The Romance of New Mexico
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While Griffith and Pickford were out on the dusty stretches above Isleta, Biograph's comedy division was down at the Albuquerque train station making
The Tourists (1912), a four-minute comic mix-up involving a woman passenger and several Indian souvenir vendors. Its star was Mabel Normand, about to become famous as the first great screen comedienne; its director was jaunty Mack Sennett, also bound for fame as the founder of the Keystone Company, a film studio devoted entirely to comedy.
No sooner had the first movie genius, Griffith, left the high desert than the second arrived. He was Romaine Fielding, creative director (some would say "Scourge") of the Lubin Company, a Motion Picture Patents signatory. Philip St. George Cooke, former New Mexico State Film Archivist, remembered as a boy watching Fielding "direct" at Lubin's headquarters in Silver City in 1913. As part of the action for a picture, an old wooden railroad bridge was to be blown up.
They had taken a box of dynamite and wired it underneath this bridge. The fuse didn't ignite the cap, so Romaine Fielding grabbed a thirty-thirty rifle and he hit the damn thing the first time, and . . . blooey, it went up! He ran that [film company] like a dictator. When he said "Jump!" by God, they had better jump.
Fielding filled a variety of roles for the film company, including lead actor, character actor, set designer, cinematographer, screenwriter and director. He was, in short, a one-man band, wildly eccentric and just as wildly imaginative. Fielding relocated his company to Las Vegas, N.M., where he made upward of a dozen featurettes over the next two years. Before he left Silver City, however, he produced most of
The Golden God (1913), a realistic and allegorical rendering of a violent labor uprising. The film's budget was said to have been a staggering $50,000, much of it spent on bringing in and paying thousands of extras. Prophetically, it included scenes of aerial bombardment and armored "war automobiles" mounted with machine gun-wielding soldiers. While awaiting release at Lubin's headquarters in Philadelphia, the film was lost in a tragic explosion that destroyed the studio's entire vault.
Fielding was a powerful presence. In Las Vegas, he practically took over the town, at one point buying the landmark Plaza Hotel, renaming it the "Hotel Romaine," and installing his production company there.
The Rattlesnake (1913) shows him at his best - athletic, emotional, neurotic, intensely compelling.
Selig Polyscope, another Patents company, became resident in Las Vegas in 1914. Led by its own star/director, Tom Mix, it produced as many as 25 or 30 short Westerns over the next two years. "Las Vegas has the Mix Craze, it seems," said the
Weekly Optic and Stock Grower newspaper. "One merchant is featuring Mix cravats, while . . . Murphy's soda dispenser has threatened to get a brand new Mix-ed drink."
