Ince and Mack Sennett. Harry E. Aitken was the promoter, and Willie Collier, Billie Burke, Raymond Hitchcock, Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree, Eddie Foy, Weber and Fields, Sam Bernard, Dustin Farnum, Frank Keenan, Willard Mack, Douglas Fairbanks and myself were among the stars engaged from the speaking stage at salaries so large that they were set down as the brazen inventions of a press agent.
Griffith, Ince and Sennett went on to greater directorial glories, Aitken went down with the ship, and of this impressive array of names recruited from the theater to revolutionize the films all failed, with one exception. Fairbanks, whose salary was among the least, survived and triumphed.
W. S. Hart, it is true, was of the Triangle company and had come from the legitimate stage, but he had not been either a star or a leading man and he had played in a number of pictures for Ince before the Triangle was formed. Aitken, whose imagination conceived the idea and whose enthusiasm and organizing ability made it a reality, first appeared on the distant horizon of the movies about 1905 as a salesman for a Chicago film exchange. Moving pictures then had been exhibited for ten years or more,
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