAT and other films.
1910 Film Industry Index: link to all movie articles on Tighsolas
Go to YouTube to see many era films in full, including Those Awful Hats and the Corner in Wheat.
The New York Hat, directed by D.W. Griffith in 1912, is my favorite of all of Griffith's silent short films--at least the ones I've seen. It stars Mary Pickford, the Canadian who become America's Sweetheart and who founded a studio in Hollywood. She plays a sad young girl with a miserly widower for a father who longs for a fancy hat recently placed in the milliner's window. The local minister, seeing her pine, buys her the hat, for her late mother has left him some money in trust. But the hat doesn't bring her the admiration and respect which she craves from her small town neighbours: it only causes a scandal. They think she is having an affair with the Minister! (Just read Margaret's 1908 letters to see how she was snubbed for being a suffragist!)
By 1912, they'd already figured out what looks good on screen: pretty young faces, love scenes, and war scenes. And film was a great medium to explore the gaping divide between the upper and lower classes. There are few middle class subjects, like this Pickford character, in Griffith's films, just the struggling poor and haughty rich. The middle class were going to the movies and probably not interested in seeing themselves.
Mack Sennett, the father of silent film comedy was born in Richmond, Quebec about the same time as Edith. He was Irish Catholic and Edith Scotch Presbyterian so it is not likely their paths crossed much, although Norman did do business with Sennett's father, J F Sinnott. He sold him some grain in the late 1880s. Sinnott's name also shows up on town voting lists. (I know nearby town of Danville claims him, but they are clearly wrong.)
When the girls went to see Man in the Box in 1909, it is likely that they didn't recognize Sennett. Griffith didn't give his players billing.
It was in 1912 that Sennett launched his famous Keystone Cops. Sennett talks about his Richmond roots in his autobiography. He says he spent his youth going to funerals. An Irish Catholic boy, he felt closer to French Canadians than Anglo Canadians. Religion trumped language back then. Not any more.
Canadians played a prominent part in the establishment of the Hollywood film industry.
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