Page:Once a Clown, Always a Clown.djvu/180

ONCE A CLOWN, ALWAYS A CLOWN Zukor and released in the fall of 1912, he began to reach out on his own. Through the Majestic Pictures Corporation, which was producing for Mutual distribution, Aitken hired D. W. Griffith away from Biograph. Mutual also was releasing the product of the New York Motion Picture Company, better known as the NYMPH, owned by Adam Kessel and Charles O. Baumann, ex-bookmakers at Sheepshead Bay and other New York tracks. NYMPH had both Tom Ince and Mack Sennett by this time.

Aitken, Griffith, Sennett and Ince put their heads together, and Mutual Masterpieces, the first American-made four and five reel feature pictures, were born. Aitken also put up the sixty thousand dollars that went into "The Birth of a Nation", the first great epic of the films, produced independently of Griffith's labors for the Majestic, but originally intended for Mutual release. The money was going out faster than it was coming in and the banking interests grew unhappy. Months of intrigue and dissension within the Mutual organization ensued.

Then on July 20, 1915, Ince, Sennett, Griffith and Aitken met by prearrangement in the Fred Harvey House at La Junta, Colorado, a