Hettie Gray Baker Rescues Fox Movies from Box Office Disaster

1.6K

Hettie Gray Baker was a little-known writer for silent films in 1915 when movie producer William Fox hired acclaimed director Herbert Brenon. Fox shipped him to Jamaica to create a spectacle like nothing ever seen before.

Brenon and Fox were famous for their differing views of filmmaking. It would take Hettie Gray Baker to save them from themselves.

“The scenario is the basis for all good pictures” Fox wrote. “The collective brain that first conceives the story knows more about the story than anyone else can possibly know.”

Brenon, meanwhile, favored a looser adherence to the planned script of a film.

“I never feel compelled to follow the scenario exactly – in fact, I never do,” wrote Brenon. “A director who does is apt to become a mere machine. Sometimes, in fact, my finished picture bears little resemblance to the original scenario, so far have I wandered away with ideas of my own.”

Roving Camera

Brenon indeed wandered far in Jamaica. He constructed wild sets, including a Moorish city as a backdrop that went up in flames in the final scene. Brenon used crocodiles and camels brought in from a circus in Connecticut for one short scene. He built a gnome village, using local children to play gnomes. Massive amounts of mosquito netting was required to control the insects. He employed more than 10,000 extras.

Part of the buildup was Hollywood hype. But not all. After a year in the Jamaican jungle, Brenon had spent more than $1 million — the most ever for a movie. Fox was furious when he saw what Brenon had returned with.

It was not so much a story as a collection of fantastic scenes of sheiks and princes and sultans, replete with harems and eunuchs, with the land of gnomes and a witch thrown in and exotic waterfalls. But it also had Annette Kellerman, the beautiful swimmer and diver from Australia who was famous – and not just for her swimming.

Kellerman made headlines when she visited Boston in 1907. She got arrested at Revere Beach for swimming in a one-piece bathing suit. Great indignation and the Kellerman line of swimsuits resulted.

She topped herself in Brenon’s film, A Daughter of the Gods, giving Fox one of the earliest nude scenes ever filmed. But he had to somehow get the film into shape to put on a screen.

Enter Hettie Gray Baker

Fox turned to Hartford’s Hettie Gray Baker for help. Baker, like many pioneers of the film industry, didn’t start out in the business. Born in 1881, she was a Simmons College-educated librarian who worked at the Hartford Public Library/ She also worked at a school for social workers in Boston and then as a law librarian for the Hartford Bar Association.

She began writing scenarios for the silent films in her 20s. Baker mailed them off, had them rejected, slipped them into another envelope and tried another studio. She tried hundreds of different scenarios and finally, in 1907, she sold one to Vitagraph for $20.

Six months later, she sold another. The pace of her work picked up and she moved to California. “I sometimes think I was too dull to think of giving up. It just never did occur to me,” she explained years later.

In California Baker earned a reputation as a sharp thinker with a light touch. She believed the words that flashed on the screen in the old silent movies shouldn’t tell the story. Instead, they should set up the viewer to anticipate the coming scene.

Daughter of the Gods

Her deft hand convinced Fox to summon her back to New York. He then put his $1 million investment into her hands — a bold move. Not only was she untested, she was a woman.

Fox’s intuition paid off. Baker turned the project around, and it launched in theaters to largely critical success. Though the story baffled the critics were baffled, the spectacle of the movie kept audiences entranced. Annette Kellerman, who would later write the book Physical Beauty and How to Keep It, danced for the Sultan and dove 100 feet off a tower into the ocean to save herself. Along the way she tastefully revealed her spectacular body for theatergoers.

Baker believed that when her name, as H.G. Baker, appeared in the film’s credits it was the first time a woman film editor was ever acknowledged.

A Daughter of the Gods helped grow Kellerman’s fame, and she went on to make several more films. One of them, Queen of the Sea, filmed in Bar Harbor. Kellerman caused considerable stir in the seaside resort by working in her trademark mermaid costume.

Hettie Gray Baker Launched

A Daughter of the Gods marked a complete breakdown in the relationship between Brenon and Fox. Fox tried to strip Brenon’s name from the final release of the film. Brenon then sued to have it restored. More lawsuits followed with the two bickering over rights and contracts.

As for Baker, her career was launched. Baker was credited with editing and writing more than 20 films, though much of her work was uncredited. She helped bringing Jack London’s novels to the screen, among others.

She worked for Fox for many years, spent much of the latter part of her career representing the company before the state board of censors, getting films approved for showing.

This story last updated in 2022.