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Allan Dwan (born Joseph Aloysius Dwan; April 3, 1885 – December 28, 1981) was a pioneering Canadian-born American motion picture director, producer, and screenwriter.
Dec 19, 2012 · Allan Dwan (1885-1981), the oldest of the directors here, invented the mercury vapor lamps that replaced klieg lights and their clouds of carbon dust. He recalls filming while hiding from the posses of the Patents Company.
Apr 18, 1997 · A college football star-turned-electrical engineer, Dwan stumbled onto a movie set after a light he helped invent, the mercury-vapor arc, was co-opted by the early silent filmmakers, and ended...
Allan started his career as an engineer with a lighting company in Chicago. The production house ‘Essanay Studios’ was a client of the company he was working with, and during one of his assignments to inspect the lights installation in the studio, he came across movie producer George Spoor.
The story was that in 1909 his work developing mercury-vapor arc lamps for the post office in Chicago was noticed by George K. Spoor, who hired him to install similar lights at the Essanay movie studio, and that after growing interested in the filmmaking he observed there, he brought in a stack of original stories that pleased the producers so m...
Trained as an electrical engineer, Dwan was a technical innovator, but his flourishes were always in service to the specific talents of his performers. In his self-effacing style, elaborate tracking and dolly shots never call attention to themselves, but only to the characters on-screen….
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Jun 19, 2011 · Allan Dwan's engineering background was useful in solving early technical problems and he is credited with inventing the dolly shot (using a car) in 1915. In 1917 he set up one of the most famous shots in all of silent film, the camera swooping down and taking in all of the huge Babylonian set in D.W. Griffith's Intolerance .
