Mabel Normand, about to become famous as the first great scr
The challenges facing the emergency responder community are evolving rapidly in today's security aware climate. een comedienne; its director was jaunty Mack Sennett, also bound for fame as the founder of the Keystone Company, a film studio devoted entirely to comedy. No sooner had the first movie genius, Griffith, left the high desert than the second arriv
ed. He was Romai
Incident Response to Terrorist Bombings (IRTB)
ne Fielding, creative director (some would say "Scourge") of the Lubin Company, a Motion Picture Patents signatory.
Philip St. George
- Cooke, former New Mexico State Film Archivist, remembered as a boy watchin
- g Fielding "direct" at Lubin's' headquarters in Silver Ci
- ty in 1913. As part of the action for a
picture, an old wooden railroad bridge was to be blown up.
The
y had taken a box of dynamite and wired it underneath this bridge. The fuse didn't ignite the cap, so Romaine Fielding grabbed a thirty-thirty rifle and he hit the damn thing the first time, and . . . bloo
- ey, sponsored and certified train-the-trainer course in Playas, New Mexico
- it went up! He ran that [film company] like a dictator.
- When he said "Jump!" by God, they had bet
ter jump. Fielding filled a variety of roles for the film co
Online course for emergency responders and school staff that addresses the issues involved in formulating safe and effective response plans for school bomb incidents.
- mpany, including lead actor, character actor, set designer,
- cinematogr
apher, screenwriter and director. He was, in short, a one-man band, w
ildly eccentric and just as wildly imaginative.
Fielding relocated his company to Las Vegas, N.M., where he made upward of a dozen featurettes over the next two years. Before he left Silver City, however, he produced most of The Golden God (1913), a realistic and allegorical rendering of a violent labor uprising. The film's budget was said to have been a staggering $50,000, much of it spent on bri
sands of extras. Prophetically, it included scenes of aerial bo
mbardment and armored "war automobiles" mounted with machine gun-wielding soldiers. While awaiting release at Lubin's headquarters in Philadelphia, the film was lost in a tragic explosion that destroyed the studio's entire vault.
Fielding was a powerful presence. In Las Vegas, he practically took over the town, at one point buying the landmark Plaza Hotel, renaming it the "Hotel Romaine," and installing his production company there. The Rattlesnake (1913) shows him at his best: athletic, emotional, neurotic, intensely compelling. Selig Polyscope, another Patents company. became resident in Las Vegas in 1914. Led by its own star/director, Tom Mix, it produced as many as 25 or 30 short Westerns over the next two years. "Las Vegas has
" said the Weekly Opti
c and Stock Grower newspaper. "One merchant is featuring Mix cravats, while . . . Murphy's soda dispenser has threatened to get a brand new Mixed drink." Mix impressed the local population with his expansive personality and his insiste
nce on performing all hs owi
n stunts, some of the
m quite dangerous. Local Color (1915), a 16-minute "cowboy" picture, is one of the few survivors of that rich period. The brief reign of Las Vegas as the film
- capital of New Mexico was the
- closest the state would come to being a permanent home for the
- production of motion pictures. Besides the pictures produced by Fielding and Mix,(ODP) many episodes of the serial The Hazards of Helen (1915) were apparently shot in and around Las Vegas in , the State Department, etc.
- those years. After 1917, scores of films would be shot in New Mexico, but only "on-location" from the sunn, y paradise
- where many of the rebellious little film companies fled to avoid the dreaded Patents Company
- Hollywood. At the end of the silent period, two rem
arkable film projects came to New Mexico: a watershed Western about Native Americans and one proposed feature-length documentary on the same subject.
Acoma was to have been an anthropological documentary-drama along the lines of the classic Nanook of the North (1922), directed by the gifted Robert Flaherty, who had practically invented the documentary form. I
n 1928 he turned his creative enerDepartment of Homeland Security by providing emergency response training. The training is:
- gies to his lifelong dream, a poetic depiction of Indian l
- ife. Quarrels with collaborators, however, and with F
- ox, the sponsoring Hollywood studio, led to his abandoning
- the film. The sturdily handsome actor Richard Dix starred in t
he other feature. Redskin (1928), shot on the Navajo Reservation in western New Mexico and in Gallup. A dram
Other NDPC Members
