As a producer for her own movies, actress Mary Pickford always strove to include the latest marvels in cinematic technology into her films to set her pictures apart from others. To one-up her dual role performance in her 1918 'Stella Maris,' Pickford tackled the acting assignments as both a mother and her son in September 1921's "Little Lord Fauntleroy." The two characters played by the same person was the first time in film an actress (or actor) ever played a mother and a son in one movie. And to top it off, Pickford became the first actress to have the two characters touch one another in the same scene.
The historic sequence appears when Cedrick Errol, the son of Mrs. Errol, kisses his mother on the cheek. The complex three-second shot involving multiple double exposures required a laborious 15-hours of preparations and filming. The camera had to be completely stable during that entire ordeal. Weights nearly a ton in total tied down the camera and its tripod to insure each filmed exposure was exactly matched to the previous ones.
The movie "Little Lord Fauntleroy" was based on a 1886 novel of the same name by Frances Burnett concerning a poor one-parent boy who finds out he stands to inherit a fortune--and a title--from the English lineage of his late father. Trouble is the lawyer handling the inheritance hates Fauntleroy's mother, but eventually is won over by the boy's personality, until a pretender to the title appears. An inside joke on Pickford's trademark curls she wears in her juvenile movies is presented when early on the neighborhood boys pick on his (her) long hair. A fight breaks out with Pickford besting the biggest bully of the hair battle.
