Sidney Olcott and Irish Politics: The Lad from Old Ireland (1910)

In 1910, it was a novel idea for an American production company to go abroad, film fictional material on location, and then return to the United States to exhibit these foreign stories. The New York-based Kalem company started these transatlantic forays, traveling first to Ireland, England, and then on to Germany; their initial trip to Ireland yielded a one-reel, twelve-minute film, The Lad from Old Ireland (1910)—a fiction film that has become central to Irish American film history—as well as a travelogue, An Irish Honeymoon (1911).¹

The Lad from Old Ireland was co-created by Sidney Olcott and Gene Gauntier, which we know from Gene Gauntier's much-cited 1928 memoir and Sidney Olcott's almost unknown contemporary travel diary. Both sources give a picture of the mechanics and logistics of making films in Ireland in this pioneering era, including the character and views of the key participants. But they also assist us in articulating the complicated political and social relationship between Ireland and America at the time. Two personal meetings between Sidney Olcott and former leader of Tammany Hall, Richard Croker, influenced the texture of these two films. Furthermore, we now have evidence to suggest that Olcott's return to Ireland in subsequent years to make historically and politically flavored adaptations was inspired by his meeting in August 1910 with the leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party, John Redmond.

Sidney Olcott and Gene Gauntier are key figures in American film history well beyond its Irish dimensions. Gauntier's career from 1906 to 1915 is a story of a meteoric rise. In a remarkably short time, she went from a touring theater actress to a minor film actor, and then a multitalented artist who incorporated a star persona and work as a major "scenarist," a term for an early forerunner of a professional screenplay writer. She ended the last few years of her career in film by setting up her own production unit, the Gene Gauntier Feature Players company, which shot three films directed by Olcott in Ireland in 1913.² Notable among the dozens, if not hundreds, of scenarios she provided for films was her Girl Spy series, which illustrated a plucky young female sleuth who was not afraid to put herself into dangerous situations.

Sidney Olcott had graduated from amateur theatricals to the professional stage in his twenties and was able to have a substantial directorial career, one that stretched from 1907 to 1927. In addition to the Irish films, he is famous for his 1907 Ben-Hur, the first American feature-length Christ narrative, From the Manger to the Cross (1912), Madame Butterfly (1915) starring Mary Pickford, and work in the 1920s with such leading stars of that era Pola Negri, Norma Talmadge, Rudolph Valentino, and Gloria Swanson. From 1907 to 1912, his work at the Kalem company required him to produce a film per week, which explains the immense number of works associated with him—most of which are now lost.³

The importance of New York as a production center and of one-reelers prior to 1912 cannot be overstressed. It was the industry's move to California and the creation of Hollywood studios that led to the gradual lengthening of narrative films into features, which required more complicated sets and consistently bright shooting days; before then, when the focus was on ten- to twelve-minute one-reel films, it was possible to produce such films simply and quickly in New York, in New Jersey, and even in Ontario or Quebec. Financing was readily available through the major New York banks, and the sheer size of the city produced economies of scale in terms of distribution to nickelodeons, early cinemas, and vaudeville theaters—all of which meant that New York would emerge as a testing ground for moving pictures art between 1896 and 1914. It attracted an entrepreneurial class who took advantage of both the recent technological developments in film equipment and the surfeit of acting talent in the city.

Another context in which to understand early cinema, and Olcott...