Inceville

In 1910 the Bison Movie Company moved from the East to the Santa Ynez Canyon, near Santa Monica, California, where it leased 18,000 acres. By chance, the Miller Brothers 101 Ranch Wild West happened to be touring in the area. With the help of entrepreneur and businessman, Thomas Ince, the two outfits struck a deal: the Oklahoma ranch’s huge holdings of Western accoutrements, including stagecoaches, tepees, herds of buffalo and cattle, and authentic cowboys and Native Americans, would settle down on the Bison acreage. The renamed company, Bison 101, began making large-scale Westerns, directed by Thomas Ince. A former actor himself, Ince had worked as a director in New York and Cuba. Rather than an artistic visionary behind the camera, Ince was more a producer. He organized his Westerns down to every minute item, coming up with detailed shooting scripts that would become the industry standard. Soon the sprawling 20,000 acre, California ranch was known as Inceville, and its films were receiving notices such as “the Bison Company’s Indians are always splendid fellows to behold and, what is more, they always look what they are supposed to be.” The company’s forte was drawing upon historical events and showing complex plots dealing with issues of ethnic diversity, such as the consequences of white settlers invading Native American lands. Ince raised the stature of the two-reel, half-hour Western with War on the Plains. The creation of Bison Movie Company enabled him to employ real Indians instead of made-up whites. At the time, the plots of his one-or-two-reel films were as ground breaking as his casting. They were the first to climax around battles between cowboys or cavalry and Indians. Ince’s well-crafted The Indian Massacre presented both sides of the story, depicting the settlers and cowboys as brave, but also showing the injustices inflicted upon Native Americans. “It’s closing scene – a silhouette of an Indian woman praying beneath the wood-frame burial pyre of her dead child – was as beautifully composed and photographed as anything in later John Ford films,” according to Western film historian William Everson. He is recognized among film historians as the “Father of Westerns.” By 1912, Ince was second only to director D.W. Griffith in importance as a director and producer. In contrast to Griffith, Ince’s films were all scripted and planned in detail with generally restrained acting and a leisurely romantic visual style.
Listed as his finest films are The Battle of Gettysburg and Custer’s Last Fight. Both films were extremely ambitious and featured the use of eight cameras to cover all the action. In 1918, Ince built the famous Culver City Studios. Many well known films have been shot over the course of the 89 years the studio has been in business. Among them were Gone With the Wind, King Kong, Lassie, and Casablanca. After spending a weekend on board William Randolph Hearst’s yacht in the summer of 1924, Thomas Ince died under mysterious circumstances. His death certificate lists thrombosis as the reason for his untimely demise, but many reports indicate he died from a gunshot wound to the abdomen.