2013 Essays

Bessie Barriscale

Lund, Maria Fosheim

On May 1, 1917, actress Bessie Barriscale invited members of the press corps and trade papers to the Paralta Plays company offices in New York. Agnes Smith, there on behalf of the Morning Telegraph, reported on the event a few days later, confessing to her readers that she had not initially known why the press had been summoned. However, the journalist quickly realized why when she arrived and saw a new sign on the door: “The Bessie Barriscale Feature Company.” Inside the Paralta offices she found Barriscale with her husband, actor Howard Hickman, director Oscar Apfel, and producer Robert Brunton. Announcing the formation of her own company whose pictures would be distributed by Paralta, Barriscale stressed the point that “good stories [would be] her first consideration” (n.p.). The Bessie Barriscale Feature Company was to start work in a new state-of-the-art studio in Hollywood, where, according to the Moving Picture World, they hoped to produce six to eight features per year with their first project to be the still extant title Rose O’Paradise (1918) (1100).