The Romance of New Mexico
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By 1912 California had become "winter camp" for several fledgling film companies - not only independents, but also Motion Picture Patents signatories, like Biograph. David Wark Griffith had been working at Biograph in New York for almost five years, rising quickly through the ranks, such as they were, from writer of photoplays to director. From director he graduated, on the power of his genius, to master of the medium. Later, with
The Birth of a Nation (1915), history would grant him another title, "father of the narrative film." A casting office could not have come up with better material for the first great movie director: tall, patrician, impeccably dressed, megaphone in hand, he was the model for future directors, and their inspiration.
Griffith and the Biograph troupe, 45 strong, had spent the winter months of 1911-1912 in Los Angeles churning out featurettes. At the end of May they boarded the train to return to New York and stopped in Albuquerque to take in the local scene - and make a picture. As it turned out, they completed two films during their weeklong stay in New Mexico. One was a full-length dramatic love story, the other a short comedy.
Like the Edison Company filmmaker before him, D.W. Griffith went directly to the Isleta Pueblo to make a Romeo-and-Juliet tale about a Hopi maiden and her Pueblo boyfriend.
A Pueblo Legend (1912), 20 minutes in length, is typical of Griffith's work at that time - brisk, theatrical, touching, filled with action. The battle scenes between warring Indian tribes prompted the local paper to report that "the picture taken in the hills . . . was one of considerable magnitude, and if it doesn't send chills and thrills through the effete East, it will . . . not be because of any deficiency on the part of the photoplay people."
The star of
A Pueblo Legend was none other than "The Biograph Girl," Mary Pickford, a golden-haired beauty with rosebud lips. In a few short years she would become "America's Sweetheart" and the world's highest-paid film artist. In 1919, she and her husband Douglas Fairbanks would join with Griffith and Charlie Chaplin to make and distribute their own movies under the banner of the United Artists.
The other star of the film was the locale. "Director Griffith said that the Isleta Pueblo offered some of the finest scenic opportunities ever put into a picture," the local press stated. "He declared that it was the best setting he had ever seen for the enactment of Biblical or Western plays."
