Frank Dolan

Biography

A fog-drenched St. Patrick’s Day, 1894, delivered Frank Dolan to San Francisco; by twenty he had traded cable-car clangor for klieg lights. Between 1914 and 1915 he sprinted through three one-reel romps—Hard Cider, Too Much Turkey, and The Night That Sophie Graduated—lending rubber-faced flair to the new art of flickers. Three decades later, on an amber-lit October afternoon in 1945, the curtains closed for him in Los Angeles, but the reels still spin.