Having directed "The Indian Massacre" and Across the Plains" the year before, Thomas Ince during 1012 directed the films "The Invaders" (three reels) starring its co-director Francis Ford and Ethel Grandin and "Custer's Last Fight" (three reels) for the New York Motion Picture Company and "Shadows of the Past" for the Vitagraph Company of America.It is often acknowledged that Thomas Ince was the first director to use a shooting script. These were detailed shooting scripts, known to be meticulous in their planning, where plotline would emerge as having precedence over action and spectacle.
Author Kenneth MacGowan notes that Thomas Ince "strove for theatric effect", but only with scripts that were "direct and tight" and used intertitles to advance character action dramatically relating to events as a technique of exposition.
As late in the century, the internet century, as 2025, a film presumed to be lost, directed in 1915, was found, restored and copied digitally: a copy Universal's "The Heart of Lincoln" (Francis Ford, three reels) was discovered in a film archive in Long Island and has a 2025 date of availability. Directed by Francis Ford, who himself stars in the film as Abraham Lincoln, the film also stars actress Grace Cunard, to whom the photoplay is attributed. Advertisements placed in magazin es by the studio, thinly masquerading with a newspaper look as The Universal Weekly News announced the release of a "Marvelous and Thrilling Drama for Lincoln's Birthday with, "Lively Grace Cunard in romantic scenes with a handsome officer, a happy ending after the war, serve to round out this virile yet tender story of the Heart of Lincoln to the supremest satisfaction of all." In regard to Lost Films, Found Magazines, now that the film has been found, perhaps our view of Thomas Ince might be sharper, particularly since we've been given an automatic reminder of how many silent films that do appear in the magazines of the time period are still presumed lost, with no existing copies that survive. Not incidentally, Keene State College holds a copy of the film "When Lincoln Paid" starring Francis Ford as Abraham Lincoln and costarring actresses Ethel Grandin and Grace Cunard- the film was presumed lost with no surviving copies existing untill the year 2006 when it was found in New Hampshire.
