What a difference 10 years makes: Edwin Porter shaped cinema during its infancy by his 1903's "The Great Train Robbery" and the fantasy film "The Dream of the Rarebit Fiend" while working at Edison Studios. Porter was hired by Adolph Zukor as chief director in 1912 for his new Famous Players Film Company. Zukor discovered later the former film projectionist turned director was more of a mechanic than a dramatic artist who would have an uncomfortable relationship with his actors.
Porter's skills at keeping up with the rapidly advancing changes in cinema's artistic merits by 1914 was falling well behind the leading directors. Actress Mary Pickford, who had signed onto the Famous Players Company the year before, noticed Porter's lack of imagination when directing April 1914's "Tess of Storm Country," based on Grace Miller White's 1909 best-selling novel. This was Pickford's fourth film under Porter's direction, and the actress, who learned the craft of making movies under D. W. Griffith, finally boiled over by Porter's lack of adopting the medium's new techniques. "He knew nothing about directing," Pickford fumed, "Nothing." She described him as simply setting up a stationary camera and in tableau fashion let the scene play out. "Tess" is the only surviving feature film of the four she made with Porter--although an earlier film, "A Good Little Devil," has one of five reels in existence. It would be the last movie the two worked together.
Her harsh criticism of Porter, however, didn't stop Pickford from realizing "Tess" was "the beginning of my career" as far as her enormous public popularity went. As one biographer noted, the movie "sent her career into orbit and made her the most popular actress in America, if not the world." Her performance alone, despite the director's unimaginative camera setups, was called simply stunning. She would go on to remake "Tess" in 1922.
Meanwhile, Porter was soon tinkering with 3-D film equipment before being hired by the Precision Machine Company, a projector manufacturing company. He would live to be 71, dying in the Hotel Taft in New York City in 1941.
