In the summer of 1917 Thomas Ince signed a releasing deal with Adolph Zukor’s Artcraft Pictures, and Hart came along as part of the package. For the first time the actor was now earning a salary commensurate with his box office stature: a guarantee of $150,000 per picture, plus a percentage of the profits. Unfortunately, Ince would still be sharing in these profits without offering the personal and logistical support he had provided during their years at Triangle. Hart felt that Ince had taken advantage of his trust and swindled him; the friendship between the two men soon came apart, and the flashpoint was not a woman, but a horse. The Narrow Trail, the first release of the newly formed “William S. Hart Productions”, had been designed to showcase Fritz, a pinto pony which Ince had inherited from the Miller Bros. Wild West show, and to whom Hart had developed a strong attachment. Indeed, he later wrote that The Narrow Trail had been “conceived and written in my love for Fritz”. But Ince disliked the little horse, and an enraged Hart resolved that, whatever the wording of his own contract, his partner would never earn another dime from the sweat of Fritz’s brow. “Tom and I were never friends afterward,” the actor wrote in his autobiography. Although Ince would receive a pro forma screen credit on these films as “supervisor”, it was Hart who now took charge of production, setting up shop at the Lasky Studio with many of his old crew, and hiring Lambert Hillyer (like C. Gardner Sullivan, an ex-newspaperman) to help with the writing and directing. Hillyer and Hart would work together on some two dozen films, sharing most of the creative duties – although Hart usually awarded full director credit to himself. For their first film they took good advantage of Artcraft’s financial resources, staging more elaborate chases and more protracted fight scenes, and expanding the film’s geographical scope from Saddle City all the way to San Francisco.

Richard e Diane Koszarski