Thomas Ince's "Civilization" - 100th anniversary

[Wellesnet]

This is the 100th anniversary of Thomas Ince's 1916 anti-war spectacle, "Civilization". The film, generally considered to be Ince's magnum opus, is available to watch on Youtube in two parts:
Part1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-oMo8AhrbM
Part2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=maaCOW78Tf0



Wiki:

Ince was known as the "Father of the Western" and was responsible for making over 800 films. He revolutionized the motion picture industry by creating the first major Hollywood studio facility and invented movie production by introducing the "assembly line" system of filmmaking. He was the first mogul to build his own film studio dubbed "Inceville" in Palisades Highlands. Ince was also instrumental in developing the role of the producer in motion pictures. He later partnered with D.W. Griffith and Mack Sennett to form the Triangle Motion Picture Company whose studios are the present-day site of Sony Pictures. He then built a new studio about a mile from Triangle which is now the site of Culver Studios. Ince's untimely death at the height of his career after he became severely ill aboard the private yacht of media tycoon William Randolph Hearst has caused much speculation, although the official cause of his death was heart failure.

Eddie Izzard's website Cake or Death has a page on Peter Bogdanovich's 2005 film, "The Cat's Meow", which presents a speculative look at the events which unfolded on Hearst's yacht:

The plot concerns the demise of one of the guests on a merry weekend cruise in 1924. Though whispered about, the scandal was never much publicized.

"No, it was all hushed up," the director says. "But you can find references to it in alternative underground type of industry scandal books like Hollywood Babylon."

He first heard the story from Orson Welles, who heard it from Ms. Davies' nephew (Charles Lederer). It even appeared in the first draft of "Citizen Kane", inserted by Herman Mankiewicz. Co-writer Welles, contending the composite character of Charlie Kane was not a killer, took it out.

[Roger Ryan]

Wiki:

...He then built a new studio about a mile from Triangle which is now the site of Culver Studios...

And here is another Ince connection to Welles: The Culver Studios (then called RKO-Pathe) is the lot where Welles shot much of Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons.

[Le Chiffre]

Interesting; then that's probably where Welles heard the story from Lederer. If I'm understanding my research correctly, the mansion that Scarlett O'Hara runs out of at the beginning of GONE WITH THE WIND, was built by Ince years before as the centerpiece of Inceville.

Gore Vidal, in his 1989 novel, HOLLYWOOD, proposes some interesting ideas about Ince, mainly that he was not really a pacifist, but was more an ally of Hearst around the time CIVILIZATION was made. The insinuation seems to be that Hearst may have partially (or largely) financed the making of Ince's film, in an indirect attempt to keep the U.S. out of WWI.