Reginald Barker

Biography

Reginald Barker’s life began on a snow-swept Winnipeg morning in 1886, but the cradle hardly had time to cool before the family swept him off to the Scottish Highlands, then across an ocean to the sun-scorched orchards of California. By sixteen he had already traded algebra lessons for greasepaint, wrangling lines and lighting cues for a barn-storming stock troupe. The road hauled him eastward to New York’s gas-lit stages, where—from 1910 onward—he called cues for Broadway melodramas and occasionally stepped into the footlights himself. The flickering new art of moving pictures lured him west again. In 1911 he traded the clang of theater curtains for the whir of hand-cranked cameras at Bison Pictures, signing on with Thomas H. Ince just as the frontier was being tamed into back-lots. One year later Barker jettisoned acting for good, marshaling cowboys and Apaches for his first directorial outing, *On the Warpath* (1912). Ince, impressed, later handed him half the reins of the pacifist spectacle *Civilization* (1916). Between 1912 and 1935 Barker stamped his name on nearly a hundred features, guiding Sessue Hayakawa’s smoldering glances, Hoot Gibson’s saddle-borne pranks, and a teenage Myrna Loy’s nascent glamour. When the talkies finally roared louder than his enthusiasm, he closed his director’s chair, opened a curiosity shop amid Pasadena’s rose-scented sidewalks, and sold trinkets to tourists until a heart attack claimed him in Los Angeles, 1945. He was fifty-eight.