The story of The Forbidden City is credited to the playwright George Scarborough (also the author of the play The Heart of Wetona) and the scenario to Mary Murillo. In later years, after the establishment of the writers’ guilds, when credits became part of contract negotiations, such dual writers credits are a common way of dealing with multiple screenwriters, but it is fairly rare in the 1910s (though it is also used for Talmadge’s films The Law of Compensation and By Right of Purchase). Scripts are generally assigned as such to one or more scenarists, and any other name in the scripting part of the credits will be the author of the book, play, or short story adapted. Several commentators at the time of release assumed the film must be based on a play by Scarborough of which the film was an adaptation – one uses the film as an example of how to adapt a play as a film, another suggests there was a bidding war for the property. It is thus hard to determine Scarborough’s contribution. As far as we know, there was no produced play or published play or novel with this title or this plot. Did Scarborough give Mary Murillo some kind of treatment? Was there, perhaps, an unproduced play or unpublished novel that Murillo adapted?
By 1918 Los Angeles was a second home to the Talmadges, however much Norma insisted she hated it. She always preferred working in New York, and The Forbidden City was mostly made in the Norma Talmadge Studio at 318 East 48th Street, New York City. This is the first of Talmadge’s films for which a set designer is specifically named, Willard Reineck, as “technical director”; publicity emphasized the research that went into the scenes in the Forbidden City in Beijing, and commentary invariably mentioned the splendor and authenticity of the sets and costumes. The room sets for Wong Li’s house and the private rooms in the Imperial Palace are very well done; the throne room in the palace is much sketchier, using drapes rather than true walls, and relying on deep staging with vistas through lines of drapes.
But it was the garden of Wong Li’s house, an important setting for much of the film’s early story, that proved a particular challenge. Press stories related how Talmadge’s regular location manager, Joseph Rotham, scoured the country, finally finding a Chinese garden so authentic-looking that it was enthusiastically approved by the film’s special Chinese consultant, P.L. Yuam. Referred to as “the best informed expert on Chinese history and culture in America,” Yuam assisted in the selection of sets and properties, and supervised the making of all the film’s costumes and scenic effects. Norma and her troupe spent several weeks that summer filming on location; their perfect Chinese garden, combining romance and atmosphere, was to be found just a simple trip away up the Hudson, at the Yama Farms Inn in Napanoch, near Ellensville in the Catskills.
Talmadge’s characterizations as a Chinese woman and her Chinese-American daughter rely very little on make-up, much more on stance and gait, but mostly on costume. The review in Wid’s Daily (13.10.1918) astutely noted how, on San San’s first appearance, she is posed surrounded by Chinese children (recruited from New York’s Chinatown, according to Variety, 27.09.1918) to show how little her face differed from theirs. More embarrassing today is the pidgin English in the titles of the Chinese characters, even when they are supposed to be speaking in Chinese to other Chinese characters. Unlike other dual-role films, The Forbidden City does not allow Talmadge to play sharply different characters, since San San and Toy, as mother and daughter, are supposed to be alike – indeed, some reviews thought it implausible that Worden, the man San San secretly marries, would fail to realize Toy is his daughter when they meet in Manila, 18 years after the emperor ordered San San’s death upon discovering the liaison. Nevertheless, even in Toy’s earliest scenes, when she is still in the Imperial Palace, Talmadge makes her look much more American than San San.
The Forbidden City and The Heart of Wetona were directed by Sidney Franklin, a significant figure in both Norma and Constance Talmadge’s careers. He directed three of Norma Talmadge’s films for Fine Arts, five of those for Select, and one for First National (as well as six of Constance Talmadge’s First National films).

Ben Brewster, Lea Jacobs