James Searle Dawley

James Searle Dawley

James Searle Dawley (often just J. Searle Dawley ; born May 13, 1877 in Del Norte , Colorado , † March 30, 1949 in Hollywood , California ) was an American film director and screenwriter. He saw himself as the "first professional film director".

Life

James Searle Dawley grew up in Denver and worked from 1895 to 1907 for various theater companies as an actor, writer and manager. In May 1907 Edwin S. Porter hired him to direct The Nine Lives of a Cat at the Edison Company . Dawley was only supposed to monitor the actors' play and control the continuity of the plot. Since these tasks were previously performed by one person along with the camerawork, Dawley's view of being the first professional film director is not absurd.

Dawley initially worked as Porter's assistant, but quickly took over filming alone. In 1908 he directed Rescued from an Eagle's Nest , in which Henry B. Walthall and David Wark Griffith made their film debut. In 1909 he produced Lunatics in Power . In 1910 Dawley went to the American West Coast and established Edison's Californian studio Balboa in Long Beach , where Henry King and William Desmond Taylor , among others , were hired as directors. James Searle Dawley created the first film adaptation of Frankenstein for Edison in 1910 . Together with Porter, he signed a contract with Adolph Zukor's Famous Players in 1912 , for which he made only 14 films. After working for his own production company Dyreda and Metro Pictures for a year , he went back to Famous Players-Lasky in 1915 , where he shot the first feature- length version of Snow White in 1916 and a version of Uncle Tom's Cabin in 1918 . James Searle Dawley worked as a freelancer between 1918 and 1921, after which he worked for Fox Films until 1923 .

After his retirement from the film industry, Dawley worked from the late 1920s to the mid-1930s for what was still a new medium, radio .

Web links

• James Searle Dawley in the Internet Movie Database (English)