Stanner E.V. Taylor

Biography

Stanner Edward Varley Taylor (1874-1948) was a newspaper man who borrowed a typewriter at the New York Herald to write plays, while the rest of the city slept. His plays impressed the owner of the American Mutoscope & Biography Co. and in 1908 he was hired to write stories for the new moving pictures. The next two years Taylor wrote 85% of their pictures including, D.W. Griffith's first film The Adventures of Dollie (1908), the first movie filmed in Hollywood, In Old California (1910), the first interfaith romance A Child of the Ghetto (1910). Taylor married his leading lady, Marion Leonard, and left Biograph to start their own studio. It was reported that Ms. Leonard's salary was $1,000 per week at a time when no one had heard of Mary Pickford. In 1912 they founded The Monopol Film Company. Taylor expanded to writing, directing and producing and made over 100 films before retiring in 1926. As a silent film pioneer, he was the first director to receive on screen credit (1910), the first screenwriter to work on retainer, the first producer to be pictured in a film advertisement (1913), and his 1913 production of Carmen contained 426 scenes. S.E.V. Taylor created the first quadruple exposure in-camera visual effects shot in Monopol's The Dead Secret (1913) with Marion Leonard playing a dual role.