Southern California has long endured devastating fires, with the Palisades and Eaton fires counting as two of the most destructive blazes in its history. More than a century ago, a series of fires in what is now the Palisades laid claim to Inceville, one of the first film studios.
The studio was founded in 1912 by Thomas Ince, a producer-director and mogul during the silent film era, built where Sunset Boulevard now intersects the Pacific Coast Highway. The grounds, spanning 18,000 acres and housing 700 people, were used to shoot numerous Westerns, with Ince helping to popularize the genre. Inceville played a part in establishing the star system and formalizing the roles of director, screenwriter and editor as separate positions. In a 1961 essay for THR, writer Allan Hersholt recalled how his father, Jean Hersholt, landed his first acting gig at Inceville in 1915. “It had sprung up like a gold-rush town, about 15 miles from the midriff of Hollywood,” Hersholt wrote about the studio, which he recounted was a 3-mile walk from the last trolley stop. “Its inhabitants included William S. Hart, H.B. Warner, Louise Glaum, Charles Ray, a stock company of about 40 actors and some 30 actresses, a tribe of [Native Americans], 40 horses, a few assorted directors, a herd or two of cattle, and one producer.”
Inceville was damaged by fire in 1916, at a time when the nitrate film being used was highly flammable. Real estate developer Harry Culver encouraged Ince to move his filmmaking headquarters to Culver City. Ince teamed with partners D.W. Griffith and Mack Sennett to open an all-new Triangle Studios in 1916. (Goldwyn Pictures would purchase it in 1918 before it ultimately became part of the Sony Pictures lot.)
Ince sold Inceville to Western star Hart in 1916. Another fire in 1922 largely destroyed the studio and left it in ruins for years to come.
After a brief involvement with Adolph Zukor’s Paramount-Artcraft Pictures, a precursor to Paramount Pictures, Ince formed another outfit in Culver City, Ince Studios, which ran from 1919 to 1924. He himself had an untimely end, dying in November 1924 of heart failure after taking ill while on William Randolph Hearst’s yacht to celebrate his 44th birthday with a group that included Charlie Chaplin. Ince’s death has remained the subject of speculation and was the focus of Peter Bogdanovich’s 2001 film The Cat’s Meow, which suggests that Hearst mistakenly shot Ince in a fit of jealousy over Chaplin’s alleged affair with actress Marion Davies.
But Ince’s work lives on. Three of his films were selected for preservation by the National Film Registry, including the 1916 epic Civilization. And classics like Gone With the Wind and Rebecca would film at the studio he founded as Ince Studios; in 2017, Amazon acquired the property, located on what is now Ince Boulevard.
This story appeared in the Jan. 17 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
