Making a Stable Living
From 1925 until his death in 1942, Cameron owned and operated the Ben Hur Riding Stables near the intersection of Jefferson and Overland in Culver City. The site is now Raintree Plaza, where a Denny’s restaurant and a Ralphs supermarket now are.
Paul Pitti told me that Cameron had appeared in or directed more than 200 films after “The Great Train Robbery. ” He retired from acting in 1924 to run the Riding Stables. He supplied horses, wagons and other animals to the movie studios. When David O. Selznick was in pre- production for “Gone With the Wind” and learned who Cameron was, he coaxed Cameron out of retirement to appear in a cameo role in “Made For Each Other,” with James Stewart and Carole Lombard. In return, Selznick agreed to rent most of the horses used in “Gone With the Wind” from Cameron.
Differences in Dollars
Paul Pitti furnished me with the following 1942 interview with Cameron, conducted by Juliette Laine, where he talked about his role in “The Great Train Robbery.”
“For that picture, said Cameron, I was paid $35. It seemed like a pretty good fee. Nowadays, most of my horses make that in a single day. It took five days to make “The Great Train Robbery.” But we wanted it to be really good, not slapdash. I remember, too, that the cast not only acted but helped set the stage, gathered props, dragged the camera around and swept the floor. Nobody was a glamour boy in those days.”
Our director, Ed Porter, talked the Lackawana Railroad into rentin’ us a train that ran on a narrow road over in New Jersey. This cost $45 a day, and it sent the picture’s budget up to $2000, which was a staggering sum in those days when $300 was all those little experimental films cost.”
The lead train robber was played by George Barnes. He appears in the final shot of the film and fires his pistol point blank at the audience.
Who Deserves the Credit?
Said Cameron, “Incidentally, I’ve heard of some later directors who were credited with inventing the closeup. But anybody who saw our Great Train Robbery knows that we did it long before the rest of them thought of it… I remember that we took one shot of the train crossing a bridge. At the right moment, we tossed a dummy out of the cab window. That was considered sensational… Then we went over to a park and took shots of me and the posse chasin’ Barnes. (Future movie immortal Al Jolson is listed in the credits as a member of the cast at the end of the film.) “Most of our cast were impromptu players who we had picked up from the park benches. They worked in the scenes just for fun. It was fun, too, but not bein’ regular actors or stuntmen, most of them kept falling off their horses. The scene had to be shot over and over again… Well, sir, the picture proved to be a sensation. It made scads of money at $75 a week. The price was based on $10 per 100 feet of film with a phonograph thrown in for incidental music.”
