Photo: Scott Garfield’s introduction to silent-era moviemaking is a sequence that intercuts between two productions. One is a cheap feature being shot by director Ruth Adler on a makeshift set where multiple Kinoscope Pictures films are being made simultaneously. It is during this production that Nellie LaRoy is discovered.
But it’s easy to forget just how much everything we do today, or that we’ve thought of as innovations in film techniques, were visible in ’20s films. After sound came in, you could argue it took another ten years or more for Hollywood to relearn how to be free, how to move the camera the same way.
Kinoscope is a fictional studio, but it’s the scrappier counterpart to MGM, so maybe it’s a little like Columbia. Not quite Poverty Row, but they definitely don’t have the budgets that Jack Conrad has. They’re not shooting thousand-person battlefield scenes with an Erich von Stroheim type. They’re doing six movies at once on one bare-bones studio lot. Someone like Ruth is probably shooting a movie a week.
For Ruth, I liked this idea of someone who can barely sit still, who’s always moving. The first time we ever see her, she’s literally manhandling a guy who’s five times her size, pushing one of the extras into the bar, screaming her head off. Then, by the last time you see her, she’s literally told that she can’t even move her leg because she’s got a spring in it. When sound comes in, the Ruths of the world get weeded out.