page_title: King Vidor
section_title: "Vidor Village" and First National Exhibitors, 1920–1925
hierarchical_section_title: King Vidor / Hollywood Apprenticeship: 1915–1918 / "Vidor Village" and First National Exhibitors, 1920–1925
caption_attribution_description: English: Director King Vidor and actress Colleen Moore on location in northern California for the snow scenes for the American drama film The Sky Pilot (1921), on page 65 of the May 28, 1921 Exhibitors Herald.
context_page_description: King Wallis Vidor was an American film director, film producer, and screenwriter whose 67-year film-making career successfully spanned the silent and sound eras. His works are distinguished by a vivid, humane, and sympathetic depiction of contemporary social issues. Considered an auteur director, Vidor approached multiple genres and allowed the subject matter to determine the style, often pressing the limits of movie-making conventions.
  His most outstanding and successful film in the silent era is The Big Parade. Vidor's sound films of the 1940s and early 1950s represent his richest output. Among his finest works are Northwest Passage, Comrade X, An American Romance and Duel in the Sun. His dramatic depictions of the American western landscape endow nature with a sinister force where his characters struggle for survival and redemption.
  Vidor's earlier films tend to identify with the common people in a collective struggle, whereas his later works place individualists at the center of his narratives.
context_section_description: King Vidor next embarked on a major project in collaboration with a major New York-based film exhibitor First National. In a bid to compete with the increasingly dominant Hollywood studios, First National advanced Vidor funding to build a small film production facility in Santa Monica, California dubbed Vidor Village. King Vidor issued a founding statement entitled "Creed and Pledge" that set forth moral anodynes for film-making, inspired by his Christian Science sympathies.
  I believe in the motion picture that carries a message to humanity.
  I believe in the picture that will help humanity to free itself from the shackles of fear and suffering that have so long bound it in chains.
  I will not knowingly produce a picture that contains anything that i do not believe to be absolutely true to human nature, anything that could injure anyone or anything unclean in thought or action.
  Nor will I deliberately portray anything to cause fright, suggest fear, glorify mischief, condone cruelty or extenuate malice.
  I will never picture evil or wrong, except to prove the fallacy of its line.
  So long as I direct pictures, I will make only those founded on the principles of right, and I will endeavor to draw upon the inexhaustible source of good for my stories, my guidance and my inspiration.
  His "manifesto" was carried in Variety magazine's January 1920 issue.
  The first production from Vidor Village was his The Jack Knife Man (1920), a bleak and bitter story of an orphaned boy raised by an impoverished yet kindly hermit, performed by former stage actor Fred Turner. Through entrepreneurial efforts the recluse achieves financial success and is ultimately rewarded with the affection of a gentlewoman, played by Florence Vidor. Redolent with the precepts of the "Creed and Pledge", the films ``relentless realism" did not please the executives at First National. They demanded entertainment that would garner a mass share of box-office receipts so as to fill their theaters.
  As film critic and biographer John Baxter observed "[t]his experience had a fundamental effect on Vidor's attitude toward film-making."  Under pressure  "as the studio system began to harden into place", the 26-year-old Vidor began to craft his films to conform to prevailing standards of the period. His 1920 film. The Family Honor exemplifies this shift towards romantic comedies and away from the ideals that had informed The Jack Knife Man.
  Vidor's The Sky Pilot(1921) was a big-budget Western-Comedy shot on location in the high Sierra Nevada of California. John Bowers stars as the intrepid preacher and Colleen Moore (soon to be famous as the quintessential Hollywood "flapper") as the girl he loves and rescues from a deadly cattle stampede. The natural landscapes serve as an essential dramatic component in the film, as they would in subsequent Vidor movies. The cost overruns cut into First National profits, and they declined to fund any further Vidor projects.  
  Vidor and Moore would begin a three-year romance on the set of The Sky Pilot that became "a Hollywood legend". The couple would resume their relationship after 40 years (in 1963), remaining close until Vidor's death in 1982.
  Love Never Dies (1921) is a “rural love story" with a spectacular disaster scene depicting a locomotive and box cars derailing and plunging into a river below. The dramatic presentation of rivers served as a standard motif in Vidor films. Impressed with this Vidor sequence, producer Thomas H. Ince helped to finance the picture.
  In 1922, Vidor produced and directed films that served as vehicles for his spouse, Florence Vidor, notable only for their "artificiality". These works conformed to the comedies of manners and romantic melodramas that were typical of his contemporary, Cecil B. DeMille at Famous Players-Lasky studios. Later, Vidor admitted to being overawed by DeMille's talents. Florence Vidor, in her later career, frequently starred in DeMille productions.
  Vidor's next picture, Conquering the Woman, was an unabashed imitation of DeMille's outstanding drama Male and Female (1919). Vidor followe
caption: King Vidor and Colleen Moore on location for The Sky Pilot near Truckee, California
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