The May Irwin Kiss. View an animated GIF of "The Kiss." (20 frames, 153KB)

Richard deCordova, noting that "before 1907 there was no discourse on the film actor" (5), sees the new emphasis on actors and actresses as a necessary second stage in the economic development of the industry:

. . . a new form of product differentiation more in keeping with an increasingly rationalized production system; the audience's appreciation would no longer be confined to the magic of the machine or to the socio-cultural interest in the thing photographed but would involve the possibility of discriminating--at the level of performance--between specific films (9).

This popular discourse on actors was being created in a somewhat anarchic atmosphere, where daring was often a sound strategy. For instance, by the fall of 1910, only half the country's 9,000 theaters were licensed (Stanley, 3). A host of independent producers, many of whom first tried unsuccessfully to use Lumière stock, were surreptitiously using Edison-trust equipment--the would-be monopoly was a patents monopoly--to make films for the burgeoning market. In 1910, Carl Laemmle and several other major independent producers joined to form the Motion Picture Distributing and Sales Corporation, which became the Trust's major competitor and its major court antagonist. By 1912, when the independents nearly equalled the Trust in film production and when the MPDSC was large enough to have a member (Harry Aitken) split off to form second major independent force (Mutual Film Corp., later Triangle), it was evident that the independents "consistently demonstrated the initiative and innovative energy that the Trust producers lacked" (Sklar, 40). One of the ways they beat the Trust was by realizing the fuller potential of the star system toward which the Trust was also groping. Whereas Edison and Vitagraph touted the quality of its "stock company" of players, perhaps harking back to a long-vanished period in American theater history, the independents more closely imitated present theatrical practices, in which stars, touring with their own ensemble companies, ruled the day. (See Staiger.) Typical of the independents' panache was Laemmle's aforementioned hiring away of the "Biograph Girl."4

After spreading the story that she had been killed in a streetcar accident, Laemmle produced Florence Lawrence, now an "Imp Girl" (Imp was the popular name of his Independent Motion Picture Company), who would henceforth appear under her own name in his pictures. The independents were likewise more willing to move into the production of longer and feature-length films than the Trust companies, a move that dovetailed neatly with a fuller exploitation of the potential of stars in such films.

As Staiger notes, the rise of the movie star system is intricately bound to the prior existence of a star system in closely related media: "Whether the demand for stars came first from the consumers or was created by enterprising capitalists is immaterial in this case since the precedents in theater and vaudeville are so immediate" (Bordwell, Classical, 101). In this respect, probably the most important early event in emergence of the star system was the founding of Famous Players Film Company by an Hungarian Jewish immigrant, Adolph Zukor--based on his phenomenal success with the four-reeler he imported from France, Queen Elizabeth starring Sarah Bernhardt.

The company's motto, "Famous Players in Famous Plays," perfectly summed up its strategy of appealing to middle-class audiences by featuring renown stage actors in feature-length "photoplays." Soon came James O'Neill (Eugene's father) in The Count of Monte Cristo and James K. Hackett in The Prisoner of Zenda. Two other immigrants, Jesse Lasky and Samuel Goldfish (later Goldwyn), quickly followed suit, founding the Jesse L. Lasky Feature Players company (a newcomer, Cecil B. De Mille, was their director), a company that merged with Zukor's in 1916, creating the second great organization of the post-Trust era.

In 1915, the government's three-year suit against the trust was decided in favor of the independents, but the latter group had already won its battle economically. For instance, the defection of D.W. Griffith, the leading stylistic innovator in the industry, from Biograph to the new Mutual in 1913, after rejecting earlier offers from independent producers, was a clearly a sign that the independents, with their riskier, more innovative management styles, were carrying the day. Within two years he would make The Birth of a Nation, probably the most influential motion picture ever made and certainly a film that could never have been made at Biograph. It was also a film that firmly fixed at least three "stars" in the public consciousness: Lillian Gish, Mae Marsh and Griffith himself.