1891-????
Edison studio executive and filmmaker Horace G. Plympton was born on this day in the Bay Ridge area of Brooklyn. He was a major studio executive at Edison's Bronx division. He was also a pioneering cinematographer. Though not a great deal of biographical material can be found on him, a great deal can be gleaned from his film contracts. He actually got directly into movie making at the end of Edison's run as a movie studio (only part of it's massive business), which closed down in 1918. He did have one lone writing credit dating from 1912 for What Happened To Mary (incidentally a film featuring the great Charles Ogle). He didn't have another writing credit until 1917 (busy as he was the day to day studio workings) and that came with Her Scrambled Ambition. He was directly involved in cinematography for the first time in 1918 with Why I Would Not Marry , which was actually made for Fox. It seems that he was signed to a contract at Fox, so this would have been after the movie division of Edison had been phased out. He directed his first film in 1919 with The Stream Of Life, under the auspices of his own production company, located in his own studio in Yonkers (note: I have no way of verifying this at this time, but it would appear that he may have bought or leased the property from Edison). As a cinematographer he stayed at Fox through 1922, but as a director he seemed to have been more of a free agent. The last three films that he is known to have worked on (as a cinematographer) was with companies other than Fox. His last known or credited film came in 1925 with Play Ball, a serial that was made for Pathé Exchange and filmed at the famed Algonquin Hotel in NYC. After this, history does not record (for now) what became of Plympton; there is not even so much as a death record for him. Still he made a mark on the early film industry, especially behind the scenes at Edison, that deserves to some light shown on it.
1865-1940
Giant of the early silver screen Charles Stanton Ogle was born on this day in Steubenville, Ohio, the son of a minister. Ogle, of course, was a stage actor before acting in film and he made his successful Broadway debut in 1905. Ogle made his film debut in 1908, when he went to work for the Edison Manufacturing Company under contract--one of the first actors to sign such a contract with a studio (the first studio, no less). The Boston Tea Party, a short historical drama, was released in July of that year and directed by Edwin S. Porter. Under this contract he would assay a number of well know roles from works of literature. Probably the most famous is that of Frankenstein's Monster in the very first film of that book. Frankenstein dates from 1910 and was directed by J.Serle Dawley. The film featured some truly impressive special effects for the day; Ogle created the makeup for the role himself--and he did a great job (!)--a tradition that was still going strong in the 1920's (see, for example, the many photos of Lon Chaney Sr. [an actor Ogle would later work with] and his portable make-up kit).
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| Ogle as The Monster |
That same year, Ogle would go on to play the meek, hardworking, rather pathetic Bob Cratchit from Charles Dickens immortal Christmas classic A Christmas Carol ; he played opposite Marc McDermott's Scrooge (McDermott was actually a much younger actor than Ogle). He had no shortage of work at Edison! By 1912, he found himself the star of What Happened To Mary, the first serial ever produced. With the serial turning out to be a great marketing plan to the public (Edison quickly noticed that they were quite addictive), a larger serial thriller was planned and executed in 1914 with The Man Who Disappeared, both Ogle and McDermott [who was the star] appeared in it. The last film that he made for Edison was also in 1914, he played Ragnarr in The Viking Queen. After this, he and his frequent co-star Mary Fuller--who he had been working with since the beginning of his film career--absconded to Victor Film. The company had a distribution deal with Universal, and indeed, the first film that they made for the studio--The Witch Girl (1914)--was distributed by Universal. By 1917, he was with Jesse L Lasky's company. The first confirmed feature length film that he is known to have acted in was A Romance Of The Redwood (1917), a Mary Pickford film directed by Cecil B. DeMille; the film is 1 hour 10 minutes long. In 1920, he appeared as Long John Silver in Treasure Island, a film which also featured Chaney Sr. Throughout the 1920's he fell easily into character acting; with the last film that he appeared in coming in 1926 with The Flaming Forest. With his retirement in 1926, in all he had appeared in more than 300 films. Ogle lived a further 14 years in Long Beach, California, where he died from arteriosclerosis on the 11th of October in 1940. He is buried at the Forest Lawn Memorial Park.
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