The writer Elizabeth R. Carpenter, sometimes credited as E. R. Carpenter, sold stories and scenarios to a variety of film companies, including Vitagraph, Kalem, Selig, Edison, and Lubin. Piecing together her biography before 1913, when Reel Life magazine (30.09.1913) hinted that she was already an established author, is challenging. Her first known published short story, “The Dean’s Checkmate”, won the New York Evening Telegram’s weekly Prize Story Contest (the story appeared in the paper on 13.01.1910), and a cheque from the Triangle Film Corporation now in the Cinémathèque française’s Harry E. Aitken Collection, dated 23.11.1912, as payment for a scenario titled “A Chase for a Fairy” (no film with this name is known), suggests her success began earlier than previously assumed. By the next year she had sold stories to the Reliance Film Company, and the name “E. R. Carpenter” also appeared regularly in the press during this time in association with stories she sent to the Photoplay Clearing House, an organization that corrected, marketed, and sold scripts.
William Lord Wright’s “Photoplay Authors” column in the New York Dramatic Mirror makes mention of Carpenter several times, quoting her in 1914 boasting of selling an average of more than three scripts per month. She also reported she was selling more synopses than finished scripts, as they paid just as well and took less time to write. Her popularity in 1914 was such that her name appeared on posters for Vitagraph’s Widow of Red Rock, and in 1915 Motion Picture News, when reporting on the Sidney Drew comedy she wrote, Rooney’s Sad Case, praised her for her versatility (11.12.1915). The New Jersey-based Carpenter disappears from the public eye in 1919, after her last known screen credit, World Pictures’ The Quickening Flame, for which she wrote the story.
The year 1915 was undoubtedly the busiest of Carpenter’s career; she is credited with 11 known films, including The Good in the Worst of Us. Identified at the 2014 “Mostly Lost” workshop in Culpeper, Virginia, the film was partly shot in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, and presents a snapshot of melodrama in the early silent era, which, as Jane Gaines notes in Pink-Slipped (2018), owes a great deal of its development to women screenwriters.
With The Good in the Worst of Us, the melodramatic elements at play – misunderstandings, the importance of trust, and the restoration of peace and virtue through death – drive the plot forward as a woman escapes the criminal she lives with, then marries a farmer and leads a contented life. The past returns when the criminal threatens her after robbing a house and murdering a man, making her reluctantly steal her husband’s money to help him. The farmer discovers her aiding the crook’s escape, and the crook is shot by the police, culminating in the film’s plot twist. Carpenter’s scenario successfully plays with audience expectation, withholding information from us and the farmer/husband until the very end, when it’s revealed that the wife’s intentions were pure, thus restoring peace and reuniting the family.
Director William J. Humphrey (1875-1952) was first known for his portrayals of Napoleon on stage, which led to Vitagraph hiring him in 1908 to play Bonaparte and other historical figures. By 1910 he was also directing for the company, remaining with Vitagraph until 1917, when he began working for other studios. In 1919 Moving Picture World reported that he had set up his own production company, the Humphrey Picture Corporation (22.02.1919), though its one announced film, Atonement, was released as a Pioneer Film production. Humphrey continued acting long after he stopped directing and writing. – Olivia Hărşan, María Hernández, John Jacobsen