Of all the films that I have made I do not believe that there is one that is even halfway right or one that I would care to have brought out twenty years from now except as a curiosity, as a family album might be brought out. Tess of the Storm Country was the only picture I ever wanted to do over. I always liked the character.

In the nine years that elapsed between the two productions of Tess, not only had great improvements been made in the mechanical processes, but the whole industry was on a different basis. The audiences had become more appreciative and certainly wider. There were changes, too, in me, I like to think. The second production of Tess is not only better lighted, better photographed and better acted, but it is a better production.

And it ought to be. The first production cost ten thousand dollars to take, including my salary. The second, not counting my salary, cost over four hundred thousand dollars to film. In the first sum are included the studio rent, my mother's and my fares from New York to California, and also those of the director and his secretary. Against the second cost the only item which actually does not show in the picture is the fifty thousand dollars which I paid to the Famous Players Company for the privilege of refilming the story. The old version took four weeks, including bad weather; the new one took seventeen weeks to make, which does not include the time spent in preparing the story or editing the film after it was taken.

In the first picture we all helped to decorate the sets. I brought my own toilet articles from the hotel to put upon the dresser in Teola's bedroom. We used no artificial light, and since we were working in a back yard of a house we could not photograph before ten o'clock in the morning because the fence on one side cut off the light, or after four in the afternoon because the light on the other side was cut off. One generator truck used in the new version of Tess cost thirty thousand dollars, but it enabled us to get some wonderful pictures, avoiding the mottled light of daytime in the woods. These were all taken after sundown.

The scene of Tess of the Storm Country is near Ithaca, New York, on the shore of the Cayuga Lake. In the first version we used the ocean, and a Japanese fishing village, which was standing nine years ago at Santa Monica, became the squatters' cabins that are so annoying to the deacon who lived on the hilltop. For the second version we erected a village at Chatsworth reservoir some thirty miles back in the hills. The houses were assembled in all corners and moved by truck to the location. The first village we got for nothing, the second cost fifteen thousand dollars to put up.

I have given these figures to show the growth and changes that have come about in nine years, and not because I believe that mere money spending will make a better picture. The first version was an excellent picture for the year nineteen-fourteen when the pictures were really in their infancy.