“Comedies Filmed by Rolin Players”

There’s a fair amount of contradiction around the founding of the Rolin Film Company, the corporation that became the Hal Roach Studio, in 1914.

Some claims arose at the time, when Rolin needed to look more stable and well financed than it really was. Others came later as Roach burnished his legend with rags-to-riches details.

Richard Lewis Ward examined the legal papers for his History of the Hal Roach Studio. Those records show that Hal Roach, Dan Linthicum (1878–1952), and I. H. Nance incorporated the Rolin Film Company on 23 July 1914. Each man bought one share for $100 and had a seat on the board.

In August, at the first board meeting, Roach said he had the cash to pay for nineteen more shares, which would be a total of $2,000. Linthicum said he would buy more later. Nance resigned; he appears to have been involved only because the law required three incorporators. An automobile dealer named Dwight Whiting (1891–1974) enthusiastically took his place.

From the auto dealership Whiting brought along his assistant, Warren Doane (1890–1964), who was also put on the board, though he was still a junior manager at most and didn’t own stock.

Roach’s friend and fellow actor Harold Lloyd recalled in his 1928 autobiography:

Roach had an idea that there would be novelty and money in kid pictures—a conviction which he vindicated eventually with the Our Gang comedies. He hired two boys and built his first picture, a one-reel comedy, around their boisterous day at the beach. I was the adult lead—the chauffeur who chaperoned them and bore the brunt of their boyish mischief, the little dears.

If that was indeed the first Rolin movie, it has entirely vanished. As have several more movies the company made in its first year.

But the company was definitely filming. On 28 September, the Morning Tribune of Los Angeles carried an article headlined: “Comedies Filmed by Rolin Players / H. E. Roach Is Directing Work of Latest Company Entering Silent Drama.”

That article stated that the Rolin Film Company had “incorporated under the laws of California, with a capital of $10,000, all of which has been paid in.” It had “rented offices at the Los Angeles Film Corporation studio, 406 Court Street,” better known as the Bradbury Mansion.

The article went on to say that Rolin had a distribution deal with the Sawyer outfit in New York, that in the previous week Roach had directed a one-reeler called “A Barber for a Day,” and that the acting company included Harold Lloyd. The last statement was reliable.

Sawyer was in business only from May 1914 to January 1915, never getting around to issuing a Rolin film. The movie about “a correspondence school woman barber” has disappeared.

As for the money behind the company, it wasn’t close to $10,000, even if the Moving Picture World repeated that figure in June 1915. Working from company files, Craig Calman has written: “Frick, Martin & Co., an Investment Securities firm, affirmed in an October 1, 1928 document that Rolin ‘was started with a paid up capital of $7,500’,” but that number seems inflated as well. The August 1914 board meeting discussed only $6,000 of shares, and not all of those were sold.

Other sources understate the working capital, going as low as $200 or $300. The 10 Jan 1937 Los Angeles Times reported that Roach had started production with $850 in January 1914, which was months before incorporation and less than he proffered at the time. That story appears to have been shaped with hindsight to make the company’s rise look even more remarkable. 

Whatever the exact figures, by the summer of 1914 the Rolin Picture Company was renting space, buying film, and paying wages. Hal Roach, previously a movie player and occasional assistant director hustling to earn $5 per day, suddenly had a couple thousand dollars to fund his own production company.

TOMORROW: Where did that money come from?