To make newcomers-to-film Gish sisters, Lillian and Dorothy, ages 19 and 14, show fear in their movie debut, September 1912's "An Unseen Enemy," Biograph director D. W. Griffith drew out his gun and chased them around the studio room, shooting into the ceiling. The ploy must have worked since what the viewer sees on the screen reflects two young girls in fear for their lives.
The Gishes were literally brought up on the stage. With a father deserting them early on, the sisters with their mother moved from the Midwest to New York City in an attempt to elevate their theater acting. They became good friends with their next door neighbor, Gladys Smith, aka Mary Pickford. Getting modeling jobs as well as stage work, the Gishes were introduced to D. W. Griffith by Pickford in 1912. Biograph signed the two to contracts, with their first movie scheduled to be "An Unseen Enemy."
Griffith thought they were twins when he first saw them, despite their age difference (19-year-older Lillian lied about her age being 16 at the time). On the set he tied a blue ribbon in the hair of one and a red ribbon on the other. When he wanted to direct one of them to do something, he would say, "Red, do this," or "Blue, do that."
After humiliating the sisters with the ribbons and the firearms shooting, Pickford took Griffith aside and asked him not to treat her friends like that ever again. And he didn't.
As for "An Unseen Enemy," the movie is almost a carbon copy of Griffith's 1909 "The Lonely Villa." Both have robberies taking place in female-only occupied houses, with the males summoned by phone miles away to come and rescue them. At this stage of his career, Griffith was becoming tired of Biograph Studios restraint on limiting the director to stick with just one reelers--about 15 minutes in length. While longer feature movies were being produced with greater frequency, Griffith would begin to search for new avenues to gain more freedom behind the camera. But "An Unseen Enemy" does show his expertise in cross-cutting with dual scenarios playing out at the same time.